settler colonial studies blog

Memorials to settler colonialism: Noah Bassil, ‘Memorials to Settler-Colonialism in Australia: Racism, Colonialism and White Power’, in Bronwyn Carlson, Terri Farrelly (eds), The Palgrave Handbook on Rethinking Colonial Commemorations, Palgrave, 2023, pp. 13-32

04Jul23

Abstract: This chapter is based on a post-colonial reading of contemporary politics and an appreciation of the long struggle against colonialism that can be traced back centuries. It contextualises the current ‘colonial memorialisation’ struggle as a component of that larger struggle, which is evident to me will continue for as long as the colonial political, economic and cultural order (i.e., imperial order) remains in place. Informed by my reading of the past, and a capacity to identify the ways the past continues to exist in the present, this chapter analyses the global memorialisation of colonisers and colonialism. The memorials discussed in this chapter include statues, flags, place and building names and dates of commemoration, beginning in 2015 with the #RhodesMustFall movement. It is argued that the monuments and memorials to colonialism and the colonisers cannot be separated from the broader politics of economic inequality, challenges to white privilege and the (re)resurgence of right-wing politics and militant nationalism. This chapter reveals how the contemporary world order relies heavily on the racist cultural order constructed in a period of Empire and then provides a contemporary exposé of the ways that the efforts to challenge the racist cultural order by movements such as #RhodesMustFall are a threat to the prevailing and dominant political and economic system. The struggle to bring down monuments dedicated to colonialism and imperialism is intertwined with continuing unequal political and economic structures. It is in the recognition that racism and capitalism are inextricably connected (Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, The University of North Carolina Press, 1944) and that the capitalist system requires a racist (and misogynist) order for its survival that the full implications of the challenge to colonial memorialisation are located.

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The electability of settler colonialism: Zachary R. Smith, ‘How Treacherous the Gift’: The Origins of Representative Institutions in Settler-Colonies, PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2023

04Jul23

Abstract: Settler-colonies are places of tremendous inequality and violence. Yet, at the same time, settlercolonies are also places where elected institutions flourish. What explains the origin of institutions
seemingly founded on ideals of equality and liberty amidst systemic violence and hierarchy? This
dissertation examines the process of elected representative institutional formation in settlercolonies through comparative-historical analysis drawing on original archival research of three
case studies—the South African Cape Colony and Natal and French Algeria—and application of
the findings from these studies to a fourth case, Zionist settlement in early twentieth-century
Palestine. It identifies two necessary conditions for institutional formation: a shared ideological
background of Enlightenment thought and a pre-existing racial hierarchy. Given these necessary
conditions, high values on two causal factors—the relative unity of the settler population and
relative support from imperial authority—explain the timing of these institutions’ creation and
their design. Linking the necessary conditions and causal factors are settlers’ economic
motivations for the protection and accumulation of wealth, which catalyze the process of
institutional formation and influence these institutions’ exclusionary character. In elected
representative institutions, the purported bastions of equality and freedom, settlers built the
bulwarks of their own domination.

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The international law of settler colonialism: Elya Milner, Alexandre Sandy Kedar, ‘Squaring the circle: Settler colonialism, the international law of occupation and the separation barrier’, Political Geography, 15, 2023

04Jul23

Abstract: The Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) is highly invested in maintaining a façade of adherence to International Law (IL) in Israel’s continuous occupation of the West Bank, and in mitigating the contradictions and complexities in Israel’s implementation of this law. Our paper proposes a unique legal-geographical perspective to the analysis of this dynamic, while anchoring the critique of the HCJ’s work within an understanding of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank as a settler colonial project. Empirically, we focus on the Court’s evolving jurisprudence in relation to the inclusion of expansion plans for the Jewish settlements in the routing of the separation barrier. Through a close reading of the legal texts, we demonstrate how the Court strove to subject the settler colonial logic of permanent spatial transformation and settlement expansion into the IL’s imperatives of temporality and conservation. Through this case-study we propose a nuanced empirical and methodological approach to the study of contemporary settler colonial legalities. This approach focuses on the intertwinement of everyday professional practices of space and law in order to unravel the weaving of settler colonial logics into contemporary imperatives.

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The property of settler colonialism: Daniel Denvir, ‘Property, Race, Colonialism, and Capitalism: An Interview with Brenna Bhandar’, Jacobin, 02/07/23

03Jul23

Excerpt: In colonial regimes, dominant conceptions of private property developed alongside racial hierarchies.

