settler colonial studies blog

Comparative literature is settler colonial (unless it is decolonised): Shu-mei Shih, ‘Decolonizing US Comparative Literature: The 2022 ACLA Presidential Address’, Comparative Literature, 75, 3, 2023, pp. 237-265

26Sep23

Abstract: This essay examines how comparative literature as a discipline has never confronted its interlocking contexts of settler colonialism, imperialism, and racialization as its conditions of possibility in the United States. Inspired by recent efforts at decolonization in other disciplines, this essay calls for decolonizing comparative literature via a critique of the discipline from the nineteenth century to the present. From evolutionary scientism at its origin, overarching and continuing Eurocentrism, the disavowal of area studies, the rise of literary theory, and the primacy of non-US-focused postcolonial studies to problematic conceptions of multiculturalism, the discipline has scrupulously dissociated itself from the US reality. This dissociation, in the final analysis, replicates and supports the settler-colonial structure that evacuates the Indigenous peoples from their land and replaces Indigenous knowledge with settler knowledge, showing comparative literature to be a settler-colonial discipline. Hence, the necessary settler-colonial critique of comparative literature ought to be superseded by Indigeneity-centered practices in our work for decolonization to be possible.

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Desire, under settler colonialism: Janice Feng, Towards a Decolonial Account of Desire: The Cultivation of Desire and Indigenous Women’s Self-Making and Resistance in Early Modern French North America, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2023

26Sep23

Abstract: This dissertation takes up desire as the central analytic to examine the founding and consolidating of settler-colonial rule in Northeastern Turtle Island (Québec and the Great Lakes area, territory claimed by the French Empire as Nouvelle-France) as well as Indigenous women’s selfmaking and resistance in that area. I explore how the cultivation of desire is simultaneously an intense site of political theorizing and colonial investment, as well as Indigenous women’s selfmaking and resistance. Centering embodiment and embodied practices, I show how colonists and Indigenous women crafted different forms of attachment and desire, as well as their respective political efficacy in early modern settler-colonial politics. If the settler-colonial cultivation of desire hinges on disciplining Indigenous women’s bodies and regulating their affect, how did Indigenous women react to, subvert, and resist such colonial interventions in and through their embodied practices? I examine these processes and practices by weaving together close textual analyses and archival-historical research. Chapters are organized thematically. Chapter 1 introduces desire as a central inquiry of political philosophy and theory. I articulate the overall theoretical problematic and my methodology. Chapter 2 is a close reading of Jean Racine’s Iphigénie to tease out what I call the “imperial fantasy of consent” manifested through the enslaved foreign woman’s attachment to her colonizer. Chapter 3 examines the settler-colonial cultivation of desire through an analysis of settlercolonial educational practices aimed at managing Indigenous children’s bodies and regulating their affect. In Chapters 4 and 5 I turn to Indigenous women’s embodied practices as ways of cultivating decolonial desire. Chapter 4 examines Indigenous women’s ascetic practices that I argue show a form of self-making and community-building. Chapter 5 examines Indigenous women’s agricultural labor, i.e., labor in land as decolonial praxis. A concluding chapter reflects on the theoretical and political efficacy of centering desire, attachment, and embodied relations to studies of subjectivity, power, and resistance, as well as to ongoing efforts in theorizing settler-colonialism as a distinct modality of power. Throughout the dissertation, I work toward a decolonial account of desire, which has two different valences. First, I develop a decolonial reading of desire—that is, I dissect how imperial ideology took shape in early modern French literary and cultural productions, as well as colonial discourses, through the articulation of desire. Second, I develop an alternative account of desire as concrete attachments and relations cultivated through embodied practices. This study therefore contributes to feminist political theory, history of political thought, settler-colonial and Indigenous studies, as well as studies of early modern France and the French Empire.

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Allotting settler colonialism: Jonathan David Radocay, Stories in Severalty: Allotment and Indigenous Modernisms, PhD dissertation, UC Davis, 2023

23Sep23

Abstract: “Stories in Severalty: Allotment and Indigenous Modernisms” examines Indigenous engagements with the uneven textual, legal, and environmental terrains of the United States federal Indian policy known as allotment, which aimed to “assimilate” and “civilize” Indigenous Peoples in the United States by disrupting Indigenous forms of collective land tenure and by extending new regimes of racial capitalist property. Intensifying with the Dawes Act of 1887, allotment extinguished recognized tribal sovereignty and privatized Native lands held in common into parcels, which were then “allotted” to individual tribal members, along with US citizenship. Allotment introduced new racialized and gendered geographies that facilitated one of the most significant transfers of land and extractions of wealth in US history. As a scheme of Indigenous expropriation through privatization, allotment has been deployed elsewhere across the globe, and I argue that its terrains, then and now, play a significant role in the history of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Through an interdisciplinary, community-engaged study of both literary and community texts, my dissertation shows how Indigenous authors engage with, resist, and challenge allotment’s enduring forms of domination. Continuous with longstanding Indigenous knowledges and practices, these engagements with “allotment modernity” work in and through allotment’s privatization schemes to extend Indigenous sovereignty and land relations into the future. My project argues that reading allotment through Indigenous texts, past and present, both critiques settler colonial and racial capitalist features of the policy that continue to impact present-day Indigenous communities, and shows how Indigenous Peoples have imaginatively appropriated and converted allotment features toward Indigenous ends.

