settler colonial studies blog

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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Talking about settler colonial cinema: Reel War Project: Dirt Maps episode 11

14Feb23

Access the podcast here.

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The settlerness of geography: Isaac Rivera, ‘Undoing settler imaginaries: (Re)imagining digital knowledge politics’, Progress in Human Geography, 2023

12Feb23

Abstract: Geography as a discipline is entangled in settler colonial regimes that continue to shape geographic practice and the boundaries of geographical knowledge. Digital technologies play an instrumental role in shaping the view of geography and sociospatial relations. This paper traces the construction of the settler imaginary in geographic thought through scholarship in digital geographies and anticolonialism. By bridging anticolonial scholarship in digital geographies, this paper contributes to debates on anticolonial and decolonial refusal politics and its role in realizing reciprocal land-life relations. The (re)imagining of digital knowledge politics begins with accountable digital geographic practices on the terms of Indigenous peoples’.

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Settler colonial nonsettlers: Raymond A. Patton, ‘The “Vanishing Indian” and the Vanishing Pole: From a Middle Ground to a Logic of Elimination in the European and Global Periphery, 1840–1880’, Slavic Review, 81, 3, 2022, pp. 609-630

12Feb23

Abstract: This article examines the use of the “Vanishing Indian” and “Doomed Race” extinction narratives in the writings of Henryk Sienkiewicz, Paul Edmund Strzelecki, and Sygurd Wiśniowski with respect to the Indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, and New Zealand. It locates these writers in the context of mid-late nineteenth century Poland, at the periphery of Europe and of empire, arguing that they demonstrated an ability to detect and critique the injustices of colonialism and sought out a rhetorical “middle ground” between Poles and non-European victims of empire in their work. However, their sympathy was in tension with Poland’s historic role as a regional metropole, the need to assert their status as White Europeans, and the lure of settler colonialism. The “middle ground” they sought to create ultimately gave way to a “logic of elimination” that neutralized this tension, justifying colonialism to themselves and to other agents of empire.

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Citing settler colonialism: Jerry Rosiek, Mary Adkins-Cartee, ‘Diffracting Structure/Agency Dichotomies, Wave/Particle Dualities, and the Citational Politics of Settler Colonial Scholars Engaging Indigenous Studies Literature’,Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2023

12Feb23

Abstract: Building on Karen Barad’s philosophy of science, this paper offers a diffractive reading of quantum indeterminacy with/across the classic structure/agency dichotomy in social science scholarship. It highlights key parallels between the metaphysics of indeterminacy in both the physical and social sciences. In the course of this analysis, we draw upon relevant Indigenous studies literature. These citations are integrated into the diffractive analysis, both as a source of important and potentially transformative insight and as a performative illustration of enactment of political responsibility under conditions of ontological indeterminacy. The inclusion of the Indigenous studies citations raises questions about how to avoid problematic practices of appropriation and/or erasure. Instead of resolving this question, we will dwell within the indeterminacy it reveals and the responsibility for constructive action it brings into focus.

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Allegorical settler colonialism: Laurence Simmons, ‘Christine Jeffs’ Rain (2001) as an Allegory of Settlement’, Media Peripheries, 17, 1, 2023, pp. 1-17

12Feb23

Abstract: This article proposes a new reading of Christine Jeffs’ 2001 film Rain as an allegory of settlement. To do so it uses Stephen Turner’s essay ‘Settlement as Forgetting’ and makes reference to the work of Lorenzo Veracini and Patrick Wolfe in settlement studies. It takes Turner’s claim that settlement requires a forgetting in order to patch over the trauma of dislocation from the mother country and explores how structures of nostalgia, fetishism and trauma construct an image of a failed and broken nation, a settler society seeking to forget its own history, afflicted with the trauma of its primal separation from Britain, and under the surface expressing anxiety about the indigenous presence that prevents settler claim over the land and (settler) cultural identity. Jeffs’ film, it is proposed, critiques the fantasmatic elements of settlement, in and through which settlers untiringly strive to envisage themselves as whole, and which sanctions the narrative of that striving to appear to be continuous.

