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Settler colonialism on display: Sa’ed Atshan, Katharina Galor, ‘Jerusalem, Museums, and Discourses’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 87, 2021, pp. 138-151

03Dec21

Abstract: This article compares four museum exhibits of Jerusalem from different geographical and political contexts: the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem, the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Jewish Museum Berlin. It examines the role of heritage narrative, focusing specifically on the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how it is either openly engaged or, alternatively, avoided. The authors employ an analytical framework of settler colonialism and specifically highlight the asymmetric power dynamics resulting from Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, and how this political reality is addressed or ignored in the respective exhibits. The article also explores the agency of curators in shaping knowledge and perspective, and examines the role of the visitors community. The authors argue that the differences in approaches to exhibiting the city’s cultural heritage reveal how museums are central sites for the politics of the human gaze, where significant decisions are made regarding inclusion and exclusion of conflict.


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Cyberspace as settler space: Wendy Hui Kyong Chung, ‘Omophily, or the Swarming of the Segregated Neighbourhood’, in Wendy Hui Kyong Chung, Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, MIT Press, 2021, pp. 81-120

03Dec21

Abstract: By the early twenty-first century, the imaginary of the Internet had moved decisively from the otherworldly expanse of cyberspace to the domesticated landscape of well-policed, gated “neighborhoods.” This was a progression rather than a transformation: U.S. settler colonialism and enclosure underlay the visions of both neighborhoods and cyberspace. Cyberspace, described as a “portal“—an elaborate façade that frames the entrance to a closed space—was always a horizon trapped within a U.S. military-academic network, a classic example of what information studies scholar Paul Edwards has called a “closed world.“ 1 Both visions also painted certain features as “inherent” to the Internet—they simply evaluated them differently. The “decentralized” nature of the World Wide Web and expanded user participation moved from being democracy’s guarantor to being its greatest threat: a breeding ground for insurrections and abuse. In a related development, the “alternative” aspects of Internet culture went from being pseudo-socialist to pseudo-fascist. As social media researcher Rebecca Lewis has pointed out, the alternative universes of YouTube have established systems of knowledge and authority that both counter and parallel the mainstream sources they have relentlessly critiqued.


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Teaching the founding violence: Avril Bell, Elizabeth Russell, ‘Aotearoa New Zealand’s New National History Curriculum and Histories of Mourning’, New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 2021

30Nov21

Abstract: From 2022, New Zealand schools are teaching a new compulsory history curriculum that aims to teach diverse New Zealand histories, while foregrounding the centrality of Māori histories and the impacts of colonisation. The new curriculum will upend a long history of ‘forgetting’ the nation’s contentious and conflictual past, and in particular the nineteenth century ‘wars for New Zealand’ (O’Malley, 2016) that secured settler hegemony over the nation-state. In this paper, we focus on the roles of remembering and forgetting in the narration of national histories to explore what might be a productive orientation to take to this contentious and unsettling past. We argue that the new history curriculum inaugurates a new phase of narrating the nation, replacing earlier phases of monocultural and bicultural nationhood that depended on this past being ‘forgotten’. And we argue for the productive value of a histories of critical mourning approach to remembering this founding violence.


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Recognition as Elimination? Emile Badarin, ‘Politics of Recognition, Elimination and Settler-Colonialism’, Critical Sociology, 2021

30Nov21

Abstract: This article cross-examines the external and internal dimensions of settler-colonial politics of recognition. In settler-colonialism, recognition represents another medium for the elimination of the natives, whose existence is considered as a source of threat, uncertainty and curtailed settler sovereignty. Settler sovereign statehood is contingent on the reengineering of the land–population relationship in the conquered territory. The settler-colonial politics of recognition seeks to institutionalise particular patterns of values that ultimately embody the logic of elimination at the normative level in an attempt to disrupt the natives’ relationship with their land. This article critically interrogates Israel’s politics of recognition and demonstrates how this politics is applied to establish internal and external normative scaffolding to normalise and legitimise the settler desire for sovereignty and invulnerability. Israel’s recognition politics dovetails with sources of sovereignty – territory and population – and evokes previous vulnerabilities and victimhood to elicit a sense of urgency and moral validation.


