settler colonial studies blog

Settlers are classed: Chris M. Hansen, ‘Marxing the Westward March: A Case Study on a Marxist Approach to Family History and Great Plains Migration’, Literature & Aesthetics, 36, 1, 2026, pp. 36-50

25Apr26

Abstract: This article provides a new look at conducting family history research from the perspective of historical materialism (Marxism). Instead of typical family histories isolating and atomizing the individual and family oral accounts which center the “great man” of the past, this work provides an analysis firmly rooted in class conflict and how individuals directly receive their conditions as mediated by the past. This specifically takes family history in the American western migration as a way to reconceptualize conducting this type of historical research, and using family stories, legends, and oral traditions as a window into the class ideologies present both in the present and the past moderating how they were shaped and transmitted, and what stories were regarded as important (especially in erasing the memory of indigenous peoples who had lived in the originally settled areas).

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The negativity of settler colonialism: Shahira A. Hathout, ‘Critical negativity in Hans Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1520–22), settler colonialism, and the death of myth’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

25Apr26

Abstract: This paper draws on the critical negativity presented by Julia Kristeva and Édouard Glissant. Despite their differences, both accounts agree on three points: First, they respectively reject the fixation of an original meaning or original identity, moving towards a more indeterminate open-ended rethinking of loss, trauma, and the fragmented subject. Like Glissant’s ‘womb abyss’, Kristeva’s ‘black sun’ is another abyss, through which fragmentation, trauma, meaning, and the possibility for differential collectivity emerge. Secondly, both accounts expose the violence inscribed into settler colonialism to unsettle master narratives and myths of civilization. Thirdly, Kristeva and Glissant acknowledge the capacity of art and poetics to operate as sites of intertextuality and negativity where myths of civilization that sustain the violence of settler colonialism could possibly activate its own collapse. Within this framework, I explore Hans Holbein’s painting, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, alongside images of the dead bodies of Palestinian children, starved by Israel’s genocide in Palestine, not as aesthetics of suffering that reproduce the sites of subjection but as aesthetics of negativity and accountability to show how myths of spiritual and cultural superiority that sustain settler colonialism collapse at the site and sight of settler colonial violence.

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Unfitting and therefore settlers: Susan Kollin, ‘Settler Ecologies and Western Adaptation: Unfitting Characters in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’, in Pamela Demory (ed.), Ecoadaptation: Mediating Nature and the Environment, Palgrave Macmillan, 2026, pp. 203-218

24Apr26

Abstract: This chapter explores how the Coen brothers reconfigure the Western in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, laying bare its white settler fantasies to reveal how toxic beliefs often shape foundational myths of regional and national identity. Many of the sequences refuse to deliver action in ways we expect in the genre. Plots, for instance, often appear unreal and cartoonish, highlighting a refusal on the part of the filmmakers to conform and adapt themselves to expectations of the Western. Satire and humor likewise redirect the narratives to reveal the underside of generic myths. Foregrounding various “unfitting” and “maladaptive” western characters whose misguided relationships with the more-than-human world and each other often end in tragedy and death, the Coens’ film illustrates how stories persist or perish, leading to the conclusion—from the point of view of ecoadaptation—that perhaps some stories need to go extinct.

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Adapting, but still settlers: Katie Kane, ‘”A Huge Mass in a Single Hand”: Yellowstone and the Selling of Montana’, in Pamela Demory (ed.), Ecoadaptation: Mediating Nature and the Environment, Palgrave Macmillan, 2026, pp. 153-170

24Apr26

Abstract: This chapter argues that the television series Yellowstone rewrites the history of white settlement and white relations with Native nations in Montana, revising a cultural idea of the “Frontier” that promotes a notion of “rugged individualism,” a ranching-style monopoly capitalism, and an ethically empty “environmental” ethos. It is a narrative adaptation of a story of the American West that positions the land as “beautiful” without considering its extreme environmental precarity and its long entanglement with extractive economies, including mining, logging, agriculture, and, most significantly, ranching. The series has had real-world impacts, affecting the state’s demography, housing market, and tourism. Even though the axiom of the series is “protect the land,” the proposed method of doing so reinforces white settler principles of class, status, and race.

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Indigenous diasporas are implicated: Hemopereki Simon, ‘”Cut your Hōhā nonsense out!” the “lady crown debacle(s)” as settler/invaderism from Māori in “so-called” Australia’, Journal for Cultural Research, 2026

24Apr26

Abstract: This article examines how Māori indigeneity is ethically reconfigured in diaspora when Māori live on Aboriginal land in so-called Australia. Drawing on tikanga-based obligations of manuhiritanga, it argues that Māori are tangata whenua in Aotearoa New Zealand but become implicated in settler/invader relations in Australia unless they practice humility, restraint, and accountability to local Aboriginal authority. The central questions are: under what conditions do Indigenous migrants become entangled in settler/invader power on other Indigenous lands, and how are claims to indigeneity, mana whenua, or customary authority articulated and contested outside their originating jurisdictions? The analysis is grounded in the sovereign jurisdiction of Dharug Ngurra, treating Dharug Law/Lore as the enduring legal and ethical framework for Parramatta and the Dyarubbin. Using the 2019 Lady Crown/Ngāti Rangihou Corrangie case as a diagnostic ‘limit case,’ the article traces how whakapapa, missionary history, pseudo-law, and media amplification can be mobilised to manufacture trans-Indigenous sovereignty claims that bypass Aboriginal consent and governance. It concludes that such diasporic overreach risks reproducing settler/invader logics in Indigenous dress, and that Māori integrity in Australia requires acting as manuhiri under Aboriginal leadership.

