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Architectural settler colonialism: Robert Flahive, ‘Settler colonialism within the settler state: remaking the past through the built environment in Casablanca’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2022

16Oct22

Abstract: This paper frames Morocco as a settler state in order to map how the structural logic of settler colonialism persists through the transformation of the built environment in contemporary Casablanca. Rather than focus on commonly-referenced settler states, such as Israel or America, this paper analyzes Morocco, where formal decolonization occurred through the end of the French Protectorate 1956, but there has been an ongoing settler colonial project in Western Sahara since 1975. The logic of elimination of Indigenous populations and territorial expansion of the settler polity endure through urban planning, documentation of the built environment, and architectural preservation. I argue that the structural logic of settler colonialism was produced by the convergence of French military strategy of domination during the Protectorate era was adapted through forms of knowledge and institutions shaping urban space through architectural preservation in contemporary Casablanca. I map the production of knowledge by French academics, then show how this knowledge shaped the preservation agenda that reproduced the structural logic of settler colonialism. The entanglement of institutions, forms of knowledge, and the applications of that knowledge by preservationists highlights how the structural logic of settler colonialism adapts to the changing conditions for settler colonial theory.


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Settler green colonialism: Ghada Sasa, ‘Oppressive pines: Uprooting Israeli green colonialism and implanting Palestinian A’wna’, Politics, 2022

16Oct22

Abstract: This article provides a comprehensive overview of Israeli green colonialism, denoting the apartheid state’s misappropriation of environmentalism to eliminate the Indigenous people of Palestine and usurp its resources. I focus on the violence of ‘protected areas’, encompassing national parks, forests, and nature reserves. This article argues that Israel primarily establishes them to (1) justify land grab; (2) prevent the return of Palestinian refugees; (3) dehistoricise, Judaise, and Europeanise Palestine, erasing Palestinian identity and suppressing resistance to Israeli oppression; and (4) greenwash its apartheid image. I situate Israeli green colonialism within the broader histories of Western environmentalism – particularly its perpetuation of the human–nature binary – and Zionism. Furthermore, I identify various means through which Palestinians and their land resist this phenomenon. I also explore Palestinian environmentalism, which is influenced by the concepts of a’wna (collaboration), sumud (steadfastness), and a’wda (return), in addition to the Islamic concept of tawhid (unity). I offer it as an alternative environmentalism, which is holistic, anti-racist, feminist, socialist, and nonlinear, while rejecting the trope of the ecological savage. Overall, the intrinsic link between all humans, and them and the environment must be recognised, to realise a just and sustainable society, in Palestine and beyond.


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A settler colonial myth (and projection): E. N. Anderson, Raymond Pierotti, ‘Appendix 3: The “Wasteful” Native Debunked’, in E. N. Anderson, Raymond Pierotti, Respect and Responsibility in Pacific Coast Indigenous Nations, Springer 2022

16Oct22

Abstract: The settler-society myth of the “wasteful” Native Americans, who exterminated the Pleistocene megafauna and drove millions of buffalo over cliffs, persists in spite of criticism. The present book must include some debunking of this myth. Native American stories make it clear that overhunting did occur and was recognized; it was also stopped when it did appear. Wise use remained the rule.


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Subterranean settler colonialism: Isabel Lockhart, Storytelling and the Subsurface: Indigenous Fiction, Extraction, and the Energetic Present, PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2022

