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Settling literally on the language: Colby Y. Miyose, Eean Grimshaw, ‘Ua mau ke ea o ka ‘āina i ka pono: Cultural appropriation of the Hawaiian language in Hawaii Five-0’, PRism, 15, 1, 2019, pp. 1-17

05Jan20

Abstract: Most in Hawaiʻi are familiar with the phrase, “Ua mau ke ea o ka ‘āina i ka pono,” roughly translated as “the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.” However, the Western adoption of this phrase has resulted in its colonization and retranslation, devaluing its significance for Native Hawaiians. This project historically traces the phrase, focusing on: ea, aina, and pono. Of particular concern is how the phrase is translated/embodied for the consumption of a global audience as the title of an episode of the hit crime series Hawaii Five-0. We discuss the implications of the show’s use of the phrase, specifically the appropriation of Hawaiian culture and language, and its resultant impact on understanding Hawaiian identity. We conclude that shows like Hawaii Five-0 distort and/or prevent an accurate understanding of what is authentically “Hawaiian,” by downplaying the uniqueness of Hawaiian identity in favor of its continued exoticization.


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Children settlers: Jonna Perrillo, ‘At Home on the Range: Cowboy Culture, Indians, and the Assimilation of Enemy Children in the Cold War Borderlands’, American Quarterly, 71, 4, 2019 pp. 945-967

03Jan20

Excerpt: One winter afternoon in 1946, Alicia Swann, an elementary school principal in El Paso, received an unusual phone call. Lois Godfrey, the American military liaison for the families of Nazi scientists relocated to nearby Fort Bliss, called Swann to ask if Crockett Elementary might accept some of the ninety school-aged children who would arrive in El Paso that spring. A year earlier, in one of the first acts of the Cold War, the US Army had launched Operation Paperclip, recruiting 118 scientists and technicians who designed the V-2 missile for the Third Reich to build an American missile program. The scientists’ wives and children were now beginning to arrive, and Swann was faced with a difficult decision. Could she “consent to let German children—enemy children—come through the door?” She decided that she could. Within months of the children’s arrival, Swann found her instincts had been right. By her measure, the Paperclip children fit in easily, learned English quickly, and possessed “no class barriers” from the school’s other students. At Crockett and in their intensive English-language classes at Fort Bliss, the children learned to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing “The Eyes of Texas.” When asked how she reconciled the fact that the children’s fathers had worked for Adolf Hitler, Swann responded, “I cannot concern myself with whatever [the parents] are or have been. It is with the children that I rest my hopes. … In spirit and in thinking they are American, for they have a happiness here they have never known before.” Crockett’s embrace of the German children, she argued, was simply American. To exemplify the students’ easy assimilation, Swann pointed to the example of Peter Lange. In class, another student had referred to him as “our German boy.” Lange corrected him, explaining that he was no longer German but just another “Davy Crockett.” To Swann, Lange’s story illustrated that the Paperclip students were like any American children, in their values and their imaginations. Still, the transformation was not predestined. Instead, Lange’s choice to figure himself in the mold of the frontiersman, Texan migrant, and Alamo martyr for whom his school was named underscores the purposeful role that schools like Swann’s played in upholding western heroes as models of patriotism.


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Calling settler colonial genocide: Craig Nessan, ‘Calling a Thing What It Is Confronting the American Genocide of Indigenous Peoples’, Currents in Theology and Mission, 47, 1, 2020

03Jan20

Abstract: This article examines the history of indigenous people through the lens of genocide theory. Following autobiographical reflections on settler colonialism and the practice of holding seminars on the theme of American genocides, the author explores the meaning of right remembering and making reparations in the context of American exceptionalism and white supremacy as represented in civil religion. Calling a thing what it is, according to Luther’s theology of the cross, involves not only righting the historical narrative based on the past but appreciating the resistance and resilience of indigenous people into the present. Gordon J. Straw was a major figure whose legacy challenges us in calling a thing what it is.


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The socio-spatial positionalities of settler colonialism: Antoine Garrault, ‘The young activists of Ramallah against the Israeli occupation: Forms of commitment and socio-spatial positionalities’, Participations, 3, 2019, pp. 165-193

01Jan20

Abstract: Focusing on the young activists of Ramallah engaged in the Palestinian “popular resistance,” this article aims to analyze particular forms of anticolonial engagement in the West Bank. In the context of spatial divisions caused by the Israeli occupation, we demonstrate that the territorial regime in Ramallah, within the Oslo system, partly determines the interpretive framing of the conflict, the nature of the mobilizations, and the formation of activist networks. This study examines the existing relationships between spatial context, on the one hand, and the commitment of young activists, on the other, by defining specific socio-spatial positionalities. 


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Bodies as territory: Esme G. Murdock, ‘This Land Was Made for … : (Re)Appearing Black/Brown Female Corporeality, Life, and Death’, Hypatia, 2019

29Dec19

Abstract: Lands and bodies are often conceptualized as exhaustible objects and property within settler-colonial and neoliberal ideologies. These conceptualizations lead to underdevelopment of understandings of lands and bodies that fall outside of these ascriptions, and also attempt to actively obscure the pervasive ways in which settler colonialism violently reinscribes itself on the North American landscape through the murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women’s bodies. In this article, I will argue that the continual murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women in North America facilitate the successful functioning of ongoing settler-colonial systems and projects. This violence creates and reinforces the functionality of Black/Brown bodies as the territory upon which settler identity and futurity gains traction, indeed, requires.


