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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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Hydro settler colonialism: Katarina Djordjevic, Encountering Settler Colonialism in Hydroelectric Development at Southern Indian Lake, MA Dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2023

22Apr23

Abstract: This thesis investigates the history and proceedings of the high-level diversion scheme at Southern Indian Lake. Though the scheme did not become a reality because the Progressive Conservative majority government who championed it dissolved before development began, its proceedings signified South Indian Lake’s first colonial encounter with regards to the Churchill River Diversion. Through the high-level diversion discourse, I argue that Manitoba’s Churchill River Diversion reproduces a social policy which creates Indigenous peoples as an Other and asserts settler dominance. It reproduces settler ideologies and fantasies of personhood, entitlement, and (dis)possession which are constitutive of colonial powers. Moreover, it reproduces hydropower as a nexus for colonial practices and ideologies which undermine Indigenous peoples and their land. Chapter One argues that the low-level diversion at Southern Indian Lake created profound negative environmental and socio-cultural impacts. It aims to place in sharp relief the arguments posited for the high-level scheme by its proponents. Chapter Two argues that Manitoba Hydro agents produced a government-supported narrative of urgency for the high-level diversion which circumvented social and environmental responsibilities towards Indigenous lands and Indigenous peoples. And Chapter Three argues that the Progressive Conservative majority government, of the time, embraced and reproduced technocratic and colonial ideologies to press for the high-level diversion. The Churchill River Diversion is a complex of colonial ideologies, government agents, engineers, and resisting Indigenous communities into a cemented structure which continues to alter hydrologies and humanities.


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Undocumented settlers? Enrique Sepúlveda, ‘Chicanx studies, indigeneity and the politics of settler colonialism’, Latino Studies, 2023

22Apr23

Excerpt: Midway through the 2019 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) annual meeting, a poignant pedagogical moment arose in the audience about the meaning of Gloria Anzaldúa’s work and the wholesale application of a theory, settler colonialism, onto communities in Abya Yala. The one area of contention I wish to highlight here in settler colonial theory is the labeling of all migrants, regardless of their complex histories and colonialities, as modern-day settler colonialists. It was a case of junior and senior scholars speaking from the heart. The last speaker in the audience was a Chicanx prospective graduate student who shared that they were undocumented and felt insulted at being labeled a settler colonialist. As they pointed to their chest, they said it pained them deeply that their people were being framed in this way. It was, for many of us, another layer of pain and trauma. The roundtable session was a critical decolonial dialogue on questions of indigeneity, settler colonialism, and the work of Anzaldúa (1987), particularly her reframing of mestizaje.


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Rusting settler colonialism: Christabel Devadoss, ‘Examining Rust Belt narratives: Race, rural representation, and everyday experiences’, Journal of Rural Studies, 100, 2023

15Apr23

Abstract: Media coverage of the rural Rust Belt has featured mainly white perspectives. Since the 1970s manufacturing decline, the Rust Belt has been characterized as home to the “white working class.” The “white working-class” trope, ubiquitous in political, social, and academic commentary, upholds settler colonial narratives and colonial ideas of race that erase the experiences and histories of people of color in Rust Belt areas. While according to the US Census, a large portion of the area is white, many people of color in rural areas are not counted in official Census data. Additionally, the Rust Belt contains some of the fastest-growing ‘minority’ populations in the country. Dominant Rust Belt narratives fail to account for the experiences of many people of color who live and work in the rural Rust Belt. Drawing from in-depth interviews and landscape analysis in Northern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, this article examines perspectives that challenge settler colonial discourses, providing a more inclusive narrative of the rural Rust Belt.


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On the emotional insecurity of settlers (why do they call the army): Eric Van Rythoven, ‘Problems, Tools, and Creativity: A Pragmatist Approach to Emotion and Security’, in Mark B. Salter, Can E. Mutlu, Philippe M. Frowd (eds), Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction, Routledge, 2023

15Apr23

Access the chapter here.


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Clearances in one place, settlements somewhere else: Iain Hutchison, ‘The 1862 Fair Isle Clearance to New Brunswick’, The Scottish Historical Review, 102, 1, 2023, pp. 91-115

15Apr23

Abstract: In May 1862, sixty-five adults and seventy children under twelve years of age left their homes on Fair Isle bound for Canada. Following a carefully orchestrated journey via Westray, Kirkwall, Granton and Glasgow, they boarded the Olympia to cross the Atlantic to St John, New Brunswick, where they were to embark upon building new lives. This article explains how hardship encountered by these families on Fair Isle in 1861 placed them in a situation of impending destitution that encouraged their departure from their native island, located halfway between Orkney and Shetland, and resulted in their resettlement in North America the following year. When emigration was proposed as a solution to their plight, glowing reports of opportunity in New Brunswick provided the ‘pull’ stimulus to counter their desperate situation on Fair Isle. Was the 1862 Fair Isle emigration an act of compassion and concern on the part of sponsors and facilitators? Or was islanders’ growing desperation used as an opportunity to remove the poorest 40% of Fair Isle’s population a decade after that process is widely accepted as having come to an end in the Highlands and islands of Scotland? Correspondence in the lead-up to the emigration of the beleaguered islanders suggests that their departure, while portrayed as benevolent intervention and offering them opportunity in a new land, was accompanied by self-interested agendas on the part of landowners and their agents who facilitated their departure. The article argues that the 1862 Fair Isle emigration was a removal of unwanted families facilitated by ‘assistance’ to them that was couched in language of compassion and concern. Landed interests orchestrated ‘aid’ and engaged in soothing public rhetoric to achieve an end that was ultimately to their own benefit.


