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Settlers once and settlers now: Cristian Cercel, ‘The persistence and malleability of settlerness: Danube Swabians in Entre Rios/Guarapuava (Paraná, Brazil)’, Immigrants & Minorities, 2023

02Jul23

Abstract: This article interrogates and contextualises the settler identification discourses related to Danube Swabians in Entre Rios/Guarapuava in southern Brazil (Paraná). It looks into the origins of Danube Swabian ‘settlerness’, asking why does it play a central role in Danube Swabian identity constructions in Brazil (but also beyond), and how has it changed over time. It follows settlerness as a thread from before the migration to Entre Rios up to the present, fleshing out its meanings and emphasising the persistence as well as the malleability of settler tropes. Discussing Danube Swabians in Brazil, the article pleads for a general critical analysis of the entanglements connecting apparently disparate spaces, such as southeastern Europe and southern Brazil, within a global history of settler colonialism, settler migration, and settler imaginations. Moreover, in engaging with the category ‘settlerness’ – as a category of practice as well as one of analysis – it shows some of the gains and limitations of the theorisations pertaining to settler colonial studies.


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Core settlers, at the margin: Matt Wray, Catherine Wolfe, ‘White settler colonialism, ‘chromanyms’ and the trouble with marginal whites’, in Rikke Andreassen, Catrin Lundström, Suvi Keskinen, Shirley Anne Tate (eds), The Routledge International Handbook of New Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Routledge, 2023

02Jul23

Abstract: The chapter provides an overview of research on the various marginal white populations throughout history; that is white people who have been called white trash, rednecks, hillbillies, chavs, bogans, redlegs or poor whites. Wray and Wolfe ask, what, if anything, can the study of marginal whites teach us about both the boundaries and the limits of whiteness in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Are they an exception to the rule of whiteness that proves that rule, or are they a rebuke to the very concept of white supremacy itself? How do marginal whites from a theoretical perspective fit (or not fit) into the growing body of research called critical whiteness studies and the study of race and class more generally?


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Indigenous resistance is a crime (as far as settlers are concerned): Adan Tatour, Lana Tatour, ‘The criminalization and racialization of Palestinian resistance to settler colonialism’, in Chris Cunneen, Antje Deckert, Amanda Porter, Juan Tauri, Robert Webb (eds), The Routledge International Handbook on Decolonizing Justice, Routledge, 2023

02Jul23

Abstract: This chapter explores the criminalization of Palestinian resistance by Israel. It focuses on ‘’48 Palestinians’ (known also as Palestinian citizens in Israel) and the ways in which Israel systematically used mass arrests during the Unity Uprising in May 2021 as a colonial technology to stifle Palestinian protest and construct Palestinians as a security threat and as criminals. The chapter demonstrates the function of the Israeli justice system as integral to Israeli settler colonial violence. To punish Palestinians for their participation in the uprising, Israel, we demonstrate, mobilized racialized legal categories that enable it to subject Palestinians to aggravated punishment by classifying offences as racist and/or terrorist crimes. Israel, we further show, worked to connect the uprising – an act of resistance to settler colonialism – to the rising crime rates in Palestinian society in recent years, resulting in a dual process that we refer to as the securitization of crime (treating crime as a security issue) and the criminalization of resistance (treating political mobilization as a criminal issue). Through the entwinement of crime and political resistance, Israel sought to erase the anti-colonial sensibilities that drove ’48 Palestinians to the streets in May 2021.


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Local decolonisations? Garrett FitzGerald, ‘Unsettling Peace: The Settler-Colonial Challenge to the Local Turn’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding , 2023

02Jul23

Abstract: The local turn in Peace Studies has raised important practical and normative questions around the ‘liberal peace’ approach that defines post-Cold War international peacebuilding. However, recent critical interventions reveal the limits of the local turn’s engagement with themes including race, gender, class, and colonialism. Engaging Indigenous authors who ground diverse conceptualizations of peace in the restitution of Indigenous land, the following discussion shows how the local turn’s theoretical framing of indigeneity risks erasing decolonial accounts of Indigenous peacebuilding in settler-colonial societies through its conceptual reliance on international intervention and normative prioritization of hybrid peace outcomes.


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Relenting settler colonialism? Lachlan McNamee, Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop, Princeton University Press, 2023

02Jul23

Description: Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United States stop settling frontier lands during the twentieth century? At the same time, why did states loudly committed to decolonization like Indonesia and China start settling the lands of such minorities as the West Papuans and Uyghurs? Settling for Less traces this bewildering historical reversal, explaining when and why indigenous peoples suffer displacement at the hands of settlers. Lachlan McNamee challenges the notion that settler colonialism can be explained by economics or racial ideologies. He tells a more complex story about state building and the conflicts of interest between indigenous peoples, states, and settlers. Drawing from a rich array of historical evidence, McNamee shows that states generally colonize frontier areas in response to security concerns. Elite schemes to populate contested frontiers with loyal settlers, however, often fail. As societies grow wealthier and cities increasingly become magnets for migration, states ultimately lose the power to settle frontier lands. Settling for Less uncovers the internal dynamics of settler colonialism and the diminishing power of colonizers in a rapidly urbanizing world. Contrasting successful and failed colonization projects in Australia, Indonesia, China, and beyond, this book demonstrates that economic development—by thwarting colonization—has proven a powerful force for indigenous self-determination.


