settler colonial studies blog

Facing settler colonialism, it makes sense to be evasive on race: Casandra D Salgado, ‘Latinxs and Racial Frames: The Evolution of Settler Colonial Ideologies in New Mexico’, Social Problems, 2023

27Apr23

Abstract: I leverage the case of Nuevomexicanos, New Mexico’s long-standing Mexican American population, to extend our understanding of how legacies of Spanish and American conquest—that is, double colonization—can inform Latinxs’ understandings of discrimination and race. I show that while most Nuevomexicanos reported experiences with discrimination, they often minimized their racialized experiences because such instances were incompatible with the idea that living in a Hispanic-majority state sheltered them from racism. The Hispanic-majority frame was often paired with rationales that addressed spatial comparisons, cultural diversity or class inequality to deflect race. Nuevomexicanos struggled with viewing themselves as a low-status group due to their substantial representation in New Mexico yet still managing White racism. I argue that Nuevomexicanos’ race-minimizing frames parallel strategies that date back to Spanish colonization to leverage whiteness in order to contest discrimination. Nuevomexicanos race-minimizing claims, therefore, embody resistance strategies to claim equality with Whites. This study details how double colonization and region reflect variations in Latinxs’ conceptions of race.

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The displaced motherland of settlers: Shawn M. Reagin, Their Heimat on the Periphery: German Settlers in Southwest Africa, 1828–1934, PhD Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2023

25Apr23

Abstract: This dissertation engages recent studies of empire and identity to investigate the German Empire and settler colonial identity in German Southwest Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A socio–cultural historical lens of identity provides an intimate sense of what the German Empire in German Southwest Africa meant to certain settlers who emigrated there and in so doing sheds light on the colonial process from the metropole in Germany and from the periphery in German Southwest Africa. Ethnic Germans first began to arrive in and write about Southwest Africa in 1828 mostly as missionaries. Then when Southwest Africa became a German protectorate in 1884 people intentionally emigrated in order to establish a permanent settler colony. This study ends in 1934 during the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Analyzing a range of primary sources during these periods including government documents, colonial–society documents, missionary literature, colonial novels, newspapers, journals, magazines, and ego–documents like autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries demonstrates the inner journeys that the settlers undertook for self–identification. Through the colonial process, this dissertation argues that some German settlers formed a unique and multifaceted Southwest African identity—distinct, though still borrowing, from their metropolitan German roots. Many settlers understood and categorized themselves as Germans or German colonists in the early years of colonization. Then, as colonial exposure increased, these settlers began to view themselves increasingly as Southwest Africans, especially after the collapse of the German Empire and into the Weimar years. The shared experience of living in a decidedly peripheral environment generated a commonality and a sense of connectedness with their fellow former German subjects.

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The security of settlers: Jethro Norman, ‘Tensions of Modernity: Privilege, Precarity, and Colonial Nostalgia among European Security Contractors in East Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2023

25Apr23

Abstract: Private security work can be a brutal world of short-term contracts, exploitation, and underregulation, where the imperative of profit is expected to trump collective notions of military brotherhood. Why then do so many demobilized soldiers turn to it as a vocation? While a rich body of work has revealed the vulnerabilities of demobilized military life, ethnographic investigations into how contractors experience and make sense of precarity are less common. Drawing on fieldwork with military veterans of European descent working and living in East Africa, this article argues that a central, yet underexplored, feature of contemporary security work is colonial nostalgia. Some contractors read the travelogues of colonial adventurers, while others trace their family genealogy to ancestral colonial frontier soldiers. A few even write their own memoirs in similar fashion. Writing, reading, and living the colonial past through this contractor canon serves several present-day functions. First, the parallels between risk-taking colonial adventurers and the kind of rugged individualism associated with homo economicus masks the tensions and fissures that emerge from soldiers’ discharge from the military and subsequent remobilization as privatized contractors. Secondly, colonial nostalgia forms part of a larger political critique ofWestern military interventions, of which many of these contractors experienced first-hand. Here, private security work is imagined as replicating an older, more effective tradition of frontier soldiering that is rooted in a logic of settler-colonialism. Finally, fantasies of a colonial past feed into contractors’ attempts to market themselves to clients and to organize their everyday work.