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Exclusion rules: Alyssa A Hunziker, ‘Chinese Exclusion, Indigeneity, and Settler-Colonial Refusal in C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold’, MELUS, 2023

13Apr23

Excerpt: C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020) begins with a simple epigraph: “This land is not your land.” More than just a contestation of the Woody Guthrie classic folk song “This Land Is Your Land” recorded in 1944, the novel comes at a time of increasing national conversation about land ownership and the United States’ settler-colonial present.


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Floating settlers! Elizabeth Walsh, ‘Like Ice Floes’: Iñupiaq Sovereignty and Settler Migration on Alaska’s North Slope, PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2022

11Apr23

Abstract: My dissertation examines relations between Iñupiat in the village of Utqiaġvik on Alaska’s North Slope and a number of non-Iñupiat transient workers who, enticed by generous salaries, have temporarily relocated there. A focus of my study is the North Slope Borough, founded by Iñupiat to preserve their political autonomy and funded by taxes collected on the nearby Prudhoe Bay oil fields. My research tests and refines theoretical frameworks concerning settler colonialism. I draw on political, economic, and environmental literatures in sociocultural anthropology, as well as Native American and Indigenous studies and interdisciplinary settler colonial studies, to show how Iñupiat and non-Iñupiat village residents engage in day-to-day interactions guided by differing economic motivations and different understandings of community, place, and value. By working in an Indigenous community with both Iñupiat and non-Iñupiat, my research adds contemporary, on-the-ground, ethnographic insight into the ways in which individuals’ perspectives and attitudes are shaped by settler colonial ideologies as they are experienced in the present. I explicitly locate the origins of attitudes and dispositions of both non-Iñupiat transient workers and Iñupiat in the settler colonial past, while also tracing how these norms have endured structurally into the present. Long-term participant observation has allowed me to explore the ways in which socio-political norms are felt in, and inform, everyday life. In the first two chapters, I contextualize contemporary transient worker passage through the village within a history of colonial comings and goings to the region initiated by European explorers and Yankee whalers pursuing similar economic goals. I locate Native Alaska, the North Slope, and Utqiaġvik within the legal and political frameworks of United States settler colonialism and demonstrate that contemporary relations among non-Iñupiat transient workers and Alaska Natives are grounded in norms and understandings derived from these frameworks. In the remaining chapters, I describe the findings of my ethnographic research. I detail how many economically motivated transient worker employees at Iḷisaġvik College, a tribal college founded to provide local, culturally informed higher education, socially segregate themselves from the majority-Iñupiat community. I show how their ethical, social, and political commitments to fellow residents and the Arctic landscape are informed by the settler colonial and capitalist ideological structures familiar to them. This puts them at odds with Iñupiat, for whom the ethical and the economic, the individual and the community, are all connected through the Iñupiaq value of sharing and the hunting and community-wide distribution of the bowhead whale.


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Settler semiotics: Sonja Dobroski, ‘The Feathered Headdress: Settler Semiotics, US National Myth, and the Legacy of Colonized Artifacts’, in Benjamin Abrams, Peter Gardner (eds), Symbolic Objects in Contentious Politics, University of Michigan Press, 2023, pp. 101-126

11Apr23

Excerpt: On February 2, 2020, the Kansas City Chiefs played the San Francisco 49ers in the 54th Super Bowl, the annual apex event of American football. Thousands of fans entered the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, Florida, in support of their respective teams. America’s devoted football aficionados wear a wide variety of adornments to identify themselves as fans of their chosen team. For instance, the Green Bay Packers wear giant foam cheese heads, while Minnesota Vikings fans don horned helmets. In the 54th Super Bowl, as fans screamed, cried, and clutched one another, waves of feathers could be seen in the stadium.


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Naming is settler sovereignty: Neil Lindsay, Robin Kearns, ‘The New Zealand Geographic Board and the Contested Nature of Place Names in New Zealand’, in Gerry O’Reilly (ed.), Place Naming, Identities and Geography: Critical Perspectives in a Globalizing and Standardizing World, Springer, 2023, pp. 241-257

11Apr23

Abstract: Processes of naming the landscape are inherently political as how, why, and what names are used can create conflict between competing groups, beliefs or ideas. This chapter examines place names in New Zealand and how they are implemented and changed. In doing so, we detail the work of the New Zealand Geographic Board Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa and how decisions for place names are made. We assert that naming practices in New Zealand have evolved in response to social and political shifts since the 1970s particularly with changes in attitude towards restoring indigenous Māori rights and the importance of place names as ‘taonga’ (treasures), giving practical and tangible effect to the Treaty of Waitangi principles of participation, protection and partnership. We detail the key issues surrounding the politics of place names in New Zealand, using case studies of recent place name changes. We also examine how the New Zealand Geographic Board reflects broader changes to New Zealand society.


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