settler colonial studies blog

The settler subject: Hans Skott-Myhre, Scott Kouri, Kathleen Skott-Myhre, ‘The Perversity of Colonial Desire: The Erotics of the Settler Unconscious’, Cultural Critique, 119, 2023, pp. 22-43

19Feb23

Abstract: This article engages a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of the process of subjectification that produces the settler as a social subject. The analysis is rooted in a reading of Lacan through Deleuze and Guattari, which the article argues may offer an alternative nonessentialist and more historically grounded analysis. Specifically, this article attends to the role that the fetish plays in the ongoing cultural appropriation of Indigenous spirituality and culture within an ongoing neocolonial material context.

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Financial settler colonialisms: Paul Robert Gilbert, Clea Bourne, Max Haiven, Johnna Montgomerie (eds), The entangled legacies of empire: Race, finance and inequality, Manchester University Press, 2023

19Feb23

Check out chapters 4, 5, and 14.

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Settler crossings: Edward Sugden (ed.), Crossings in Nineteenth-Century American Culture: Junctures of Time, Space, Self and Politics, Edinburgh University Press, 2022

19Feb23

Description: A state of the field essay collection that offers new models for analysing time, space, self and politics in nineteenth-century American culture. Across four parts of exploratory, creative and speculative essays, this book provides provocative frameworks and readings of canonical and non-canonical literature. The essays cover off-the-map places, warped historical chronologies, excessive selves, unlikely meetings and systemic incommensurability. Collectively they define original methods, categories and terrains for the study of the American cultural past. Altogether, this collection interrogates some of the most dominant critical moves of the past two decades and proposes alternative ways of working and thinking with the American nineteenth century.

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If we represent it, we are near-Indigenous (we are not): Rob E. King, Christine Self, Robert G. Weaver (eds), David Lynch and the American West: Essays on Regionalism and Indigeneity in Twin Peaks and the Films, Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2023

17Feb23

Description: This collection convenes diverse analyses of David Lynch’s newly conceived, dreamlike neo-noir representations of the American West, a first in studies of regionalism and indigeneity in his films. Twelve essays and three interviews address Lynch’s image of the American West and its impact on the genre. Fans and scholars of David Lynch’s work will find a study of his interpretations of the West as place and myth, spanning from his first feature film, Eraserhead (1977), through the third season of Twin Peaks in 2017. Symbols of the West in Lynch’s work can be as obvious as an Odessa, Texas street sign or as subtle as the visual themes rooted in indigenous artistry. Explorations of cowboy masculinity, violence, modern frontier narratives and representations of indigeneity are all included in this collection.

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If we are settlers, they are aliens (but are they?): Michael Lechuga, Visions of Invasion Alien Affects, Cinema, and Citizenship in Settler Colonies, Jackson, MS, University Press of Mississippi, 2023

17Feb23

Description: Visions of Invasion: Alien Affects, Cinema, and Citizenship in Settler Colonies explores how the US government mobilizes media and surveillance technologies to operate a highly networked, multidimensional system for controlling migrants. Author Michael Lechuga focuses on three arenas where a citizenship control assemblage manufactures alienhood: Hollywood extraterrestrial invasion film, federal antimigration and border security legislation, and various immigration enforcement protocols implemented along the Mexico–United States border. Building on rhetorical studies, settler colonial studies, and media studies, Visions of Invasion offers a glimpse at how the processes of alien-making contribute to an ongoing settler colonial project in the US. Lechuga demonstrates that popular films—The War of the Worlds, Predator, Men in Black, and more—participate in the production of migrants as subjective terrorists, felons, and other noncitizen personae vilified in public discourse. Beyond just tracing how alien invasion narratives circulate in popular media, Lechuga describes how the logics motivating early US colonists materialize in both the US’s citizenship control policy and in some of the country’s most popular texts. Beneath each of the film franchises and antimigrant political expressions described in Visions of Invasion lies an anxious colonial logic in which the settler way of life is seemingly threated by false narratives of imminent invasion from abroad. The volume offers a deep dive into how the rhetorical figure of the alien has been manufactured as a political subjectivity, one that plays out the anxieties, guilts, and fears of colonialism in today’s science fiction landscape.

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The truth about truth telling and settler colonialism (is that it depends): Sarah Maddison, Julia Hurst, Archie Thomas, ‘The Truth Will Set You Free? The Promises and Pitfalls of Truth-Telling for Indigenous Emancipation’, Social Inclusion, 11, 2, 2023

14Feb23

Abstract: First Nations in Australia are beginning to grapple with processes of treaty-making with state governments and territories. As these processes gain momentum, truth-telling has become a central tenet of imagining Indigenous emancipation and the possibility of transforming relationships between Indigenous and settler peoples. Truth, it is suggested, will enable changed ways of knowing what and who “Australia” is. These dynamics assume that truth-telling will benefit all people, but will truth be enough to compel change and provide an emancipated future for Indigenous people? This article reports on Australian truth-telling processes in Victoria, and draws on two sets of extant literature to understand the lessons and outcomes of international experience that provide crucial insights for these processes—that on truth-telling commissions broadly, and that focusing specifically on a comparable settler colonial state process, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The article presents a circumspect assessment of the possibilities for Indigenous emancipation that might emerge through truth-telling from our perspective as a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous critical scholars. We first consider the normative approach that sees truth-telling as a potentially flawed but worthwhile process imbued with possibility, able to contribute to rethinking and changing Indigenous–settler relations. We then consider the more critical views that see truth-telling as rehabilitative of the settler colonial state and obscuring ongoing colonial injustices. Bringing this analysis into conversation with contemporary debate on truth-telling in Australia, we advocate for the simultaneous adoption of both normative and critical perspectives to truth-telling as a possible way forward for understanding the contradictions, opportunities, and tensions that truth-telling implies.

