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Decolonisation will be televised: Susan Fountaine, Sandy Bulmer, Farah Palmer, Lisa Chase, ‘Decolonising public service television in Aotearoa New Zealand: telling better stories about Indigenous rurality’, Media, Culture & Society, 2022

31Oct22

Abstract: In settler-colonial countries like Aotearoa New Zealand, television programmes about rurality are fundamentally entwined with the nation’s colonial history, but how this context impacts on locally made, public service television content and production is seldom examined. Utilising data collected from interviews with programme makers and a novel bi-cultural friendship pair methodology, we examine how a high-rating mainstream programme, Country Calendar, conceptualises and delivers stories about Indigenous Māori and consider the extent to which these stories represent a decolonising of television narratives about rurality. The findings highlight the importance of incorporating Indigenous voices and values, the impact of structural limitations and staffing constraints on public service television’s decolonising aspirations, and challenges reconciling settler-colonialism with the show’s well-established ‘rosy glow’. While rural media are often overlooked by communication scholars, our study demonstrates the contributions they might make to the larger task of decolonising storytelling about national identity.


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Settler denialism: Maha Nassar, ‘Exodus, Nakba Denialism, and the Mobilization of Anti-Arab Racism’, Critical Sociology, 2022

31Oct22

Abstract: Nakba denialism – that is, denying Zionist culpability for the mass expulsions of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland in 1948 – has long been a feature of US discourse on Palestine. Through a content analysis of Leon Uris’ 1958 novel, Exodus, I argue that Nakba denialism rests on three anti-Arab racist tropes. The first trope presents Palestinian Arabs as lacking religious attachment to Palestine, the second trope claims they lack modern feelings of national identity, and the third trope claims they are easily induced to commit acts of violence by their ruthless leaders. Through the deployment of these tropes, the Exodus narrative popularized key elements of Nakba denialism in US discourse by blaming the victims of settler colonial violence for the expulsions they faced. More broadly, this article shows how the imbrication of race and settler colonialism functions to epistemologically erase the very acts of settler colonial violence that produce racialized Others.


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Agency against the Agency: Valerie Lambert, Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, University of Minnesota Press, 2022

27Oct22

Description: What happens when American Indians take over an institution designed to eliminate them? This work provides an essential national-level look at an intriguing and impactful form of Indigenous resistance. It describes, in great detail, the continuing assaults made on Native peoples and tribal sovereignty in the United States during the twenty-first century, and it sketches the visions of the future that Indians at the BIA and in Indian Country have been crafting for themselves.


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Buried settler colonialism: Lindsay Martel Montgomery, ‘The Archaeology of Settler Colonialism in North America’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 51, 2022, pp. 475-491

27Oct22

Abstract: Beginning in earnest in the 1990s, archaeologists have used the material record as an alternative window into the experiences and practices of Black and Indigenous peoples in North America from the sixteenth century onward. This now robust body of scholarship on settler colonialism has been shaped by postcolonial theories of power and broad-based calls to diversify Western history. While archaeologists have long recognized the political, cultural, biological, and economic entanglements produced by settler colonialism, the lives of Indigenous peoples have largely been studied in isolation from peoples of African descent. In addition to reinforcing static ethnic divisions, until recently, most archaeological studies of settler colonialism have focused on early periods of interethnic interaction, ending abruptly in the nineteenth century. These intellectual silos gloss over the intimate relationships that formed between diverse communities and hinder a deeper understanding of settler colonialism’s continued impact on archaeological praxis.


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Horrific settler colonialism: Kali Simmons, ‘On Native Horror and the Terrors of Settler Colonialism‘, The Red Nation Podcast, 17/10/22

27Oct22

Abstract: Kali Simmons (@SimmonsKali) talks to The Red Nation Podcast co-hosts Jen Marley (@JenMarley1680) and Nick Estes (@nickwestes) on the cultural links between settler colonialism and horror fiction and film. The Red Nation Podcast features discussions on Indigenous history, politics, and culture from a left perspective. Hosted by Nick Estes and Jen Marley with help from our friend and comrade Sina. Support the show: Patreon.com/redmediapr Website: therednation.org Follow the hosts on Twitter @nickwestes and @JenMarley1680 and the Red Nation @The_Red_Nation.Theme song: “Dead Horse” by Weedrat https://weedrat.bandcamp.com/

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Unsettler educators: Unsettling Settler-Colonial Education:  Cornel Pewewardy, Anna Lees, Robin Zape-tah-hol-ah Minthorn (eds), The Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model, Teachers College Press, 2022

27Oct22

Description: This book presents the Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model (TIPM), an innovative framework for promoting critical consciousness toward decolonization efforts among educators. The TIPM challenges readers to examine how even the most well-intentioned educators are complicit in reproducing ethnic stereotypes, racist actions, deficit-based ideology, and recolonization. Drawing from decades of collaboration with teachers and school leaders serving Indigenous children and communities, this volume will help educators better support the development of their students’ critical thinking skills. Representing a holistic balance, the text is organized in four sections: Birth–Grade 12 and Community Education, Teacher Education, Higher Education, and Educational Leadership. Unsettling Settler-Colonial Education centers the needs of teachers, children, families, and communities that are currently engaged in public education and who deserve an improved experience today, while also committing to more positive Indigenous futurities.


