settler colonial studies blog

The theology of settler colonialism: Dana Lloyd, Jan Pranger, ‘Decolonization at the Intersection of Political Theology and Settler Colonial Studies’, Political Theology, 2023

01Nov23

Excerpt: In March 2023, the Vatican issued a statement repudiating the doctrine of discovery. The repudiation is a result of dialogue with Indigenous Catholics: ‘In our own day, a renewed dialogue with indigenous peoples, especially with those who profess the Catholic Faith, has helped the Church to understand better their values and cultures. With their help, the Church has acquired a greater awareness of their sufferings, past and present, due to the expropriation of their lands, which they consider a sacred gift from God and their ancestors, as well as the policies of forced assimilation, promoted by the governmental authorities of the time, intended to eliminate their indigenous cultures’. There is a lot to unpack in this statement: for example, the acknowledgement of present suffering, not only past suffering (historian Patrick Wolfe would say that settler colonialism is a structure rather than a discrete event), that lands that were stolen from Indigenous peoples were – are – sacred to them, and the Catholic Church’s active (even if only tacitly admitted) role in executing policies of forced assimilation. There is a throughline that runs from the papal bulls that applied the doctrine of discovery in the Americas in the fifteenth century to the mass graves of Indigenous children unearthed at sites of Native American and First Nations residential schools in the United States and Canada. Investigating this throughline is one of our goals in gathering scholars to think at the intersection of political theology and settler colonialism.

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The settler colonialist university: Abigail Boggs, ‘Educational Pasts, Enduring Colonial Presents: Indigenous Student Conscripts and the Foundation of the US University’, History of the Present, 13, 2, 2023, pp. 141-165

01Nov23

Abstract: Taking Indigenous sovereignty as at once axiomatic and constitutively strategic, this article argues that it is necessary to expand the chronology and disrupt the geographic certitude through which the history and present of US higher education and its internationalization are conventionally understood. Colleges and universities in the British colonies and what became the United States, including Harvard, William & Mary, and Dartmouth, were founded and funded with the intention that they would function as a vital technology through which the nation-state and white Christian culture would reproduce and secure themselves, their possessions, and their futures. This project was to be accomplished through the assimilation and at times incorporation of people, often youth, from polities understood as fundamentally other from that of their instructors and benefactors. Assessments of the extent to which such projects were effectuated vary, but it is well established that contemporary universities and colleges are conceptually and financially rooted in colonial educational projects that targeted Indigenous students for incorporation and assimilation. In an era when many of these same institutions are making substantial, if inadequate, efforts to contend with their historical origins, it is necessary to move beyond acknowledgment of these histories and contend, instead, with how such projects materially and epistemologically underwrite the basic functions of the most well-resourced and prestigious higher education institutions of the present.

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The slow violence of settler colonialism: Dorota Golańska, ‘Slowness as warfare: Towards a relational approach to political violence in the West Bank’, Geography Compass, 2023

01Nov23

Abstract: Engaging with recent applications of the concept of slow violence to the ongoing political developments in the West Bank, this review article argues that the relational approach offered by feminist geopolitics facilitates the conception of slow violence and warfare as part of a single complex of violence. The article traces feminist geopolitics’ contribution to research on geographies of slow violence on the one hand, and to the analyses produced within the fields of critical geopolitics and critical war studies on the other, exposing that scholarly work exploiting the relational approach generated within and across these areas of research enables a broader understanding of political violence’s tangled operations. Based on the analysis of the recent scholarly engagement with slow violence in the West Bank, the article proposes that thinking of slowness as a form of warfare captures the complex entanglement of different modalities of violence as they materialize in specific spatio-temporal circumstances. Moreover, such an approach contributes to the further reinvigoration of feminist geopolitics with insights generated within (settler) colonial studies.

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The anticolonial sovereignty of food health: Valarie Blue Bird Jernigan, Cassandra J. Nguyen, Susanna V. Lopez, ‘Food Sovereignty and Health: A Conceptual Framework to Advance Research and Practice’, Health Promotion Practice, 24, 6, 2023

28Oct23

Abstract: Settler colonialism disrupted traditional Indigenous foodways and practices and created high rates of diet-related disease among Indigenous peoples. Food sovereignty, the rights of Indigenous peoples to determine their own food systems, is a culturally centered movement rooted in traditional Indigenous knowledge. This approach directly intervenes upon systems-level barriers to health, making it an important strategy for health equity. While food sovereignty initiatives can be found within many Indigenous communities, the conceptual linkages between food sovereignty and health have not been well documented within the public health literature. We present a practice-informed conceptual framework developed as part of the Center for Indigenous Innovation and Health Equity (CIIHE) initiative, a community–academic partnership with the goal of strengthening Indigenous food systems and practices to promote health and well-being. The framework emphasizes connectedness, including the transmission of knowledge across generations and the restoration of relational responsibilities, as central to Indigenous concepts of health and wellness.

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Chinese settler colonialism: Uradyn E. Bulag, ‘The wheel of history and minorities’ ‘self-sacrifice’ for the Chinese nation’, Comparative Education, 2023

28Oct23

Abstract: This article offers a theoretical intervention in new and emergent approaches to analysing China’s coercive nation-building policies under Xi Jinping. The author contends that the recent Western framing of CCP policies as genocidal or necropolitical, predicated on notions of settler colonialism and indigeneity, not only strips minority nationalities of their political agency but also prevents them from pursuing anti-colonial self-determination. By delving into the extensive scholarly work within Chinese anthropology, history, and philosophy that contributes to the reconstruction of a retrotopian Chinese nation with non-Han minority groups at its core, this article argues that the ongoing effort to build a revitalised Chinese national community requires more than merely overcoming obstacles related to minority cultures and identities. It entails actively reimagining the role and participation of minorities in ‘self-sacrifice’ for the Chinese national community, implying their voluntary relinquishment of identities and rights in order to align with the Chinese nation.

