settler colonial studies blog

The health of the Indigenous population (another’s settler predicament): Osama Tanous, ‘”You, as of Now, Are Someone Else!”: Minoritization, Settler Colonialism, and Indigenous Health’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2023

08Mar23

Abstract: This article challenges the dominant notion that the health of Palestinians inside the Green Line can be framed or understood as an issue of “minority health” characterized by a “gap” that needs bridging in order for health equity to be attained. It situates the health of Palestinians in Israel within the realm of Indigenous health and claims that the settler-colonial nature of the state of Israel, the minoritization of Palestinians, and their depeasantization through land policies and water infrastructures have produced an Indigenous community alienated from its lands and from nature. These processes, I argue, contribute to adverse health outcomes that are then reported simply as “minority health” phenomena, chalked up to behavioral patterns or biology. The article seeks to challenge the entire notion of “minority health” as a purportedly neutral statistical unit and to launch a conversation on the health effects of minoritization in settler-colonial contexts.

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How to best remove? (the settler’s predicament): Noura Erakat, ‘”A thorn in their throat”: planning for settler colonial removal in Hizma’, Human Geography, 2023

08Mar23

Abstract: Hizma is a Palestinian village historically located within the Jerusalem Governate that Israel has arbitrarily severed from it in its quest to expand and entrench a Greater Jerusalem. To eliminate the village and its natives, the settler state has incrementally deployed a series of urban planning policies that together constitute an eliminatory infrastructure. These have included overlapping and tenuous jurisdictional areas; movement restrictions imposed through closures, checkpoints, and surveillance regimes; transformation of common lands into a state-run nature preserve; and the construction of the Apartheid Wall through the village. These measures have concentrated Hizma’s residents into an urban area and severely isolated them from their agricultural lands, places of worship, education, families, and health facilities. Based on field work conducted between 3 August and 18 August 2019, this essay sets out to explore two phenomena. First, it seeks to understand how Palestinians navigate and resist Israel’s eliminatory infrastructure. Second, it explores what this infrastructure revealed about the relationship between the violence of settler colonialism and the banal administration of urban planning. Using autoethnography, this essay documents the journey of Palestinians in Hizma across three eliminatory terrains erected by planning policies: through the Apartheid Wall, within the suffocating physical and juridical bounds of entrapment, and into the community’s expropriated spring.

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Annexing or not-annexing? (the settler’s dilemma): Merav Amir, ‘Unfastening Israel’s Future from the Occupation: Israeli Plans for Partial Annexation of West Bank Territory’, Antipode, 2023

08Mar23

Abstract: Israeli plans to partially annex West Bank territory have mainly been perceived as frustrating the two-state solution, and as putting Palestine/Israel on a path leading to the one-state alternative. This paper analyses partial annexation plans without assuming that the future of Palestine/Israel would necessarily abide by either statist resolution. It argues that by ostensibly distancing Israel’s hold of the West Bank from an identifiable configuration of a belligerent occupation, partial annexation is offered to Jewish Israelis as a path for detaching the futurity of the two nations, and as a trajectory for normalising the Israeli state, without having to make what much of this public would see as painful concessions. It further explores settlers’ objections to such plans, claiming that even a partial incorporation of West Bank territory into formal Israel is expected to erode the exclusivity of Jewish domination which Israel has been upholding in its settlercolonial frontier.

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Imagining the settler (literarily): Brian Reinken, ‘Unsettlement: Destabilizing Development in Southern Africa’s Settler Fiction’, ELH, 90, 1, 2023, pp. 205-235

08Mar23

Abstract: In the midst of a turbulent decade, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) registered the uncertain future of British colonialism in southern Africa by endowing their white protagonists with alternative possible selves whose pluralism complements the alternative possible instantiations of the settler colony. Forking, parallel, and recursive developmental trajectories lead these novels’ characters toward multiple, sometimes contradictory, future states. What results is a dynamic, antiteleological model of Bildung that conceives of the self as a pluralized assortment of potential subjects.

