settler colonial studies blog

The usual threats to the settler state: Sergio Caggiano, Laura Mombello, ‘Immigrants and Indigenous Peoples in the Twists and Turns of Nationality and Citizenship: The Construction of Threats in Argentina (2015-2019)’, Historia y Sociedad, 39, 2020

18Oct20

Abstract: As part of research on social conflicts caused by the appropriation and use of lands and other spaces, this article addresses how the Argentine state constructed social threats between 2015 and 2019. The topics explored include who is construed as a threatening subject, the justification for using violence against these subjects and, more specifically, the notion of citizen versus foreigner used to legitimize the violence. By creating a threat, illegality is legally produced as part of the government’s concern for population security and circulation. Legislation, public debates, and national press coverage provide insight into these questions, as does the ethnographic fieldwork the authors have done with migrant organizations and rural and native communities since 1990. The state actions analysed herein should be understood as part of stricter control of migratory movements and borders in recent decades. But these global trends are linked to national and regional histories. In the policies implemented in Argentina between 2015 and 2019, two issues commonly viewed separately in the social sciences and public policies are connected: immigration/border crossing and the indigenous “problem.” Thus, the global rhetoric surrounding border control and illegality in Argentina refers to both non-nationals who move to the country and native groups who precede the nation-state. Although citizenship has been increasingly seen as separate from nationality, this article shows how the state continues to connect the two vis-à-vis the concept of foreignness. Additionally, it draws attention to how theoretical concerns about governmentality can be enriched by questions related to inequalities, disputes over goods and recognition, and, particularly, processes associated with accumulation by dispossession.

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Settler storytelling against settle ignorance: Carla Rice, Susan D. Dion, Hannah Fowlie, Andrea Breen, ‘Identifying and working through settler ignorance’, Critical Studies in Education, 2020

18Oct20

Abstract: As Canadian education systems implement the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, various expressions of white settler resistance become amplified. This article examines the potential for settler-educators’ stories to teach about processes for working through settler ignorance. Insight into the question of how to transform settler subjectivities and relationships with Indigenous peoples cuts across theoretical terrain in three fields: decolonizing education, epistemic ignorance, and affect/felt theory. We engage with these currents to analyze settler resistance through nIshnabek de’bwe wIn, a project aimed at transforming relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students and teachers through collaborative storytelling. We report on one project facet that brought Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, educators, and students together to create digital/multimedia stories about experiences of schooling that could inform settler-educator learning by offering critical insight into unlearning ignorance as one strategy (among many) for decolonizing colonial structures of schools. Attention to settler stories reveals a triadic relationship between power/knowledge/affect wherein these forces are inextricably entangled in ways that create and reinforce the epistemological knot of settler ignorance and resistance. The emotional work storytellers undertook as part of their embodied learning offers insight into the promise of creative pedagogies for untying that knot.

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Settler intimacy with land as a solution? Lorenz Gabriel Francesco Poeschl, De-Naturalising Affects: Toward Intimacy as a Means to Negotiate Settler Public Pedagogies in the Aotearoa/New Zealand Nature Site, PhD dissertation, University of Auckland, 2020

18Oct20

Abstract: This thesis investigates the role that conservation sites play in settler identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand and offers a theoretical framework, based on Peter Trawny’s reflections on intimacy, by means of which to interrogate and experience this role, which it considers a process of public pedagogy. The thesis situates the discourse of national identity through nature in the literature on settler colonial efforts to claim belonging through land. This effort in New Zealand was based on claims to unicity. These claims continue on into the discourses of present-day conservation. The thesis grounds the dispersal of this discourse in the literature on public pedagogy, meaning the teaching of ways of thinking and being through public spaces, figures, and practices. The particular discourse of national belonging the thesis takes as an affective discourse, one that changes the possibilities of bodies’ experience and capability. Places of identity give settler colonials the ability to experience themselves as belonging. Four New Zealand conservation sites are here investigated in their function as affective places of public pedagogy. As a means to negotiate such a public pedagogy of affect this thesis offers a theoretical framework based on the German philosopher Peter Trawny’s writings on intimacy. Intimacy is the condition of approach that makes no claim to finality. An intimate settler renounces the claim to native belonging and understands sites of public pedagogy as places that are to be performed without end. The case study sites are interrogated in terms of their ability to host intimate interaction. The attitude of intimacy also influences the form of this thesis. The writing should be considered in many places as seeking to express itself in the same attitude of which it speaks.

