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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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The founding violence is unavoidable: David W. Everson, ‘Red Power, white narrative: founding violence & the invalidation of Indigenous rights’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

26Jun23

Abstract: The disavowal of ‘founding violence’ remains a core proposition of settler colonial theory. This paper expands our theoretical understanding of the concept to account for the strategic invocation of founding violence to legitimate settler colonial racial orders. Drawing from a sample of in-depth interviews (n = 27) with settlers who have historical connections to the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) confrontational activism in the 1970s, I show how non-Indigenous territoriality is affirmed through the narrative displacement of founding violence onto Indigenous peoples. Across the U.S. state of South Dakota, where AIM’s ‘Red Power’ activism was most pronounced, interviewees routinely delegitimize movement grievances through historicized narratives of incessant inter-tribal conflict and Indigenous violence. Thus, in addition to justifying settler society’s bloody origins, the invocation of founding violence remains a powerful discursive mechanism for delegitimizing contemporary Indigenous rights.


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Liberal settler colonialism: Éléna Choquette, ‘Enlarging the British settler state of Canada: A liberal theory of government and violence’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 2023

26Jun23

Abstract: This paper examines the writings of George Brown, a leading expansionist and liberal thinker in the British settler state of Canada. Studying George Brown’s thinking as a non-canonical colonial statesman and thinker who helped appropriate Indigenous lands exposes the specific liberal ideas that authorized the enlarging of British settler states. Specifically, inquiring into Brown’s liberalism brings out a powerful liberal theory of self-government, which he adjusted to the circumstances of expanding settler states on stolen Indigenous lands. Brown’s theory of self-government overturns some of John Stuart Mill’s most influential ideas, including his proposition that the legitimacy of despotism is contingent upon it being temporary and for the improvement of the colonized. Against conservative rivals, Brown argues settler communities must self-govern locally and adopt colonial policies, including territorial appropriation from Indigenous peoples. Analysing Brown’s liberal thinking, developed from within expanding settler colonies, finally surfaces the readiness of liberal thought and practice to use physical and military force against Indigenous Peoples, especially as they resist the liberal policies of settler self-government and dispossession.


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Local, global, gendered, and settler colonial: Louise Swaffer, ‘Women’s Protestant foreign mission work and settler state formation in Canada: A re-examination of the Scottish diaspora’, Atlantic Studies, 2023

26Jun23

Abstract: Renewed interest in empire and colonialism has transformed our understanding of transnational networks and processes of exchange, entanglement, and globalisation. However, colonial entanglement still conceals some significant players in globalising cultures. The Protestant women’s foreign missionary movement pioneered transnational activism by interweaving women’s empowerment in “foreign” and “home” environments into a single mission. Essential in developing conceptual and organisational frameworks to address “global issues,” the movement’s impact upon state formation was also profound. This case study of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (1876–1914) combines global diaspora frameworks with local, regional, national, and gendered settler lenses. Close review of Scottish diaspora scholarship and a multi-scale approach to the WFMS’s engagement with social reform helps integrate siloed scholarships, revealing how local and foreign mission environments intersected and collaborated to fortify structures of Anglo-Protestant hegemony in Canada and globally.


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Can women be actual settlers? Carly Nichols, Angie Carter, ‘It doesn’t bother me: An intersectional analysis of discrimination among white women farmers in the US Corn Belt’, Journal of Rural Studies, 101, 2023

22Jun23

Abstract: While women in United States agriculture are increasingly asserting control over land and assuming identities as primary producers, they continue to face significant challenges in being “read” as legitimate producers and in accessing the material resources (land, labor, capital) to do the work of farming. Although scholarship documents how women are generating new strategies to gain legitimacy as farmers and how programs have emerged to provide agricultural outreach to women, much of this work has been “colorblind” in its lack of a critical analysis of race and its intersections with gender. In this paper, we analyze the complex intersections between white supremacy and patriarchy that may benefit white women farmers as they negotiate and normalize gender-based discrimination. Viewing race and gender as materially lived and negotiated, we analyze in-depth qualitative data from 43 conventional white women producers in the US Corn Belt to identify the nuanced ways they socially navigate the white male-dominated world of production agriculture. We find while respondents universally feel that women claiming the role of farmer are subject to both dismissals and outright aggressions in agricultural encounters, many of the respondents claim this discrimination “doesn’t bother” them. We argue, that in the semi-dynastic world of Corn Belt production, these white women socially position themselves by drawing on both their embodied histories of labor along with their relationalities to land and people (particularly men) in ways that facilitate a sense of collective belonging contingent on others’ exclusion. We conclude by reflecting on how agricultural research on gender could incorporate more critical analyses of race to uncover continuing forms of discrimination in agricultural spaces.