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Settler colonialism and liberalism are imbricated: Theodra Bane, A Question of Rights: Settler Colonialism, Racialization, and the Political Economy of Liberalism, PhD dissertation, Villanova University, 2022

08Mar23

Abstract: In times of crisis, liberalism is frequently upheld as the only alternative to authoritarianism because of its foregrounding of rights. This is the internal mechanism to governance that enshrines in law the protection of the individual. Further, rights frameworks allow for ongoing amelioration and expansion, rectifying previous practices of exclusion. However, this positive narrative does not consider ongoing systems of exclusion within liberalism. Are modes of exclusionary violence within liberalism a misapplication of rights, or are rights as a structure endemic to an exclusionary model of governance? The work of this dissertation takes seriously the latter position by theorizing the structure of rights relations themselves. Under liberalism, rights function to protect the individual insofar as that individual’s self and interests can be made legible to the state apparatus. Specifically, rights within liberalism rely on a dual ideological function to identify their proper subject: the reduction of land into property; and the reduction of persons into bodies. Taken together, these two structurally foundational components of rights posit an ontologically salient ideal of the liberal citizen—the normative self-possessive human subject. Rights discourse thus becomes a necessary condition for addressing liberalism as a political economy because it gives us an ideological mode with which to track the obfuscation and denial of the economic realm in governance and the normative, regulatory demands on subjects to be legible to liberalism in the first place. This dissertation will demonstrate that settler colonialism and racialization are not anomalies of liberal application, but endemic to how such a system governance operates through the demand of legibility for rights to function. The work of this dissertation is not to dismiss the salient power of rights regimes in fighting for a more just world. Rather, it is an analysis of how rights function in our current shared ideological schema. Rights are constructed and premised upon the capitalist property relation—the possession of the self and of objects for accumulation. This logical premise means that who counts as self-possessive or human enough to participate or be worthy of recognition will be an ongoing terrain of contestation within the framework itself.

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With several interventions on settler colonialism in particular (unfortunately, the publisher does not advertise the table of contents – I thought they wanted to sell their books): Nadia Y. Kim, Pawan Dhingra (eds), Disciplinary Futures: Sociology in Conversation with American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies, NYU Press, 2023

08Mar23

Description: Reimagines how race, ethnicity, imperialism, and colonialism can be central to social science research
and methods. There is a growing consensus that the discipline of sociology and the social sciences broadly need to engage more thoroughly with the legacy and the present day of colonialism, Indigenous/settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism in the United States and globally. In Disciplinary Futures, a cross-section of scholars comes together to engage sociology and the social sciences by way of these paradigms, particularly from the influence of disciplines of American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies. With original essays from scholars such as Yến Lê Espiritu, Sunaina Maira, Hōkūlani K. Aikau, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Ben Carrington, Yvonne Sherwood, and Gilda L. Ochoa, among others, Disciplinary Futures offers concrete pathways for how the social sciences can expand from the limiting frameworks they traditionally use to study race and racism, namely: the black-white binary, the privileging of the nation-state, the fixation on the US mainland, the underappreciation of post- and settler-colonial studies, the liberal assumptions, and the limited conception of what constitutes data. In turn, the contributors reveal that sociology has many useful questions, methodologies, and approaches to offer scholars of American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies. Disciplinary Futuresis an important work, one which renders these disciplines more intellectually expansive and thus better able to tackle urgent issues of injustice.

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Zionism is a settler colonial enterprise: Joseph B. Yudin, The Protestant Settlers of Israel: Missionaries, Millenarians, and the African Hebrew Israelites, Rowman & Littlefield, 2023

08Mar23

Description: When conjuring an image of “settlers” in the Holy Land, one hardly envisions vast numbers of European and North American Evangelical Protestants. Yet this is precisely the picture set forth in this book. The region has witnessed settlement, conquest, destruction, and resettlement from time immemorial. But the story of Protestants settling in the Land and staking their own claim, while missionizing among the population, has yet to be told in its fullness. The Protestant Settlers of Israel tells that tale, including a discussion of the present-day whereabouts of some 100,000 Protestant individuals living in the State of Israel, with a steady rate of expansion and growth in some circles.

