« Older posts
Newer posts »

Medieval settler colonialism: Lisa Wolverton, ‘The Elbian Region as Predatory Landscape, 900–1200 CE: Enslavement, Slaughter, and Settler Colonialism’, Mediaevalia, 43, 2022, pp. 101-135

21Nov22

Excerpt: My aim in this article is simple: to draw the attention of the community of scholars interested in the history of enslavement to the lands along and east of the river Elbe in the central Middle Ages.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler museums: Pierre Walter, ‘Decolonizing US settler-colonial narratives in living history museums: the Pilgrims as first people?’ Journal of Heritage Tourism, 2022

21Nov22

Abstract: Museums around the world are recognizing their responsibility to repudiate violent legacies of colonialism and decolonize collections, exhibits and interpretation. In North America, decolonization has meant repatriating sacred artifacts, sites and bodies to Indigenous and other dispossessed people; presenting counter-narratives to white settler-colonial history; challenging racist, sexist and other negative stereotypes and histories; and teaching the legacies of violence against Indigenous Peoples, enslaved Black Africans and other groups brutalized by settler-colonialism. Decolonization also means Indigenous and other marginalized people telling their own stories, co-designing exhibits, and developing non-colonial alternatives to museums to research, preserve, celebrate and educate about their heritage and history. This paper examines the historical narratives found in Plimoth Patuxet living history museum alongside those presented by local Wampanoag People. Findings include an elaboration of settler-colonial, bicultural and decolonizing narratives. The paper concludes with a discussion on centering decolonizing narratives in museums.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Criminalizing Indigenous hunting and settler colonialism in Taiwan: Wei-Chieh Jarita Chen, Land is Life: Settler Colonial Governance of National Parks and Hunting in Taiwan, Honors dissertation, Macalester College, 2022

21Nov22

Abstract: This thesis situates Taiwan as a settler colonial state by examining the discourse around the governance of national parks and the criminalization of Indigenous hunting. Placed in the context of historical patterns of land dispossession and cultural genocide, these two issues represent the ongoing process of settler colonialism and the reproduction of settler colonial relations through environmentalism. I focus on the narratives around three case studies: the controversial and ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the Maqaw National Park, the Tumpu Daingaz buluo’s struggle with the Yushan National Park, and the Tama Talum Indigenous hunting constitutional reinterpretation case. I argue that settler colonial framings of Indigenous/environmental issues enable the continued enactment of colonial relations and policies. Settler narratives and environmentalism perpetuate settler colonialism through what Métis scholar Max Liboiron explains as the assumption of access to Indigenous land, cultures, and knowledge. These cases are often framed as a progressive and benevolent government inclusion of Indigenous cultures and ecological knowledge. However, a settler colonial lens of analysis demonstrates that these moves of settler inclusivity serve to preserve settler legitimacy and futures in Taiwan while deeper contentions over Indigenous sovereignty remain unresolved. Indigenous voices within these stories reveal a throughline of ongoing resistance and resurgence, offering alternative understandings that center Indigenous land and life. While settler narratives portray and encourage limiting frameworks that prioritize settler interests, Indigenous narratives and activism expand the ways for Indigenous self-determination, futures, and land relations.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settlers in the face of decolonisation: Emanuele Ertola, ‘Blowing Against the Winds of Change: Settlers Facing Decolonization in Eritrea, 1941–52’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2022

16Nov22

Abstract: The literature on decolonization in settler contexts is characterized by an almost exclusive focus on the Anglo-French world, and by a marked emphasis on violence as the predominant feature of the settlers’ reaction to change. This article aims to challenge this assumption. Eritrea – like the other former Italian colonies – is certainly a peculiar case of early, top-down decolonization; but the actors on the field were anything but passive spectators. In the 10 years in which the international community decided the fate of Eritrea, there were a lively political confrontation and an armed struggle with anti-colonial nuances, while the settlers organized themselves politically to defend their interests. The complex variety of strategies with which they reacted to the end of colonial power constitutes an example of the non-binary relationship between former colonizers and former colonized; it enriches our knowledge of how whites reacted to decolonization in Africa; and it helps to complicate the monolithic idea of settlers as an undifferentiated transnational category.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler civilisationism: Alexandra McFadden, ‘Wardens of Civilisation: The Political Ecology of Australian Far-Right Civilisationism’, Antipode, 2022

16Nov22

Abstract: The notion of a superior “civilisation” has been a hallmark of the politics of Western institutions and fringe white supremacists alike. Known ideologically as “civilisationism”, it has occupied a prominent position in the ideology of the Australian farright. Paying tribute to their settler-colonial origins, the far-right has consistently promoted “white civilisation”, even inspiring terrorist attacks. Despite this propensity for violence, far-right civilisationism remains largely unexplored. Through investigating a dataset of Australian far-right content, this paper reveals civilisationism as a significant part of their ideology, an ideology which relies on the idealisation of European technologies and environments to render Indigenous land and people uncivilised. A critical narrative analysis of the data illustrates the ways that these ecological factors are drawn into narrative to articulate Australian far-right civilisationism, an ideology inseparable from the political ecology of European history and colonialism, that today represents a particularly virulent version of its legacy.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Feral settler indigenising: Simon Farley, ‘Mateship with Brumbies: Horses, Defiance and Indigeneity in the Australian Alps’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2022