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Settler colonial panto! Heather Davis-Fisch, ‘Theatrical Recycling as Colonial Prequel: The Provocation!, Nootka Sound, and British Columbia’s “First” Play’, Theatre Research in Canada, 2023

22Jun23

Abstract: The 1790 pantomime The Provocation!’s intervention into the Nootka Crisis may signal that what was to crystalize by 1871, when BC entered Canadian Confederation as a settler colony, was already taking shape: the confluence of the development of a series of extractive industries, the establishment of settler colonies, and persistent imperial ambivalence about the territory that would eventually become a Canadian province. Given that the Nootka Sound Crisis is now relatively unknown, this forum piece begins by briefly summarizing the crisis. After describing Nootka Sound and The Provocation!, The Provocation!’s apparent intervention in British diplomacy is discussed. Finally, after outlining how the public appearance of the Cherokee Chiefs was deployed by the press, the article addresses how the two plays built on pre-circulating British understandings of Indigeneity and of the Pacific Northwest, recycling and activating these performative and visual genealogies to lay the groundwork for the settler-colonial structures that followed in the nineteenth century.


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Edugration is settler colonialism: Lisa Ruth Brunner, ‘Settler nation-building through immigration as a rationale for higher education: a critical discourse analysis’, Higher Education Research & Development, 42, 5, 2023, pp. 1086-1102

22Jun23

Abstract: As education-migration (edugration) blurs the line between international student and immigrant recruitment in some jurisdictions, higher education admission is becoming linked to settler nation-building projects. Using critical discourse analysis, this article examines the Canadian higher education sector’s response to COVID-19 through pre-budget submissions to the House of Commons of Canada Standing Committee on Finance for the 2021 federal budget. Findings demonstrate how institutions instrumentalized international students to position themselves as valuable actors in Canada’s immigration regime and justify their requests for public financial support. In this way, nation-building through immigration – both globally, as an imperial power, and domestically, as a colonial power – is now a new societal role of higher education which is becoming hegemonic within institutions. This is significant because, as higher education’s purposes align with those of economic immigration, the sector not only fails to interrupt, but itself reproduces, systemic patterns of border imperialism and settler-colonialism. The article urges higher education institutions to (1) more deeply consider how a reliance on international student enrolment is impacting its societal roles, while also (2) avoid exceptionalizing the present by recognizing that higher education has long functioned in the service of the state as a colonial and imperialist power.


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Settler political mythology 101: Steven Johnston, ‘John Ford’s Legendary Western Ambiguity and White Settler Colonialism’, in Damien K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought: A Fistful of Politics, Palgrave, 2023, pp. 47-63

22Jun23

Abstract: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a profound meditation on the paradoxical phenomenon of political founding worthy of Machiavelli (The Machiavelli of The Discourses, that is). In it, Ford tells the story of a democratic political community that comes into being thanks to the heroic intervention of an outsider, Ransom Stoddard, who happens to arrive in it one day, and effectively forces its citizens to be free.


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It is ONE Indigenous struggle against settler colonialism: Jamal Nabulsi, ‘Reclaiming Palestinian Indigenous Sovereignty’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2023

15Jun23

Abstract: The 2021 Unity Intifada represented a vital moment in the history of Palestinian resistance. The unification of Palestinian struggle inherent to the uprising can be read as an expression of Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty. Drawing on the critical thought of Palestinians and other Indigenous peoples struggling against settler colonialism, I argue for a theorization of Palestinian indigeneity. Following from this indigeneity, I show that Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is the embodied political claim to the land of Palestine. This theorization of sovereignty offers uniquely productive ways to account for and challenge Zionist/Israeli settler-colonial violence and, ultimately, to forge paths toward decolonial Palestinian futures.


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With a section on lawfare and settler colonialism: Mariful Alam, Patrick Dwyer, Katrin Roots, (eds), Violence, Imagination and Resistance: Socio-legal Interrogations of Power, AU Press, 2023

15Jun23

Excerpt: What is the story of race and settler colonialism in the legal landscape of present-day Canada? How do we tell these legal histories of settler-state racial violence in the context of the ongoing realities of Indigenous dispossession, anti-Black racism, and the experiences of civil death by migrants and displaced people? What does it mean to commit to this inquiry at a time when human rights discourse and projects of reparative justice corroborate with the legacies of white supremacy and racial colonial violence inherent in juridicopolitical mechanisms of liberal rights regimes? In this chapter, we maintain that socio-legal scholars in Canada need to do much more to address the historical, structural, and affective significance of race, racism, and settler colonialism in our socio-legal analyses and imaginations.


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