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Decolonisation is a sport: Janice Forsyth, Christine O’Bonsawin, Russell Field, Murray G. Phillips (eds), Decolonizing Sport, Fernwood, 2023

08Nov23

Description: Decolonizing Sport tells the stories of sport colonizing Indigenous Peoples and of Indigenous Peoples using sport to decolonize. Spanning several lands — Turtle Island, the US, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Kenya — the authors demonstrate the two sharp edges of sport in the history of colonialism. Colonizers used sport, their own and Indigenous recreational activities they appropriated, as part of the process of dispossession of land and culture. Indigenous mascots and team names, hockey at residential schools, lacrosse and many other examples show the subjugating force of sport. Yet, Indigenous Peoples used sport, playing their own games and those of the colonizers, including hockey, horse racing and fishing, and subverting colonial sport rules as liberation from colonialism. This collection stands apart from recent publications in the area of sport with its focus on Indigenous Peoples, sport and decolonization, as well as in imagining a new way forward.


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Bookending settler colonialism: Jody Mason, Sarah Pelletier, ‘”Singular Plurality”: Settler Colonial Transcendence and Canada’s 2021 Guest-of-Honour Campaign at the Frankfurt Book Fair’, Book History, 26, 2, 2023, pp. 467-496

08Nov23

Abstract: Building on recent scholarship on the role of the Frankfurt Book Fair in contemporary book culture, this paper looks at FBM2021, Canada’s guest-of-honour campaign for the 2021 Frankfurt Book Fair. FBM2021’s brand, “Singular Plurality,” depended on Indigenous authors and their writing to signify the post-reconciliation eclecticism that is at the heart of Canadian Heritage’s current cultural export strategy. The sign of reconciliation—part of a settler strategy that Lowman and Barker identify as transcendence––is particularly treacherous in this context because it folds Indigenous writers and their work into a creative-economy logic that depends on cultural diversity as a unifying sign, while actively suppressing questions regarding Indigenous sovereignty. We argue that the campaign’s silencing of questions of production is the motor of transcendence. Drawing on a survey we conducted with Indigenous-owned publishers in Canada, we attend to the unique needs of Indigenous-owned publishers to make visible the fact that reconciliation is not simply a matter of culture; it is at the same time always a matter of political and economic sovereignty.


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Educating against settler colonialism: Nicole Alia Salis Reyes, Christine A. Nelson, Stevie Lee, Alicia Reyes, LaJoya Reed Shelly, Ethan Chang, ‘(Re)Wiring Settler Colonial Practices in Higher Education: Creating Indigenous Centered Futures Through Considerations of Power, the Social, Place, and Space’, in Laura W. Perna (ed.), Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, Springer, 2023, pp. 1–77

08Nov23

Abstract: In this chapter, we seek to illuminate the dangerous, active, pervasive, and personal nature of settler colonialism within US higher education. We use an electrical current metaphor to conceptualize settler institutions of higher education in relation with settler colonialism and to convey how that relationship needs to be rewired to forge Indigenous centered futures in higher education. To accomplish this, first, we reflect on how our personal experiences with settler colonialism brought us together to write this chapter. We also describe how we approached our writing process collaboratively to support one another and to push against settler colonial writing conventions. Second, we contrast Indigenous and settler colonial ways of knowing and being. Third, we offer an analytical framework, which draws on concepts of power, the social, as well as place and space, for making sense of how we encounter Indigenous and settler colonial ways of knowing and being throughout our interactions in higher education. Fourth, we explore the tensions and possibilities of transforming settler colonial institutions of higher education into Indigenous Centered Institutions. Finally, we offer our conclusions and implications for dreaming vibrant Indigenous futures through solidarities against settler colonialism.


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Indigenous diplomacy as the modality of settler engagement? Morgan Brigg, Mary Graham, ‘Holding contradictions: toward the lawful carriage of Indigenous diplomacy’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2023

08Nov23

Abstract: This reflective engagement with responses to the inaugural (2023) Coral Bell School Lecture on Indigenous Diplomacy considers and suggests a way of addressing conceptual and practical chasms associated with advancing Indigenous diplomacy in the context of contemporary foreign policy. First, we argue that differences among lifeworlds as well as deleterious challenges arising from settler colonialism need to be registered, embraced, and inhabited rather than glossed over. Second, we revisit the meaning and relationship between our terms ‘survivalism’ and ‘relationalism’, for increased clarity and understanding. Third, we consider challenges associated with the contingency and historical specificity of the ontological forms that are typically assumed in mainstream International Relations (IR) knowing. We conclude by drawing together the sketch of ‘principled pragmatism’ that we have explicated throughout as an orientation and way of responding to the challenge and difficulties of advancing Indigenous diplomacy in contemporary foreign policy. Our concluding comments register the necessity of pursuing principled pragmatism and Indigenous diplomacy in ‘lawful’ Aboriginal terms in the Oceania regional context.


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Manifestly settler colonial: Rijuta Mehta, ‘Manifest Documentary’, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 63, 1, 2023, pp. 53-79

08Nov23

Abstract: This article argues that the symbolic and material power of Manifest Destiny inhered in the norms of documentary photography at Life magazine, particularly in preexisting shooting scripts. An analysis of visual re-takes and narrative fixity in the 1947 photo-essay on the Indian Partition, “The Great Migration,” reveals how tropes of US settler colonialism were projected onto distressed refugees in South Asia. The norm of having photographed subjects enact script-image correlation was a revenue-minded colonial action; it absorbed a range of racial differences—South Asian, Black American, and Native American—into the fantasy of postwar US hegemony.


