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If settler colonialism is about reproducing a social body in the place of another, the settler polity is an empire of homes: Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘Reconsidering Domesticity through the Lens of Empire and Settler Society in North America’, The American Historical Review, 124, 4, 2019, pp. 1249–1266

13Oct19

Abstract: Our reconsideration of domesticity comes at a time when empire and colonial and postcolonial categories of analysis are informing many fields of historical study. This essay traces the historiographic origins of the intersection of domesticity and empire, focusing on domesticity’s usefulness as a window on cross-cultural intimacy and conflict. It also offers an example of how previous treatments of domesticity might be revised by taking empire and settler society into account.


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The other captivity narrative (indigenous women in the house) as a settler story: Victoria Haskins, ‘Domesticating Colonizers: Domesticity, Indigenous Domestic Labor, and the Modern Settler Colonial Nation’, The American Historical Review, 124, 4, 2019, pp. 1290–1301

13Oct19

Abstract: The placement of Indigenous girls and young women in white homes to work as servants was a key strategy of official policy and practice in both the United States and Australia. Between the 1880s and the Second World War, under the outing programs in the U.S. and various apprenticeship and indenturing schemes in Australia, the state regulated and constructed relations between Indigenous and white women in the home. Such state intervention not only helped to define domesticity in a modern world, but was integral to the formation of the modern settler colonial nation in its claims to civilizing authority in the United States and Australia. In the context of settler colonialism, domesticity was not hegemonic in this period, but rather was precarious and uncertain. By prescribing and demanding from employers demonstrations of domesticity, the state was engaged in perfecting white women as well as Indigenous women, the latter as the colonized, to be domesticated, and the former as the colonizer, to domesticate.


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The captivity narrative (i.e., the settler woman out of the house) as settler crisis: Treva Elaine Hodges, The captivity narratives of Cynthia Ann Parker: settler colonialism, collective memory, and cultural trauma, PhD dissertation, University of Louisville, 2019

13Oct19

Abstract: This dissertation explores representations of the captivity narrative of Cynthia Ann Parker, an Anglo woman captured as a child by Comanche, with whom she lived in a kinship relationship until her forced return to Anglo society twenty-four years later. The project draws upon trauma theory to explain the persistent appeal of Parker’s narrative. Interpretations analyzed include the original historical account of Parker’s narrative, and appearances in the genres of opera, film, graphic novel, and historical fiction. The dissertation reveals how appearances of Parker’s narrative correspond to periods in US history in which social change threated the dominant position of Anglo American men. The primary argument is that captivity narratives serve to reinforce hegemonic Anglo masculinity promoted by the American settler colonial system. The dissertation is divided into six chapters organized chronologically to demonstrate the significance of Parker’s narrative in various historical moments. Chapter One provides a historical overview of Parker’s story and briefly reviews the impact of captivity narratives. Chapter Two explores the first formal historical account of Parker’s narrative and discusses the significance of myth to conceptions of Americanism during the Progressive Era. Chapter Three examines Julia Smith’s interpretation of Parker’s narrative via her opera, Cynthia Parker, to show how expansion of rights for white women between World Wars I and II failed to translate to equal rights for all due to the persistence of the racial hierarchy established by the settler colonial system. In Chapter Four, John Ford’s film The Searchersdemonstrates how Parker’s narrative helped reinforce the social position of Anglo men returning from World War II. Chapter Five looks to alternative forms of Parker’s narrative in the graphic novel, White Comanche, and historical fiction, Ride the Wind, to demonstrate how Anglo writers, even when attempting to center Native people as agents in Parker’s story, continue to reinforce negative stereotypes that perpetuate the supremacy of Anglo masculinity. The final chapter briefly looks at the current political and social climate of the US to demonstrate how the long-term insidious trauma inherent in the settler colonial system continues to impact racial and gender hierarchical performance.


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Sponge Bob is a settler! Holly M. Barker, ‘Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom’, The Contemporary Pacific, 31, 2, 2019 pp. 345-379

12Oct19

Abstract: Billions of people around the globe are well-acquainted with SpongeBob Squarepants and the antics of the title character and his friends on Bikini Bottom. By the same token, there is an absence of public discourse about the whitewashing of violent American military activities through SpongeBob’s occupation and reclaiming of the bottom of Bikini Atoll’s lagoon. SpongeBob Squarepants and his friends play a role in normalizing the settler colonial takings of Indigenous lands while erasing the ancestral Bikinian people from their nonfictional homeland. This article exposes the complicity of popular culture in maintaining American military hegemonies in Oceania while amplifying the enduring indigeneity (Kauanui 2016) of the Marshallese people, who maintain deeply spiritual and historical connections to land—even land they cannot occupy due to residual radiation contamination from US nuclear weapons testing—through a range of cultural practices, including language, song, and weaving. This article also considers the gendered violence of nuclear colonialism and the resilience of Marshallese women.


