settler colonial studies blog

Cinema, the settler (I): Caroline Damiens, ‘Film exhibition for indigenous people in Soviet Siberia: ‘cinema-coming’ and political enlightenment in the red yurt’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 2023

18May23

Abstract: How can we get insights into early Soviet cinema screenings for indigenous audiences in the Siberian taiga at the end of the 1920s? Preserved by the Grodekov Khabarovsk Regional Museum (Russia), the recently published diaries of Alexandra Putintseva, a cultural worker posted at the ‘Far Eastern red yurt’ from 1929 to 1932, are a valuable source to investigate the issue. Putintseva’s diaries provide a wealth of information on movie screenings within these particular Soviet institutions, as well as their reception by indigenous audiences. They show that, far from the common colonial stereotype, indigenous audience was not astonished or frightened in front of the cinematic spectacle or apparatus. Furthermore, they also offer essential information on the immediate context within which these screenings took place, an issue of equal importance in understanding what cinema as a social practice meant for indigenous audiences. Performed in a multifunctional building aiming to radically change (‘modernise’) indigenous (‘traditional’) way of life, cinema was classified as political enlightenment work. As a result, for the indigenous audience, watching films was intimately intertwined with the new Bolshevik society and its modernising endeavour. Ultimately, the diaries illustrate what I have termed ‘cinema-coming’ (when the expected audience does not go to the cinema, cinema ‘comes’ to the audience), in which film exhibition was closely linked to state ideology and the formation of modern citizens.

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The architecture of settler colonialism: Thierry Jasmin, ‘Capital, Colonization, Contemporaneity: The Architecture Behind Joar Nango’s Sámi Shelters’, Canvas, 2023

18May23

Excerpt: In an interview with Pin-Up Magazine, Sámi artist and architect Joar Nango (b. 1979) explains that “colonization and architecture are not separate phenomena.” Nango makes the salient observation that no Sámi institution has been designed by Sámi architects, even though they certainly exist. Therefore, it is important to ask how Sáminess is represented in the architecture of these institutions and if this representation should be considered an appropriation or a contribution to Sámi culture. This essay will establish that the contemporaneity of Sámi architecture is characterized by a particular use of materials that is based on nomadic vernacular architecture, but brought into the future by critiquing colonial notions of land rooted in capitalism. Nango’s brilliant installation Sámi Shelters #1-5 (2009-2014) purposefully avoids this important architectural feature to critique the “Giant Lávvu Syndrome,” a popular appropriation of Sámi architecture that reduces an anti-colonial use of materials to mere form.

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The reproductive injustice of settler colonialism: Autumn Asher BlackDeer, ‘Violence, Trauma, and Colonialism: A Structural Approach to Understanding the Policy Landscape of Indigenous Reproductive Justice’, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 2023

18May23

Abstract: Indigenous peoples in the U.S. have the highest rates of violence against women, disproportionate representation in the child welfare system, and exorbitant amounts of traumatic injuries among all ethnic groups within the U.S. yet discussions of trauma and violence against Native communities fail to consider the ongoing influence of settler colonialism. Too often trauma-focused work takes an individualist approach while policy work focuses on the collective, leading to a siloed approach in which micro-trauma work misses policy influences and in which policy work fails to seriously consider the ongoing trauma and violence experienced by Native Nations. Through the application of three Indigenous theoretical models that account for both historic and ongoing colonial influence, this work introduces relevant issues in the policy landscape of reproductive justice for Indigenous communities that are essential for trauma scholars and practitioners to understand.

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The religion of settler colonialism (I have been saying this for a while): SueJeanne Koh, ‘”Misreading” Calvin: The Question of World-Making in the Texts of Settler Colonialism and Theology’, Political Theology, 2023

18May23

Abstract: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s account of European settler colonialism in the United States notably focuses on Calvinist communities as a primary catalyst in rationalizing land seizure, identifying covenantal theology as supporting settler claims to sovereignly held indigenous lands. This article argues that while she rightly identifies a correspondence between divine providence and a settler colonial logic of replacement, a vertical orientation, her analysis of theology as settler colonialism can be completed through a recourse to a rhetorical and literary analysis of Calvin’s Institutes. That is, settler colonialism also possesses a horizontal component, a logic of replicability that describes the temporal and spatial movement of settler colonialism. To make this argument I turn to Michelle Sanchez and Ford Lewis Battles’ respective explorations of literary genre and the language of accommodation. My analysis points to how Calvin’s covenantal theology can conjure the “imagined community” that is then embodied as settler colonialism. I end by suggesting that further careful articulation of the nexus between theology and settler colonialism is necessary for us to reckon the present and ongoing possibilities of inhabiting space and sharing life together, settler and indigenous alike.

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The violence of Indigenous boys: Katherine Irwin, ‘Boys’ Violence in Settler–Colonial Contexts: Illegitimate Civic Duty and Pathways to Violence’, Deviant Behavior, 2023

18May23

Abstract: The data for this paper come from an 11-year participant observation study in a public high school in Hawaiʻi. The study included 25 interviews with working-class and poor boys of color, most of whom were of Pacific Islander ancestry. This manuscript considers whether everyday acts of violence among the boys in the study stemmed from common motivations that cut across race, gender, and class divides. The study also explored whether the boys’ violence could be tied to historic, multifaceted inequalities within the settler-colonial order of Hawaiʻi. The boys authored a form of violence that can be called “illegitimate civic duty,” which allowed them to demonstrate their alignment with mainstream nationalist ideologies and masculinity norms. In some ways, the boys’ violence in enacting their civic duty could be tied to common motivations that affect boys across the U.S. In other cases, however, the boys’ use of violence could be linked with their unique consciousness and view of the historic injustices embedded in the settler-colonial system of Hawaiʻi. The findings are used to weave together general and subgroup-specific perspectives on male violence.