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The home of settler colonialism: Libby Porter, David Kelly, ‘Dwelling justice: locating settler relations in research and activism on stolen land’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 2022

25Oct22

Abstract: There is a general consensus now in Australia that we are in the grip of a severe housing crisis. The characteristics of spiralling housing costs and deepening precarity are unfolding in a context of the systematic managed decline of public housing as a critical social infrastructure, such that the capacity to make and find ‘home’ is thinning every day. Yet in a settler-colony, such as Australia, the struggle against housing injustice is set inside an already violent relationship of un-homing that creates the very conditions for others to make home. Reckoning with this monstrous dilemma, of the politics of dwelling justice on stolen land, is the focus of this essay, which springs from our own experience and failure to fully comprehend the ways that our housing research and activism works to reinforce settler colonial logics of dwelling on stolen land.


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Private property and settler colonialism: Edyta M. Bojanowska, ‘Was Tolstoi a Colonial Landlord? The Dilemmas of Private Property and Settler Colonialism on the Bashkir Steppe’, Slavic Review, 81, 2, 2022, pp. 324-348

25Oct22

Excerpt: A peasant named Pakhom leaves his cramped Russian village in search of more land. He grows increasingly greedy, buying ever more of it, and ultimately perishes during his most spectacular transaction in the faraway imperial periphery of Bashkiria, famed for fire-sale prices. Pakhom stakes 1,000 rubles on a land parcel as large as he can walk around in a day, agreeing to the condition that he must return to his departure point by sundown. He does, but dies of exhaustion that very moment. In this 1886 moral parable for the common reader by the title “Mnogo li cheloveku zemli nuzhno?” (How Much Land Does a Man Need?), Lev Tolstoi answers the question from his own title in the following way: the three arshins, or roughly six feet, that it takes to bury Pakhom, is exactly how much land anyone needs.


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Mnemonics against settler colonialism: Siddhant Issar, ‘Unsettling the Politics of Race: Kevin Bruyneel’s Settler Memory‘, Theory & Event, 25, 4, 2022, pp. 954-958

23Oct22

Excerpt: Why were liberals incensed by Rachel Dolezal masquerading as Black but relatively untroubled by Elizabeth Warren’s claim to Cherokee ancestry? How does the anti-racist Left’s ritual rendition and interpretation of Bacon’s Rebellion and Radical Reconstruction constrain an adequate understanding of white supremacy in the US? In what ways is the election of Donald Trump related to neoliberal multiculturalism and the longue durée of the US settler state? Kevin Bruyneel’s latest book, Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States, raises and answers such urgent questions and more.


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Hermeneutics against settler colonialism: Balamohan Shingade, Hermeneutical Injustice in the Context of Settler Colonialism, MA dissertation, University of Auckland, 2022

23Oct22

Abstract: The search for justice in Aotearoa New Zealand will depend, in part, on how we contend with and overcome the settler-colonial situation—in a word, it will be based on the struggle for decolonisation. This thesis aims to show how epistemic goals and hermeneutical practices are not incidental, but intrinsic to such political struggles. Focusing on the epistemic dimension of Indigenous–settler relations, I discuss the asymmetrical practices of interpretation and understanding across these groups, and specifically across te ao Māori and the Western worldview. In the context of settler colonialism, when Indigenous peoples are wronged in their capacities as knowers and knowledge holders, they experience “epistemic injustice” (Fricker 2007). More precisely, the thesis demonstrates how “hermeneutical injustice” occurs due to deficiencies, dysfunctions, and distortions maintained in the dominant hermeneutical resources, which settlers in turn impose onto Indigenous peoples while simultaneously marginalising them from shaping dominant interpretations and understandings in a way that draws upon Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing. I further demonstrate that cross-cultural knowledge practices are socio-politically motivated such that the marginally situated make genuine efforts at interpretation and understanding, whereas dominantly situated interlocutors practice what I term “disingenuous interpretive charity.” Correspondingly, reflecting on questions of blameworthiness and responsibility, I suggest that settlers’ individual and collective responsibility for hermeneutical justice should be conceived as forward-looking and solidarity-oriented. Finally, I propose “unsettling” as a possible method, which opens to ontologico-epistemic shifts, and helps clear the space for thinking through what is unthinkable under the logics of settler colonialism.


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