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A happy settler family is a family you don’t know well: Andrew Milne, ‘Australian Selectors in the Nineteenth Century and Discrepancies in Imaginings and Realities: Critical Family History’, Genealogy, 2023

28Oct23

Abstract: Queensland became an independent state in 1859, separating from New South Wales. Almost immediately, an ambitious plan on migration was embarked upon in order to attract emigrants to Queensland, above all other possible colony destinations in the British Empire. Henry Jordan was instrumental as the Emigration Commissioner (1861–1866) in devising the land order scheme and Richard Daintree, as Agent-General, wooed, through modern techniques on never-before-seen photography in colour, small capitalists to the isolated outreaches of Queensland, where settlement was encouraged. Life there for those that migrated was, however, vastly different from what either they knew in Britain, or what they expected. But, ultimately, they settled, took possession of considerable stretches of lands, as selectors, or pastoral land owners, with disregard for the indigenous populations there. In this article, I examine one migration story on an ancestor in the nineteenth century, Andrew Milne, from London to Queensland, through the lens of critical settler family history theory. I take up the challenge for historians to question who their ancestors were, since the past is telling of the present, and the perceptions that are longed for in the future selves. Namely, in the construction of the future self, an individual must also confront their past, and the lives of those that preceded them. In particular, in the case of Australia, settlement, colonisation, and the possession of land are not benign, and are not isolated events, but have an impact on the present and future lives of both descendants of those that possessed the land, and those from whom it was taken away. The legacy of racial segregation (through the Stolen Generations), and despite the attempt to ‘close the gap’ since 2008, Aboriginal peoples in Australia still suffer the consequences of objectification and dehumanisation to which they were subjected. The consequences are not only financial and economic, but are visible in health, education, social status, and in their mistrust of public services.

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Ukraine as a settler colony through history: Boris Belge, ‘Grain, Coal, and Gas: Ukraine’s Economy since the Eighteenth Century’, in Modernity at the Crossroads of Empires: Analytical Articles, Transcript, 2023, pp. 101-118

28Oct23

Excerpt: When taking a closer look at Ukraine’s history, three forms of colonialism are especially applicable: exploitation colonialism, settler colonialism, and internal colonialism. These three types are not mutually exclusive but instead provide different perspectives on the complex process of colonization.

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The poverty of settler colonialism: George Bishi, Duncan Money, ‘”Daisyfield in the crucible”: Afrikaners, education and poor whites in Southern Rhodesia, 1911–1948’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

28Oct23

Abstract: This article examines the history of Daisyfield School, an Afrikaner children’s orphanage and school in Southern Rhodesia. The existence of an Afrikaner school in a self-consciously British settler colony represented a distinctive settler project within the settler state, one supported by the school’s transnational connections and one whose aims often conflicted with the state. These aims centred around the rehabilitation of poor white children, and we demonstrate how non-state institutions engaged in far-reaching interventions into the lives of children identified as poor whites. We also show how the children who were recipients of this treatment could resist it by crossing social and geographical boundaries. Challenges to Daisyfield’s regime produced a kind of solidarity between the school and state to suppress this challenge as the existence of poor whites threatened racial boundaries in the colony.

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On Islamic settler colonialism: Mohamed Abdou, ‘Conquistador Settler-colonialism & the Crises of Migrant Muslim Complicity’, Political Theology, 2023

28Oct23

Abstract: Many migrant Muslims to “conquistador settler-colonial” U.S./Canada are driven to become good – settlers because of the devastating imperialist conditions reaped upon our original homelands. However, no Muslim political-theological works address Indigenous struggles or seriously engage settler-colonial studies. Migrant Muslims assume that the U.S./Canada are democratic-secular despite their animation by white-supremacist religious doctrines as Manifest Destiny. This contribution addresses the Qur’anic bases for a globally applicable decolonial, anti-statist/capitalist, social justice, Islam or what I refer to as Anarcha-Islam Drawing on the Qur’anic perspective of ethical-political responsibilities of Muslim hijra (migration), I argue how non-Black migrant Muslims in exile must seriously re-examine their ethical-political commitments and construct mutual alliances with Indigenous and Black peoples in their demands for land’s repatriation as well as reparations.

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The settler polity as a negative commonwealth: Lorenzo Veracini, Dan Tout, ‘The negative Commonwealth: Australia as “laboratory”, then and now’, Thesis Eleven, 2023

27Oct23

Abstract: Federated Australia was seen for a long time as a significant social ‘laboratory’. The Commonwealth itself was seen as an ‘experiment’. This widespread metaphor relied on a particular pattern of perception: the country was ‘new’ (it was not), and the country was allegedly isolated (it was not, at least not completely). Many believed that its social environment could be controlled, like that of a scientific laboratory. A laboratory is designed to shut all disturbances out – the value of the data and experiments depends on it. This article outlines this metaphor in the context of Australian history during the 20th century, its rhetorical power and what made it discursively possible.

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