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The permanent residency of Indigenous subjects: R. Isa, ‘Precarious Living in Jerusalem: Return, Fear, and Sumud’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2023

12Feb23

Abstract: This essay addresses the Israeli designation of “permanent residency,” more commonly known as Jerusalem residency to which Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem are confined. Since 1967, the Israeli Ministry of Interior has revoked or refused to renew the residencies of nearly 15,000 Palestinians. Masquerading as a democracy, Israel hides behind the center of life doctrine—a set of policies and laws that require people to prove their lives center around Jerusalem, or areas occupied in 1948. Property deeds, rental contracts, employment papers, and utility bills are the documents Palestinians must produce to show evidence of belonging to Jerusalem. This bureaucratic wall of Israeli settler colonialism dispossesses Palestinians and employs fear to ethnically cleanse people who trace generations of ancestry to the city. The author shares her struggles in affirming her claims to Jerusalem and practicing sumud.

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Indigenous refugees: Eman Ghanayem, ‘Being Indigenous and Refugee: The Duality of Palestinian and American Indian Narratives’, in Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Vinh Nguyen (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, Routledge, 2023, pp. 381-392

12Feb23

Excerpt: This chapter understands rigid boundaries between Indigenous and refugee as enforcing a social invisibility akin to colonial erasure. In fact, the overlap between an Indigenous person and a refugee, and their connection to colonial dispossession, is most illuminated in the example of Indigenous populations displaced by what is known as settler colonialism. A particular but representative type of colonialism, settler colonialism is defined by a drive to settle on an already inhabited land, replace an Indigenous population violently, create a national origin story that erases Indigenous presence, and build institutions (legal, cultural, academic, etc.) to disseminate its false narrative and uphold the process of settlement. This chapter argues that displacement caused by settler colonialism demands troubling the boundaries between refugee and Indigenous narratives, precisely because many refugees were and remain Indigenous despite this colonial displacement. It also invites us to read literature in an intersectional and relational way that observes overlaps in displacement and understands settler colonialism as a global phenomenon constructive of comparable realities. Major examples that speak to these demands are found in Palestinian and American Indian writings.

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Settler colonial unionism: Marcelo Svirsky, ‘The Marginalization of the Mizrahim: Jewish Syndicalism in the Context of Settler-Colonial Zionism in Palestine before 1948’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2023

12Feb23

Abstract: This article investigates the institutional attitudes of the Histadrut (the General Organization of Workers in the Land of Israel) toward Palestine’s Middle Eastern Jews (Mizrahim) between 1920 and the late 1940s. Based on archival evidence and secondary sources, it argues that what Mizrahi workers experienced in their dealings with the Histadrut was not the result of random or unintended abuse but of a political culture that promoted social fragmentation and inequality. The corollary of this argument is that the Mizrahim who arrived immediately after 1948 found themselves thrown into a racial binary mold that had been in the making for about fifty years, beginning with the first waves of Zionist immigration to Palestine.

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Plantations and their planters: Colette Le Petitcorps, Marta Macedo, Irene Peano (eds), Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023

07Feb23

Description: Taking a multidisciplinary and global approach, this edited book examines the dynamic role of plantations as productive, socio-political and ecological forms throughout imperial and post-colonial worlds spanning multiple and broad temporalities. Showcasing an expansive range of case studies across different geographies, the collection sheds light on the heterogeneity of plantations and offers insights into the afterlives, spectres and remnants of systems that have been analysed as schemes of production, extraction and authority. Focusing on the expansion of plantation systems throughout various political-economic and ecological projects, and across the modern (and post-modern) period, allows the authors to move beyond analyses that often deal with individual empires through human-centered lenses. The contributors explore resistance to the mechanisms of extraction and control that plantations and their afterlives demanded, shedding light on their excesses, contradictions, failures and deviations. Offering a comprehensive treatment of global plantations, this book provides valuable reading for researchers with an interest in the socio-political and environmental effects of colonialism and imperialism in their various guises.

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