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Textbook indigenisation (this time the rider is not on horseback but about rejecting ‘harmful appropriation’): Himanee Gupta, ‘Spiritual Dimensions of Farming Amid Settler Colonialism’, Political Theology, 2023

27Jun23

Abstract: This autoethnography explores how the author’s work with farming led her to learn from such Indigenous knowledge practices as listening to Nature and forming a familial relationship with land in pursuit of a spiritual life focused on social change. In doing so, it highlights how such pursuits as farming at a small-scale level contributes to food sovereignty efforts worldwide that question and resist settler-colonialist structures. While incorporating Indigenous knowledge into one’s own practices risks contributing to harmful appropriation, the author argues that such knowledge has much to offer allies who wish to learn.


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Climate Change is a structure, not and event: Kerstin Reibold, ‘Settler Colonialism, Decolonization, and Climate Change’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2022

27Jun23

Abstract: The article proposes that climate change makes enduring colonial injustices and structures visible. It focuses on the imposition and dominance of colonial concepts of land and self-determination on Indigenous peoples in settler states. It argues that if the dominance of these colonial frameworks remains unaddressed, the progressing climate change will worsen other colonial injustices, too. Specifically, Indigenous self-determination capabilities will be increasingly undermined, and Indigenous peoples will experience the loss of what they understand as relevant land from within their own ontologies of land. The article holds that even if settler states strive to repair colonial injustices, these efforts will be unsuccessful if climate change occurs and decolonization is pursued within the framework of a settler colonial ontology of land. Therefore, the article suggests, decolonization of the ontologies of land and concepts of self-determination is a precondition for a just response to climate change.


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The occupation of the left: Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba, Stanford University Press, 2023

27Jun23

Description: Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn ‘Amer. Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians within the British imperial field. Even as left-wing kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair helped lay the groundwork for settler colonial Jewish sovereignty, its settlers did not conceal the prior existence of the Palestinian villages and their displacement, which became the subject of enduring debate in the kibbutzim. Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a protracted process instituted over decades. Colonizing Palestine traces social and political mechanisms by which forms of hierarchy, violence, and supremacy that endure into the present were gradually created.


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Online settlers: Nathan Scneider, ‘Homesteading on a Superhighway: The Californian Ideology and Everyday Politics’, International Journal of Communication, 17, 2023, pp. 4255-4271

27Jun23

Abstract: When Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron diagnosed the “Californian Ideology” of Silicon Valley, they outlined a macro-level political and cultural economy. This article turns to the micropolitics of everyday online life. It argues that the Californian Ideology has inscribed into its products the habits of homesteading—a legacy so familiar, nostalgic, and violent in the American West—which have trained far-flung users in the practice of quotidian feudalism. Everyday experience with Californian systems has thereby contributed to hollowing out the rudiments of democratic culture, especially the skills and habits of accountable association. These systems have meanwhile aided in generating new breeds of world-historical authoritarianism. To change course, therefore, instruments such as legislation and foreign policy may be inadequate; securing a more democratic future also requires fresh attention to how online spaces organize, constrain, and enable everyday politics.


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Trans-settlerism: Jamey Jesperson, ‘Settler TransNationalism: The Colonial Politics of White Trans Passing on Stolen Land’, Spectator, 42, 1, pp. 32-43

27Jun23

Abstract: In “Homonationalism as Assemblage,” Jasbir Puar situates her theory of ‘homonormative nationalism’ within Palestine/Israel to reveal how sexuality is “a crucial formation in the articulation of proper citizens.” As an extension to previous work, Puar clarifies that the queers seen as ‘proper’ by the settler nation-state are not ‘gender queer.’ Rather, “trans and gender nonconforming queers are not welcome” in Israeli homonationalism. While Puar’s dissection of trans people from homonationalism in 2013 is justified, the common exclusion of trans people from critiques of nationalist ‘exception’ calls for further interrogation in 2022. Through synthesis of historical and contemporary media, this paper configures a separate analytic of transnationalism to consider how certain trans bodies “pass” into the dominant U.S. body politic, not just by gender, but by investment in the nation. Informed by readings in Queer Indigenous Studies and Scott Lauria Morgensen’s theory of settler homonationalism, I argue that trans passing in the U.S. is mediated by racialized gender norms accumulated through the colonial regulation of trans indigeneity over time. While white trans people in the U.S. may experience varying degrees of marginalization, we are also settlers on stolen land. As such, our efforts to pass into the national body politic must be theorized beyond a critique of the visual to consider how passing, as settlers, involves a specific set of nationalist convictions, gestures, and actions linked to the elimination of Indigenous peoples. Transnationalist politics—whether conservative or liberal—distance the trans movement from its anti-assimilationist roots, normalize the settler state’s claims to Indigenous lands, and ultimately vacate the possibility for ever-necessary linkage between trans liberation and decolonization.


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