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Facing settler colonial dispossession and recursive colonialism: Joshua Lee Mayer, Conjuring Territory: Afro-Indigenous Authority and Settler Capitalism in Nicaragua, dissertation, UCLA, 2023

12Jun23

Abstract: This dissertation, based on 20 months of activist fieldwork, is an ethnographic examination of Afro-Indigenous peoples’ struggle to conjure territory—that is, to convert the legal recognition of territorial rights into a social reality. In 2009, the Indigenous Rama and Afrodescendant Kriol peoples in southeastern Nicaragua received a joint title to roughly 4,000 km2 of land and 4,000 km2 of sea. Since then, they have faced dispossession and displacement at the hands of land speculators, cattle ranchers, gold miners, and state-supported megaprojects. As community members grapple with the failure of the law itself to generate freedom from dispossession, the dissertation demonstrates that they are confronting fractally recursive colonialism: a form of colonialism at one scale that reproduces another form of domination at a different scale. Specifically, the violent, extractive relation of United States imperialism toward Nicaragua is reproduced within Nicaragua as mestizo settler colonialism toward Afro-Indigenous peoples. Over the past century, Global North actors have forcibly indebted the Nicaraguan state, resulting in current debts to multilateral and private lenders. Paying these debts requires constant growth in exports to bring in U.S. dollars. The state meets these obligations by promoting mining, cattle ranching, and infrastructure projects that depend on the settler colonization of Afro-Indigenous lands. After conceptualizing fractally recursive colonialism, the dissertation moves on to an ethnographic account of Rama-Kriol political thought and action. Starting from oral histories in two Rama and Kriol communities, the dissertation examines the historical roots of Rama-Kriol political thought on territory and freedom, attending especially to concepts of territorial care. The dissertation then narrates Rama and Kriol communities’ efforts to contest dispossession through an array of strategies, including lawsuits, vigilance, outright refusal of state and settler authority, cooperation with government officials and settlers, and appeals to international authorities. Through political and economic entanglements with state and international institutions, the communities are generating jurisdiction within their territory—a key building block for sovereignty. The conclusion reflects on the enormous stakes of the Rama and Kriol communities’ work to get free and—alongside similar communities around the world—to create a livable future on this planet.


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The settler colonial heartland: R. Douglas Hurt, Agriculture in the Midwest, 1815–1900, University of Nebraska Press, 2023

12Jun23

Description: After the War of 1812 and the removal of the region’s Indigenous peoples, the American Midwest became a paradoxical land for settlers. Even as many settlers found that the region provided the bountiful life of their dreams, others found disappointment, even failure—and still others suffered social and racial prejudice. In this broad and authoritative survey of midwestern agriculture from the War of 1812 to the turn of the twentieth century, R. Douglas Hurt contends that this region proved to be the country’s garden spot and the nation’s heart of agricultural production. During these eighty-five years the region transformed from a sparsely settled area to the home of large industrial and commercial cities, including Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Detroit. Still, it remained primarily an agricultural region that promised a better life for many of the people who acquired land, raised crops and livestock, provided for their families, adopted new technologies, and sought political reform to benefit their economic interests. Focusing on the history of midwestern agriculture during wartime, utopian isolation, and colonization as well as political unrest, Hurt contextualizes myriad facets of the region’s past to show how agricultural life developed for midwestern farmers—and to reflect on what that meant for the region and nation.


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Settler colonial reconciliationism (reconciliation as a settler resource)? Myra Hird, Hillary Predko, Extracting Reconciliation: Indigenous Lands, (In)human Wastes, and Colonial Reckoning, Routledge, 2023

08Jun23

Description: Extracting Reconciliation: Indigenous Lands, (In)human Wastes, and Colonial Reckoning argues that reconciliation constitutes a critical contemporary mechanism through which colonialism is seeking to ensure continuing access to Indigenous lands and resources. Making use of two historical case studies concerned with the intersection of resource extraction, Crown/Inuit relations, and waste legacies in Nunavut, Turtle Island (Canada), the authors illuminate the mechanisms of colonial and neoliberal governance globally that promise reconciliation while delivering the status quo. Through Indigenous and non-Indigenous anticolonial and posthuman concepts and theories, the book engages with the inhuman politics of settler colonial extractivism, and explores the socio-ethical social justice dimensions, political possibilities, and environmental implications of a much more challenging and accountable reckoning between (settler) colonialism and Indigenous land rights. Extracting Reconciliation is of interest to students and scholars in gender studies, postcolonial studies, environmental studies, indigenous studies, and politics.