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Settler colonialism is an infrastructure (not an event): Rebecca Clements, Glen Searle, Tooran Alizadeh, ‘Epistemic silences in settler-colonial infrastructure governance literature’, Geographical Research, 2023

16May23

Abstract: The existing landscape of infrastructure governance discourses tends to focus on closing “governance gaps” commonly based on fractured and opaque neoliberal planning and delivery processes, privatisation and financialisation issues, and inequitable distribution and undemocratic decisionmaking processes. These gaps represent a deeply troubling erosion of infrastructure’s capacity to serve public interests or confront crises of climate injustice. However, the literature rarely confronts the uncomfortable politics of decolonising infrastructure or acknowledges ongoing permutations of settler-coloniality, implicating infrastructural framings of land, development, property, ownership, and decision-making power. This paper reflects on the current state of infrastructure governance literature about ongoing settler-colonial legacies in urban planning and development. Explaining some of the ways unceded Indigenous land has been exploited to facilitate settler state infrastructure development in major Australian cities, we then draw a line to the complicities of contemporary infrastructure governance. This foundation is considered using a systematic method to review infrastructure governance literature and reveal stark gaps in engagement with settler-coloniality and the politics of decolonisation. In light of these silences, we reflect on disciplinary responsibilities to redress research practices and suggest two reflexive approaches centred on to truth-telling and deep listening.

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Decolonial struggles: Lucas Savino, Decolonizing Patagonia: Mapuche Peoples and State Formation in Argentina, Rowman & Littlefield, 2023

16May23

Description: In Decolonizing Patagonia: Mapuche Peoples and State Formation in Argentina, Lucas Savino examines Indigenous efforts for self-determination, territorial autonomy, and decolonization in Northern Patagonia, Argentina. Through an analysis of the ways in which Mapuche activists organize in particular localities in the province of Neuquén, this book contributes to broader theoretical understandings of collective identity formation and Indigenous activism under multicultural neoliberal regimes of citizenship. Building on interdisciplinary contributions on state formation, citizenship, and collective identity formation, Savino demonstrates that territorial struggles and the importance of the local political level are crucial for understanding how collective identities are configured.

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The skulls of settler colonialists: Alexandra Roginski, Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, Cambridge University Press, 2023

15May23

Description: The contentious science of phrenology once promised insight into character and intellect through external ‘reading’ of the head. In the transforming settler-colonial landscapes of nineteenth-century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, popular phrenologists – figures who often hailed from the margins – performed their science of touch and cranial jargon everywhere from mechanics’ institutions to public houses. In this compelling work, Alexandra Roginski recounts a history of this everyday practice, exploring how it featured in the fates of people living in, and moving through, the Tasman World. Innovatively drawing on historical newspapers and a network of archives, she traces the careers of a diverse range of popular phrenologists and those they encountered. By analysing the actions at play in scientific episodes through ethnographic, social and cultural history, Roginski considers how this now-discredited science could, in its own day, yield fleeting power and advantage, even against a backdrop of large-scale dispossession and social brittleness.

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The premises of settler colonialism: Rauna Kuokkanen, ‘From Indigenous private property to full dispossession – the peculiar case of Sápmi’, Comparative Legal History, 2023

15May23

Abstract: The concept of dispossession has become ubiquitous in contemporary critical theory, including analyses of settler colonialism and Indigenous scholarship. It suggests that in addition to being colonised, Indigenous peoples have been deprived of their lands and the territorial foundations of their societies. Critics, however, allege that theories and arguments of Indigenous dispossession are inconsistent, arguing that Indigenous peoples did not have conceptions of land as property or possession. The critics’ question is as follows: how can there be an act of dispossession if there was no prior possession or Indigenous concept of ownership? This article examines a case where there was both prior possession and a concept of ownership adopted by and extended to an Indigenous people, the Sámi, and upheld by the colonial court system. What can the Sámi case of individual (family) land ownership tell us about the concept of dispossession and Indigenous conceptions of ownership and property? The objective is to demonstrate how the concept of dispossession has different histories in different contexts, and how individual land ownership has not historically been alien to Indigenous peoples.

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The consequences of settler colonialism: David G. Embrick, Johnny Eric Williams, ‘Alienation, Racial Capitalism, and the Racialization of Palestinians, Critical Sociology, 2023

15May23

Abstract: In this paper, we outline the contours of the history of oppression toward Palestinians to discern how the settler colonial racial capitalist state of Israel generates alienation in Palestinians. To accomplish this, we explore how the Global North disregards and/or participates in propping up Israel’s oppressive structural processes for stripping Palestinians of their land, resources, and identity. This includes the Palestinian healthcare system that has suffered decades of deliberate neglect, under-development, and strategic fragmentation, which hindered its coronavirus disease response. We conclude with implications and suggestions for rethinking not only how Palestinians are racialized and alienated as ‘others’ in a settler colonial racial capitalist system of oppression, but how the slow process of identity erosion (and perversion) works to dehumanize and justify the dispossession of Palestinians.

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