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Palestine against settler colonialism: Ahmad H. Sa’di, Nur Masalha (eds), Decolonizing the Study of Palestine: Indigenous Perspectives and Settler Colonialism after Elia Zureik, Bloomsbury, 2023

23Apr23

Description: Writing about Palestine and the Palestinians continue to be controversial. Until the late 1980s, the question of Palestine was approached through Western social theories that had appeared after World War 2. This endowed European settlers and colonists the mission of guiding the “backward” natives of Palestine to modernity. However, since the work of Palestinian scholar Elia Zureik, the study of Israel, and the “ethnic relations” in Palestine-Israel has been radically shifted. Building on Zureik’s work, this book studies the colonial project in Palestine and how it has transformed Palestinians’ lives. Zureik had argued that Israel was the product of a colonization process and so should be studied through the same concepts and theorization as South Africa, Rhodesia, Australia, and other colonial societies. He also rejected the moral and civilizational superiority of the European settlers. Developing this work, the contributors here argue that colonialism is not only a political-economic system but also a “mode of life” and consciousness, which has far-reaching consequences for both the settlers and the indigenous population. Across 13 chapters (in addition to the introduction and the afterward), the book covers topics such as settler colonialism, dispossession, the separation wall, surveillance technologies, decolonisation methodologies and popular resistance. Composed mostly of Palestinian scholars and scholars of Palestinian heritage, it is the first book in which the indigenous Palestinians not merely “write back”, but principally aim to lay the foundations for decolonial social science research on Palestine.

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History, reclaimed: John Docker, ‘Reclaiming History from the Settler Coloniser: A Meditation on Nur Masalha’s Palestine across Millennia: A History of Literacy, Learning and Educational Revolutions’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 22, 1, 2023

23Apr23

Abstract: In this wonderful book, Nur Masalha challenges and transforms world history, as did his earlier Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (2018). In this meditation I recount some of Nur Masalha’s argument — not all, given the extraordinary richness of the material he has uncovered, described, and analysed — but also offer my own reflections prompted by his book. As Masalha relates in his introduction, the work is a passionate response to Zionism’s historical claim that Palestinians possess no history of literacy, education, and literary culture. He shows the falsity of such a claim through multiple examples. Masalha explores, for example, the multifaceted history of education in Byzantine Palestine (Third to Early Seventh Century), based on a philosophy of ‘civil society’. Palestine as a cosmopolitan and transnational world inhered in what Masalha refers to as Cities of Learning. There were famous intellectuals, such as in antiquity Josephus (AD 37-c.100) and Origen (AD 185–253). In modernity he highlights Khalil Sakakini (1878–1953), whose remarkable educational reforms, emphasizing a ‘philosophy of joy’, emerged at a similar time to A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School in the UK. Women’s education is featured, from the time of the Palestinian Madrasas under the Ayyubids and Mamluks (1187–1517) onwards, a powerful tradition which continues into the modern era. When press censorship was relaxed following the Ottoman Young Turk Revolution of 1908, there was a huge growth of newspapers, photography, and photojournalism, a remarkable figure here being the Palestinian photographer Karima ‘Abboud (1893–1940). Masalha draws attention to the importance of translation in Palestinian history, especially in the important figure of Khalil Ibrahim Beidas, a relative of Edward Said, who was interested in the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Gorky. There is a fascinating chapter on the interactions of Palestinian scholars and the Crusaders, with free passages of ideas, goods and technologies; arabesque became a mainstream European decorative art. The result of these multiple explorations is a major transformation in how we think about the world.

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Militarised settler colonialism: Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat, ‘Militarized urbanism in the cold war era: The resettlement of the refugees in Khan Younis’, Politics and Space, 2023

23Apr23

Abstract: The resettlement of Palestinian refugees is often studied through two distinct approaches: the first uses settler colonialism as an analytical framework to explore structural violence and Indigenous transfer, expressed through counterinsurgency and urbicide; the second investigates practices of care and governance and their representations within a universalized discourse of humanitarianism. This article introduces a new approach, exploring historical (post)colonial architectural narratives—rooted in international discourses of humanitarian relief and development aid—to interrogate the complex settler-colonial conditions and practices of Israel’s resettlement of refugees. Such narratives emphasis the materialization of resettlement, in which structural violence is culturally co-produced. The article focuses on the Khan Younis refugee resettlement project in the Gaza Strip (1983-1993), drawing on archival materials and in-depth interviews to offering ‘militarized urbanism’ as a novel description of the violence of resettlement. Situated at the junction between military technologies and cultural practices, ‘militarized urbanism’ represents the transformation of the geopolitics of colonial warfare to the colonization of the everyday, where urban and architectural knowledge are reshaped by security logics in the mediation of conflicting civilian and political agendas.

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Armenian settler colonial studies? Helen Makhdoumian, ‘Armenian Studies in Conversation with Critical Indigenous Studies and Settler Colonial Studies: An Invitation’, Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, 2023

23Apr23

Abstract: This article argues that Armenian Studies can learn from and contribute to the fields of critical Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies in generative ways, especially as those fields increasingly become global in scope. After surveying recent scholarly discourses in Armenian Studies, I illuminate pathways forward for interdisciplinary approaches to the study of indigeneity, colonization, genocide, removal, dispossession, biocultural assimilation, cultural heritage preservation, and memory work. I situate these potential possibilities and needed nuances within a larger discussion on the origins, aims, and current state of critical Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies, two interrelated but distinct modes of inquiry.

