settler colonial studies blog

Disaster and settler colonialism: Minh Do, Amy Janzwood, Kristen Pue, ‘Multilevel governance, climate (in)justice, and settler colonialism—evidence from First Nations disaster evacuations in so-called Canada’, Critical Policy Studies, 2023

14Jul23

Abstract: Wildfires and subsequent community evacuations offer a highly visible example of climate change-induced dislocation. In so-called Canada, both the changing climate and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples are policy priorities for the federal government and certain provincial governments, like the Province of British Columbia. Despite these purported policy priorities, we find evidence that colonial logics–like the rejection of Indigenous governments’ capacity and knowledge to shape this policy area–underpin emergency management, resulting in the perpetuation of inequities and less effective responses. By analyzing data from Indigenous Services Canada, we find that First Nations are disproportionately affected by largely climate-related disasters, evacuating at a higher frequency–328 times higher, on average. We then employ a decolonial lens to analyze the policy landscape and actions taken to date and examine whether emergency management is moving away from unilateral policymaking in favor of more horizontal, multilevel governance arrangements. We find that both the federal and British Columbia governments perpetuate barriers that prevent First Nations from acting as effective first responders in emergency situations.

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Settler colonialisms in Crimea: Rory Finnin, Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity,University of Toronto Press, 2022

14Jul23

Description: In the spring of 1944, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars, a small Sunni Muslim nation, from their ancestral homeland on the Black Sea peninsula. The gravity of this event, which ultimately claimed the lives of tens of thousands of victims, was shrouded in secrecy after the Second World War. What broke the silence in Soviet Russia, Soviet Ukraine, and the Republic of Turkey were works of literature. These texts of poetry and prose – some passed hand-to-hand underground, others published to controversy – shocked the conscience of readers and sought to move them to action. Blood of Others presents these works as vivid evidence of literature’s power to lift our moral horizons. In bringing these remarkable texts to light and contextualizing them among Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian representations of Crimea from 1783, Rory Finnin provides an innovative cultural history of the Black Sea region. He reveals how a “poetics of solidarity” promoted empathy and support for an oppressed people through complex provocations of guilt rather than shame. Forging new roads between Slavic studies and Middle Eastern studies, Blood of Others is a compelling and timely exploration of the ideas and identities coursing between Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine – three countries determining the fate of a volatile and geopolitically pivotal part of our world.

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Figuring it out: Nicole R. Tuitt, Lisa M. Wexler, Carol E. Kaufman, Nancy Rumbaugh Whitesell, Elizabeth Rink, Michael Anastario, Jerreed D. Ivanich, Lorenda Belone, Roland S. Moore, David Huh, Tessa Evans Campbell, James Allen, ‘Unsettling Settler Colonialism in Research: Strategies Centering Native American Experience and Expertise in Responding to Substance Misuse and Co-occurring Sexual Risk-Taking, Alcohol-Exposed Pregnancy, and Suicide Prevention Among Young People’, Adversity and Resilience Science, 2023

11Jul23

Abstract: Native American (NA) populations in the USA (i.e., those native to the USA which include Alaska Natives, American Indians, and Native Hawaiians) have confronted unique historical, sociopolitical, and environmental stressors born of settler colonialism. Contexts with persistent social and economic disadvantage are critical determinants of substance misuse and co-occurring sexual risk-taking and suicide outcomes, as well as alcohol exposed pregnancy among NA young people (i.e., adolescents and young adults). Despite intergenerational transmission of resistance and resiliencies, NA young people face continued disparities in substance misuse and co-occurring outcomes when compared to other racial and ethnic groups in the USA. The failure in progress to address these inequities is the result of a complex set of factors; many of which are structural and rooted in settler colonialism. One of these structural factors includes barriers evident in health equity research intended to guide solutions to address these disparities yet involving maintenance of a research status quo that has proven ineffective to developing these solutions. Explicitly or implicitly biased values, perspectives, and practices are deeply rooted in current research design, methodology, analysis, and dissemination and implementation efforts. This status quo has been supported, intentionally and unintentionally, by researchers and research institutions with limited experience or knowledge in the historical, social, and cultural contexts of NA communities. We present a conceptual framework illustrating the impact of settler colonialism on current research methods and opportunities to unsettle its influence. Moreover, our framework illustrates opportunities to resist settler colonialism in research. We then focus on case examples of studies from the Intervention Research to Improve Native American Health program, funded by the NIH, that impact substance use and co-occurring health conditions among NA young people.

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Settler colonial erasure, challenged: Noa Shaindlinger, Displacement and Erasure in Palestine: The Politics of Hope, Edinburgh University Press, 2023

11Jul23

Description: Displacement and Erasure in Palestine: The Politics of Hope explores the ways in which Palestinians negotiate physical and symbolic erasures by producing their own archives and historical narratives. With a focus on the city of Jaffa and its displaced Palestinian population, Noa Shaindlinger argues that the Israeli state ‘buried’ histories of mass expulsions and spatial appropriations. Based on a wide-variety of sources, this book brings together archival, literary, ethnographic and oral research to engage with ideas of settler colonialism and the production of history, violence and memory, refugee-hood and diaspora. This multi-sited study traces Jaffa’s refugee experience beyond 1948 to the West Bank and the diaspora in Toronto and Cape Town, re-inscribing the erased experience of Palestinians into an account of Israeli state practices of dispossession. By integrating rigorous archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, literary and spatial analysis, the book reveals Palestinian’s (and their Israeli-Jewish allies’) creative responses that challenge displacement and argue for their right to belong to their homeland and their city.