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Settlers once and settlers now: Cristian Cercel, ‘The persistence and malleability of settlerness: Danube Swabians in Entre Rios/Guarapuava (Paraná, Brazil)’, Immigrants & Minorities, 2023

02Jul23

Abstract: This article interrogates and contextualises the settler identification discourses related to Danube Swabians in Entre Rios/Guarapuava in southern Brazil (Paraná). It looks into the origins of Danube Swabian ‘settlerness’, asking why does it play a central role in Danube Swabian identity constructions in Brazil (but also beyond), and how has it changed over time. It follows settlerness as a thread from before the migration to Entre Rios up to the present, fleshing out its meanings and emphasising the persistence as well as the malleability of settler tropes. Discussing Danube Swabians in Brazil, the article pleads for a general critical analysis of the entanglements connecting apparently disparate spaces, such as southeastern Europe and southern Brazil, within a global history of settler colonialism, settler migration, and settler imaginations. Moreover, in engaging with the category ‘settlerness’ – as a category of practice as well as one of analysis – it shows some of the gains and limitations of the theorisations pertaining to settler colonial studies.

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Core settlers, at the margin: Matt Wray, Catherine Wolfe, ‘White settler colonialism, ‘chromanyms’ and the trouble with marginal whites’, in Rikke Andreassen, Catrin Lundström, Suvi Keskinen, Shirley Anne Tate (eds), The Routledge International Handbook of New Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Routledge, 2023

02Jul23

Abstract: The chapter provides an overview of research on the various marginal white populations throughout history; that is white people who have been called white trash, rednecks, hillbillies, chavs, bogans, redlegs or poor whites. Wray and Wolfe ask, what, if anything, can the study of marginal whites teach us about both the boundaries and the limits of whiteness in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Are they an exception to the rule of whiteness that proves that rule, or are they a rebuke to the very concept of white supremacy itself? How do marginal whites from a theoretical perspective fit (or not fit) into the growing body of research called critical whiteness studies and the study of race and class more generally?

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Indigenous resistance is a crime (as far as settlers are concerned): Adan Tatour, Lana Tatour, ‘The criminalization and racialization of Palestinian resistance to settler colonialism’, in Chris Cunneen, Antje Deckert, Amanda Porter, Juan Tauri, Robert Webb (eds), The Routledge International Handbook on Decolonizing Justice, Routledge, 2023

02Jul23

Abstract: This chapter explores the criminalization of Palestinian resistance by Israel. It focuses on ‘’48 Palestinians’ (known also as Palestinian citizens in Israel) and the ways in which Israel systematically used mass arrests during the Unity Uprising in May 2021 as a colonial technology to stifle Palestinian protest and construct Palestinians as a security threat and as criminals. The chapter demonstrates the function of the Israeli justice system as integral to Israeli settler colonial violence. To punish Palestinians for their participation in the uprising, Israel, we demonstrate, mobilized racialized legal categories that enable it to subject Palestinians to aggravated punishment by classifying offences as racist and/or terrorist crimes. Israel, we further show, worked to connect the uprising – an act of resistance to settler colonialism – to the rising crime rates in Palestinian society in recent years, resulting in a dual process that we refer to as the securitization of crime (treating crime as a security issue) and the criminalization of resistance (treating political mobilization as a criminal issue). Through the entwinement of crime and political resistance, Israel sought to erase the anti-colonial sensibilities that drove ’48 Palestinians to the streets in May 2021.

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Local decolonisations? Garrett FitzGerald, ‘Unsettling Peace: The Settler-Colonial Challenge to the Local Turn’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding , 2023

02Jul23

Abstract: The local turn in Peace Studies has raised important practical and normative questions around the ‘liberal peace’ approach that defines post-Cold War international peacebuilding. However, recent critical interventions reveal the limits of the local turn’s engagement with themes including race, gender, class, and colonialism. Engaging Indigenous authors who ground diverse conceptualizations of peace in the restitution of Indigenous land, the following discussion shows how the local turn’s theoretical framing of indigeneity risks erasing decolonial accounts of Indigenous peacebuilding in settler-colonial societies through its conceptual reliance on international intervention and normative prioritization of hybrid peace outcomes.

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Relenting settler colonialism? Lachlan McNamee, Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop, Princeton University Press, 2023

02Jul23

Description: Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United States stop settling frontier lands during the twentieth century? At the same time, why did states loudly committed to decolonization like Indonesia and China start settling the lands of such minorities as the West Papuans and Uyghurs? Settling for Less traces this bewildering historical reversal, explaining when and why indigenous peoples suffer displacement at the hands of settlers. Lachlan McNamee challenges the notion that settler colonialism can be explained by economics or racial ideologies. He tells a more complex story about state building and the conflicts of interest between indigenous peoples, states, and settlers. Drawing from a rich array of historical evidence, McNamee shows that states generally colonize frontier areas in response to security concerns. Elite schemes to populate contested frontiers with loyal settlers, however, often fail. As societies grow wealthier and cities increasingly become magnets for migration, states ultimately lose the power to settle frontier lands. Settling for Less uncovers the internal dynamics of settler colonialism and the diminishing power of colonizers in a rapidly urbanizing world. Contrasting successful and failed colonization projects in Australia, Indonesia, China, and beyond, this book demonstrates that economic development—by thwarting colonization—has proven a powerful force for indigenous self-determination.

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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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