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Philosphy against settler colonialism: Adam Y. Stern, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of Survival’, Theory & Event, 25, 4, 2022, pp. 804-828

23Oct22

Abstract: Beginning with Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” this paper unfolds a supplementary set of theses on the genealogy of a different concept (survival) and different figure (the survivor). Benjamin’s distinction between the “victor” and the “angel” serves as a binary framework for an understanding of the philosophical legacy of survival in the twentieth century—as it runs through the philosophy of history and across a tradition that continually imagines the survivor as historian. The paper traces this narrative through selected readings in the writings of major figures, from Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Blanchot to Hannah Arendt and W.G. Sebald. The question throughout is whether the survivor-historian writes the history of the ruling class or the history of the defeated. The paper concludes by offering some reflections on the ramifications of this genealogy of survival for recent debates about the legacy and ongoing practices of settler colonialism.


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Violent settlers: Kelly Menzel, Tyson Yunkaporta, ‘Settler-on-Settler Violence: Ritual Protocols in YouTube Street Fight Videos – Part Two’, Journal of Indigenous Research, 10, 2022

23Oct22

Abstract: This is part two of a series of two papers exploring a project was conducted by two Australian Aboriginal researchers, one male and one female, and might be described as ‘reverse anthropology’, in the same way that people sometimes refer to positive discrimination as ‘reverse racism’. But we would just call it anthropology; a tidal river is still a river when it flows back the other way. The project could hardly be acknowledged as anthropology though, as it was based on Indigenous methods of inquiry that do not yet belong to a formal discipline. Initially the goal was to disrupt Australian colonial narratives of ‘black-on-black violence’ and hold up a mirror to the occupying culture, by applying customary Indigenous conflict protocols to an analysis of online street fight videos featuring settlers from various colonies. However, our early encounters with the field revealed that public violence in settler communities is a lot more rule-governed than we had expected, inspiring us to a deeper investigation that went beyond critique and culture jamming. While we found a lot of common ground with settler public violence rituals, the code of chivalry we observed was unfamiliar and drew the focus of our inquiry, leading to some interesting findings about the gendered nature of non-Indigenous public violence.


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Reconciling with loss? Bennett Collins, Ali Watson, ‘Refusing reconciliation with settler colonialism: wider lessons from the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, The International Journal of Human Rights, 2022

20Oct22

Abstract: Commission (MWTRC) is one of the more recent examples of the truth and reconciliation model being used in a settler colonial context. This article argues that the MWTRC highlighted a historical and continued refusal by Wabanaki people to ongoing systems of white settler violence especially in the form of Native child welfare. Examining the MWTRC through the lens of refusal allows for a critical analysis of the ways in which the MWTRC subverts neoliberal reconciliation models that leave colonial structures unchallenged and unchanged. The MWTRC, as a process founded and led by Wabanaki and settler social workers and Wabanaki survivors of the child welfare system, actively refused reconciliation with settler colonialism. Instead it sought a process predicated on a relationship that accepted the realities of historical and continued oppression of Wabanaki people and sought long-term transformative change for Wabanaki people. Relying on two years of conversations between the authors and the community of Wabanaki and settler individuals who initiated and partook in this process, this article offers an analysis of the MWTRC and how its strategy of refusal denied settler colonial cooption of a Wabanaki-centred process.


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Urban settler colonialisms: Nathan McClintock, Stéphane Guimont Marceau, ‘Settler-colonial urbanisms: convergences, divergences, limits, contestations’, Urban Geography, 2022

16Oct22

Abstract: The past few years have seen a groundswell of geographic scholarship on settler colonialism and its manifold articulations with the urban, from the historical development of cities to ongoing logics and practices of colonization and resistance alike. Given this growing attention to “settler-colonial urbanism” – as well as concerns that a focus thereupon risks obscuring Indigenous theories and practices – the goal of this Debates & Interventions forum is to reflect on settler-colonial urbanism’s limits and possibilities as an analytical lens for understanding processes of dispossession and for re-imagining cities as Indigenous spaces. The eight interventions address: 1) conceptualizations of settler-colonial urbanism; 2) how the diverse processes and mechanisms of settler-urbanization unfold in a variety of geographic contexts; and 3) how such processes are (or can be) challenged and unsettled.


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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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