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Settler colonial pandemic: Fiona McCormack, Bronwyn Isaacs, Priya Kurian, Rolande Paekau, Cayathri Divakalala, Sharayne Bennett, ‘Settler colonial bordering and post-pandemic futures: disrupting the nation state in Aotearoa/New Zealand’, Cultural Studies, 2023

08Jun23

Abstract: In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the relative safety offered by border regime closures during Covid-19 promised to ease uncertainty surrounding perilous futures, yet it did so by extending nation building into more intimate areas of life, exacerbating existing lines of discrimination. While justified in terms of crisis management, state expressions of citizen care during the pandemic were largely modelled in terms of a particular conflation of nature, society and economy peculiar to settler colonialism. Using bordering practices during the pandemic as a point of departure, this essay draws on scholarship on borders to interrogate settler colonialism in Aotearoa. This allows for four innovations: First, it situates Covid-19 as structure rather than event, one which accentuated historical patterns of nation-making. Second, it underscores continuities in Indigenous relations of ownership, belonging, social reproduction, kinship ethics and environmental engagements. Third, it suggests alliances between migrants, non-white and colonized peoples; those for whom borders do not remain at the periphery, but rather penetrate deep into the informal spaces of the everyday. And fourth, it recalibrates resistances as expressions of sociality aimed at reclassifying nature, economy and society.


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Settler colonial plurinationalism? Chuck Sturtevant, ‘The settler roots of Plurinational Bolivia: state-sponsored indigenous colonization on Bolivia’s Amazonian “frontier”‘, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

08Jun23

Abstract: This article analyzes a land conflict in Latin America through the lens of settler colonial studies. I focus on an area of the Bolivian Amazon known as the Alto Beni, where a government-sponsored colonization project settled indigenous colonists from the Bolivian highlands in territories occupied by the Mosetén people. This project has led to conflicts over land that continue to this day. I argue that this project continues to reflect the settler colonial logics of the development professionals who designed it, particularly their ideas about the role of Bolivia’s Amazonian ‘frontier’ in the production of a national identity. This involves the circulation of ideologies that cast the settler frontier as a key step on the path toward modernization, both for settlers (who are to be incorporated as citizens of a modernizing Bolivia) and for Mosetenes (who are to be eliminated in order to make room for this process). I conclude by challenging the stark distinction that scholars of settler colonialism make between settler colonialism (particularly as it depends on Anglocentric ideologies of racial classification) and other experiences of colonial oppression (particularly those which involve the circulation of ideas and the production of knowledge).


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Colonial coethnics, including settlers: John L. Hennessey, Janne Lahti, ‘Nordics in Motion: Transimperial Mobilities and Global Experiences of Nordic Colonialism’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 51, 3, 2023

08Jun23

Excerpt: This special issue investigates Nordic individuals in transimperial spaces. It tracks Nordics on the move from the early modern period to the twentieth century, as they crossed imperial boundaries, and connected, networked, and operated in different spaces around the world within the framework of European global expansion. Though coming from countries with few or no formal colonies of their own, Nordic people were not distant observers but actively participated in the co-production of colonial ideology, knowledge, and rule from North America and the Caribbean in the west to the Dutch East Indies and China in the east, and from Africa in the south to Sápmi in the north. Nordics in motion sought personal gain, they crossed spaces within and between empires for work and leisure, and their mobility took place independently and as part of institutional settings. And in the case of the Sámi they also engaged in involuntary crossings. By zooming in on Nordics in motion these articles not only expand the cast of colonial projects from the classic ‘coloniser’ – ‘colonised’ binary, but develop a more complicated and nuanced conceptualisation of colonial mobilities and therefore of colonial globality, meaning the asymmetrical relationships created by colonial empires that structured global integration, cultural flows, and projects of modernisation. Aligning with the recent imperative to blur distinctions between national and colonial histories to better comprehend the legacies of Western colonialism in the modern world and within a genuinely global perspective, these articles build on and connect to transimperial history and Nordic colonial history, two fields that have expanded more or less concurrently but in relative isolation from each other.


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Unseeing settler colonialism: R. Afana, ‘Unseeing settler–extractive colonialism: The “blindness epidemic” in the (com)promised lands’, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 29, 2, 2023, pp. 126-134

08Jun23

Abstract: Decolonial praxis requires an awareness of colonial praxis: here, I show that the process of unseeing crime is central to the colonial enterprise in Palestine and significant to understanding the victimizer’s ethos, which in turn may help reframe strategically the victim’s options. First, I introduce the blindness epidemic in José Saramago’s dystopian novel, an epidemic which I later use as an allegory for the structural unseeing which has come to define the Zionist project. This is followed by a brief introduction to how my identity as a (half) Palestinian shapes my relation to the physical, structural, and epistemic violence I have lived or witnessed. I begin my analysis of colonial violence in Israel/Palestine by tracking the shifting interpretations of the impasse, and how these relate to decolonial conceptions of justice, repair, and healing. Next, I illustrate grassroots perspectives on how colonialism is unseen or invisiblized, drawing on my fieldwork data: interviews with leading Palestinian and Israeli activists. Here, the agents and beneficiaries of colonialism become incapable of seeing and “seeing” the criminality before and within them. It is a sinister, omnipresent process. I then discuss some psychosocial aspects of this “blindness epidemic,” showing the complexity here of both seeing and unseeing, which are simultaneously deliberate and automatic processes. After analyzing the structures and processes activating invisibility or unseeing in this colonial site, I show that the few Israeli Jews—some, my interviewees and others, my friends—choosing to exit the “blindness epidemic” become agents of coresistance (as opposed to “coexistence,” misleading mantra of peacebuilding) and of healing. Coresistance here is premised on seeing (and countering) the socially mandated unseeing.