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Uncanny settler colonialism: Travis Franks, ‘Uncanny encounters and haunting colonial histories in Australia’s reconciliation-era narratives’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

23Apr23

Abstract: Settler literature is haunted by the colonial past. Motifs found in the Australian literary tradition signify this haunting-Aboriginal spectrality, uncanny Aboriginal ceremonial grounds, and taboo massacre sites being the most common. Settler authors typically use these literary devices in moments of social and political upheaval that disturb the foundational myths of settler belonging. Australia’s Reconciliation agenda brought realities of colonial frontier violence and the scale of Aboriginal deaths to the fore of mainstream socio-political consciousness. Literary scholars have adapted Freud’s concept of the uncanny to argue that settler belonging feels imperiled or strange when confronted with the distressing knowledge of Aboriginal modernity. Overwhelmingly, the manufacture of Aboriginal haunting in Australia’s Reconciliation—era signifies settler anxiety and attempts to reclaim the authority unsettled by Indigenous alterity. Works by Henry Reynolds—Why Weren’t We Told? (2000)—and Alex Miller-Journey to the Stone Country (2003)—are representative of a broader literary response to Reconciliation, after which depictions of Aboriginal death and burial, as well as new settler quests for belonging, proliferated. The essay concludes by reading Noongar writer Kim Scott’s novel Taboo (2017) as a subversion of works like those by Reynolds and Miller.

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Settler colonialism in colonial cities: Farabi Fakih, ‘Settler cities in the Dutch Indies: Race, class and the emergence of settler colonialism’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2023

23Apr23

Abstract: This article explores the colonial land tenure system which evolved in the municipalities of the Dutch Indies in the early twentieth century, resulting in structural differences in urban property ownership. The development of a formal and informal property regime during this period created the logic of racialised capitalism that underpinned settler colonialism. By looking at the actions of the Indo-Europeesche Verbond (IEV), the main Indo-European political party, this article seeks to understand why settler colonialism failed in the Dutch Indies. It finds that the success of the settler colonialism project depended on its relationship with global capitalism and imperial support. This study also finds that structural differences in property ownership have continued in postcolonial Indonesia.

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Settler architectures: Vajdon Sohaili, The Shape of Unity: Architecture, Art, and the Designs of Postwar Transnational Settler Colonial Community, PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2023

22Apr23

Abstract: Following the 1945 signing of the United Nations Charter and the resulting waves of decolonization, projects of public architecture and art increasingly sought to shape conceptions of political community unified under idealized consensus. Yet, in contexts resisting decolonization—specifically, settler colonial contexts—such projects served to perpetuate settler interests, affirming non-existent, incomplete, or unwanted social harmonies. Analyzing public institutional architecture and public art—officially sanctioned works seeking to represent pluralist, humanistic ideals and interpellate collective self-understandings—in three post-WWII settler colonial societies, this dissertation argues that “unity,” “community,” and their contextual avatars supplied not only a logic for spatial design, but also a transnationally traded alibi for the perpetuation of settler power. First, in the former Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), a disingenuous policy of “interracial partnership” permits a White minority to defer Black majority rule, and results in the construction of a circular National Museum that monumentalizes settler archaeology. Second, preaching a doctrine of “oneness,” the Bahá’í religion constructs two monumental devotional buildings—one in the newly-constituted Israel, another in suburban Chicago—as twin base-camps for a global conversion campaign drawn along colonial lines and sustained by settlerism’s strategies of elimination. And third, in Montréal, against violent acts of separatism by Quebec-nationalists, expressions of social and artistic “integration” animate the construction of a massive performing arts complex and the techno-utopian idealism of Expo 67, both founded on Indigenous erasures. In each case, a public byword—respectively, “partnership,” “oneness,” “integration”—operates as a discursive surrogate of unity, channeling the populist appeal of community rhetoric, and shaping a program of cultural-institutional production driven by a complicit settler creative class of architects and artists. Reframing history and political mythology via spatial and iconographic conflations, these projects exhibit the erasures and clefts of settlerism’s eliminationist logic, while at the same time, channeling and repurposing the communitary idealisms associated with postwar modernism. Geographically diverse, but structurally and materially entwined, the three case studies examined here disclose a transnational settler typology of public-institutional architecture and art ostensibly oriented towards reparative notions of unity and community, but pragmatically arranged to forestall decolonial fragmentation.

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