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Imprisonment as elimination: Ilana Feldman, ‘Elimination Politics: Punishment and Imprisonment in Palestine’, Public Culture, 31, 3, 2019, pp. 563-580.

12Oct19

Abstract: Focusing on punishment and imprisonment across three time periods, this essay explores the two-pronged attack on Palestinian politics that has characterized the settler-colonial project in Palestine over the past one hundred years. This double move entails an attempt to deny or destroy Palestinian political community, while simultaneously identifying Palestinians as political actors, specifically as bad actors. The aim is to undermine Palestinian political capacity by disrupting connection and organizing, while still deploying the weapon of categorizing Palestinians, individually and collectively, as enemies—under labels such as insurgents, terrorists, and enemy combatants. The struggle over elimination in Palestine has continued through multiple changes in governing regime and across territorial reconfigurations. The different tactics deployed against Palestinians over these decades are a product both of these changes and of the continuing Palestinian refusal to acquiesce to their elimination.


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How boarding worked: Andrew Woolford, ‘Charting the intimate terrain of Indigenous Boarding Schools in Canada and the United States’, Modern Cartography Series, 8, 2020, pp. 129-141

09Oct19

Abstract: Any attempt to set rigid boundaries around assimilative education is likely to misrepresent the varied experiences within Indigenous boarding schools, the relations between Indigenous communities and the school and the specific interactions of staff and students, among other factors. While for many a term like genocide captures the destructive ends sought through these schools, a processual and nuanced application of the term must be insisted upon, so that the historical particularity of Indigenous Boarding Schools is not unduly circumscribed and reduced for the satisfaction of legal accusation. In this chapter, I present the metaphor of the ‘settler colonial mesh’ as a means for capturing this complexity. In addition, I show how what is sometimes referred to as ‘intimate colonialism’ can be captured through this metaphor. Finally, I discuss how Cybercartography opens map-making to the intimacy and unevenness of settler colonial genocide.


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How the boarding school worked: Samantha M. Williams, The School on Snyder Street: Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Resilience at the Stewart Indian School, 1890-2018, PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2019

09Oct19

Abstract: In 1879, the U.S. government embarked upon a program to assimilate thousands of Native American children who were taken from their homes and sent to off-reservation boarding schools managed by federal officials. These schools were designed to destroy the connections between Native children and their lands, isolate them from their families, and divorce them from their cultures and traditions. The Stewart Indian School opened in Carson City, Nevada, in December 1890, and enthusiastically embraced its mission. Newly enrolled students were separated from their families, had their appearances altered, and were forced speak only English. They were assigned work details on campus, compelled to attend church, and placed in remedial classes and vocational training programs. The message at Stewart, particularly during its early years, was clear: assimilation meant the adoption of white, middle-class values for Native students, forgoing their connections with tribal lands and communities, and the explicit acceptance of Indigenous inferiority and white supremacy. For U.S. officials, school like Stewart would resolve the “Indian problem” once and for all by eradicating Indigenous cultures, ending U.S. treaty obligations, and allowing the unfettered expansion of white settlers into Native lands.

In this dissertation, I argue that settler colonialism propelled U.S. government programs designed to assimilate generations of Native children at the Stewart Indian School. I examine the history of the Stewart Indian School from its opening in 1890 to its closure in 1980, and underscore the settler colonial underpinnings of assimilationist practices at the school. At the same time, I also employ a borderlands framework to explain how and why Indigenous students and their families subverted school rules, and to investigate tensions between federal officials and the local authorities charged with implementing their policies. I further evaluate the current status of the Stewart Indian School grounds to underscore the ongoing nature of federal and state settler colonial policies, which have focused, until recently, on erasing the trauma inflicted on generations of Native families connected to the school.

