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Settler colonialism is also numbers: Kyle Willmott, Colonial Numbers: Quantification, Indigeneity, and the Politics of Fiscal Surveillance, Surveillance & Society, 21, 1, 2023, pp. 16-28

22Mar23

Abstract: This paper considers how processes of quantification are implicated in settler colonial political imperatives. I examine how colonial numbers operate as forms of governmentality that obfuscate, depoliticize, commensurate, fiscalize, promote transparency and visibility, and ultimately reduce the density of Indigenous Nations. The paper specifically focusses on how fiscal surveillance flows from colonial numbers to make Indigenous life legible to the state, markets, and settlers. The paper concludes by complicating the relationship between colonialism, numbers, governance, and ignorance.


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The settler supremacist international: Aden Knaap, ‘White Internationalism and the League of Nations Movement in Interwar Australia’, Journal of Global History, 2023

20Mar23

Abstract: Popular support for the League of Nations spread around the world in the interwar period but it did not spread evenly. Instead, it was concentrated in white-majority countries: both in Europe and beyond in the form of settler societies around the world. This article explores the relationship between the League movement and white supremacy in one such community: Australia. Citizens in that country combined their allegiance to the League with their beliefs in white supremacy: about the need to restrict immigration through the ‘White Australia’ policy; about the rationale of them ruling over non-white peoples in the territories they held under League ‘mandate’; and about their treatment of Indigenous Australians. In short, they were ‘white internationalists’. Australia’s white internationalists were relatively few. But they reveal a global history of popular white internationalism. Interwar Australians might have been some of the most blatant white internationalists but they were far from the only ones.


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Refugee and settler: Michele Janette, ‘Dao Strom’s Grass Roof, Tin Roof as Settler Refugee Critique’, Western American Literature, 57, 4, 2023, pp. 399-422

20Mar23

Excerpt: As the fiftieth anniversary of the “Fall of Saigon” approaches, and as the global displacement of peoples has persisted and indeed accelerated during these past five decades, two new developments in Asian American and refugee studies have emerged to help us, in the words of Aimee Bahng, “stay in the game and face the end times ethically” (Aimee Bahng and Thea Nagle). Scholars such as Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Candace Fujikane, Jonathan Okamura, Quynh Nhu Le, Dean Saranillio, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Iyko Day have begun to map the terrain of what Gandhi calls the “distinct yet overlapping modalities of refugee and Indigenous displacement, shaped by entangled histories of war, imperialism, settler colonialism, and US military violence” (2). Concurrently, the insights of Vietnamese diasporic artists and scholars who write from and through the expertise of refugees themselves have become increasingly important to navigating the complex, diasporic, transnational, and migratory futures that face us all. Scholars such as YӃn Lê Espiritu, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Long Bui, Catherine Fung, Marguerite Nguyen, Lan Duong, Ma Vang, and Viet Thanh Nguyen as well as writers and language artists such as Monique Truong, Bao Phi, Aimee Phan, Beth Nguyen, Lan Cao, and—again, this time in his role as Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction writer—Viet Thanh Nguyen, have proffered paradigm shifts in understanding refugees not as helpless victims in need of rescue by mighty nation-states, but as astute yet insufficiently recognized observers and critics of geopolitical and social dynamics who themselves understand the offer of refuge itself not as simple humanitarian generosity but also as a self-aggrandizing global alibi for continuing harm.


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Indigenous rhetorics against settler colonialism: Lawrence W. Gross (ed.), Native American Rhetoric, University of New Mexico Press, 2021

20Mar23

Description: Native American Rhetoric is the first book to explore rhetorical traditions from within individual Native communities and Native languages. The essays set a new standard for how rhetoric is talked about, written about, and taught. The contributors argue that Native rhetorical practices have their own interior logic, which is grounded in the morality and religion of their given traditions. Once we understand the ways in which Native rhetorical practices are rooted in culture and tradition, the phenomenological expression of the speech patterns becomes clear. The value of Native communities and their languages is underlined throughout the essays. Lawrence W. Gross and the contributors successfully represent several, but not all, Native communities across the United States and Mexico, including the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Choctaw, Nahua, Chickasaw and Chicana, Tohono O’odham, Navajo, Apache, Hupa, Lower Coast Salish, Koyukon, Tlingit, and Nez Perce. Native American Rhetoric will be an essential resource for continued discussions of Native American rhetorical practices in and beyond the discipline of rhetoric.