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The handmaiden of settler history: Shawn Van Ausdal, ‘Cattle ranching: Handmaiden of settler colonialism’, in Mark Moritz, Igshaan Samuels, Nikolaus Schareika, Eva Schlecht (eds), Routledge Handbook of Pastoralism, Routledge, 2026

24Apr26

Abstract: This chapter briefly compares the nature of ranching and pastoralism. It then follows the diffusion of cattle ranching to the Americas, Oceania, and southern Africa. And it explores how ranching helped propel settler colonialism. However, rather than viewing cattle as the “shock troops” of European settlement, it describes ranching as the handmaiden of state-led pacification. By altering land uses and landscapes, by promoting new sets of property rights and social relationships, by shifting diets and identities, and by occupying vast spaces, cattle ranching helped to produce new cartographies of colonial power.

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Indigenous title as a trap: Maritza Paredes, Danitza Gil, Anke Kaulard, ‘The Indigenous land titling trap: adaptive practices and the limits of climate governance’, World Development, 204, 2026, #107429

23Apr26

Abstract: This article examines why Indigenous land titling, widely promoted as an enabling condition for climate action, advances without closing persistent gaps in territorial recognition. It conceptualizes this paradox as a climate titling institutional trap, in which reforms progress through adaptive practices yet remain embedded in territorial governance configurations that constrain their transformative potential. Drawing on an extended case study of Kichwa communities in San Martín, Peru, based on multi-scalar ethnographic research, the paper shows how Indigenous leaders and bureaucrats deploy pragmatic strategies to navigate administrative bottlenecks and secure partial advances in titling. However, these gains unfold within historically layered regimes of agrarian, extractive, and conservation governance that overlap and converge in limiting Indigenous territorial rights. The interaction between adaptive practices and these layered institutional orders produces incremental change without altering underlying power relations. The article contributes to development debates by reframing institutional traps as dynamic outcomes of reform processes, highlighting the political-economic conditions shaping the limits of Indigenous inclusion in climate governance.

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Clearly, on Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu: Kim Alley, Dan Tout, ‘Backlash: Dark Emu, Settler Nationalism, and Indigenous Sovereignty’, in Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, Julia Hurst (eds), Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Why Won’t Settlers Listen? Springer, 2026, pp 129-153

21Apr26

Abstract: Over the past decade, Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu has become a flashpoint in Australia’s ongoing History Wars. By challenging colonial myths that depicted Aboriginal peoples as ‘mere hunter-gatherers’ and demonstrating the complexity of pre-colonial practices of cultivation and land management, Pascoe directly unsettled the legal fiction of terra nullius and, with it, the legitimacy of the settler-colonial nation-state. This chapter situates the backlash against Dark Emu—and against Pascoe himself—within the politics of Australian settler nationalism. It argues that what is at stake in this controversy is less the technical question of whether Aboriginal peoples were ‘farmers’ or ‘hunter-gatherers’ (whether ‘mere’ or ‘complex’) than the threat posed to foundational settler narratives and their enduring ideological, cultural, and legal force. The often vitriolic responses to Pascoe, including attempts to delegitimise his identity and work, exemplify a reactionary effort to extinguish the basis for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. In tracing these dynamics, we show how the Dark Emu debate represents a twenty-first-century iteration of the History Wars, illuminating both the persistent anxieties of dispossession structuring settler nationalism and the possibilities opened up by truth-telling for unsettling its shaky foundations.

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Paralysed settler colonialism: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Fear and Loathing in Settler Australia’, in Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, Julia Hurst (eds), Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Why Won’t Settlers Listen? Springer, 2026, pp. 155-167

21Apr26

Abstract: A widely shared assumption is that truth-telling about colonial violence can facilitate reconciliation between settlers and Indigenous peoples. This paper addresses the psychological disposition of the settlers of Australia as it was manifested in recent public contestations, including in the lead-up to the Voice referendum of October 2023, when the proposal of amending the Australian Constitution and establishing an Indigenous body capable of making representations to parliament was rejected. The paper focuses on foreclosure and disavowal as specific defensive mechanisms displayed by Australian settler publics, the former prompted by fear, the latter leading to paralysing loathing.

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Tone deaf settler colonialism: Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, Julia Hurst (eds), Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Why Won’t Settlers Listen? Springer, 2026

21Apr26

Description: This collection brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and experts from Australia and beyond to examine the persistent settler-colonial patterns of denial, ignorance and antipathy that continue to constrain the possibilities of truth and justice in settler-colonial societies. Written from diverse cultural and disciplinary perspectives, the chapters identify and analyse the social, cultural and political barriers to listening, hearing, and responding on the part of settlers, and the settler state/s. Prompted by the unsuccessful 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament and the constitutional recognition of the First Peoples of Australia as the First Peoples of Australia, the volume reorients the discussion. Rather than returning to questions of how truth-telling might be improved or made more persuasive, it shifts the focus towards the continuing refusal of settlers (and the settler state/s) to adequately and ethically engage with the truths that have already been told. The chapters investigate patterns of denial, deflection, and structural resistance, exposing their contradictions and points of vulnerability with the express aim of contributing to their undoing. While a number of contributions paint a sobering picture of the enduring impediments to meaningful change, others—particularly those from First Nations authors—highlight the continuing, generative, healing work of truth-telling and/as activism already underway. These contributions foreground the transformative potential of Indigenous-led truth-telling practices, not only as responses to settler inaction, but as active forces for reimagining and reshaping settler–Indigenous relations.

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