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A voice against voicelessness: Lorenzo Veracini, Dan Tout, ‘The Negative Commonwealth: Australia as “Laboratory”, Then and Now’, Thesis Eleven, 2023

11Oct23

Excerpt: This work appraises settler-colonial Australia’s strategic contribution to the transnational political traditions of what James Belich (2009) seminally called the global ‘settler revolution’. Specifically, this paper discusses settler Australia’s self-appointed role as sociopolitical ‘laboratory’ during the early decades of the twentieth century, after the settler revolution had entered a period of crisis elsewhere. The federal Commonwealth took this role seriously. The Torrens title, a mode of registering and transferring real estate that systematically erases all traces of prior ownership, the ‘Australian ballot’, identifying a specific settler-colonial form of democratic governance impervious to ‘Old World’ patronage, the constitutionally enshrined exclusion of Indigenous and exogenous alterities through the White Australia policy, and the Court of Arbitration were all institutional devices tested in Australia before being exported elsewhere. A cluster of interlocking political experiments, some older, some more recent, would coalesce in what Paul Kelly in another seminal intervention defined as the ‘Australian Settlement’ (1992). The Australian imperial nationalists loudly lamented the ‘Tyranny of Distance’ (see Blainey 1966), but in crucial ways ‘Australia’ was imagined as a globally relevant laboratory of sociopolitical experimentation precisely because of its assumed isolation. There is no laboratory without a controlled environment.


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The massacre of memory: Vanessa Whittington, ‘Memorialisation, Reconciliation and Truth-Speaking: The Role of Explorer and Massacre Memorials in Settler-Colonial Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2023

11Oct23

Abstract: Memorialisation in settler-colonial nations such as Australia is intensely political. It creates public symbols of people and events those in authority consider important and worthy of remembrance. Counternarratives of various marginalised others are silenced through processes of collective forgetting. In Australia, this forgetting has meant that colonial histories of exploration and discovery have been commemorated through ubiquitous explorer memorials. But these memorials represent a very selective account of settler-colonial history firmly based in the colonial fiction of terra nullius or empty land used to justify the British claim to Australia. This fiction is now being actively countered by social protests focused on memorials to explorers and colonial administrators. Furthermore, a trend to memorialise and commemorate the massacres of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as part of the colonisation process is overturning the myth that Australia was peacefully settled. In fact, truth-speaking is now recognised by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians as an integral part of the reconciliation process. However, the truths spoken as part of the shared memorialisation of Aboriginal massacre sites by the Australian reconciliation movement are only partial, and may serve to perpetuate rather than interrupt what has historically been a resounding silence about colonial dispossession and violence.


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Settler petromobilities: Alec Follett, ‘Oil and the Hard-Boiled: Petromobility, Settler Colonialism and the Legacy of the American Century in Thomas King’s Cold Skies’, in Nathan Ashman (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology, 2023

11Oct23

Abstract: This chapter examines the relationship between oil and the hard-boiled mode in Cherokee author Thomas King’s Cold Skies (2018). Uniting the fields of crime fiction and petrocriticism, the chapter first traces how the hard-boiled developed alongside twentieth-century American petromobility. It then analyses how King uses hard-boiled conventions to make legible how oil is both an abstracted commodity associated with pleasure and power and a material substance tied to settler-colonial extractivism and dispossession of Indigenous land. Consequently, I argue to address contemporary oil dependency, we must understand and ultimately rewrite our relationship with the American century and with genre.


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The carnivals of settlers are a serious matter: Adrian Franklin, ‘Carnival Relocated? Popular Culture and the Carnivalesque in Colonial Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania)’,Cultural and Social History, 2023

11Oct23

Abstract: This article re-evaluates the historical research on the carnivalesque rituals that arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (VDL) with British convicts, their colonial minders and free settlers. The revaluation deploys more theoretically informed understandings of carnivalesque ritual (using Bakhtin, Zemon Davis, le Roy Ladurie, Bristol, Underdown, Durston and others), coupled with more recent historical understandings of carnivalesque ritual in Britain at the time of convict transportation and new evidence on how carnivalesque ritual specific to VDL responded to changes in penal policy and practice. It is argued that carnivalesque rituals persisted as a means for building social solidarity, belonging, cultural-political expression and resilience.


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Crazy settlers at the end of the world after the end of the world: Andrew Nickson, ‘Great Britain and the War of the Triple Alliance: The Lincolnshire Farmers Colonization Scheme to Paraguay and the Fourth Ally Thesis’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 2023

11Oct23

Abstract: This article challenges the fourth ally thesis, which argues that Great Britain was a crucial actor underpinning the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay that defeated Paraguay in the 1864–70 War of the Triple Alliance. To date, the debate has focused on British involvement in the genesis and financing of the allied war effort. This article instead focuses on the postwar behavior of the British government, exploring its attitude to the 892 mainly English colonists of the failed 1872–73 Lincolnshire farmers emigration scheme to Paraguay. The British government’s open hostility to the scheme and its lack of concern for the plight of the colonists offer new evidence suggesting that the War of the Triple Alliance was of little interest to British imperialism in general and to settler colonialism in particular.


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Stating the inevitable: Joanie Bouchard, Sabrina Bourgeois, ‘An Unheard Confidence Crisis? An Analysis of Indigenous Peoples’ Perception of Settler Institutions and Politics’, Representation, 2023

11Oct23

Abstract: Focusing on the case of Canada, this paper offers an investigation of how members of Indigenous nations perceive the system of government using data from the 2019 Canadian Election Study (CES). Given the legacies of colonialism, we consider if Indigenous individuals in Canada adopt a distinct outlook on political institutions, actors, and democracy when compared to other Canadian voters by leveraging quantitative tools. We find that Indigenous people have a significantly more negative perception of several political institutions, politicians, and democracy in Canada.


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Visual settler colonialism: Mishuana Goeman, Settler Aesthetics: Visualizing the Spectacle of Originary Moments in The New World, University of Nebraska Press, 2023

11Oct23

Description: In Settler Aesthetics, an analysis of renowned director Terrence Malick’s 2005 film, The New World, Mishuana Goeman examines the continuity of imperialist exceptionalism and settler-colonial aesthetics. The story of Pocahontas has thrived for centuries as a cover for settler-colonial erasure, destruction, and violence against Native peoples, and Native women in particular. Since the romanticized story of the encounter and relationship between Pocahontas and Captain John Smith was first published, it has imprinted a whitewashed historical memory into the minds of Americans. As one of the most enduring tropes of imperialist nostalgia in world history, Renaissance European invasions of Indigenous lands by settlers trades in a falsified “civilizational discourse” that has been a focus in literature for centuries and in films since their inception. Ironically, Malick himself was a symbol of the New Hollywood in his early career, but with The New World he created a film that serves as a buttress for racial capitalism in the Americas. Focusing on settler structures, the setup of regimes of power, sexual violence and the gendering of colonialism, and the sustainability of colonialism and empires, Goeman masterfully peels away the visual layers of settler logics in The New World, creating a language in Native American and Indigenous studies for interpreting visual media.


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The question of indigeneity is not settled (in South Africa): Rafael Verbuyst, ‘Indigeneity, Autochthony, and Belonging: Conceptual Ambiguity as an Impediment to Decolonisation in South Africa’, in Decolonising Political Concepts, 2023

11Oct23

Excerpt: On 18 March 2022, a South African judge delivered an unprecedented judgement: “the fundamental rights of First Nations Peoples” were insufficiently considered in the context of a multi billion-rand property development in Cape Town …


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The children of settler colonialism: Julia R. Shatz, ‘”On this project depends the glory of Palestine”: childhood and modern futures at the Ramallah clinic’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

11Oct23

Abstract: In 1925, one of the first infant welfare clinics to specifically serve Arab children in Palestine opened in the city of Ramallah. This article examines how that institution brought together various political ideologies that used the Palestinian child’s body as a vehicle for a modern future. The clinic targeted poor children and mothers in an attempt to eradicate local knowledge and indigenous practices of infant care in the name of progress and science. Supported and funded by American missionaries, Palestinian philanthropists, local medical practitioners, colonial administrators, and Zionist health organizations, it produced conceptions of modern Palestinian childhood at the intersections of Zionist settler colonialism, interwar global humanitarianism, and indigenous political claims. The Ramallah clinic, along with other infant welfare projects in Palestine, offers a complicated view of the on-the-ground operation of settler colonial projects and the role of children within them. Based on a study of the different constituencies involved in opening the clinic, this article argues that discourses of infant health became means for articulating different – and sometimes opposing – political futures. In doing so, this article illuminates how settler colonialism interacted with, shaped, and was shaped by other local and global forms of coloniality as well as resistance to colonial structures.


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Whose country? Richard Abel, Our Country/Whose Country? Early Westerns and Travel Films as Stories of Settler Colonialism, Oxford University Press, 2023

07Oct23

Description: The concept of settler colonialism offers an invaluable lens to reframe early westerns and travel pictures as re-enactments of the United States’ repressed past. Westerns in particular propose a remarkable vision of white settlers’ westward expansion that reveals a transformation in what “American Progress” came to mean. Initially, these films tracked settlers moving westward across the Appalachians, Great Plains, and Rockies. Their seizure of “empty land” provoked continual resistance from Indigenous peoples and Mexicans; “pioneers” suffered extreme hardships, but heroic male figures usually scattered or wiped out those “aliens.” Some films indulged in nostalgic empathy for the Indian as a “Vanishing American.” In the early 1910s, westerns became increasingly popular. In Indian pictures, Native Americans ranged from devious savages, victims of white violence, and “Noble Savages” to “in-between” figures caught between cultures and “mixed-descent peoples” partnered for security or advantage. Mexicans took positions across a similar spectrum. In cowboy and cowgirl films, “ordinary” whites became heroes and heroines fighting outlaws; and bandits like Broncho Billy underwent transformation into “good badmen.” The mid to late 1910s saw a shift, as Indian pictures and cowgirl films faded and male figures, embodied by movie stars, dominated popular series. In different ways, William S. Hart and Harry Carey reinvented the “good badman” as a stoic, if troubled, figure of white masculinity. In cowboy films of comic romance, Tom Mix engaged in dangerous stunts and donned costumes that made him a fashionable icon. In parodies, Douglas Fairbanks subverted the myth of “American Progress,” sporting a nonchalant grin of effortless self-confidence. Nearly all of their films assumed firmly settled white communities, rarely threatened by Indians or Mexicans. Masked as “Manifest Destiny,” the expropriation of the West seemed settled once and for all. Our Country/Whose Country? offers a rich and expansive examination of the significance of early westerns and travel pictures in the ideological foundations of “our country”.


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