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Settler colonial narratives, refuted: Kali Simmons, ‘”It Has to Stop”: Refusing Colonial Narratives in The Only Good Indians’, The American Indian Quarterly, 47, 1, 2023, pp. 70-85

11Jul23

Abstract: This article examines Stephen Graham Jones’s 2020 horror-revenge novel The Only Good Indians, arguing that the work’s diversions from generic convention are an enactment of epistemic and formal refusal. The novel’s refusals function to both expose the constraints of settler-colonial subjectivity and story other modes of selfhood and relationality. The framework of refusal can also help scholars and readers to better theorize Indigenous genre works, in particular the ways Indigenous storying practices must respond to the formal, affective, and philosophical expectations obligations that give structure to western genres.

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Settler colonial microerasures: Kenneth A. Cruz, ‘Micro-Erasures: How an “Evidence-Based” Violence Intervention with Indigenous Youth Advances Cultural Genocide’, The American Indian Quarterly, 47, 1, 2023, pp. 1-25

11Jul23

Abstract: In this case study of an evidence-based violence intervention with Indigenous youth in the southwestern United States, Cruz examines four different types of what he calls “micro-erasures”: individual-level interactions that correct, pathologize, punish, or otherwise supplant Indigenous ways of being with the taken-for-granted norms of settler society. Using critical realist grounded-theory methods, he demonstrates how these micro-level practices advance the colonial crimes of cultural imperialism and cultural genocide in often subtle and unconscious ways. To rectify the harms caused by these practices, recommendations for both healing and liberation (beyond traditional Marxism) are discussed.

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Japanese settlers: Anke Scherer, ‘Frontier spirit and the making of the Japanese pioneer’, Asiatische Studien – Études Asiatiques, 2023

08Jul23

Abstract: This article analyses the origins of the so-called frontier spirit as the main feature of the Japanese pioneers who were the grass-roots agents of Japanese expansion into Asia. It argues that this narrative traces back to the government-sponsored cultivation program in Hokkaidō, where so-called tondenhei were employed as farmer-soldiers to open up the new frontier region as Japan’s first colony. After the termination of the tondenhei program, the frontier spirit took on a life of its own. It was embraced by advocates of Japanese settler colonialism on the Asian continent as a vital element of the quintessential Japanese pioneer, capable of overcoming any hardships that might arise. Consequently, the iconic Japanese pioneer in Manchuria, who eventually fell victim to Japan’s megalomanic migration machine in Northeast China, can be seen as the reincarnation of their equally unfortunate predecessor, the tondenhei soldier.

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The intersectional occupation: Raja Khalidi, ‘De-Mystifying the Decolonization of Palestine’, Forum for Social Economics, 2023

08Jul23

Abstract: This essay reviews three contributions to a growing critical literature on Palestine political economy, pushing the analytical envelope that had prevailed for decades, powered by a ‘new wave’ of mainly Palestinian scholars. These seek to situate the struggle in a broader ‘inter-sectional’ framework (analysing the combined impacts of settler colonialism, racialism, capitalism and indigeneity, among other concepts) that identifies with, and explicitly combats for, Palestinian rights and agency. The works reviewed here falls squarely within that legacy.

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The pluriversal sovereignty of post-settler colonialism? Ajay Parasram, ‘Pluriversal sovereignty and the state of IR’, Review of International Studies, 49, 3, 2023, pp. 356-367

08Jul23

Abstract: IR proceeds on a Eurocentric ontological assumption that sovereignty has universal validity today. How can IR be decolonised, when in spite of countless examples of the enactment of ‘sovereignty otherwise’, the discipline remains unconcerned with the fact that the logic of sovereignty remains uni-versal. The question is as much political as it is intellectual, because as a discipline, we have allowed the inertia of our professional rhythms to marginalise pluri-versal sovereignty, or the organisation of sovereignty along different ontological starting points. I argue IR must abandon its disciplinary love affair with uni-versal sovereignty. The tendency to ‘bring in’ new perspectives by inserting them into an already ontologically constituted set of assumptions works to protect IR’s Eurocentricity, which makes disciplinary decolonisation untenable. I propose that as a starting point, IR needs to be more mature about recognising the decolonisations that are happening under our very feet if we are to stand a chance at disciplinary level decolonisation. As an illustrative example, I explore an ongoing collision of settler-colonial and Mi’kmaw sovereignty through the issue of lobster fisheries in Mi’kma’ki, or Nova Scotia as the territory is known to Canadians.

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Settlers at the end of the world: Rohan Howitt, ‘The company-microstate: The Auckland Islands and corporate colonialism in global history, 1849-52’, Journal of Global History, 2023

08Jul23

Abstract: The Auckland Islands, a subantarctic archipelago 465 kilometres south of New Zealand, were the setting for one of the stranger episodes in the global history of colonial expansion. From 1849–52, these remote, inhospitable islands were governed and settled by a chartered company. The project was driven by lofty ambitions to simultaneously create a flourishing settler colony and unlock vast new whaling grounds in the Southern Ocean; the reality was a commercial disaster plagued by bitter internal disputes and a speedy abandonment. Drawing on the methods of global microhistory, I argue that the colonization of the Auckland Islands was a pivotal moment in the integration of the Southern Ocean world into global processes of governance, mobility, and trade. This anomalous case contributes to recent scholarship on ‘company-states’ and the central role of such hybrid polities in processes of cross-regional interaction and globalization.

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