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Another look at someone else’s settler experiment: Jürgen Tampke (ed.), Wunderbar Country: Germans Look at Australia, 1850–1914, Routledge, 2022 [1982]

11Nov22

Description: Wunderbar Country (1982) examines the experiences of Australia’s second largest migrant community, the Germans. Many Germans saw Australia as a land of social equality and mobility, with unlimited resources and economic possibilities. This book analyses Australian social legislation and the labour movement, the subject of much debate in Germany. Articles present both sides to an argument, with some stating that Australia was indeed a workers’ paradise, the home of social progress; others point to miserable working conditions. It also deals with the experiences of immigrants from Germany to this new land: rural life in Bong Bong; a meeting with Ned Kelly; Adelaide in the 1850s; the wild gold town of Ballarat.


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Sporting Indigenous children under settler colonialism: Andrew Bennie, Jeremy Hapeta, Dan Henhawk, Audrey R. Giles, ‘Addressing the Needs of Indigenous Children?: Coach Education Programs in Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia’, in Martin Toms, Ruth Jeanes (eds), Routledge Handbook of Coaching Children in Sport, Routledge, 2022

11Nov22

Abstract: Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand all share histories of devastating acts of colonialism against Indigenous peoples. As a result of this colonial history, and despite profound and enduring cultural strength and resilience, Indigenous children in these countries being produced as being “at risk.” Sport has long been used as a tool to connect with at-risk youth; unsurprisingly, Indigenous children are often the targets of sport-focused interventions that are meant to “improve” areas in which they are deemed as being deficient. Sport coaches, thus, can play key roles in the lives of Indigenous children. Without sufficient training, however, coaches who are meant to play positive roles in Indigenous children’s lives can (re)produce a sport environment that enables racism and reinforces neo-colonialism. This chapter examines coach education programs in Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, and the extent to which they provide opportunities for coaches to become familiar with Indigenous approaches to sport and sport pedagogy. This chapter argues that it is crucial for national coaching bodies to use culturally safe approaches to sport coaching to ensure that prospective coaches learn about the strengths and resilience of Indigenous peoples, the impacts and legacies of colonisation, and their role of influence in sport contexts over time and Indigenous children’s sport participation.


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There is no settler colonialism if there is Indigenous sovereignty (kin): Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future, 1517 Media, Broadleaf Books, 2022

09Nov22

Description: We find our way forward by going back. The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won’t just send them all “home.” Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to “unforget” our history. This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught.


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There is no settler colonialism without exogenous peoples: Sophie Crowe, ‘Racial others & settler colonialism in Israel: migrant rights claims refracted through colonial logics’, Identities, 2022

09Nov22

Abstract: From 2006, thousands of migrants crossed into Israel after travelling through the Sinai Desert. The majority came from Eritrea and Sudan, seeking asylum from state violence. Israel’s government classified them as ‘infiltrators’ using a law enacted in 1954 to criminalize Palestinians seeking to return to expropriated lands. Drawing on fieldwork in Israel in 2018–2019, the article examines dimensions of a process of political subjectivation among these migrants and citizens in solidarity with them. It is concerned with the performative effects of a struggle migrants waged for refugee status by contesting their construction in government discourse as infiltrators. It argues their claims became refracted through debates over contours of a fissured collective self, which challenged the limits of political community. While their claims disrupted the order’s dividing lines, the article argues the latter proved durable, that conditions of possibility for disruptive speech are mediated by overlapping structures of colonialism and racializations.


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There is no settler colonialism without settlers: Joanne Smith Finley, ‘Tabula rasa: Han settler colonialism and frontier genocide in “re-educated” Xinjiang’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 12, 2, 2022, pp. 341-356

09Nov22

Abstract: In his analysis of the frontier genocides waged against the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia, Benjamin Madley (2004) identified three phases. The first is initiated by colonial invasion: economic and political frictions develop as settlers and indigenous peoples struggle for limited resources and power. In Phase Two, indigenous peoples attack settlers to reclaim lost resources and land, and this prompts a genocidal military campaign. In Phase Three, the settlers’ government incarcerates the indigenous peoples in concentration camps, where it continues genocide by attrition (through malnutrition, inadequate medical care, overwork, unsanitary conditions, and violence). All three genocides began with the assertion that the land was empty or should be made empty. Here, I consider how far the concept tabula rasa (“a map scraped clean”) applies to contemporary “re-educated” Xinjiang on China’s northwest frontier.