16Oct22

Abstract: Storytelling and the Subsurface concerns the relationship between Indigenous land and the generation of energy. Specifically, it reads contemporary literature as responsive to the enormous economic growth of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Under the dispossessive structure of settler colonialism, exponential growth has a particular bearing on Indigenous peoples, whose lands are tapped for energy resources and critical minerals for infrastructure. The project moves across carbon and non-carbon fuels to consider energy as a system of social relations that eats up lands, waters, and ecologies. Showing how seemingly the most “settled” lands are charged with other attachments, meanings, and values, I argue that contemporary Indigenous literatures offer a form of critical transition storytelling into not just a “green” future but a decolonized one. This reveals some of the tensions between Indigenous resistance and environmentalism at large and provides new ways of considering the fraught intersection of Indigenous studies and the environmental humanities. In each of my first three chapters, I look to the ways that Indigenous literatures on subsurface extraction diverge from or nuance the dominant environmental motifs of urgency, rights, and trans-localism, and I analyze how Indigenous storying constitutes a specific form of environmental narrative related to rebuilding kinship relations in an extractive zone. The project moves from Cree, Dene, and Métis lands in Alberta, Canada, to Waanyi country in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia, to Laguna Pueblo in the U.S. Southwest, and finally to Ngāi Tahu lands on the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. It moves from tar, to zinc, to uranium, and to alluvial gold across literature by Warren Cariou, Alexis Wright, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Eleanor Catton. I am interested in the textures of struggle across situated but globally resonant locales, which together build an impression of the conceptually and aesthetically distinct character of Indigenous resistance. With a turn to the nineteenth-century Anglophone gold rushes, my fourth and final chapter shifts the lens to the storied, nostalgic place of subsurface extraction in cultures of settler colonialism.


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Settler colonialism is also an encounter: Katsuya Hirano, ‘Settler Colonialism as Encounter: On the Question of Racialization and Labor Power in the Dispossession of Ainu Lands’, in Yasuko Takezawa, Akio Tanabe (eds), Race and Migration in the Transpacific, Routledge, 2022

16Oct22

Access the chapter here.


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Solidarity against settler colonialism: Connor Woodman, ‘The West Papuan liberation movement, Indonesian settler colonialism and Western imperialism from an international solidarity perspective’, The International Journal of Human Rights, 2022

16Oct22

Abstract: Getting solidarity right, as West Papuans struggle against a colonial genocide, is crucial. Distilling a non-Papuan UK citizen’s experience of several years working with the West Papuan liberation movement, this article offers a historical, anti-imperialist framework for thought and action in solidarity with West Papua. Counter-posing its approach to the depoliticised framework of leading Western human rights organisations, the article places three terrains of the struggle – the Indonesian settler colonial state, the West Papuan liberation movement, and Western solidarity networks – in a global historical perspective, examining the dynamic interactions between them in order to unravel the ties that bind the Indonesian state to West Papua. The collaborations and connections between Indonesian elites and dominant Western sections are counter-posed to the possibility of an alliance between West Papuans and poorer Indonesians – but only if Western solidarity organisers are attentive to the role Western (neo)imperialism plays in structurally determining the genocidal form Indonesia’s colonisation takes.


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A settler colonial conversion: Dani Pickering, ‘Harm Received, Harm Caused: A Scottish Gael’s Journey to Becoming Pakeha’, Genealogy, 6, 82, 2022

16Oct22

Abstract: Beurla an donais. The language of the devil. This is how my great-great-great grandfather, Neil McLeod, described English in his native Gaelic as he grieved the loss of his wife Rebecca Henry in 1886. Even as he tried to distance himself socially and linguistically from the Anglophone world, however, he had already long since been caught up in its colonial machinery. After being cleared from his ancestral homeland of Raasay, Scotland in 1864 and relocated to the colonial frontier in Aotearoa New Zealand, Neil went on to spend more than fifteen years in the New Zealand Armed Constabulary and its reconstituted form, the New Zealand Police Force, before being killed on the job in 1890. Drawing on critical family history literature, firsthand accounts from Neil’s personal diaries, other family accounts and additional historical research, this article retraces Neil’s assimilation into white New Zealand. By unsettling the “constitutive forgetting” by which Neil and his descendants forsook our connection to Raasay and the Scottish Gàidhealtachd to become Pakeha settlers, I explore a history prior to and concurrent with the colonisation of Aotearoa which accounts for multi-ethnic Pakeha origins, beyond the Anglo-Saxon, and enables a deeper understanding of how and why Gaels such as Neil participated in the British Empire. I conclude by considering how Neil’s story deepens our understanding of how the settler-colonial subject is produced by highlighting the occasionally fine but always distinct line between coloniser and colonised.