16Nov22

Abstract: The feral horses of the Australian Alps—“brumbies”, as they are usually called—have occupied considerable space in settler-Australian culture since the 1890 publication of “The Man from Snowy River”. From the 1980s onwards, brumbies have been culled periodically to preserve “native” alpine ecosystems, which have not evolved to support hoofed animals. Such culls, however, are often highly controversial. This article uses Sara Ahmed’s concept of affective economies to explain why the culling of brumbies generates such heated debate and intense public outpourings of emotion. I relate the hyperaffective public performances of brumby supporters to a crisis in settler identity in Australia: as Indigenous activism has undermined the legitimacy of settler claims to belonging, some settlers have begun to use brumbies to assert their own kind of indigeneity.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Differently settlers? Amir Reicher, ‘Settler-colonialism in the West Bank from the standpoint of its Mizrahi settlers’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2022

16Nov22

Abstract: This article is about Israel’s West Bank settler-colonial project from the standpoint of settlers who are of Mizrahi origin (i.e. Jews of African or Middle Eastern descent). While historically predominantly Ashkenazi (i.e. Jews of European descent), with time many Mizrahim have moved to the West Bank and joined the settlement project. And yet, there is more or less scholarly silence regarding the existence of Mizrahi West Bank settlers, and when they are addressed, their motivations are reduced to simplified “economic” considerations; in a way that devoid them of political consciousness compared to their Ashkenazi counterparts. While there has been an immense body of work dealing with ethnic tension between settlers and the indigenous population, by centreing the experience of a particular group of Mizrahi settlers, this article examines how internal ethnic tensions within the society of settlers play into and are transformed in the settler-colonial process.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Comparative transindigeneity (against settler colonialisms): Priyanka Shivadas, A TransIndigenous Study of Indigenous Australian and Adivasi/Tribal Literatures: Seeking Literary and Thematic Connections, PhD dissertation, UNSW, 2022

13Nov22

Abstract: This thesis juxtaposes Indigenous Australian literature and Adivasi/tribal literature—two self-governing bodies of Indigenous literature differently situated: one in an Anglophone, white settler-nation in the Pacific region and the other in a non-Anglophone, postcolonial nation-state in Asia. Studies exploring critical connections between Indigenous writing from Australia and Adivasi/tribal writing from India are rare. A considerable amount of scholarship brings together the literatures of Indigenous Australians, Māori, Native American and First Nations peoples of Canada, who share much in their responses to European settler-colonialism, but little ventures into comparative study of the literatures of the Indigenous peoples of Australia and India. This thesis is guided by Native American scholar Chadwick Allen’s trans-Indigenous methodologies, which open up possibilities for global Indigenous literary studies by building from specificities and across, through and beyond differences in diverse Indigenous contexts. Beginning from a place of accepted difference and distance, this thesis thus seeks connection and comparability, framing similarities through identifying a shared set of issues/themes and genres. This study finds the following literary and thematic concerns are shared between Indigenous Australian and Adivasi/tribal writing: (a) land and labour, (b) bilanguaging, (c) editorial negotiations in cross-cultural, collaborative life writing, (d) gender and sexuality as sites of decolonial critique, and (e) responses to over-policing and death in police custody. These shared concerns structure and organise the thesis. They also form the basis for trans-Indigenous analysis of a selection of illuminating case studies. In each case, analysis seeks to yield Indigenous-centred, productive readings of juxtaposed Indigenous Australian and Adivasi/tribal texts, resulting from the tension generated between their distinctiveness and shared (post)colonial concerns. Ultimately, this study disrupts familiar patterns of comparison and encourages new models of critical thought in global Indigenous literary studies.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

How can one not see it? Nader Hakim, Ghina Abi-Ghannam, Rim Saab, Mai Albzour, Yara Zebian, Glenn Adams, ‘Turning the lens in the study of precarity: On experimental social psychology’s acquiescence to the settler-colonial status quo in historic Palestine’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 2022

13Nov22

Abstract: This review examines the coloniality infused within the conduct and third reporting of experimental research in what
is commonly referred to as the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’. Informed by a settler colonial framework and decolonial theory, our review measured the appearance of sociopolitical terms and critically analysed the reconciliation measures. We found that papers were three times more likely to describe the context through the framework of intractable conflict compared to occupation. Power asymmetry was often acknowledged and then flattened via, for instance, adjacent mentions of Israeli and Palestinian physical violence. Two-thirds of the dependent variables were not related to material claims (e.g. land, settlements, or Palestinian refugees) but rather to the feelings and attitudes of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. Of the dependent measures that did consider material issues, theynearly universally privileged conditions of the two-state solution and compromises on refugees’ right of return that would violate international law. The majority of the studies sampled Jewish–Israeli participants exclusively, and the majority of authors were affiliated with Israeli institutions. We argue that for social psychology to offer insights that coincide with the decolonization of historic Palestine, the discipline will have to begin by contextualizing its research within the material conditions and history that socially stratify the groups.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The horror of settler colonialism (again): Kali Simmons, ‘The Savage Screen: Vengeful Indigeneity in the Modern American Horror Film‘, Fear 2000: Horror Undying, 08/05/22

11Nov22

Abstract: To live under the conditions of settler-colonialism as an Indigenous person is to exist under a terrifying structure of dispossession and violence. And yet, American cinema has tended to imagine the opposite by rendering white settlers and the state as the victims of terrifying Indigenous others seeking violent revenge. This talk examines representations of Indigenous peoples in contemporary American horror cinema from the 1970s to the present, focusing on the trope of the vengeful Indigenous killer. I link these contemporary representations to early colonial texts which circulated during initial “contact” with Indigenous peoples and the colonization of the Americas in order to gesture towards a genealogy of the revenge trope. Although in recent years Hollywood has begun to render Indigenous peoples more sympathetically, these narratives nonetheless continue to perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Indigenous peoples that are premised upon western white supremacist and patriarchal worldviews. Indigenous filmmakers, writers, critics, and audiences have responded to this long history of harmful representation in their works and in doing so they expose these works’ foundational colonial ideologies and challenge longstanding national mythos.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »