settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism is instagrammable: Carrie Karsgaard, ‘Perform and Transform the Settler Colonial City: Digital Infrastructure and Located Expression on Instagram’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 21, 6, 2022, pp. 623-639

04Jan23

Abstract: While opposition to the Trans Mountain pipeline extends far beyond British Columbia’s southwest coast, Vancouver provides a specific site to explore the intersections of platform, place, and anti-pipeline sentiment in Instagrammed expression surrounding a controversy embedded in colonial extraction. A city located on Indigenous lands yet shaped by an elite settler imaginary of sustainability, outdoor recreation, and west coast lifestyles, Vancouver-based anti-pipeline resistance sees the uneven geographic intersection of the pipeline with various social, environmental, and climate concerns, including Canada’s failure to acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty on pipeline-affected lands. Through the patterns revealed by digital methods and visual methodologies centered on Instagram’s location tag, this paper reveals how settler colonialism infuses the platformed and grounded components in placebased issue expression – and also how it is resisted, reconfiguring relations both on the land and in the digital realm.

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Settler colonialism is dynamic: Belal Alakhras, Raja Noriza Raja Ariffin, Makmor Tumin, ‘Dynamics of Settler Colonialism: Influencing Factors on the Israeli Treatment Towards the Palestinians’, Al-Shajarah, 27, 2, 2022, pp. 233-262

04Jan23

Abstract: This essay explores the factors influencing the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip between 2009 and 2019. The essay argues that the Israeli approach towards the Palestinians can be examined in the broader context of settler colonialism and is not exclusively shaped on a security basis. Semi-structured interviews, documents, and other secondary data sources were employed to determine factors defining Israel’s approach in confronting Palestinians. Multiple internal and external factors have shaped the Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Internal elements include power structure, ideology, public opinion, and the colonized people’s response. The external factors include the regional (dis-)order and the US-Israel alliance. This analysis finds that most of these factors have fuelled a violent Israeli treatment towards Palestinians. The Palestinian resistance was found to compel Israel to lessen its violent treatment on various occasions. These results indicate that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is not exclusively shaped on a security basis.

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Zombies everywhere! Anna-E. Younes, ‘Palestinian Zombie: Settler-Colonial Erasure and Paradigms of the Living Dead’, Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies, 21, 2, 2022, pp. 27-46

04Jan23

Abstract: The modern zombie is a horror story of the many-headed processes of land conquest, dehumanization, and production of surplus populations. It is argued that the zombie always bore the fate of at least two positions of subjection that trouble dominant class-based analytics: namely, the African and the Indigenous slave. From the plantations of Haiti, to Auschwitz, and eventually to today’s Palestine, this article follows a different figure of the zombie in a cultural analysis of its history and a critique of its popular culture representations, focusing on land conquest and erasure in capitalism. From the 20th century onward, a white (genocidal) gaze eventually turned the zombie myth into a flesh/meateating figure, roaming the land without direction and in need of cleansing from the earth. Understanding popular representations of the Haitian zombie myth as enslaved and erased history, however, hints at today’s cultural re-productions of civilizational erasure and land conquest, war and surplus populations, and a “clean slate” paradigm to create “New World” fantasies. In this essay, Haiti, Auschwitz, and Palestine will be treated as sites of Indigenous struggles against settler-colonial ideology and genocide. This article argues that incorporation into modern (racial) capitalism and its (warring) violence made the zombie appear everywhere.

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Settlers and territory: Oded Haklai, ‘Settlers and Territorial Control’, International Studies, 2022

01Jan23

Abstract: Population settlements/settlers as a means for obtaining territorial control have been an omnipresent phenomenon throughout recorded history of human society. Whereas scholarly debates about settlers have typically been associated with European imperial settler colonialism, an emerging research agenda has started to develop in the 21st century around the politics of settlers, or population settlements, in contested territories in the post-WWII era, primarily in the postcolonial world. The research around this ubiquitous phenomenon is still in its infancy, however, and is characterized more by studies of specific cases and less by comparative analysis that aims to identify patterns of theoretical relevance. Cases of settlers in contested lands are abundant all over the world: from Xinjiang and Tibet in China, to Israel and the West Bank in the Middle East, the Casamance in Senegal, Abkhazia in the Caucasus, Aceh and Papua in Indonesia, and the islands of San Andrés and Providencia in Colombia. Multiple questions can be drawn from studies of these cases as well as the emerging body of literature around them: How have population settlements been conceptualized? What drives them? How have they been pursued? What array of variables has been identified by scholars to explain their proliferation in different cases? What broad patterns and categories can be identified and used for comparative and theoretically driven research? Finally, how can these general categories be useful for generating more robust theory-building scholarship?

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Indigenous health: Yara M. Asi, Weeam Hammoudeh, David Mills, Osama Tanous, Bram Wispelwey, ‘Reassembling the Pieces: Settler Colonialism and the Reconception of Palestinian Health’, Health and Human Rights Journal, 24, 2, 2022

01Jan23

Extract: In health as in many disciplines, too often the perspectives and framings of the very populations in question are obscured in favor of staid and acceptable discourses born out of the Global North and its attendant neocolonial and settler-colonial logics. Indigenous scholars and practitioners across the globe have long been disregarded when assessing, examining, and tending to their own health and well-being. The health issues of Indigenous and otherwise marginalized and racialized populations are thus frequently analyzed without sufficient historical or political context, rendering them as mere victims of humanitarian misfortune rather than as groups that are deliberately harmed and discounted in service of broader political, and often territorial, aims. So while the fragmentation of the Palestinian people and land is now increasingly understood to be the legacy of more than a century of Zionist settler colonialism, the hegemonic discourses on Palestinian health often perpetuate their dismemberment in eliding this history and their ongoing dispossession.

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The trail of trees: Ramey Moore, ‘Returning to the “Natural State”: Trail Trees and Settler Colonial Conservation in the Arkansas Ozarks’, Human Organization, 81, 4, 2022, pp. 338-347

01Jan23

Abstract: The trees at the heart of this paper are not an isolated story but contribute to the machinery of the settler colonial present, feeding off indigenous dispossession of the Arkansas Ozarks. In this paper, I explore “trail trees,” a form of culturally-modified tree used to sustain and perpetuate replacement narratives romanticizing a lost Native American past and constructing a pure, modern, scientific “reality” of White settler possession of the region. My critique is directed at the settler colonial worldview and the systems through which it is constructed, legitimated, and spread. I ask: What is at stake for advocates for the existence of “trail trees”? What can disrupt and dismantle the “trail tree” discourse and the replacement narrative that it functions within? What work can we do to create an opening for anti-colonial praxis? The answers to these questions involve direct engagement with conservation and conservationists and the narratives of replacement that suffuse their work.

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Settler readers: Cheryl O’Byrne, ‘Aboriginal Women’s Life-History Writing, Settler Reading and Not Just Black and White’, Australian Literary Studies, 37, 3, 2022

01Jan23

Abstract: In a 2019 article in The Guardian, Gomeroi poet, essayist and legal scholar Alison Whittaker declared ‘Blak literature is in a golden age. Our white audiences, who are majorities in both literary industry and buying power, are deep in an unseen crisis of how to deal with it.’ This essay tries to understand what constitutes the crisis, how settler readers, like me, might see it and emerge from it, and what some of the stakes are. I consider the reading crisis in relation to the dominant model for reading testimonial literature established by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, which positions the reader/listener as empathetic co-owner of the speaker’s trauma and powerful enabler of their testimony. Following Libby Porter, I contend settlers can progress to ‘more mature ways of responding to the invitation to a sovereign relationship.’ I discuss three strategies settler readers can implement to this end: focus on the presence of the writer, position themselves as outsiders wanting to listen and recognise themselves as implicated subjects. I ground the discussion in the 2015 life-history text Not Just Black and White: A Conversation between a Mother and Daughter by Murri women Lesley Williams and Tammy Williams.

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Honestly, I am not sure: Maria Teresa Houar, ‘The erotic of abstinence: Refusing the white-possessive and embracing settler abstinence in performance pedagogy’, in Amy Mihyang Ginther (ed.), Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and Decolonial Actor Training, Routledge, 2022

01Jan23

Abstract: The Erotic of Abstinence is an aesthetic in art and performance that makes desirable an ethic of care and intimacy in resistance to the non-consensual violence of settler colonialism and the consequences of this violence to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC); queer; and disabled lives. Settler colonial values normalize non-consensual ways of relating, and these values have shaped our spaces and pedagogies for actor training. This chapter reflects on the ways that the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the insidious harms of these values hidden within the intimacy of labor in our everyday lives and offers a timely proposal for allies to embrace settler abstinence as an erotic ethic that would refuse the demands of settler productivity and systems of property and embrace an aesthetic that promotes wellbeing and consensual relating within performance pedagogy.

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The settler onslaught: Carrie Mott, ‘Theft: Grave robbery, territorial conquest, and irrigation’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2022

27Dec22

Abstract: This paper explores the process of settler colonialism in Washington State’s Yakima Valley in the early twentieth century as an example of a regional power bloc that sought to maximize white access to natural resources while dispossessing Native Americans of their lands and access to water. Through a multiscalar approach, I consider how colonization and white supremacy were normalized through infrastructural projects crucial to agricultural development and economic prosperity in the US West A discussion of a 1906 Native American grave robbery operates as an anchor for a larger analysis of how irrigation infrastructure and other reclamation projects served the colonizing aims of the US federal government. In the US West, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and Bureau of Reclamation (BoR) were both federal agencies that played critical roles in an era where public lands were being converted to private property and allotted Native American reservation land was significantly diminished after being sold to non-Natives. The grave robbery itself and ensuing trial serve as indications of everyday life in the Yakima Valley in 1906, revealing the interconnections between infrastructural advancements, white supremacist settler colonialism, and grave robbery.

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The inclusion/exclusion of settler education: Sophie Rudolph, Archie Thomas, ‘Education, Racial Justice, and the Limits of Inclusion in Settler Colonial Australia’, Comparative Education Review, 2022

27Dec22

Abstract: Education both actively excludes (through suspensions and expulsions) and tries to include (through inclusion policies, programs, and pathways). Students who experience both exclusion and attempts at inclusion tend to be racialized Black, Brown, and/or Indigenous; identify as queer or trans; be experiencing poverty; and/or be living with a disability. These are also the young people who tend to experience incarceration in settler colonial states. In this article we draw on and develop the metaphor of the “school-to-prison pipeline,” which originated in the United States, to examine the contours and tensions of educational exclusion in Australia. In doing this we map a range of “modes of exclusion” that we illustrate are based on the interconnected racial logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. We propose a new research agenda for understanding the links between racial domination, criminality, carcerality, and educational exclusion in settler colonial contexts that seeks to go beyond normative models of inclusion.

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