settler colonial studies blog

Textbook indigenisation (this time the rider is not on horseback but about rejecting ‘harmful appropriation’): Himanee Gupta, ‘Spiritual Dimensions of Farming Amid Settler Colonialism’, Political Theology, 2023

27Jun23

Abstract: This autoethnography explores how the author’s work with farming led her to learn from such Indigenous knowledge practices as listening to Nature and forming a familial relationship with land in pursuit of a spiritual life focused on social change. In doing so, it highlights how such pursuits as farming at a small-scale level contributes to food sovereignty efforts worldwide that question and resist settler-colonialist structures. While incorporating Indigenous knowledge into one’s own practices risks contributing to harmful appropriation, the author argues that such knowledge has much to offer allies who wish to learn.

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Climate Change is a structure, not and event: Kerstin Reibold, ‘Settler Colonialism, Decolonization, and Climate Change’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2022

27Jun23

Abstract: The article proposes that climate change makes enduring colonial injustices and structures visible. It focuses on the imposition and dominance of colonial concepts of land and self-determination on Indigenous peoples in settler states. It argues that if the dominance of these colonial frameworks remains unaddressed, the progressing climate change will worsen other colonial injustices, too. Specifically, Indigenous self-determination capabilities will be increasingly undermined, and Indigenous peoples will experience the loss of what they understand as relevant land from within their own ontologies of land. The article holds that even if settler states strive to repair colonial injustices, these efforts will be unsuccessful if climate change occurs and decolonization is pursued within the framework of a settler colonial ontology of land. Therefore, the article suggests, decolonization of the ontologies of land and concepts of self-determination is a precondition for a just response to climate change.

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The occupation of the left: Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba, Stanford University Press, 2023

27Jun23

Description: Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn ‘Amer. Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians within the British imperial field. Even as left-wing kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair helped lay the groundwork for settler colonial Jewish sovereignty, its settlers did not conceal the prior existence of the Palestinian villages and their displacement, which became the subject of enduring debate in the kibbutzim. Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a protracted process instituted over decades. Colonizing Palestine traces social and political mechanisms by which forms of hierarchy, violence, and supremacy that endure into the present were gradually created.

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Online settlers: Nathan Scneider, ‘Homesteading on a Superhighway: The Californian Ideology and Everyday Politics’, International Journal of Communication, 17, 2023, pp. 4255-4271

27Jun23

Abstract: When Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron diagnosed the “Californian Ideology” of Silicon Valley, they outlined a macro-level political and cultural economy. This article turns to the micropolitics of everyday online life. It argues that the Californian Ideology has inscribed into its products the habits of homesteading—a legacy so familiar, nostalgic, and violent in the American West—which have trained far-flung users in the practice of quotidian feudalism. Everyday experience with Californian systems has thereby contributed to hollowing out the rudiments of democratic culture, especially the skills and habits of accountable association. These systems have meanwhile aided in generating new breeds of world-historical authoritarianism. To change course, therefore, instruments such as legislation and foreign policy may be inadequate; securing a more democratic future also requires fresh attention to how online spaces organize, constrain, and enable everyday politics.

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Trans-settlerism: Jamey Jesperson, ‘Settler TransNationalism: The Colonial Politics of White Trans Passing on Stolen Land’, Spectator, 42, 1, pp. 32-43

27Jun23

Abstract: In “Homonationalism as Assemblage,” Jasbir Puar situates her theory of ‘homonormative nationalism’ within Palestine/Israel to reveal how sexuality is “a crucial formation in the articulation of proper citizens.” As an extension to previous work, Puar clarifies that the queers seen as ‘proper’ by the settler nation-state are not ‘gender queer.’ Rather, “trans and gender nonconforming queers are not welcome” in Israeli homonationalism. While Puar’s dissection of trans people from homonationalism in 2013 is justified, the common exclusion of trans people from critiques of nationalist ‘exception’ calls for further interrogation in 2022. Through synthesis of historical and contemporary media, this paper configures a separate analytic of transnationalism to consider how certain trans bodies “pass” into the dominant U.S. body politic, not just by gender, but by investment in the nation. Informed by readings in Queer Indigenous Studies and Scott Lauria Morgensen’s theory of settler homonationalism, I argue that trans passing in the U.S. is mediated by racialized gender norms accumulated through the colonial regulation of trans indigeneity over time. While white trans people in the U.S. may experience varying degrees of marginalization, we are also settlers on stolen land. As such, our efforts to pass into the national body politic must be theorized beyond a critique of the visual to consider how passing, as settlers, involves a specific set of nationalist convictions, gestures, and actions linked to the elimination of Indigenous peoples. Transnationalist politics—whether conservative or liberal—distance the trans movement from its anti-assimilationist roots, normalize the settler state’s claims to Indigenous lands, and ultimately vacate the possibility for ever-necessary linkage between trans liberation and decolonization.

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The founding violence is unavoidable: David W. Everson, ‘Red Power, white narrative: founding violence & the invalidation of Indigenous rights’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

26Jun23

Abstract: The disavowal of ‘founding violence’ remains a core proposition of settler colonial theory. This paper expands our theoretical understanding of the concept to account for the strategic invocation of founding violence to legitimate settler colonial racial orders. Drawing from a sample of in-depth interviews (n = 27) with settlers who have historical connections to the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) confrontational activism in the 1970s, I show how non-Indigenous territoriality is affirmed through the narrative displacement of founding violence onto Indigenous peoples. Across the U.S. state of South Dakota, where AIM’s ‘Red Power’ activism was most pronounced, interviewees routinely delegitimize movement grievances through historicized narratives of incessant inter-tribal conflict and Indigenous violence. Thus, in addition to justifying settler society’s bloody origins, the invocation of founding violence remains a powerful discursive mechanism for delegitimizing contemporary Indigenous rights.

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Liberal settler colonialism: Éléna Choquette, ‘Enlarging the British settler state of Canada: A liberal theory of government and violence’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 2023

26Jun23

Abstract: This paper examines the writings of George Brown, a leading expansionist and liberal thinker in the British settler state of Canada. Studying George Brown’s thinking as a non-canonical colonial statesman and thinker who helped appropriate Indigenous lands exposes the specific liberal ideas that authorized the enlarging of British settler states. Specifically, inquiring into Brown’s liberalism brings out a powerful liberal theory of self-government, which he adjusted to the circumstances of expanding settler states on stolen Indigenous lands. Brown’s theory of self-government overturns some of John Stuart Mill’s most influential ideas, including his proposition that the legitimacy of despotism is contingent upon it being temporary and for the improvement of the colonized. Against conservative rivals, Brown argues settler communities must self-govern locally and adopt colonial policies, including territorial appropriation from Indigenous peoples. Analysing Brown’s liberal thinking, developed from within expanding settler colonies, finally surfaces the readiness of liberal thought and practice to use physical and military force against Indigenous Peoples, especially as they resist the liberal policies of settler self-government and dispossession.

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Local, global, gendered, and settler colonial: Louise Swaffer, ‘Women’s Protestant foreign mission work and settler state formation in Canada: A re-examination of the Scottish diaspora’, Atlantic Studies, 2023

26Jun23

Abstract: Renewed interest in empire and colonialism has transformed our understanding of transnational networks and processes of exchange, entanglement, and globalisation. However, colonial entanglement still conceals some significant players in globalising cultures. The Protestant women’s foreign missionary movement pioneered transnational activism by interweaving women’s empowerment in “foreign” and “home” environments into a single mission. Essential in developing conceptual and organisational frameworks to address “global issues,” the movement’s impact upon state formation was also profound. This case study of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (1876–1914) combines global diaspora frameworks with local, regional, national, and gendered settler lenses. Close review of Scottish diaspora scholarship and a multi-scale approach to the WFMS’s engagement with social reform helps integrate siloed scholarships, revealing how local and foreign mission environments intersected and collaborated to fortify structures of Anglo-Protestant hegemony in Canada and globally.

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Can women be actual settlers? Carly Nichols, Angie Carter, ‘It doesn’t bother me: An intersectional analysis of discrimination among white women farmers in the US Corn Belt’, Journal of Rural Studies, 101, 2023

22Jun23

Abstract: While women in United States agriculture are increasingly asserting control over land and assuming identities as primary producers, they continue to face significant challenges in being “read” as legitimate producers and in accessing the material resources (land, labor, capital) to do the work of farming. Although scholarship documents how women are generating new strategies to gain legitimacy as farmers and how programs have emerged to provide agricultural outreach to women, much of this work has been “colorblind” in its lack of a critical analysis of race and its intersections with gender. In this paper, we analyze the complex intersections between white supremacy and patriarchy that may benefit white women farmers as they negotiate and normalize gender-based discrimination. Viewing race and gender as materially lived and negotiated, we analyze in-depth qualitative data from 43 conventional white women producers in the US Corn Belt to identify the nuanced ways they socially navigate the white male-dominated world of production agriculture. We find while respondents universally feel that women claiming the role of farmer are subject to both dismissals and outright aggressions in agricultural encounters, many of the respondents claim this discrimination “doesn’t bother” them. We argue, that in the semi-dynastic world of Corn Belt production, these white women socially position themselves by drawing on both their embodied histories of labor along with their relationalities to land and people (particularly men) in ways that facilitate a sense of collective belonging contingent on others’ exclusion. We conclude by reflecting on how agricultural research on gender could incorporate more critical analyses of race to uncover continuing forms of discrimination in agricultural spaces.

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Settler colonial panto! Heather Davis-Fisch, ‘Theatrical Recycling as Colonial Prequel: The Provocation!, Nootka Sound, and British Columbia’s “First” Play’, Theatre Research in Canada, 2023

22Jun23

Abstract: The 1790 pantomime The Provocation!’s intervention into the Nootka Crisis may signal that what was to crystalize by 1871, when BC entered Canadian Confederation as a settler colony, was already taking shape: the confluence of the development of a series of extractive industries, the establishment of settler colonies, and persistent imperial ambivalence about the territory that would eventually become a Canadian province. Given that the Nootka Sound Crisis is now relatively unknown, this forum piece begins by briefly summarizing the crisis. After describing Nootka Sound and The Provocation!, The Provocation!’s apparent intervention in British diplomacy is discussed. Finally, after outlining how the public appearance of the Cherokee Chiefs was deployed by the press, the article addresses how the two plays built on pre-circulating British understandings of Indigeneity and of the Pacific Northwest, recycling and activating these performative and visual genealogies to lay the groundwork for the settler-colonial structures that followed in the nineteenth century.

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