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Specieist settler colonialism: Kelsey Dayle John, ‘The horse is Indigenous to North America: why silencing the horse is so important to the settler project’, in Rick De Vos (ed.), Decolonising Animals, Sydney University Press, 2023

20Mar23

Access the chapter here.


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Like besieged settlers: Liam J. Liburd, ‘White against empire: Immigration, decolonisation and Britain’s radical right, 1954-1967’, in Josh Doble, Liam J. Liburd, Emma Parker (eds), British culture after empire: Race, decolonisation and migration since 1945, Manchester University Press, 2023, pp. 127-146

20Mar23

Abstract: Inspired by other studies that analyse the politics of Enoch Powell in light of the legacy of the British Empire, this chapter examines the British radical right’s response to Commonwealth immigration and decolonisation. In both challenging and building on these studies, this chapter argues that the British radical right drew deeply on the vast ideological and experiential reservoir of British imperialism in formulating and articulating their political vision. Drawing mostly on the published output of several of the groups that merged together to become the National Front in 1967, the chapter demonstrates that the activists within these groups experienced decolonisation and Commonwealth immigration as interlinked civilisational crises.  In doing so, it considers their presence and activism around the Notting Hill racist riots in 1958 and at their response to Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. Against what they termed the ‘coloured invasion’ in Britain and the perceived surrender of ‘white rule’ abroad, they looked longingly at the renegade settler states of South Africa and Rhodesia, eventually reimagining Britain as the metropolitan equivalent of a besieged white-settler colony and white Britons as a variety of endangered white settler. This saw them reject the imperial remnants of the Commonwealth and advocate an imperial solution of a different order: a white alliance of Britain, its Dominions, South Africa and Rhodesia.


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Settler colonial promises: John Truden, Indigenous-Settler Partnerships in the American West, 1875-1975, PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2023

16Mar23

Abstract: Between Reconstruction and the early Cold War, Indigenous communities in Oklahoma faced an existential crisis. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the United States applied intense pressure on Indigenous communities in the path of US settlers to relocate to Indian Territory, an unincorporated US territory at the center of the continent. US officials offered the “promise” – as US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch famously termed it in his groundbreaking opinion for McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020) – that Indian Territory would be Indigenous land forever. In 1889, those same officials reversed themselves and began opening parts of the territory to American settlers. Faced with disaster and bereft of resources, many Indigenous people formed strategic relationships with White settlers to survive and thrive in an otherwise hostile environment. Drawing stories and perspectives from Comanche, Southern Cheyenne, Cherokee, Absentee Shawnee, Choctaw, Seminole, Kanza, Citizen Band Potawatomi, Chickasaw, Mvskoke (Muscogee Creek), Mississippi Choctaw, Sac and Fox, Kiowa, Plains Apache, Kansas Kickapoo, and Prairie Band Potawatomi communities, this dissertation follows a suppression and resurgence of Indigenous sovereignty across Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression, World War II, the early Cold War, and finally the Red Power era. Over this broad swath of time, Indigenous-settler relationships varied in scope and scale, evolved, and were shaped by race, class, gender, and a host of other factors. Gradually, these partnerships became more sophisticated and involved larger groups of people. Still, Indigenous-settler relationships were never ideal; Indigenous people formed ties with White settlers as a stand in solution after the federal government suppressed their systems of self-governance during Reconstruction. Until they were able to rebuild their tribal governments, they did the best they could with the resources that they had. With the assistance of their allies, Indigenous communities in Oklahoma revitalized their governments from the 1970s onward but retained a skillset of making alliances.