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Settler colonial slavery: Rajeshwari Dutt, ‘Emancipation and Imperialism in a Borderland: The Challenge to Settler Sovereignty over Slavery in Belize in the 1820s’, The Americas, 80, 1, 2023, pp. 1-31

14Feb23

Abstract: This article points to the 1820s as a crucial period that saw a great reversal in the location of sovereignty in Belize. The article employs two inflection points—first, an 1822 case of ‘Indian’ slaves from Mosquito Shore, and second, slave desertion in 1825—to point to unprecedented challenges to settler sovereignty over slavery in Belize that arose during the 1820s. While British amelioration allowed the metropolitan government to bring frontier and borderland regions within its legal purview, thus challenging settler autonomy, the concurrent event of Central American emancipation provided enslaved people in Belize additional opportunity to desert their masters at a moment when restitution of runaway slaves became increasingly difficult. Yet, this essay is about more than just the fracturing of settler sovereignty over slavery. Rather it also illuminates how settlers responded to these challenges by using force, diplomacy, and the print media. The settlers’ most potent response was in portraying Belizean slavery as ‘benign,’ creating a surprisingly robust narrative that would endure for generations. The essay illuminates how emancipation and imperialism remained inextricably linked in borderland areas such as Belize, which straddled the boundaries between Spanish America and the British Caribbean.

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Settler colonising with Indigenous peoples? Hannah Greenwald, ‘”Improve Their Condition While Making Them Useful”: Colonia General Conesa and the Dynamics of Settler Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century Argentina’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 103, 1, 2023, pp. 101-137

14Feb23

Abstract: In 1879, as the Argentine army prepared a military campaign against Indigenous groups in the Pampas and Patagonia, the national government created an Indigenous colony called Colonia General Conesa. Conesa’s inhabitants were expected to build homes and cultivate crops under military watch and become “useful” Argentine citizens in the process. This short-lived assimilationist project, which the government abandoned three years later, illuminates the rapidly shifting dynamics of Argentine settler colonial ideology. Although Argentine officials initially saw Conesa as an expedient resolution to the nation’s so-called “Indian question,” the dissolution of the southern frontier line in the early 1880s necessitated a shift toward new strategies that emphasized the complete physical and discursive erasure of the region’s Indigenous peoples. Conesa’s history, situated within the broader context of interethnic relations in Argentina’s southern borderlands, sheds light on the development of Argentine settler colonialism and exemplifies how Indigenous people were written out of the nation’s history.

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Land education everywhere against settler colonialism: Lindsey Schneider, ‘Meeting Them Where They Are: A Case Study in Land Education and Indigenous Resurgence’, Journal of American Indian Education, 61, 2, 2022, pp. 63-89

14Feb23

Abstract: Land education has emerged as an important and promising area of development within the field of Native education, in that it connects students with Indigenous knowledges while simultaneously attending to structural problems that settler colonialism has imposed on Indigenous Peoples. Existing models for this kind of programming, however, tend to focus on urban areas with high-density Native populations or on reservation communities. Native students growing up in suburban/exurban or nonreservation rural areas may not have access to these kinds of programs, yet mainstream “equity and diversity” initiatives do not fully meet the unique needs of these students either. The case study presented here offers a model for a community-driven program in a suburban/exurban area of Colorado’s Front Range that not only works to meet the specific needs of these students but can also contest settler narratives of Indigenous erasure and removal and contribute to the project of Indigenous resurgence.

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If it smells like settler colonialism … Jake Silver, ‘Tear gas in orbit: On the olfactory and the extraplanetary in Palestine’ American Ethnologist, 2023

14Feb23

Abstract: What does outer space smell like? On the one hand, space scientists have used scent as a hint to discover the molecular histories of the cosmos. On the other, Palestinian astronomers, who regularly encounter Israel’s vertical military arsenal, joke that it smells like Israel. Based on three years of fieldwork in the occupied West Bank, this article follows these astronomers and reveals how colonial experience can emerge in faraway realms, even past our planet. I position the space sciences alongside these Palestinian perspectives, arguing that such encounters with a superterranean state reveal the increasingly extraplanetary contours of colonial struggle. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in other words, orbits earth. Scale thus emerges not as something that divides the (space) sciences, colonialism, and everyday sensory encounters into separable domains, but as a relational concept through which we can better grasp the dimensions of colonialism, politics, and power today.

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