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The massacre of settler colonialism: Hannah Sue Andrea Thompson, Oscar Howe’s Wounded Knee Massacre: A Complex Critique of Settler Colonialism, MA dissertation, UC Davis, 2023

23Sep23

Abstract: Oscar Howe’s painting Wounded Knee Massacre has been understudied and sparsely exhibited since its completion in 1960. The few scholarly analyses of the work that exist rely heavily on a written interpretation of the painting that Howe produced in 1974. Scholarship has been satisfied with a surface level discourse that concludes that the painting, as Howe himself states, is “a [record of a] true event.” Lack of rigorous examination and interpretation of this work fails to situate it within the social and political climate of the 1950s and 1960s in which Howe was working. This article rectifies this lack through a reevaluation of Wounded Knee Massacre and Howe’s writing about it to provide a more rigorous interpretation that accounts for the broader socio-political context of twentieth-century Native American-settler relations. Specifically, it articulates how Wounded Knee Massacre functions as a nuanced critique of settler colonial violence and the harm caused by its logic of elimination.

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Indigenous health and settler concern: Lucy Vorobej, ‘By Their Own Efforts’: First Nations Health Policy in Canada, 1940s-1970s, PhD dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2023

23Sep23

Abstract: This dissertation explores the early years of Ottawa’s 20th century integration policy with a focus on the impact of settler-colonial power and priorities on First Nations’ access to Canadian health care systems under it. Using critical discourse analysis and the theoretical frameworks of Post-Colonialism and Critical Race Theory to read “along the grain of colonial common sense,” this study explores settler archives to examine the discourses, policies, and practices of settler political and bureaucratic leadership from the 1940s to the 1970s. I argue that Ottawa’s policy of integration, despite settler pronouncements of its break from the past, represented a profound continuity of settler desires for Indigenous erasure and White settler power. As a result, many settler politicians and department officials chose willful blindness to First Nations’ assertions of their Indigenous or treaty rights to health care—deemed to be threats to the status quo. In their place, settler leadership drew on racialized myths of First Nations landlessness and “a primitive unproductive” culture to claim exclusive sovereignty, to “justify” settler incursion, and to offer access to settler health care systems on settler terms. Ultimately, Ottawa’s approach produced a system of profound harm. It left Ottawa’s Indian Health Service unprioritized and underfunded, its mandate unwanted by provincial governments, and its policies the target of resistance from many First Nations individuals and communities. My dissertation joins with a rising number of health care historians who recognize that the history of settler-colonialism and systemic racism is a necessary addition to the history of health care in Canada. Specifically, my research will result in a richer understanding of how racialization continued to impact First Nations access to health care during a political period in Canadian history when overt racial discrimination was no longer sanctioned and details how settler efforts to develop policy in “First Nations best interests” operated largely to serve settler aims.

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Indigenous thrivance against settler colonialism: Dianne Baumann, ‘Thrivance is My Identity: Moving Beyond Survival’, Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, 10, 4, 2023

22Sep23

Abstract: In this article I explore the significance of ancestral homelands to Blackfeet identity. Through the analysis of Blackfeet stories and our historical and on-going fight for land sovereignty I examine the entanglements of settler colonial formations and ideologies within Indigenous communities without reinforcing a problematic “plight of the Indian” logic. While the information presented here may contain some elements of pain, the focus centers on pushing beyond a theory of survivance to a theory of thrivance, emphasizing an understanding of our own Blackfeet ways-of-knowing and practices. A thrivance focus is important as it moves beyond a statement of survival to a statement of “we are here, we are productive, and we continue to thrive and contribute to today’s world.” In addition, thrivance accentuates the importance of ancestral homelands and traditional practices to healing and a positive sense of Indigenous identity and dignity. This emphasis on Blackfeet identity contributes to Native American studies, ethnic studies, and settler colonial studies; but most importantly it offers the hope of understanding through reintroducing a positive Indigenous identity, thus encouraging more balanced and harmonious communities.