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A settler colonial education: Arathi Sriprakash, Sophie Rudolph, Jessica Gerrard, Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State, Pluto Press, 2022

16Oct22

Description: Whiteness is not innate – it is learned. The systems of white domination that prevail across the world are not pregiven or natural. Rather, they are forged and sustained in social and political life. Learning Whiteness examines the material conditions, knowledge politics and complex feelings that create and relay systems of racial domination. Focusing on Australia, the authors demonstrate how whiteness is fundamentally an educational project – taught within education institutions and through public discourse – in active service of the settler colonial state. To see whiteness as learned is to recognise that it can be confronted. This book invites readers to reckon with past and present politics of education in order to imagine a future thoroughly divested from racism.


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Settler colonial triangulations: Conor Joseph Donnan, ‘An Empire Of Liberty?’ Irish Immigrants, Native Americans, And American Imperialism In The Trans-Mississippi West Between 1840 And 1940, PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2022

11Oct22

Abstract: This dissertation examines the ways in which Indigenous peoples and Irish people combatted or contributed to U.S. imperialism in the American West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1840 and 1940, the United States engaged in Westward expansion, displacing Native Americans in the name of imperialism, capitalism, and Anglo-Protestantism. Simultaneously, Anglo colonization in Ireland prompted millions of Irish people to flee to the United States. This dissertation follows the complex interactions between the Irish, Native Americans, and Anglo-Protestants in Ireland and North America. In the American West, the Irish became the unwitting foot soldiers for U.S. expansion, engaging in bloody assaults on Indigenous people. They worked with Anglo-Protestants to undermine Native American nations in exchange for wealth and social mobility. Despite this, some Irish Catholics and Indigenous peoples found common ground in shared colonial experiences. They expressed political solidarity, used anti-Anglo language, cooperated to challenge Anglo-Protestantism, and promoted alternative visions of the world based on their traditional values. The mutual admiration and transatlantic solidarity led to intermarriage, joint political campaigns, innovations in the labor movement, and weapon exchanges. The project draws on government reports, military records, newspapers, memoirs, diaries, letters, interviews, business records, and artwork. It also utilizes Indigenous letters and pictographs such as the Waníyetu iyáwapi, known as Winter Counts. Reading Anglo-Protestant sources against the grain in conjunction with Irish and Indigenous material helps provide insight into a neglected tale of transatlantic solidarity. In privileging the voices of Indigenous and Irish peoples, the dissertation offers valuable insights into alternatives to Anglo-Protestant hegemony, imperial expansion, and capitalist economic structures.


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Settler assimilation far away: Samantha J. Kramer, Arctic Assimilation: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in the Canadian Arctic and Carlisle Indian Industrial School,  MA dissertation, The College of William and Mary, 2022

11Oct22

Abstract: Previous generations of Canadian historians have focused on welfare when examining the twenty-first century colonization of the territory of Nunavut. Patrick Wolfe’s theory of settler colonialism, on the other hand, presents a form of colonialism that allows for examination through a more cultural-centric lens, while still recognizing the exploitation of economics for purposes of assimilation. Using government reports, Truth and Reconciliation Committee findings, and first-hand accounts from local Inuit, this paper takes Wolfe’s theory and analyzes how his idea of “logics of elimination” were exemplified in the Canadian government’s actions after the 1930s. The “going away” focus of settler colonialism appeared in both the physical and cultural sense within methods used by the government and the RCMP. Physical logics of elimination occurred in projects such as the various High Arctic Relocations and the building of settlements, used for the purposes of showing sovereignty and effective occupation in the north. Cultural logics of elimination took the form of actions like wildlife and game management laws, the slaughter of sled dogs, residential schools, disc numbers, Project Surname, and healthcare removal. All the above elements are examined within the paper to showcase how the theory of settler colonialism can and should be used to examine the history of the Canadian Arctic.


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