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Settlers of colour: Arama Rata, Faisal Al Asaad, ‘Whakawhanaungatanga as a Māori Approach to Indigenous–Settler of Colour Relationship Building’, New Zealand Population Review, 45, 2019, pp. 211–233

29Dec19

Abstract: Communities of colour are racialised and oppressed differentially by settler colonial states , yet the discourse of diversity and inclusion that dominates state interactions with communities of colour tends to conflate marginalised groups as equivalent and interchangeable to the detriment of intergroup relations. An approach to community building that recognises racial difference in general and the irreducibility of indigeneity in particular is needed if racialised communities are to create solidarities for transformative change. We engage Indigenous and settler colonial theories to address these imperatives, while noting the distinct character of these frameworks. In particular, we seek to highlight the specificity of indigeneity in settler colonial contexts, such as Aotearoa New Zealand, and to generate a model for relationship building that is not founded on settler colonial ideologies, by drawing on Indigenous concepts. Through thematic analysis of interviews with Māori community leaders, we explore Māori-–tauiwi (settler) of colour (ToC) relations. The results of our qualitative analysis provide evidence for Māori–ToC relations that are consistent with whanaungatanga (good relationships characterised as family-like, based on similar experiences, and bound in conditional solidarity). Furthermore, we identify the following four aspects of whakawhanaungatanga (relationship building): positioning, power sharing, dialogue and cultural practice. Thus, we suggest whakawhanaungatanga as a Māori approach to relationship building with the potential to generate Indigenous–settler of colour solidarities towards transformative change.


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Settler geologies: Jeremy J. Schmidt, ‘Settler geology: Earth’s deep history and the governance of in situ oil spills in Alberta’, Political Geography, 78, 2020, #102132

29Dec19

Abstract: Alberta’s bitumen industry is frequently identified as a key site of environmental politics in the Anthropocene owing to the scale of its fossil fuel extraction operations. While popular images of surface mining activities often focus these discussions, approximately 80% of the bitumen reserves in the Canadian province lie too deep for surface mining and are extracted through in situ technologies, including processes that inject high-temperature, high-pressure steam to mobilize geologic formations of the tar-like fossil fuel. This article examines how in situ extraction was governed in response to four flow-to-surface (FTS) events in which bitumen unexpectedly migrated to Earth’s surface as the result of in situ operations. The governance response to these events is of particular interest because it counters the assertion that existing governance institutions operate on time scales that are incommensurate with those relevant to the Anthropocene. The Alberta case shows the opposite owing to how Earth’s deep history was used to provide temporal syntax for a geotechnical debate that ensued over what caused the FTS events. By detailing the controversy over what caused the FTS events, and the search for “enabling conditions” that would link causal explanations to the spatial distribution of the four bitumen seeps, Earth’s deep history was also made commensurate with the political geography of settler colonialism in Alberta. The article introduces and develops the notion of ‘settler geology’ in order to capture the naturalization of geologic forms of reasoning about Earth’s deep history, the geologic force of anthropogenic in situ operations, and the temporal framework of settler colonial governance in Alberta.


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Virtual residential schools: Andrew Woolford, Adam Muller, Struan Sinclair, ‘Risky Times and Spaces: Settler Colonialism and Multiplying Genocide Prevention through a Virtual Indian Residential School’, Genocide Studies and Prevention, 13, 3, 2019, pp. 79-96

29Dec19

Excerpt: Accordingly, the logic of prevention can also be seen to operate as a “logic of elimination.” Just as the logic of elimination, as identified by Patrick Wolfe, works to erase Indigenous presence upon the land while naturalizing non-Indigenous settlement, the logic of prevention turns our gaze away from the many means of elimination (e.g., forced assimilation, removal, linguistic and political destruction), thereby allowing us to imagine North America as a space not needing prevention. Indigenous groups, and the centrality of culture to the ongoingness of these groups, are defined out of the scope of genocide and so out of the scope of prevention, facilitating the perpetuation of a settler colonial logic of elimination by legal and other means.


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On the vitality of an interpretative approach: Kevin Bruyneel, ‘Review Essay: On Settler Colonialism’, The Review of Politics, 82, 1, 2020 , pp. 145-157

27Dec19

Reviewing Brenna Bhandar’s Colonial Lives of property, Adam Dahl’s Empire of the People, Sarah Deer’s The Beginning and End of Rape, and Onur Ulas Ince’s Colnial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism.

 


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‘Wakefield’s laboratory’ then and NOW: Simon Barber, ‘In Wakefield’s Laboratory: Tangata Whenua into Property/Labour in Te Waipounamu’, Journal of Sociology, 2019

27Dec19

Abstract: This article follows the alchemical political economy of Edward Gibbon Wakefield for whom Kāi Tahu whenua served as a laboratory. Wakefield’s clever formula for the transubstantiation of an incendiary social situation in Britain into new terrain for capital was designed to secure the transplantation of English economic and social relations to the colonies to ensure the persistence of a landless class compelled to sell their labour for wages. Ingeniously, the transport of that labour to the colonies was to be paid for by the market in land in the new colony: Kāi Tahu would be made to fund their own colonisation. I track the fate of capital’s settler dream for ready land and labour as it was brought into being by the New Zealand Company, subsequently taken over by the Crown, and as it continues into our present. The argument is divided into two parts. The first is the classical moment of primitive accumulation, clearing people from the land to provide a market in land and labour, ‘legal’ dispossession, and commodification. The second is the more recent continuation of the initial processes of dispossession and commodification as these assert themselves in processes of redress and as they are expressed in the corporatisation of Ngāi Tahu.


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