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The Indigenous city: Patricia E. Rubertone, Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast, University of Nebraska Press, 2020

16Oct20

Description: A city of modest size, Providence, Rhode Island, had the third-largest Native American population in the United States by the first decade of the nineteenth century. Native Providence tells their stories at this historical moment and in the decades before and after, a time when European Americans claimed that Northeast Natives had mostly vanished. Denied their rightful place in modernity, men, women, and children from Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pequot, Wampanoag, and other ancestral communities traveled diverse and complicated routes to make their homes in this city. They found each other, carved out livelihoods, and created neighborhoods that became their urban homelands—new places of meaningful attachments. Accounts of individual lives and family histories emerge from historical and anthropological research in archives, government offices, historical societies, libraries, and museums and from community memories, geography, and landscape. Patricia E. Rubertone chronicles the survivance of the Native people who stayed, left and returned, who faced involuntary displacement by urban renewal, who lived in Providence briefly, or who made their presence known both there and in the wider indigenous and settler-colonial worlds. These individuals reenvision the city’s past through everyday experiences and illuminate documentary and spatial tactics of inequality that erased Native people from most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history.

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The settlers who do not even settle: Jason R. Rudy, ‘Settled: Dorrit Down Under’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 75, 2, 2020, pp. 184-206

16Oct20

Abstract: Although the conclusion to Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57) finds the protagonists Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit comfortably situated in London, the novel’s long and meandering narrative entertains alternate possibilities. This essay considers the relation of emigration to British middle-class identity, both in the historical context of the 1850s and in the fictional world of Dickens’s novel. Australian free emigration, which saw a significant rise in the 1850s, serves as a limit case against which to test the significance of remaining at home in England. Little Dorrit is a novel that “settles” on a domestic life of bourgeois stability, but it arrives at this conclusion only after contemplating less-predictable futures abroad. Dickens himself considered emigrating to Australia while writing Little Dorrit, and the novel’s quiet conclusion reflects the author’s own conflicted resolution to forego life beyond British shores. Dickens’s novel ultimately suggests that Victorian middle-class stability depended at least in part on the rejection of economic possibilities abroad.

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Settlers are educated: Dinorah Sánchez Loza, Reading, Writing, and Right Wing (Re)Production: The Teaching and Learning of Settler Citizenship in Ohio, PhD dissertation, University of California Berkeley, 2020

14Oct20

Abstract: This dissertation calls for a shift in the way scholars approach the role of schooling in democratic participation. Much of the scholarship documenting unequal schooling conditions exposes the absence of civic learning opportunities in under-resourced schools, and conversely, how
more rigorous academics and democratic learning environments in higher resourced schools result in higher rates of youth political participation. However, more analyses are needed that interrogate the ideologies that undergird these “successful” students’ political ideas and practices and that
explore how homogenous schooling environments, specifically predominantly white and politically conservative schools, impact the development of youth in these spaces. Also, not sufficiently considered is the impact of settler colonialism in structuring relationships, ideologies, and schooling, and how these derive from and give rise to specific relationships to the nation-state. Reading, Writing and Right-Wing Reproduction: The Teaching and Learning of Settler Citizenship in Ohio offers this contribution and investigates the political ideologies that circulate and are (re)produced within spaces commonly perceived as “good schools.” This dissertation looks at the everyday life in US Government classrooms and asks: What role does schooling play in shaping how youth come to think and act politically? A political ethnography of schooling, this project examines the political education occurring in two predominantly white high schools in central Ohio: one in an affluent suburb, the other in a workingclass semi-agricultural small town. Drawing upon observations, interviews, and documents from students and teachers, findings show that both schools play important roles in the (re)production of settler citizenship and this process is: 1) teacher-facilitated through ascription to politically neutral pedagogy that, in fact, reifies right-wing hegemony 2) student co-constructed via funds of settler knowledge that students draw from and deploy to co-create communities of practice where settler logics are apprenticed, and 3) sanctioned in school communities though a settler-normed pubic sphere that amplifies dominant ideologies and serves an assimilatory function into the white settler normative citizen. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for the sociocultural and, ultimately, colonial contexts in which political education takes place and the impact this has to (re)produce settler power and engagement in the public sphere. As scholars and education practitioners continue to theorize and research schools as potential sites of democracy-building, this research offers insights with regard to how we approach citizenship, governance, and political engagement and the (im)possibilities of disrupting settler citizenship education in the classrooms of those most benefited by political and social structures as they are.