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Returning to return: Tiina Järvi, ‘Uncanny returns in settler colonial state: return, exile, and decolonization in Palestine/Israel’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2023

08Nov23

Abstract: In this article, I propose uncanniness as a defining characteristic of return as I explore the settler colonial context of Palestine/Israel, where return has starkly ethno-nationalistic connotations. For Palestinians, return is associated with the liberation of Palestine, while for Israelis, it is part of Zionist foundational narratives. By explicating academic research and biographical literature, I consider how the concept of uncanny can further our understanding of what it means to return in this context, and beyond. Uncanniness brings attention to feelings of disorientation, strangeness, and not-at-homeness, and by approaching return as uncanny, I suggest, it is possible to tap into the volatility of “being-at-home” and thus unsettle exclusive and essentialist notions of belonging that define settler colonialism. Consequently, the article offers a way to consider return in a manner that gets from nostalgia to a new beginning and, in the settler colonial context of Palestine/Israel, from settler anxiety to decolonization.


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Settler colonialism is a prison: Elizabeth Venczel, ‘Settler colonialism and prisons: a comparative case study of Canada, Palestine, and Australia’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

04Nov23

Abstract: Through an examination of the history of settler colonial violence against Indigenous peoples and lands in Canada, Palestine, and Australia, this paper exposes the links between colonialism and the penitentiary, across borders. This paper interrogates the differences and similarities between the use of prisons as a tool in settler colonial expansion in these three states. As a contribution to abolitionist thought and theory, this paper highlights the need for an intersectional analysis of the overlapping consequences of settler colonialism and international carceral regimes. Efforts to resist carceral expansion around the world must include efforts to resist colonial expansion, and the voices of Indigenous peoples must be centred throughout this process.


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The ‘politics of reminding’ and settler colonialism: Rafael Verbuyst, ‘Settler colonialism and therapeutic discourses on the past: a response to Burnett et al.’s “a politics of reminding”‘, Critical Discourse Studies, 2023

04Nov23

Abstract: In ‘A politics of reminding: Khoisan resurgence and environmental justice in South Africa’s Sarah Baartman district’, Burnett et al. scrutinize the memory activism of the Gamtkwa Khoisan Council, which is part of the wider ‘Khoisan resurgence’ sweeping across post-apartheid South Africa. Although the authors missed important nuances, they also pointed out flaws in the way I used Niezen’s ‘therapeutic history’ [Niezen, R. (2009). The rediscovered self: Indigenous identity and cultural justice. McGill-Queen’s Press] in my work to account for why Khoisan activists turn to the past. I therefore not only respond to their criticism, but also revise aspects of my theoretical framework. Therapeutic history is not divorced from material concerns. Nor is it representative of all engagements with the past by indigenous people or simply the opposite of academic history. Instead, by drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork and theorizing alongside the Khoisan, I show how it captures emic discourses on the past that entangle notions of indigenous identity, healing, and history in order to resist settler colonialism and its oppressive etic histories. While the concept of therapeutic history has its limitations, it effectively highlights indigenous people’s agency in the face of settler colonialism in South Africa and elsewhere.


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Settler theology: Joëlle M. Morgan, ‘The Stones Cry Out and the Trees Talk: A Praxis of Epistemic Disobedience Toward a Settler Theology of Aurality’, Political Theology, 2023

04Nov23

Abstract: Epistemic disobedience (Mignolo) to settler-coloniality in Canada requires conscientisation to Indigenous peoples’ stories and a decolonial turn (Maldonado-Torres) in epistemology and ontology of relations (Tinker) between Indigenous and settler peoples. One group of primarily settler Christians on unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin/Anishnaabe territory engaged such a praxis, through Right Relations with their United Church in Ottawa, toward social healing (Lederach and Lederach) of colonial wounds, transformationally engaging in oral-aural praxis to relationally receive hi/stories of local Indigenous communities. Stan McKay, Cree elder and former moderator of the United Church of Canada, through Indigenous peoples’ understanding of creation invites a decolonial turn with hermeneutical listening in which one hears teachings of Jesus as cry of creation – such that even “the stones cry out” (Luke 19:40) and the trees teach – which has implications for a settler theology of aurality.


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Encountering settler colonialism: Mark Griffiths, Mikko Joronen (eds), Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, University of Nebraska Press, 2023

04Nov23

Description: Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, edited by Mark Griffiths and Mikko Joronen, sits at the intersection of cultural and political geographies and offers innovative reflections on power, colonialism, and anti-colonialism in contemporary Palestine and Israel. Organized around the theme of encountering and focusing on the ways violence and struggle are un/made in the encounter between the colonizer and colonized, the essays focus on power relations as they manifest in cultural practices and everyday lives in anti/colonial Palestine. Covering numerous sites in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel, Encountering Palestine addresses a range of empirical topics—from marriage and queer aesthetics to policing, demolition, armament failure, and violence. The contributors utilize diverse theoretical frameworks, such as hyperreality, settler capitalism, intimate biopolitics, and politics of vulnerability, to help us better understand the cultural making and unmaking of colonial and anti-colonial space in Palestine. Encountering Palestine asks us to rethink how colonialism and power operate in Palestine, the ways Palestinians struggle, and the lifeways that constantly encounter, un/make, and counter the spaces of colonial violence.


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