Each chapter explores different periods of the Stewart Indian School’s history and connects them with trends in federal Indian policy. After a discussion of methodologies and the boarding school system, chapter two focuses on the early decades of the school, when students were subjected to harsh assimilationist policies. Chapter three examines reforms that occurred between 1925 and 1948, and argues that, despite new federal guidelines, Stewart School officials remained intent on the assimilation of Native children. The fourth chapter focuses on the implementation of the Navajo Special Program at Stewart, and connects this rigidly assimilationist program with federal attempts to terminate tribal rights and relocate Native peoples to urban areas. In chapter five, I describe student and parent-led reform efforts in the 1960s and 1970s, their connections with national self-determination movements, and Stewart officials’ continued focus on assimilation. My final chapter examines the history of the Stewart School after its 1980 closure, and illustrates how state, federal, and local officials sought to erase negative Indigenous experiences at the Stewart Indian School and replace them with an overwhelmingly positive historical narrative.


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Indigenous and settler (it depends on where one is): Patricia Tupou, Broken Islands / Moving Islands: Settler Colonialism and Oceanic Mobilities, MA Dissertation, University of Hawai’i, 2019

09Oct19

Abstract: This thesis discusses settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi, paying particular attention to the inclusion of Pacific Islanders as settlers within the discourse. In particular, I concentrate on Tongans in Hawaiʻi, whilst situating this work within a broader Oceanic literature couched within Pacific Islands Studies. By examining literature on indigeneity, settler colonialism, empire, and Indigenous politics, this thesis aims to extend Oceanic narratives that often exclude Hawaiʻi by reorienting our understanding of kinships in the Pacific. This thesis looks into concepts of land, mobility, identity and labor in Oceania through the movement of people, rocks and islands. Ultimately provoking new areas of inquiry within critiques of settler colonialism, but also asking how we should approach such new terrain. This thesis argues that to date, critiques of settler colonialism have failed to include Pacific Islanders and the mobilities of Pacific peoples within an Oceanic diaspora. Further, concepts of indigeneity as presented through a settler colonial analytic may work to undermine and occlude Pan-Pacific relationalities from being realized. Settler state cartographies and the multiple writings of landscapes further alienate connections between native and non-native Pacific Islanders within the settler states of Oceania. Therefore, this thesis offers a re-reading of space through rocks as sites and symbols of resistance and Oceanic connection.


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The settler’s house is an indigenous structure: Thomas Abowd, ‘Edward Said’s Home, Martin Buber’s Mailbox: The “Terrible Silences” of Israeli Colonial Jerusalem’, Social Text, 37, 3, 2019, pp. 73-92

06Oct19

Abstract: This article examines the primary means by which Israeli settler colonialism has appropriated and reconfigured Jerusalem since 1948—discursively no less than physically. It analyzes how the Jewish state, building on the colonial suppositions and discourses of the pre-1948 Zionist movement, has sought to efface Palestinian attachments to and histories in this contested urban realm. This piece foregrounds the life and works of Jewish Israeli philosopher Martin Buber and the binationalist, antistatist politics he sought to build in Palestine with the indigenous Arab populations before the creation of Israel in 1948. However, it also offers a critique of the ways in which even Buber and other Zionist binationalists’ dovish political positions were implicated in settler colonialism and the displacement and erasure of the Palestinians. The article details some of the ways in which the mobilization of presence and absence has been crucial to Israel’s colonization of Jerusalem and how they have been utilized in the service of the state’s drive for exclusive control over this symbolically potent city. This is done, principally, through a reading of the Palestinian house in Jerusalem in which Buber resided during his first four years in the country: the family home of Palestinian scholar and activist Edward Said. This article explores the relationship between the exiled intellectual, Said, and this structure, commandeered by Zionist forces in 1948. This article also explores some of Said’s views on colonial landscapes and binationalist futures for Israelis and Palestinians.


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Decolonising psychiatric knowledge: Yi-Cheng Wu, ‘Governing Indigenous Drinking: Jiejiu in Settler-Colonial Taiwan’, Human Organization, 78, 3, 2019, pp. 230-240

06Oct19

Abstract: This study explores the disparity between psychiatric interventions and the lived experience of problematic drinking, which is a critical global mental health issue, including in an indigenous area in Northern Taiwan. This strategically situated three-year ethnographic study on a hospital’s jiejiu project highlights the dilemma of current health interventions that target indigenous people who drink under settler-colonial conditions. Interventions based on Western psychiatric categories can lose their efficacy due to disparate understandings regarding illness, moral experience, and perceptions of indigenous drinking cultures. The difficulties of such interventions also appear from hesitant self-identification and ambivalence toward a drinking culture shaped by social changes wrought by marginalization and oppression through colonization. Psychiatrization of the human condition and the top-down format of health delivery policy reaffirm colonial power and generate various levels of stigmatization. This study asserts the need to decolonize modern psychiatric knowledge and inquire into the ontology of drinking practices under complicated contexts in the contemporary world.


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