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Defacing settler colonialism: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, ‘Persistent faces: Palestinian fatherhood against necropower’, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 29, 2, 2023, pp. 82-86

08Jun23

Abstract: Decoloniality and decolonization are epistemic and active processes that disrupt the coloniality of power. This article centers the voices of a Palestinian father, and his son, Hassan, in their opposition to settler-colonial dehumanization. The defacing of 15-year-old Hassan occurred when he was shot and killed by the state apparatus, taken from his family and loved ones, and kept in a freezing space of no life. His father’s refusal to accept Hassan’s frozen body as a dehumanized one made him read Hassan’s teared-up eyes, wounded mouth, and face as resistance to his undignified death. The father challenged the necropenological weaponization of his dead child’s body and transmutation of grief through his act of refusal. The father’s decolonial praxis that disrupted the state’s affective economies requires that we imagine a different world away from necropolitical unchilding, disrupt relations of power and violence, and engage with the living power of those persistent faces in narrating their humanity against their unchilding. By centering the face as a decolonial praxis, this article looks at the way the securitized erasure of Hassan’s face is intimately connected to settler-colonial racial ideologies and the political work of its power structure. It necessitates searching and reading beyond what is dictated by hegemonic modes of analysis, enabling possibilities of life amidst death, and building decolonial praxis.


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Crimea: A settler colony; then a settler colony? Maksym Sviezhentsev, Martin-Oleksandr Kisly, ‘De-occupation or (de)colonization? Challenges for Crimea’s future’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2023

07Jun23

Abstract: This essay focuses on the problem of the decolonization of Crimea within the context of the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war. Both authors agree that the decolonization of Crimea involves a complex intellectual challenge for Ukrainian society and for the rest of the world. For centuries Crimea was a settler colony of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. In 2014, Russia resumed its settler-colonial project by means of discrimination against the indigenous Crimean Tatar people, persecution of political prisoners, and mass resettlement of Russian citizens to the occupied territory. Since 2014, Ukraine has rediscovered Crimea and Crimean Tatars. While the general perception of Crimean Tatars has become more positive within Ukrainian society, there is still no agreement on the future of the de-occupied peninsula. While Ukrainian society generally agrees that Crimea should be an integral part of Ukraine, some of the views about Crimea’s future are rooted in the narratives produced by colonizers for the purposes of colonization. This essay shows that military de-occupation does not equal decolonization and that some complicated questions remain unanswered.


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Settlers go with the flow: Erin O’Donnell, Elizabeth Macpherson, ‘Environmental and Cultural Flows in Aotearoa and Australia’, Environmental Science, 2023

07Jun23

Abstract: In settler colonial states like Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, water for the environment and the water rights of Indigenous Peoples often share the common experience of being too little and too late. Water pathways have been constrained and defined by settler colonialism, and as a result, settler state water law has both a legitimacy problem, in failing to acknowledge or implement the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and a sustainability problem, as the health of water systems continues to decline. In both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, the focus of water law has historically been to facilitate use of the water resource to support economic development, excluding the rights of Indigenous Peoples and poorly protecting water ecosystems. However, in the early 21st century, both countries made significant advances in recognizing the needs of the environment and the rights of Indigenous Peoples. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) provides an important bicultural and bijural framework that is beginning to influence water management. In 2017, as part of a Treaty dispute settlement, Aotearoa New Zealand passed legislation to recognize Te Awa Tupua (the Whanganui River) as a legal person and created a new collaborative governance regime for the river, embedding the interests and values of Māori at the heart of river management. In Australia, water recovery processes to increase environmental flows have been under way since the 1990s, using a combination of water buybacks and water savings through increased efficiency. There has been growing awareness of Indigenous water rights in Australia, although progress to formally return water rights to Indigenous Peoples remains glacially slow. Like Aotearoa New Zealand, in 2017, Australia also passed its first legislation that recognized a river (the Birrarung/Yarra River) as a living entity and, in doing so, formally recognized the responsibilities of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people as Traditional Owners of the river. This trend toward more holistic river management under a relational paradigm, in which the relationships between peoples and places are centered and celebrated, creates a genuine opportunity for water governance in settler states that begins to address both the legitimacy and sustainability flaws in settler state water law. However, these symbolic shifts must be underpinned by relationships of genuine trust between Indigenous Peoples and the state, and they require significant investment from the state in their implementation.


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