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The secret life of terra nullius: Thomas H. Ford, Justin Clemens, Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius, Melbourne University Press, 2023

16Mar23

Description: What does the first poetry in Australia, written by the Judge who declared the land terra nullius, tell us about the singular nature of colonialism here? On 24 February 1817, Barron Field sailed into Sydney Harbour on the convict transport Lord Melville to a ceremonial thirteen-gun salute. He was there as the new Judge of the Supreme Court of Civil Judicature in New South Wales – the highest legal authority in the turbulent colony. Energetic and gregarious, Field immediately set about impressing his vision of a future Australia as a liberal and prosperous nation. He courted the colony’s leading figures, engaged in scientific research and even founded Australia’s first bank. He also wrote poetry: in 1819, he published First Fruits of Australian Poetry, the first book of poems ever printed in the country. In England, Field had been the theatre critic for The Times, and a friend of such major Romantic writers as William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt. In New South Wales, he saw the chance to become a major figure himself, someone who could shape culture and society in enduring ways. Founding Australian poetry was part of that ambition; so too was law. Asked to determine whether Governor Macquarie had authority to impose taxes in the colony, Field issued a fateful judgement that established, for the first time, what is now called terra nullius. This book is an extraordinary reconstruction of the circumstances and implications of Field’s actions in New South Wales using an original and revealing method: the close reading of his poetry.


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Exogenous ‘out of placers’, Indigenous ‘out of timers’: Juliana Hu Pegues, Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements, University of North Carolina Press, 2022

16Mar23

Description: As the enduring “last frontier,” Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in the shift from western continental expansion to global empire. In this richly theorized work, Juliana Hu Pegues evaluates four key historical periods in U.S.-Alaskan history: the Alaskan purchase, the Gold Rush, the emergence of salmon canneries, and the World War II era. In each, Hu Pegues recognizes colonial and racial entanglements between Alaska Native peoples and Asian immigrants. In the midst of this complex interplay, the American colonial project advanced by differentially racializing and gendering Indigenous and Asian peoples, constructing Asian immigrants as “out of place” and Alaska Natives as “out of time.” Counter to this space-time colonialism, Native and Asian peoples created alternate modes of meaning and belonging through their literature, photography, political organizing, and sociality. Offering an intersectional approach to U.S. empire, Indigenous dispossession, and labor exploitation, Space-Time Colonialism makes clear that Alaska is essential to understanding both U.S. imperial expansion and the machinations of settler colonialism.


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Mapping against settler colonialism: Eleanor Benson, Morgan Brigg, Ke Hu, Sarah Maddison, Alexia Makras, Nikki Moodie, Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘Mapping the spatial politics of Australian settler colonialism’, Political Geography, 102, 2023

15Mar23

Abstract: Cartography has historically been a weapon of colonists used to demarcate land stolen by empire. More recently, however, ‘critical cartographies’ have emerged as a means of critiquing colonial discourses, revealing maps as representations of the dominating ideologies that produce them. This article explores a series of ongoing questions raised by our own work seeking to map the intersection of colonial and Indigenous governance regimes in so-called Australia. As a visualisation of the intense intervention into Indigenous lives by the settler state, this map tells a story of colonial extraction and elimination, as well as of Indigenous survival, thriving, resistance and resurgence, “denaturalis[ing]” settler geographies of power to contextualise current tensions in governance relations within a continuing history of colonisation (Razack, 2018). Drawing on Indigenous critical theory and the Latourian concept of the immutable mobile (1986) as a way of naming the apparatus that operationalises colonial mapping, we explore the ethical and political dynamics of critical cartography, characterised by a tension between reinscribing and undoing colonial power. We argue that, in navigating and attempting to foreground these tensions, our mapping project has value in its visual inversion of conventional representations of sovereignty. It reveals the fragility, incompleteness, and material violence of colonial sovereignty, which is so often understood as neutral and inevitable. It maps this colonial project in relation to and as rendered impossible by the endurance of Indigenous sovereignty. Against the colonial imagining of Indigenous sovereignty as fragile, disappearing and mutable, it resituates this sovereignty as inhering in the land and in Indigenous peoples as “resilient existent” and as the true immutable.


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