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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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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