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Indigenous sovereigns host: Anne Meneley, ‘Eating Wild: Hosting the Food Heritage of Palestine’, PoLAR, 2021

30Nov21

Abstract: This article examines the strategic use of an event of hospitality celebrating the Wild Foods of Palestine as part of a form of fertile activism. Artist Mirna Bamieh presented the dinner as a “live art” event where the positive power of food and Palestinian culinary distinction was highlighted more than victimhood. In a moment of pleasurable pedagogy, the guests learned about the preservation of knowledge about foraging precious wild plants and their preparation. They enjoyed traditional and innovative spins on Palestinian cuisine, absorbing the wild tastes of the land. By eliciting embodied responses, a moment of pleasurable convivial pedagogy was produced to inspire the guests to engage with activism against ongoing dispossession under Israeli settler colonialism. The wild plants themselves and the knowledge of how to process them were envisioned as a type of cultural heritage to be preserved as an archive for potential transformation. The event raised important possibilities for the futures of this particular kind of Palestinian activism: edible, fertile, aesthetic. 


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Reparative, not distributive: E. Klein, E. Fouksman, ‘Reparations as a Rightful Share: From Universalism to Redress in Distributive Justice’, Development and Change, 2021

30Nov21

Abstract: The distribution of resources through an unconditional, universal mechanism (such as a universal basic income) recognizes the shared origins of wealth created by past generations and built out of the commons. Yet some groups have lost and suffered far more than others during the process of production and wealth creation, due to colonization, slavery and expropriation. This article argues that calls for reparations are an important caveat to the universalist case for distributive justice. It does so by examining three cases for reparations: reparations for slavery, for transnational inequalities generated by European colonization, and for the dispossession of Indigenous peoples by settler colonialism. The authors put these three cases in dialogue with the argument for universalist (re)distribution, in particular the contention that a universal but redistributory rightful share could act as redress for the unjust expropriation and wealth accumulation of capitalism. This article thus demarcates the overlaps and tensions between reparatory justice and distributory justice, underscoring both the intersection and the friction between calls for redistribution on universal lines and variegated forms of redistribution plus recognition.


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An Italian settler colony: Lucy Riall, ‘Hidden Spaces of Empire: Italian Colonists in Nineteenth-Century Peru’, Past & Present, 2021

30Nov21

Abstract: Among the clichés in modern European history, one of the most common is of Italy as ‘the least of the Great Powers’, unable to punch above its weight in the international arena and classed as a ‘latecomer’ to imperial conquest. In this article, I suggest instead that historians have been looking in the wrong place, and in the wrong period, for evidence of Italian ambition. By concentrating on territorial acquisitions in Africa, they are assessing only a small, relatively unproductive and arguably atypical slice of Italy’s global presence. I argue that even before national unification, and long before acquiring a formal Empire, Italy built a global influence structured by the activities of overseas migrants. Yet, despite the recent ‘turn’ to global history and the stress on diversity in colonial experience, the chronology and geography of the European nation-state still shape our understanding of nineteenth-century Empire. Looking at the hugely successful Italian colony in Peru, at both its commercial and scientific interests and at a violent attempt to establish a settler colony in Chanchamayo, in the Peruvian Amazon, I argue that this Italian world was driven not a nation state but relied instead on a common culture, a culture that was created by a capacity for local assimilation, by Catholic notions of civilisation and by ideas of white racial superiority. Modern imperialism was shaped as much by ‘lesser’ powers, often before – or without – the nation-state, and in continuity with the practices of the early-modern period. Moreover, mundane migrants could be the most successful empire-builders. I conclude with a call to take note of the full and diverse range of nineteenth-century colonial activities, and not to assume the primacy of formal Empires in the period of ‘High Imperialism.’


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The settler’s wilful ignorance: Syeda Karishma Bristy, A Relational Analysis of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance in Canada’s Settler-Colonial Context, MA dissertation, Carleton University, 2021

30Nov21

Abstract: In this thesis, I expand and apply the work of Miranda Fricker, Gaile Pohlhaus, José Medina, and Christine Koggel to argue that willful hermeneutical ignorance is the most appropriate entry point for analyzing epistemic injustice between settlers and Indigenous people. I examine how early settler-colonial relationships of power and oppression have evolved to help sustain a form of epistemic injustice towards Indigenous communities in Canada. I investigate the colonial history, legal legacies, and myths that create the fundamental asymmetries of material and hermeneutical power. This background context highlights how this history impacts the respective racial/social/epistemic positionality of White settler society and racialized migrant communities. I argue that each group holds a performative and interactive role in silencing and marginalizing Indigenous knowers as equal and valid epistemic agents. Lastly, I incorporate the relational insights gained from my analysis to inform/propose counteractive measures to address epistemic injustice towards Indigenous communities in Canada.


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The recreation of a settler society: Lisa Tink, Fit to be Canadian? The Recreation Industrial Complex in Canada, PhD dissertation, University of Alberta, 2021

28Nov21

Abstract: In recent years, both recreation scholars and practitioners began calling for a sectoral return to municipal recreation’s historical roots as a public good (e.g., Mahaffey, 2011; ISRC & CPRA, 2015; Cureton and Frisby, 2011; Smale and Reid, 2002; Taylor and Frisby, 2010). Blaming neoliberal ideology for the current pay-per-use model, these calls for a more inclusive recreation system not only highlighted the negative impacts of a consumer-based recreation system, they suggested that the profession’s ‘business-like’ practices should be of concern because they are in direct opposition to the field’s historic mandate of ‘equal opportunity’ for access. A central assumption underlying these calls for the recreation profession to return to ‘its historical roots’ is that municipal recreation services, until late ‘80s and ‘90s, were available to all members of society. This narrative – of a more inclusive and equitable era in recreation’s past – is, however, a romanticized account of public recreation’s history. As I will argue throughout this dissertation, public recreation has always been, and continues to be, a location where racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, outcomes are (re)produced. Using Foucauldian genealogy, I trace some of the conditions that have given rise to what I have labeled the recreation industrial complex. More specifically, I use a vast collection of formal and informal archival documents to demonstrate how our public recreation facilities (both past and present) are intricately linked to the white supremacist logics of Western exceptionalism, settler colonialism, ableism, racism, capitalism, and (hetero)patriarchy. I begin by analyzing three seemingly unrelated pieces of Canada’s past: Indigenous legislation, immigration policy and race science. I do so in an attempt to politicize the category ‘Canadian’ and demonstrate how it has been taken-for-granted in our traditional recreation histories. I then weave these seemingly unrelated pieces of Canadian history into a recreation context. More specifically, I analyze two distinct eras of recreation facility development – the social medicine era (1880s-1920s) and the social welfare era (1930s-1970s) – and provide examples of how recreation was both produced by, and reproduced technologies of white supremacy. Finally, I demonstrate how these historical discourses, practices, and policies have created the conditions for the a public recreation system that positions everyone except white, middle to upper class, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied boys and (younger) men as an excludable type (Titchtosky, 2003). By exposing the ways particular bodies came to be centered in a recreation context, the purpose of this work is to demonstrate how historical inclusions and exclusions (whether intentional or not) were in fact part of a broader biopolitical project intended to sustain white supremacy, with the goal of encouraging critical dialogues about what is inherently problematic, difficult, and dangerous in the discourses, practices, and policies that govern our contemporary public recreation systems.


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Indigenous to settler: Caroline Kahlenberg, How Locals Became Settlers: Mizrahi Jews and Bodily Capital in Palestine, 1908-1948, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2021

28Nov21

Abstract: This dissertation explores early twentieth-century Palestine through the lens of bodies and material culture. While histories of modern Palestine often treat “Jews” and “Arabs” as naturally distinct categories, I examine how these categories were constructed as racialized, embodied, and opposing identities. At a time when Palestine witnessed major changes— including the transition from Ottoman to British rule, mass Zionist settlement, shifting labor patterns, and the rise of Palestinian nationalism—residents made sense of their identities by spreading ideas about whose bodies were like, or unlike, their own. This dissertation focuses on Sephardi and Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews, many of whom lived in Palestine prior to modern Zionist settlement, which offers a unique lens to explore the process of Arab-Jewish boundary-making. At the turn of the twentieth century, Mizrahi Jewish bodies were not always clearly marked as exclusively “Jewish” or “Arab.” Their clothing, accents, and cultural tastes were often indistinguishable from those of their Muslim and Christian neighbors in Palestine. However, the growing colonial-national conflict in the 1920s and 1930s forced Mizrahi Jews to confront their position vis-à-vis Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. They adopted several strategies in light of this new reality. Many abandoned “Arab” clothing and accents in order to assimilate into the Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish community (Yishuv). In doing so, they helped produce a visual and sonic Arab-Jewish division on the ground. Others challenged the emerging divide by refusing to change their bodies. They expressed pride in their cultural and linguistic heritage in the Islamic world. Yet others selectively employed their “Oriental” bodies as a way to assert Zionist belonging and nativeness in Palestine. This dissertation makes three broader contributions. First, using photographs, oral histories, material culture, and written sources, it illuminates how clothing, sounds, sexuality, and age become racialized in circumstances of colonial-national conflict. Second, while scholars often point to one “year zero” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the founding of a political movement, the outbreak of ethnic violence, or the publication of a specific document, I demonstrate that building a Jewish-Arab division demanded the constant policing of how individuals looked and sounded. Finally, the dissertation’s focus on Mizrahi Jews pushes scholars of settler colonialism to think beyond a local-versus-settler paradigm. Many Mizrahi Jews in Palestine were locals who also became part of a settler movement; they were, as I term them, “local settlers.” The story of this dissertation, then, is the story of how the locals became settlers.


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