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Settler colonialism and liberalism are imbricated: Theodra Bane, A Question of Rights: Settler Colonialism, Racialization, and the Political Economy of Liberalism, PhD dissertation, Villanova University, 2022

08Mar23

Abstract: In times of crisis, liberalism is frequently upheld as the only alternative to authoritarianism because of its foregrounding of rights. This is the internal mechanism to governance that enshrines in law the protection of the individual. Further, rights frameworks allow for ongoing amelioration and expansion, rectifying previous practices of exclusion. However, this positive narrative does not consider ongoing systems of exclusion within liberalism. Are modes of exclusionary violence within liberalism a misapplication of rights, or are rights as a structure endemic to an exclusionary model of governance? The work of this dissertation takes seriously the latter position by theorizing the structure of rights relations themselves. Under liberalism, rights function to protect the individual insofar as that individual’s self and interests can be made legible to the state apparatus. Specifically, rights within liberalism rely on a dual ideological function to identify their proper subject: the reduction of land into property; and the reduction of persons into bodies. Taken together, these two structurally foundational components of rights posit an ontologically salient ideal of the liberal citizen—the normative self-possessive human subject. Rights discourse thus becomes a necessary condition for addressing liberalism as a political economy because it gives us an ideological mode with which to track the obfuscation and denial of the economic realm in governance and the normative, regulatory demands on subjects to be legible to liberalism in the first place. This dissertation will demonstrate that settler colonialism and racialization are not anomalies of liberal application, but endemic to how such a system governance operates through the demand of legibility for rights to function. The work of this dissertation is not to dismiss the salient power of rights regimes in fighting for a more just world. Rather, it is an analysis of how rights function in our current shared ideological schema. Rights are constructed and premised upon the capitalist property relation—the possession of the self and of objects for accumulation. This logical premise means that who counts as self-possessive or human enough to participate or be worthy of recognition will be an ongoing terrain of contestation within the framework itself. 


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With several interventions on settler colonialism in particular (unfortunately, the publisher does not advertise the table of contents – I thought they wanted to sell their books): Nadia Y. Kim, Pawan Dhingra (eds), Disciplinary Futures: Sociology in Conversation with American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies, NYU Press, 2023

08Mar23

Description: Reimagines how race, ethnicity, imperialism, and colonialism can be central to social science research
and methods. There is a growing consensus that the discipline of sociology and the social sciences broadly need to engage more thoroughly with the legacy and the present day of colonialism, Indigenous/settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism in the United States and globally. In Disciplinary Futures, a cross-section of scholars comes together to engage sociology and the social sciences by way of these paradigms, particularly from the influence of disciplines of American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies. With original essays from scholars such as Yến Lê Espiritu, Sunaina Maira, Hōkūlani K. Aikau, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Ben Carrington, Yvonne Sherwood, and Gilda L. Ochoa, among others, Disciplinary Futures offers concrete pathways for how the social sciences can expand from the limiting frameworks they traditionally use to study race and racism, namely: the black-white binary, the privileging of the nation-state, the fixation on the US mainland, the underappreciation of post- and settler-colonial studies, the liberal assumptions, and the limited conception of what constitutes data. In turn, the contributors reveal that sociology has many useful questions, methodologies, and approaches to offer scholars of American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies. Disciplinary Futuresis an important work, one which renders these disciplines more intellectually expansive and thus better able to tackle urgent issues of injustice.


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Zionism is a settler colonial enterprise: Joseph B. Yudin, The Protestant Settlers of Israel: Missionaries, Millenarians, and the African Hebrew Israelites, Rowman & Littlefield, 2023

08Mar23

Description: When conjuring an image of “settlers” in the Holy Land, one hardly envisions vast numbers of European and North American Evangelical Protestants. Yet this is precisely the picture set forth in this book. The region has witnessed settlement, conquest, destruction, and resettlement from time immemorial. But the story of Protestants settling in the Land and staking their own claim, while missionizing among the population, has yet to be told in its fullness. The Protestant Settlers of Israel tells that tale, including a discussion of the present-day whereabouts of some 100,000 Protestant individuals living in the State of Israel, with a steady rate of expansion and growth in some circles.


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Indigenous Nation Building against settler colonialism: Miriam Jorgensen, Alison Vivian, Anthea Compton, Donna Murray, Debra Evans, Janine Gertz, ‘Yes, The Time Is Now: Indigenous Nation Policy Making for Self-determined Futures’, in Nikki Moodie, Sarah Maddison (eds), Public Policy and Indigenous Futures, Springer, 2023

06Mar23

Abstract: There is a proliferation of ideas about the meaning and content of the term ‘Indigenous nation building’ (INB). Returning to the findings of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, INB refers to the exercising of decision-making authority and strengthening of a nation’s capacity for legitimate governing, which is associated with achieving a nation’s self-determined goals. In Australia, a number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations are doing exactly this. The Gunditjmara, Gugu Badhun, and Wiradjuri nations are working to rebuild their governing foundations, strengthen community governance and, in so doing, advance nation goals. These nations have been able to do so not because of settler colonial policy support, but because of their own Indigenous public policy. The Gunditjmara, Gugu Badhun and Wiradjuri nations have worked to seize available opportunities that assist in advancing their self-determined goals, and to reject those that do not. Current shifts in settler colonial government policy may offer further opportunities that nations can leverage from to support their strategising for self-governing.


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Robotic settler colonialism: Ali Hisham Musleh, To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth: On the Automation of Settler Colonialism in Palestine, PhD dissertation, University of Hawai’i, 2023

06Mar23

Abstract: How do weapons make the colonial worlds that Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis inhabit? My dissertation attends to this question starting from an experience shared by Palestinians: that the majority of us have never encountered an Israeli settler, whether in uniform or out of uniform, who is not attached to a weapon, be it an assault rifle, a fighter jet, or a tank, etc. Taking this experience as a philosophical provocation, I subject the settler colony to a form of insurgent study exercised everyday by Palestinians that confronts the settler as contingent and transitory human-weapon ensembles. These studies are bodying and worlding. They reveal and unravel the spatialized embodiments, sensations, affective terrains, orientations and regimes of truth that weapons generate as lived world(s) of experience. In doing so, Palestinians exercise a fleshy sociality that constantly puts into question the self-evidence of the settler and the settler state.Thinking with Palestinians and alongside peoples of struggle, my dissertation is a performance in reverse engineering that moves from micrological sites, scenes and bodies of war, to macro formations of sovereignty. My itinerary focuses primarily on encounters with remote and robotic weaponry as technologies of engineering spatial and procedural distance between the settler and weapon. My task has been to show how that distance became the abyssal site from which forms of war, apartheid, and erasure emerge that consign settlers to martial automatisms that materialize and mediate their existence. The result is a work that dissects settler colonialism as a form of life inseparable from weapon power, as I also consider Palestinian rehearsals of decolonial life in the robotic age of war.


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Memes on settlers: Ia Morrison-Young, Julia de Bres, ‘Decolonial Māori memes in Aotearoa’, AlterNative, 2023

02Mar23

Abstract: This article examines the contemporary phenomenon of decolonial Māori memes, created by young urban Māori to advance the project of decolonizing Aotearoa (New Zealand). We weave Kaupapa Māori (philosophy and practice of Māori people) theory with Foucauldian visual analysis and critical multimodality to analyze 154 memes posted on three Instagram accounts from 2019 to 2021. We demonstrate how the Māori meme creators use discursive strategies to advance decolonization locally, drawing on Māori concepts and practices, including kotahitanga (solidarity), whanaungatanga (relationship-building), whakapapa (ancestry), tino rangatiratanga (self-determination), and use of te reo Māori (the Māori language). We distinguish two functional categories: boundary-marking memes that reference racist Pākehā (New Zealander with European ancestry) behaviors that perpetuate colonization, and solidarity-building memes that reference Māori acts of decolonization. We argue that the humor of the memes provides a potential decolonization roadmap for New Zealanders via its critique of Pākehā actions and cultivation of kotahitanga among Māori.