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Indigenous Nation Building against settler colonialism: Miriam Jorgensen, Alison Vivian, Anthea Compton, Donna Murray, Debra Evans, Janine Gertz, ‘Yes, The Time Is Now: Indigenous Nation Policy Making for Self-determined Futures’, in Nikki Moodie, Sarah Maddison (eds), Public Policy and Indigenous Futures, Springer, 2023

06Mar23

Abstract: There is a proliferation of ideas about the meaning and content of the term ‘Indigenous nation building’ (INB). Returning to the findings of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, INB refers to the exercising of decision-making authority and strengthening of a nation’s capacity for legitimate governing, which is associated with achieving a nation’s self-determined goals. In Australia, a number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations are doing exactly this. The Gunditjmara, Gugu Badhun, and Wiradjuri nations are working to rebuild their governing foundations, strengthen community governance and, in so doing, advance nation goals. These nations have been able to do so not because of settler colonial policy support, but because of their own Indigenous public policy. The Gunditjmara, Gugu Badhun and Wiradjuri nations have worked to seize available opportunities that assist in advancing their self-determined goals, and to reject those that do not. Current shifts in settler colonial government policy may offer further opportunities that nations can leverage from to support their strategising for self-governing.

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Robotic settler colonialism: Ali Hisham Musleh, To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth: On the Automation of Settler Colonialism in Palestine, PhD dissertation, University of Hawai’i, 2023

06Mar23

Abstract: How do weapons make the colonial worlds that Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis inhabit? My dissertation attends to this question starting from an experience shared by Palestinians: that the majority of us have never encountered an Israeli settler, whether in uniform or out of uniform, who is not attached to a weapon, be it an assault rifle, a fighter jet, or a tank, etc. Taking this experience as a philosophical provocation, I subject the settler colony to a form of insurgent study exercised everyday by Palestinians that confronts the settler as contingent and transitory human-weapon ensembles. These studies are bodying and worlding. They reveal and unravel the spatialized embodiments, sensations, affective terrains, orientations and regimes of truth that weapons generate as lived world(s) of experience. In doing so, Palestinians exercise a fleshy sociality that constantly puts into question the self-evidence of the settler and the settler state.Thinking with Palestinians and alongside peoples of struggle, my dissertation is a performance in reverse engineering that moves from micrological sites, scenes and bodies of war, to macro formations of sovereignty. My itinerary focuses primarily on encounters with remote and robotic weaponry as technologies of engineering spatial and procedural distance between the settler and weapon. My task has been to show how that distance became the abyssal site from which forms of war, apartheid, and erasure emerge that consign settlers to martial automatisms that materialize and mediate their existence. The result is a work that dissects settler colonialism as a form of life inseparable from weapon power, as I also consider Palestinian rehearsals of decolonial life in the robotic age of war.

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Memes on settlers: Ia Morrison-Young, Julia de Bres, ‘Decolonial Māori memes in Aotearoa’, AlterNative, 2023

02Mar23

Abstract: This article examines the contemporary phenomenon of decolonial Māori memes, created by young urban Māori to advance the project of decolonizing Aotearoa (New Zealand). We weave Kaupapa Māori (philosophy and practice of Māori people) theory with Foucauldian visual analysis and critical multimodality to analyze 154 memes posted on three Instagram accounts from 2019 to 2021. We demonstrate how the Māori meme creators use discursive strategies to advance decolonization locally, drawing on Māori concepts and practices, including kotahitanga (solidarity), whanaungatanga (relationship-building), whakapapa (ancestry), tino rangatiratanga (self-determination), and use of te reo Māori (the Māori language). We distinguish two functional categories: boundary-marking memes that reference racist Pākehā (New Zealander with European ancestry) behaviors that perpetuate colonization, and solidarity-building memes that reference Māori acts of decolonization. We argue that the humor of the memes provides a potential decolonization roadmap for New Zealanders via its critique of Pākehā actions and cultivation of kotahitanga among Māori.

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