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There is no settler colonialism without Indigenous peoples: Musapir, Sean R. Roberts, ‘Should Uyghurs be considered an Indigenous people?’ FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 12, 2, 2022, pp. 373-381

09Nov22

Abstract: This article asks whether Uyghurs should be considered an Indigenous people. In doing so, it highlights the contested issues this question raises and seeks to initiate a more comprehensive debate on the question among Uyghurs themselves, who ultimately decide the appropriateness of such identification. The Chinese state is implementing an intense campaign against Uyghurs that bears striking resemblance to those historically waged by other settler-colonial regimes against the Indigenous peoples they displaced. Embracing indigeneity could serve as a useful strategy for at least contextualizing Uyghurs’ present repression and dispossession, but Uyghurs in the diaspora are ambivalent about the concept. The article examines both why Uyghurs can be considered an Indigenous people under UN criteria and why they are reticent to embrace this status. While Uyghurs’ ultimate acceptance of indigeneity as a means of self-identification would require the participation of all Uyghurs, including those living in the PRC who are currently unable to engage in such discussions, we argue that even a limited debate on the relevance of indigeneity to their identity among Uyghurs in exile would widen the possibilities of responses to the acts of repression, erasure, and dispossession carried out against their people inside China.


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Settler colonial commemorations do not reconcile: Elizabeth Nelson, Anne Godlewska, ‘Settler Ignorance and Public Memory: Kingston, Ontario’, Geographical Review, 2022

08Nov22

Abstract: Since the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, municipalities are increasingly addressing reconciliation in their practice, including new engagement with Indigenous heritage and public memory. Nevertheless, municipal perspectives of heritage are frequently colonial and result in commemorative landscapes that reinforce official national narratives of history and identity. These landscapes limit expressions of Indigenous heritage and reinforce settler ignorance. This article explores settler-colonial commemorative practice in the context of reconciliation in Canada and presents what was learned through conversations with Indigenous peoples in Kingston, a mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada. It emphasizes the need for productive settler discomfort in addressing settler ignorance and considers how reimagined places of public memory might unsettle hegemonic heritage narratives in Canadian cities. Noting the limitations of settler-Canadian commemoration in the context of reconciliation, it posits how decolonizing commemorative practices might offer new pathways for building relations.


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The university as a dispossessing settler colonial landlord: Joel Barnes, ‘Australian universities and Atlantic slavery’, History Australia, 2022

05Nov22

Abstract: This article seeks to open a conversation about Australian universities and Atlantic slavery. To an extent previously unexamined, Australian universities benefited financially, administratively and intellectually from the proceeds and legacies of slavery in the Caribbean and the American South. The research follows the examples of American and British universities’ examinations of their historical links to slavery, and builds upon recent scholarship that has emphasised the significance to the growth of Australian settler colonialism of the large-scale compensation paid to slave-owners following emancipation in the British Empire in 1833. The article reports on the findings of a survey of around 1,200 benefactions to the six oldest Australian universities from 1850 to 1939; it also examines the family and financial links to slavery of educators and key administrators in Australian universities’ early histories. The Dixson family of tobacconists, donors to several universities, is considered as an extended case study. The significance of universities’ connections to slavery in the Australian context has to be understood in terms of imperial transformations and expansions of settler colonialism, and to be thought and told in relation to universities’ Indigenous histories.


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Harassing settlers: Mahdi Sabbagh, ‘Sumud: Repertoires of Resistance in Silwan’, Public Culture, 2022

05Nov22

Abstract: This essay aims to identify methods and strategies used to manipulate the Palestinian urban fabric. First, the essay will focus on Israeli settler-colonial activity through a study of the deployed tactics of de-development, destruction, and harassment. Second, it will focus on Silwan’s popular movements and their culture of resistance. Instead of viewing their resistance as reactionary or as an act of survival, the essay attempts to frame it as an active praxis. Silwan’s collective movement’s various means of manipulation—sumud, communal awareness, outreach, and the sit-in tent—form a powerful set of resistance tactics that embody possibly universal lessons in urban resilience.


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Tangled settler histories: Max Kaiser, Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022

03Nov22

Description: Provides the first book-length study of Australian Jewish antifascism, utilising a transnational lens; Considers the mutually reinforcing ideologies of settler colonialism, both in Palestine and Australia; Aims to spur debate on Jewish politics, antifascism and settler colonialism internationally.


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