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The settler road: Avinoam Meir, Batya Roded, Arnon Ben-Israel, ‘Janus-faced mobility, sense of road-as-place and Indigenous Bedouin-Jewish settlers relationships’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

14Oct20

Abstract: Roads in peripheral areas are a scarce social resource over which people compete. When a periphery is an internal ethnic frontier, competition between the local/Indigenous people and the settlers over accessibility/connectivity afforded by a road reflects not only hegemonic cultural and identity differences but also contradicting spatiality temporality and dimensionality related to sense of road as place. These mobility-related differences are a neglected area of ethnic relationships. We analyze Indigenous Bedouin’s and Jewish settlers’ sense of Road 31 as place in Israel as an infrastructure for understanding ethnic relationships resulting from co-using it. We surface relationships at various times scales and spatial dimensions revealing the contrasting and dynamic dimensionality of mobility, accessibility regimes, and informal mobility emanating from both cultural and political ethnic relationships.

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Tourists and settlers: Dorien Vanden Boer, Touristic Entanglements: Settler colonialism, world-making and the politics of tourism in Palestine, PhD dissertation, Ghent University, 2020

14Oct20

Abstract: This dissertation contributes to critical tourism studies by integrating a settler colonial perspective with the concepts of world-making, ordering and placemaking, and focusing specifically on the case of Palestine. While the colonial legacy of tourism has already been examined more widely, the specific implications of the settler colonial logic in tourism remain rather underexposed. A relational approach to settler colonialism sheds a different light on the relation between the production of space, knowledge, and power in tourism. By employing literature on ‘world making,’ Actor-Network Theory and ordering, I analyze how tourism produces spaces and in fact worlds that are entangled into ongoing political processes of colonization and contestation in Palestine. This dissertation is the result of qualitative fieldwork and archival research in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Israel, and Jordan, combined with a literature study. The case studies I explore range from Palestinian hiking movements to tourism infrastructure in Jerusalem, the development of a Peace Park on the Jordan River, as well as the historic development of tourism in Palestine and its relation to Zionism and settler colonization. The cases expose the complex entanglement of space, settler colonization and tourism as a messy process of co-constitution. The production and consumption of touristic spaces goes hand in hand with the making of affective relations, that reproduce colonial and decolonial ontologies. The research contributes to a critical understanding of how tourism and settler colonialism are intertwined in Palestine and also develops a notion of the subversive capacity of tourism as a way to both make sense and actually produce alternative, decolonial worlds.

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Racialised migrants would rather be settlers: Andonis Piperoglou, ‘Migrant-cum-Settler: Greek Settler Colonialism in Australia’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 38, 2, 2020, pp. 447-471

14Oct20

Abstract: Representations of early Greek migrants in Western Australia constituted a process of Greek migrant-cum-settler colonialization. This process was informed by the exclusionary operations of Australian race-making and the transnational dynamics of Greek labor migration. By claiming an exemplary attachment to whiteness and alerting immigration authorities to the fact that Greek proprietors were breaching labor laws, Greek migrants who wrote to Australian local presses and government agencies articulated a settler sense of belonging that aligned with the cultural and legal contours of the Australian settler state. Inspired by the Australian example of the self-sufficient and law-abiding settler, Greek migrant-cum-settler colonialism took shape in the context of Greek migrants’ lived experience as a racialized minority in White Australia.

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Settler colonialism at the end of town: Desiree Poets, ‘Settler colonialism and/in (urban) Brazil: black and indigenous resistances to the logic of elimination’ Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

11Oct20

Abstract: How does elimination work in Brazil? After a brief history of miscegenation as assimilation/elimination, this article addresses this question through the experiences of one urban indigenous group (Aldeia Maracanã) and one urban Afro-descendant quilombo (Sacopã) in Rio de Janeiro. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2017, the article traces the continuities of settler colonialism in independent Brazil, including the multicultural turn of the 1988 Constitution. I centralise the lived experiences and struggles of the two groups, whose intersecting politics are caught within the inescapability of being ‘within Empire’ while having to imagine a politics outside of it (Simpson 2014). I then contribute to Settler Colonial Theory from this perspective, challenging its land-labour binary, for blacks and indígenas have both been affected by processes of elimination, dispossession, labour exploitation, and exclusion (racism). Moreover, miscegenation/assimilation has not been merely ‘a kind of death’, as Patrick Wolfe has portrayed it (Wolfe, 2006). Miscegenation has also functioned as the space from which indigenous and black peoples have resurged, survived, and thrived. When we engage critically with the political options available to these groups within settler colonialism, we are forced to ask: What does it mean to talk about de-colonisation in Brazil?

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