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Not Red Indians: Audra Simpson, ‘We Are Not Red Indians (We Might All Be Red Indians)’, Mapping Change, 26/07/15

22Sep23

Excerpt: In a 2004 interview Yasser Arafat, in a state of near confinement and exhaustion, reflected upon his incapacity to move without the immediate threat of assassination, about the Palestinian right of return, about American elections, and his achievements. Among these achievements was the fact that “the Palestine case was the biggest problem in the world” and that Israel had “failed to wipe us out.” As a final mark of that success, he added the declarative and comparative and final point of distinction, “we are not red Indians.” This paper uses this point of comparison of a departure point to reflect upon the deep specificity and global illegibility of Indigenous struggle and life in the face of death and dispossession in North America. In order to do so I will choose a series of historical assemblages — of sociality, treaty-making, militarized pushbacks upon encroachment, spatial confinement (“reservationization”), and pushback for land, for life and for dignity within occupation to amend Arafat’s statement and reimagine “success.” I argue that these assemblages are themselves a structure of political life that stand alongside and push against a “logic of elimination” – a logic that authorizes the removal, the attacking and “assimilating” of indigenous peoples for land. I consider these tangled processes in order to re-narrate the seemingly negligible political and corporeal life of Indigenous sovereignty within dispossession and settler occupation. This is an occupation that naturalizes itself through law and narrates itself as new, as beneficent and democratic atop the lands and lives of Indigenous peoples who persist, with sovereignties intact, in spite of this grinding historical and political process of settler colonialism. In order to put this point of comparison, and sentiment of Arafat’s achievement in relief this paper examines how is it that the very techniques of force, of pushback, of sociality and outright refusal and resistance receive the writ of dismissal within a global and comparative frame of resistance and (political life). At the end of the paper it is asked how these processes may be re-narrated and comprehended in a global, comparative frame of not only analysis, but struggles for justice.

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Is settler colonialism civilisational? Steven Sabol, ‘The Touch of Civilization’: Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization, University Press of Colorado, 2017

19Sep23

Description: “The Touch of Civilization” is a comparative history of the United States and Russia during their efforts to colonize and assimilate two indigenous groups of people within their national borders: the Sioux of the Great Plains and the Kazakhs of the Eurasian Steppe. In the revealing juxtaposition of these two cases author Steven Sabol elucidates previously unexplored connections between the state building and colonizing projects these powers pursued in the nineteenth century. This critical examination of internal colonization—a form of contiguous continental expansion, imperialism, and colonialism that incorporated indigenous lands and peoples—draws a corollary between the westward-moving American pioneer and the eastward-moving Russian peasant. Sabol examines how and why perceptions of the Sioux and Kazakhs as ostensibly uncivilized peoples and the Northern Plains and the Kazakh Steppe as “uninhabited” regions that ought to be settled reinforced American and Russian government sedentarization policies and land allotment programs. In addition, he illustrates how both countries encountered problems and conflicts with local populations while pursuing their national missions of colonization, comparing the various forms of Sioux and Kazakh martial, political, social, and cultural resistance evident throughout the nineteenth century. Presenting a nuanced, in-depth history and contextualizing US and Russian colonialism in a global framework, “The Touch of Civilization” will be of significant value to students and scholars of Russian history, American and Native American history, and the history of colonization.

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Music to settler ears: Jody Stark, ‘”Unpacking the Keeper Current” of Settler Colonialism: Why Decolonizing Work is Complicated for (White) Music Educators’, Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 22, 2, 2023, pp. 37–62

19Sep23

Abstract: In this article, I explore several complicating factors that impact (White) music teachers as they work towards decolonizing their teaching practices. Created by the discursive structures of settler colonialism, these factors include the discourse of an additive multiculturalism, both in society and in the field of music education, the tendency to enact what Tuck and Yang call “moves to innocence” to avoid dealing with one’s privilege and complicity in systems of oppression, the Western penchant for spectacle and consumption resulting from an extractivist mindset, and a Western conception of music as works or pieces.

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Hydraulic settler colonialism: Adrian Drummond-Cole, Making Water Liquid: Hydraulic Settlement in California’s Central Valley, PhD dissertation, UC Santa Cruz, 2023

19Sep23

Abstract: Making Water Liquid: Hydraulic Settlement in California’s Central Valley provides a social, spatial, and historical account of the role of water management in the Anglo conquest of California. This work focuses on the San Joaquin Valley from the mid-nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century to evaluate efforts by settlers, farmers, scientists, engineers, and administrators to render land and water into objects of knowledge, ownership, investment, and use. Drawing on archival research and fieldwork, I develop the concept of hydraulic settlement to describe the strategic use of hydraulic infrastructure, governmental institutions, and financial instruments to carry out a mode of colonial settlement and capital accumulation defined by its relationship to the manipulation and control of water. Charting a contingent history from Indigenous reservations and swampland reclamation through canal irrigation, hydraulical materialism, and political hydrography to water districts, groundwater extraction, and the bonds of settlement, this research reveals how the seemingly neutral processes used to manage, measure, and monetize water belie understudied histories of dispossession, exclusion, inequality, and violence.

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