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Multiple settler sovereignties during the Jacksonian era: Thomas Richards, Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States, JHUP, 2020

14Jan21

Description: Most Americans know that the state of Texas was once the Republic of Texas—an independent sovereign state that existed from 1836 until its annexation by the United States in 1846. But few are aware that thousands of Americans, inspired by Texas, tried to establish additional sovereign states outside the borders of the early American republic. In Breakaway Americas, Thomas Richards, Jr., examines six such attempts and the groups that supported them: “patriots” who attempted to overthrow British rule in Canada; post-removal Cherokees in Indian Territory; Mormons first in Illinois and then the Salt Lake Valley; Anglo-American overland immigrants in both Mexican California and Oregon; and, of course, Anglo-Americans in Texas. Though their goals and methods varied, Richards argues that these groups had a common mindset: they were not expansionists. Instead, they hoped to form new, independent republics based on the “American values” that they felt were no longer recognized in the United States: land ownership, a strict racial hierarchy, and masculinity. Exposing nineteenth-century Americans’ lack of allegiance to their country, which at the time was plagued with economic depression, social disorder, and increasing sectional tension, Richards points us toward a new understanding of American identity and Americans as a people untethered from the United States as a country. Through its wide focus on a diverse array of American political practices and ideologies, Breakaway Americas will appeal to anyone interested in the Jacksonian United States, US politics, American identity, and the unpredictable nature of history.


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Against settler colonial scarcity: Candace Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai’i, Duke University Press, 2021

14Jan21

Description: In Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future, Candace Fujikane contends that the practice of mapping abundance is a radical act in the face of settler capital’s fear of an abundance that feeds. Cartographies of capital enable the seizure of abundant lands by enclosing “wastelands” claimed to be underdeveloped. By contrast, Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) cartographies map the continuities of abundant worlds. Vital to restoration movements is the art of kilo, intergenerational observation of elemental forms encoded in storied histories, chants, and songs. As a participant in these movements, Fujikane maps the ecological lessons of these elemental forms: reptilian deities who protect the waterways, sharks who swim into the mountains, the navigator Maui who fishes up the islands, the deities of snow and mists on Mauna Kea. The laws of these elements are now being violated by toxic waste dumping, leaking military jet fuel tanks, and astronomical-industrial complexes. As Kanaka Maoli and their allies stand as land and water protectors, Fujikane calls for a profound attunement to the elemental forms in order to transform climate events into renewed possibilities for planetary abundance.


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A matter of reproduction: Christopher Mayes, ‘Race, Reproduction, and Biopolitics: A Review Essay’, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2021

12Jan21

Abstract: This review essay critically examines Catherine Mills’s Biopolitics (2018) and Camisha Russell’s The Assisted Reproduction of Race (2018). Although distinct works, the centrality of race and reproduction provides a point of connection and an opening into reframing contemporary debates within bioethics and biopolitics. In reviewing these books together I hope to show how biopolitical theory and critical philosophy of race can be useful in looking at bioethical problems from a new perspective that open up different kinds of analyses, especially around historically embedded problems like institutional racism and the legacies of colonialism in healthcare.


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‘Reconciliation’ as a (juridical practice of) dispossession: Nicole Van Lier, ‘Reconciliation 2.0: Resolving Contradictions in the Production of Settler Colonial and Capitalist Space in Canada’, Antipode, 2021

12Jan21

Abstract: This paper reviews a pair of Canadian legal decisions on the duty to consult to explore the court’s role in reconciling tensions between settler colonial and capitalist space. Following a period of political and economic instability that made energy development vulnerable to Indigenous legal challenge, the court legalised the delegation of Indigenous consultations to corporate and regulatory actors, defined consultation in practical terms, and intensified the remedy for inadequate consultation. The court not only substituted nation‐to‐nation negotiations with corporate engagements, but submitted energy corporations to the work of legitimising and effectuating Canadian sovereignty. The decisions call for an expanded view of “reconciliation” as a judicial practice of Indigenous dispossession, accomplished not only by reconciling Indigenous authority with Canadian sovereignty, but by reconciling capitalist energy development with the legalities of Canada’s modern settler colonial order. The decisions bring into greater focus the state’s increasing reliance on corporations to reproduce Canadian sovereignty.


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Settler vengeance: Joshua Nelson, ‘Frontiers of American Vengeance: The Frontier Thesis, the Zero Tolerance Policy, and the Interpersonal Process of Creative Shame’, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 2021

10Jan21

Abstract: During the Spring of 2018, the United States Federal Government, in accordance with its new Zero Tolerance immigration policy, separated at least 2,654 infants and children from their parents at its southern border. This was done with no plans for reuniting these families which, in many cases, has proven extremely difficult if not impossible. These acts echo the vengeance that occurred on the original American Frontier and included the Native-American genocide. Although the specifics and severities greatly differ, the psychodynamics and related processes are similar. Also, certain associated national foundational myths of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny 1 are manipulated and exploited in similar ways. Unlike with the genocide, however, these acts are occurring in the present day and offer an opportunity for Americans to engage in the interpersonal, potentially remedial, process of creative shame. The author’s experience of this generative process is presented, including an example from his clinical work.