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Settler space: Paula Jane Byrne, ‘Australian Squatter Space 1850-1880’, Britain and the World, 16, 1, 2023

02Mar23

Abstract: Young men of empire seeking their fortune in Australia incorporated violence against Indigenous people into their lives as part of leisure. This derived from the persona created by romanticism. Squatters created an emotional community that valued capital at the expense of family and emphasised uniformity, they were a transitory people travelling to England and Europe. They held a specific relationship to the Aboriginal polity in which they lived and a loose and imaginative relationship to government. This paper explores squatter space as they saw it.


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The long durée of settler discovery: Sheikh Salauddin, The enduring legacy of the doctrine of discovery: a comparative critique of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the USA, the Site-C dam in Canada and the Adani mine in Australia, PhD dissertation, Macquarie University, 2023

02Mar23

Abstract: This thesis is based on the premise that the Doctrine of Discovery explicitly and tacitly underpinned the colonisation of the USA, Canada and Australia. Elements of the Doctrine, including first discovery, civilisation, Christianity, pre-emption, native title, limited sovereign and commercial rights, and conquest, have been used recurrently by the Crown and by subsequent governments to extinguish Indigenous rights and cultures, dispossess them of their lands and undermine their sovereignty, self-determination and systems of government. Some of these elements continue to be used by governments and their agencies to acquire Indigenous lands and to exploit their resources. Indigenous lands are still prime lands for the development of mines, highways, dams, pipelines and many other projects, for which Indigenous rights are ignored. This thesis draws on Indigenous perspectives that identify the continuing application of the Doctrine in the dispossession of their lands. Most notably, the rise of neoliberalism and globalisation has resulted in further dispossession through the expansion of global markets and a corresponding increase in government support for multinational corporations that seek to extract natural resources and construct mega infrastructure projects on Indigenous lands. This thesis argues that these developments have given rise to a new era, in which a Doctrine of Neo-Discovery now prevails. To exemplify the enduring legacy of the Doctrine, this thesis examines three recent case studies in detail: the Dakota Access Pipeline in the USA, the Site-C dam in Canada and the Adani mine in Australia. While these development projects have lacked the ‘free, prior and informed’ consent and Indigenous peoples continued to struggle to have their rights recognised, the governments in these countries have different approaches towards Indigenous peoples. The differences in each government’s approach may be traced to differences in government structures, histories of dispossession and ill treatment of Indigenous peoples in each nation. Despite these differences, the outcomes for Indigenous peoples appear to be largely the same. In each case, government supported economic development in line with neoliberal and globalisation trends. While attempts have been made to challenge these developments in the courts, their power to circumvent these developments is limited either by common law precedents or by laws enacted by parliament. Further, international legal developments have not served to address the continuing negative effects of the Doctrine. In view of the limitations of current national and international legal regimes to protect and safeguard Indigenous rights, this thesis presents recommendations that could temper the enduring effects of the Doctrine across national and international levels.


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Painting settlers: Dana Leibsohn, Barbara E. Mundy, ‘Settler Colonialism, Families, and Racialized Thinking: Casta Painting in Latin America’, in Matthieu Chapman, Anna Wainwright (eds), Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide, ASU, 2023

02Mar23

Excerpt: The history of race and of racialized thinking took a distinctive turn when Europeans became settler colonists in the Americas after 1492. So decisive were these changes that they still inflect thinking about identity, image-making, and family histories today. 


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The structure underpinning the (settler colonial) structure: Nathan Etherington, ‘The Architecture of Territory: The Lands Building and State Expansion in New South Wales’, Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 2023

28Feb23

Abstract: The New South Wales colonial project was a land-centred enterprise that became dependent on the surveying and sale of land. The process of land alienation was a significant factor in the configuration of the colonial territory as well as the development, distribution and typologies of architecture. This article considers a building that was central to this project: the Lands Building in Sydney that housed the Lands Department, the bureaucracy responsible for implementing the governmental instruments relating to Crown land. An analysis of the building suggests that systems of governance were deeply entwined in its form, planning and use. Of particular concern is the integration of symbols and technologies of surveying and land recording that are integrated into the design of the building and its subsequent adaptation. These include the configuration and expression of the façade, the organisation of the plan, a domed observatory and measuring instruments. At stake is the reframing of the architecture of the State as a technology of governance with territorial reach.


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