settler colonial studies blog

Armenian settler colonial studies? Helen Makhdoumian, ‘Armenian Studies in Conversation with Critical Indigenous Studies and Settler Colonial Studies: An Invitation’, Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, 2023

23Apr23

Abstract: This article argues that Armenian Studies can learn from and contribute to the fields of critical Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies in generative ways, especially as those fields increasingly become global in scope. After surveying recent scholarly discourses in Armenian Studies, I illuminate pathways forward for interdisciplinary approaches to the study of indigeneity, colonization, genocide, removal, dispossession, biocultural assimilation, cultural heritage preservation, and memory work. I situate these potential possibilities and needed nuances within a larger discussion on the origins, aims, and current state of critical Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies, two interrelated but distinct modes of inquiry.

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Uncanny settler colonialism: Travis Franks, ‘Uncanny encounters and haunting colonial histories in Australia’s reconciliation-era narratives’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2023

23Apr23

Abstract: Settler literature is haunted by the colonial past. Motifs found in the Australian literary tradition signify this haunting-Aboriginal spectrality, uncanny Aboriginal ceremonial grounds, and taboo massacre sites being the most common. Settler authors typically use these literary devices in moments of social and political upheaval that disturb the foundational myths of settler belonging. Australia’s Reconciliation agenda brought realities of colonial frontier violence and the scale of Aboriginal deaths to the fore of mainstream socio-political consciousness. Literary scholars have adapted Freud’s concept of the uncanny to argue that settler belonging feels imperiled or strange when confronted with the distressing knowledge of Aboriginal modernity. Overwhelmingly, the manufacture of Aboriginal haunting in Australia’s Reconciliation—era signifies settler anxiety and attempts to reclaim the authority unsettled by Indigenous alterity. Works by Henry Reynolds—Why Weren’t We Told? (2000)—and Alex Miller-Journey to the Stone Country (2003)—are representative of a broader literary response to Reconciliation, after which depictions of Aboriginal death and burial, as well as new settler quests for belonging, proliferated. The essay concludes by reading Noongar writer Kim Scott’s novel Taboo (2017) as a subversion of works like those by Reynolds and Miller.

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Settler colonialism in colonial cities: Farabi Fakih, ‘Settler cities in the Dutch Indies: Race, class and the emergence of settler colonialism’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2023

23Apr23

Abstract: This article explores the colonial land tenure system which evolved in the municipalities of the Dutch Indies in the early twentieth century, resulting in structural differences in urban property ownership. The development of a formal and informal property regime during this period created the logic of racialised capitalism that underpinned settler colonialism. By looking at the actions of the Indo-Europeesche Verbond (IEV), the main Indo-European political party, this article seeks to understand why settler colonialism failed in the Dutch Indies. It finds that the success of the settler colonialism project depended on its relationship with global capitalism and imperial support. This study also finds that structural differences in property ownership have continued in postcolonial Indonesia.

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Settler architectures: Vajdon Sohaili, The Shape of Unity: Architecture, Art, and the Designs of Postwar Transnational Settler Colonial Community, PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2023

22Apr23

Abstract: Following the 1945 signing of the United Nations Charter and the resulting waves of decolonization, projects of public architecture and art increasingly sought to shape conceptions of political community unified under idealized consensus. Yet, in contexts resisting decolonization—specifically, settler colonial contexts—such projects served to perpetuate settler interests, affirming non-existent, incomplete, or unwanted social harmonies. Analyzing public institutional architecture and public art—officially sanctioned works seeking to represent pluralist, humanistic ideals and interpellate collective self-understandings—in three post-WWII settler colonial societies, this dissertation argues that “unity,” “community,” and their contextual avatars supplied not only a logic for spatial design, but also a transnationally traded alibi for the perpetuation of settler power. First, in the former Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), a disingenuous policy of “interracial partnership” permits a White minority to defer Black majority rule, and results in the construction of a circular National Museum that monumentalizes settler archaeology. Second, preaching a doctrine of “oneness,” the Bahá’í religion constructs two monumental devotional buildings—one in the newly-constituted Israel, another in suburban Chicago—as twin base-camps for a global conversion campaign drawn along colonial lines and sustained by settlerism’s strategies of elimination. And third, in Montréal, against violent acts of separatism by Quebec-nationalists, expressions of social and artistic “integration” animate the construction of a massive performing arts complex and the techno-utopian idealism of Expo 67, both founded on Indigenous erasures. In each case, a public byword—respectively, “partnership,” “oneness,” “integration”—operates as a discursive surrogate of unity, channeling the populist appeal of community rhetoric, and shaping a program of cultural-institutional production driven by a complicit settler creative class of architects and artists. Reframing history and political mythology via spatial and iconographic conflations, these projects exhibit the erasures and clefts of settlerism’s eliminationist logic, while at the same time, channeling and repurposing the communitary idealisms associated with postwar modernism. Geographically diverse, but structurally and materially entwined, the three case studies examined here disclose a transnational settler typology of public-institutional architecture and art ostensibly oriented towards reparative notions of unity and community, but pragmatically arranged to forestall decolonial fragmentation.

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Hydro settler colonialism: Katarina Djordjevic, Encountering Settler Colonialism in Hydroelectric Development at Southern Indian Lake, MA Dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2023

22Apr23

Abstract: This thesis investigates the history and proceedings of the high-level diversion scheme at Southern Indian Lake. Though the scheme did not become a reality because the Progressive Conservative majority government who championed it dissolved before development began, its proceedings signified South Indian Lake’s first colonial encounter with regards to the Churchill River Diversion. Through the high-level diversion discourse, I argue that Manitoba’s Churchill River Diversion reproduces a social policy which creates Indigenous peoples as an Other and asserts settler dominance. It reproduces settler ideologies and fantasies of personhood, entitlement, and (dis)possession which are constitutive of colonial powers. Moreover, it reproduces hydropower as a nexus for colonial practices and ideologies which undermine Indigenous peoples and their land. Chapter One argues that the low-level diversion at Southern Indian Lake created profound negative environmental and socio-cultural impacts. It aims to place in sharp relief the arguments posited for the high-level scheme by its proponents. Chapter Two argues that Manitoba Hydro agents produced a government-supported narrative of urgency for the high-level diversion which circumvented social and environmental responsibilities towards Indigenous lands and Indigenous peoples. And Chapter Three argues that the Progressive Conservative majority government, of the time, embraced and reproduced technocratic and colonial ideologies to press for the high-level diversion. The Churchill River Diversion is a complex of colonial ideologies, government agents, engineers, and resisting Indigenous communities into a cemented structure which continues to alter hydrologies and humanities.

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Undocumented settlers? Enrique Sepúlveda, ‘Chicanx studies, indigeneity and the politics of settler colonialism’, Latino Studies, 2023

22Apr23

Excerpt: Midway through the 2019 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) annual meeting, a poignant pedagogical moment arose in the audience about the meaning of Gloria Anzaldúa’s work and the wholesale application of a theory, settler colonialism, onto communities in Abya Yala. The one area of contention I wish to highlight here in settler colonial theory is the labeling of all migrants, regardless of their complex histories and colonialities, as modern-day settler colonialists. It was a case of junior and senior scholars speaking from the heart. The last speaker in the audience was a Chicanx prospective graduate student who shared that they were undocumented and felt insulted at being labeled a settler colonialist. As they pointed to their chest, they said it pained them deeply that their people were being framed in this way. It was, for many of us, another layer of pain and trauma. The roundtable session was a critical decolonial dialogue on questions of indigeneity, settler colonialism, and the work of Anzaldúa (1987), particularly her reframing of mestizaje.

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Rusting settler colonialism: Christabel Devadoss, ‘Examining Rust Belt narratives: Race, rural representation, and everyday experiences’, Journal of Rural Studies, 100, 2023

15Apr23

Abstract: Media coverage of the rural Rust Belt has featured mainly white perspectives. Since the 1970s manufacturing decline, the Rust Belt has been characterized as home to the “white working class.” The “white working-class” trope, ubiquitous in political, social, and academic commentary, upholds settler colonial narratives and colonial ideas of race that erase the experiences and histories of people of color in Rust Belt areas. While according to the US Census, a large portion of the area is white, many people of color in rural areas are not counted in official Census data. Additionally, the Rust Belt contains some of the fastest-growing ‘minority’ populations in the country. Dominant Rust Belt narratives fail to account for the experiences of many people of color who live and work in the rural Rust Belt. Drawing from in-depth interviews and landscape analysis in Northern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, this article examines perspectives that challenge settler colonial discourses, providing a more inclusive narrative of the rural Rust Belt.

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On the emotional insecurity of settlers (why do they call the army): Eric Van Rythoven, ‘Problems, Tools, and Creativity: A Pragmatist Approach to Emotion and Security’, in Mark B. Salter, Can E. Mutlu, Philippe M. Frowd (eds), Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction, Routledge, 2023

15Apr23

Access the chapter here.

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Clearances in one place, settlements somewhere else: Iain Hutchison, ‘The 1862 Fair Isle Clearance to New Brunswick’, The Scottish Historical Review, 102, 1, 2023, pp. 91-115

15Apr23

Abstract: In May 1862, sixty-five adults and seventy children under twelve years of age left their homes on Fair Isle bound for Canada. Following a carefully orchestrated journey via Westray, Kirkwall, Granton and Glasgow, they boarded the Olympia to cross the Atlantic to St John, New Brunswick, where they were to embark upon building new lives. This article explains how hardship encountered by these families on Fair Isle in 1861 placed them in a situation of impending destitution that encouraged their departure from their native island, located halfway between Orkney and Shetland, and resulted in their resettlement in North America the following year. When emigration was proposed as a solution to their plight, glowing reports of opportunity in New Brunswick provided the ‘pull’ stimulus to counter their desperate situation on Fair Isle. Was the 1862 Fair Isle emigration an act of compassion and concern on the part of sponsors and facilitators? Or was islanders’ growing desperation used as an opportunity to remove the poorest 40% of Fair Isle’s population a decade after that process is widely accepted as having come to an end in the Highlands and islands of Scotland? Correspondence in the lead-up to the emigration of the beleaguered islanders suggests that their departure, while portrayed as benevolent intervention and offering them opportunity in a new land, was accompanied by self-interested agendas on the part of landowners and their agents who facilitated their departure. The article argues that the 1862 Fair Isle emigration was a removal of unwanted families facilitated by ‘assistance’ to them that was couched in language of compassion and concern. Landed interests orchestrated ‘aid’ and engaged in soothing public rhetoric to achieve an end that was ultimately to their own benefit.

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Exclusion rules: Alyssa A Hunziker, ‘Chinese Exclusion, Indigeneity, and Settler-Colonial Refusal in C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold’, MELUS, 2023

13Apr23

Excerpt: C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020) begins with a simple epigraph: “This land is not your land.” More than just a contestation of the Woody Guthrie classic folk song “This Land Is Your Land” recorded in 1944, the novel comes at a time of increasing national conversation about land ownership and the United States’ settler-colonial present.

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