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Mediterraneanism as settler colonialism: Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, ‘Mediterraneanism in conflict: development and settlement of Palestinian refugees and Jewish immigrants in Gaza and Yamit’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2021

10Jan21

Abstract: This article examines Israeli development in the Gaza Strip and Northern Sinai from 1972 to 1982 from the perspective of architectural history. We argue that the prime objective of the Israeli occupation in this decade was economic development, not elimination; its guiding logic saw humanitarian aid as the preferred way to “resolve” the Palestinian refugee crisis. We follow how the pro-development, humanist “know how” of the architects and urban planners wrote themselves onto Gaza’s politics of space. Their scientific approach embodied in Mediterranean architecture was the solution of choice to hit two birds with one stone: end the refugee crisis by assimilating them into the Gaza strip cities, and ensure dependence on Israel by a new development plan with Yamit city at its epicentre. Mediterranean architecture expressed the gradations of vernacularity in the Israeli policy, and helped fashion a unique ideology of development based on exclusion and ethnic separation.


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Solar energy against settler colonialism: Jordan B. Kinder, ‘Solar Infrastructure as Media of Resistance, or, Indigenous Solarities against Settler Colonialism’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 120, 1, 2021, pp. 63-76

10Jan21

Abstract: The ongoing history of setter colonialism is inextricable from the infrastructures of energy and extraction that provide its material foundation. Addressing this inextricable relationship, this article explores how Indigenous solarities in Canada resist extractivism and generate conditions for just energy futures beyond settler colonialism through emergent solar infrastructures. Developing a preliminary theory of Indigenous solarities, this article anchors the author’s observations to Lubicon Cree energy justice activist Melina Laboucan-Massimo’s Sacred Earth Solar initiative and its two completed projects: the Piitapan Solar Project in Laboucan-Massimo’s home community of Little Buffalo, Alberta, Canada, which powers a community health center, and a partnership with the Tiny House Warriors. The Tiny House Warriors is a Secwepemcled movement to construct mobile tiny houses along the path of the Trans Mountain Expansion Pipeline Project. This article’s approach is methodologically informed by recent infrastructural thinking from theorists such as Lauren Berlant and Deborah Cowen who offer an expansive, relational understanding of infrastructure. It is also informed by thinkers such as Myles Lennon and Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer, who respectively see in solar energy infrastructures the possibilities to decolonize energy and to generate a feminist techno-ecological ethos. This article offers a brief account of the historical and contemporary relationship between settler colonialism and infrastructural development in Canada, before providing an overview of three mutually informing frameworks for preliminarily thinking through the materialization of Indigenous solarities: as media of resistance; as expressions of Indigenous feminism; and as expressions of Indigenous futurisms. The article concludes by scaling out from the context of Sacred Earth Solar’s emergent infrastructures of Indigenous solarities, connecting these efforts with larger movements of Indigenous resistance and renewable energy infrastructure initiatives. Ultimately, this article argues that Indigenous solarities signify myriad potentialities for reorienting our collective energy imaginaries from scarcity to abundance in ways that foreground Indigenous self-determination against and beyond extractivism.


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Gossiping settlers: Marek Paryż, ‘Secrecy, Suspicion, Exposure: Negotiating Authority Structures in a Settler Colonial Society as Depicted in Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident’, European Journal of American Studies, 15, 4, 2021

10Jan21

Abstract: The article discusses the ways in which Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s 1940 novel The Ox-Bow Incident problematizes the issues of secrecy, suspicion, gossip and exposure as a basis for the depiction of a variety of regulatory practices in a hierarchized settler society whose structures of authority enter a phase of renegotiation. The novel can be read as a portrayal of the Far West’s transition toward a more egalitarian and modern social organization. Clark depicts a stratified society in which striving for a form of advancement is a shared necessity that powerfully influences individual mindsets, and this tendency can redefine even the entrenched hierarchies. Secrecy and suspicion exemplify the tactics through which individual interests fuel a larger process of the renegotiation of power relations within the settler collective.


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Critical Forum: On the Uses of Settler Colonial Studies (3): Robert Warrior, ‘Settler sidekick solidarity?: response to Lorenzo Veracini: “Is settler colonial studies even useful?”‘, Postcolonial Studies, 2020

05Jan21

Excerpt: Being neither a settler colonial studies practitioner nor among those who have accused it of being ‘useless’ or ‘detrimental to Indigenous struggles’, I approach the arguments Lorenzo Veracini references in his commentary as an (engaged) observer. Those of us in Indigenous studies can hardly help but be engaged observers of settler colonial studies, especially those like me who are also connected to American studies. Veracini’s defence of settler colonial studies is one I want to engage not only as a working scholar but also as someone who has been actively involved in leadership positions in scholarly associations connected to these two other fields. I was one of the six founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and I have held multiple offices in the American Studies Association (ASA), which has given me a pretty good working knowledge of these fields.


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Critical Forum: On the Uses of Settler Colonial Studies (2): Alice Te Punga Somerville, ‘OMG settler colonial studies: response to Lorenzo Veracini: “Is Settler Colonial Studies Even Useful?”‘, Postcolonial Studies, 2020

05Jan21

Excerpt: I am one of those Indigenous scholars who often finds herself in conversations where the other person says ‘but I mean “post-colonial” … like have the colonisers left?’. On the inside, each time this happens, I wrestle with four selves. My nerdy self wants to say ‘actually, that’s not what the “post” means in that term’. My Indigenous self prioritises relationships and so doesn’t want to be a patronising know-it-all. My self-doubting she’s-colonised-and-she-knows-it self wonders if all of this education has prevented me from seeing the ridiculousness of the ‘post’. And, finally, my normal human self just wants to be seen and loved and doesn’t want the other person to think of me as a very colonised person or a real buzzkill. The bout of internal wrestling can result in a wide variety of actual responses that depend on my connection with the other person, the risks and possibilities of ‘going there’ and (honestly) whether I am tired from a long day of being in explanation mode.


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