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Exogenous athletes in the settler colonial league: Chen Chen, ‘Professional Sport, Settler Multiculturalism, and Exalted Chinese Arrivants: Re-Remembering the “China Clippers”‘, in Steve Bien-Aimé, Cynthia Wang (eds), Perceptions of East Asian and Asian North American Athletics,  Springer, 2022, pp. 175-198

02Oct22

Abstract: This chapter examines the historically changing media discourse around two historically significant Chinese Canadian athletes, the “China Clippers”: Larry Kwong, the first player of Chinese (and Asian) descent in the National Hockey League (NHL), and Norman Kwong, the first player of Chinese descent in the Canadian Football League (CFL). Growing up in Chinese immigrant families in Western Canada in the 1920s and emerging as successful young male athletes, they initially appeared in mainstream newspapers as rare, exotic “Chinese” subjects. With the changing political and ideological context of Canada in the latter half of the twentieth century, their careers and achievements were differently represented and exalted within Canadian media in recent decades, serving the myth of Canada as a progressive, multicultural society. While their historic breakthroughs in hockey and football were symbolic of the Chinese diasporic communities and have, to some extent, served to disrupt the stereotypes of the emasculated Chinese man in Western media, I argue that the ways these stories were told should be critically scrutinized so that the normalcy of settler colonialism can be questioned and alternative visions of existence for racialized communities on Indigenous land sustained.


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The settler colonial anti-kinship: Helen Gardner, ‘Kinship acknowledged and denied: Collecting and publishing kinship materials in 19th-century settler-colonial states’, History of the Human Sciences, 2022

02Oct22

Abstract: In the second half of the 19th century, anthropology rode the coat-tails of modernity, adopting new printing technologies, following new travel networks, and gaining increasing access to Indigenous people as colonialism spread and new policies were developed to contain and control people in settler-colonial states. The early innovator in kinship studies Lewis Henry Morgan and his two greatest proteges, Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt, working respectively in the United States, Fiji, and Australia, epitomised this conflation of governance, technologies of representation, and anthropology. They corresponded on the alterity of kinship systems across increasingly regularised postal routes, and developed new forms of collecting and new diagrammatic representations of kinship using developments at the press. Nineteenth-century kinship studies were focused exclusively on relationships formed through biology and descent, and there was little recognition of kinship making beyond these forms. This was especially significant for Howitt, whose closest Aboriginal interlocutor, Tulaba, claimed him as a brogan (brother), according to Gunaikurnai kinship paradigms. This article tracks the links between the collection and publication of kinship material in the questionnaires and the books of the latter part of the 19th century across the English-speaking world and the outcomes for Indigenous peoples, as arguments for distinctive kinship systems helped define their ‘primitiveness’ and dismissed Aboriginal attempts to forge kinship links across the settler/Indigenous divide.


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The environmental injustices of settler colonialism: M. Parsons, K. Fisher, ‘Decolonising Flooding and Risk Management: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism, and Memories of Environmental Injustices’, Sustainability, 14, 2022

02Oct22

Abstract: This paper examines the history of settler-colonialism and how settler-colonial-led policies and projects to remake the landscapes and waterscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand resulted in the production of Indigenous environmental injustices. Underpinned by theorising on ecological justice and decolonisation, we draw on archival sources and oral histories of Maori and Pakeha (European) individuals living in a single river catchment—the Waipa River—to trace how actions to remove native vegetation, drain wetlands, introduce exotic biota, and re-engineer waterways contributed to intensifying incidence of floods. While Pakeha settlers interpreted environmental transformation as inherently positive, Indigenous Maori perceived it as profoundly negative, a form of ecological dispossession. We demonstrate that while Pakeha narrated floods as disaster events, Maori viewed colonisation as the true disaster, with floods and fires merely products of settlers’ mistreatment of the environment. Moreover, the colonial government’s efforts to control floods resulted in Maori being further alienated from and losing access to their rohe (ancestral lands and waters) and witnessing the destruction of their taonga (treasures including forests, wetlands, and sacred sites). For Maori of the Waipa catchment, flood risk management regimes were far more destructive (socially, economically and spiritually) than flood events.


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Colonial continuities: Jane Lydon, ‘Racial Punishment from Slavery to Settler Colonialism: John Picton Beete in Demerara and Swan River’, Slavery and Abolition, 2022

29Sep22

Abstract: The career of Captain John Picton Beete (1799–1886, later John Picton Picton), an officer of the 21st Regiment of Foot (North British Fusiliers), maps some of the continuities between slavery and settler colonization. While military punishment was practiced across a wide imperial field, by focusing on the links between slavery and the new settler colonies we see how black bodies remained vulnerable to violent techniques well after they had been abolished elsewhere. Beete’s status was owed largely to his family’s extensive business interests in slavery, and he spent his career furthering the empire’s appropriation of Indigenous land and the exploitation of black labour. Beete and the 21st Regiment played a prominent role in quelling one of the largest slave uprisings in history, the landmark Demerara Rebellion of 1823. A decade later, shortly after arriving in Swan River, Western Australia, Beete and the 21st led the most intense phase of violence between colonists and Binjareb Nyungar, climaxing in the infamous 1834 Pinjarra Massacre. The common role of spectacular punishment represents the shared strategies of legal violence that maintained racial hierarchies across the empire, and points toward the continuities between British slave and settler colonies.


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The irony of settler colonialism: Alex Trimble Young, ‘”The Vigorous New Vernacular”: Settler Colonialism and the Politics of Irony in Roughing It‘, The Mark Twain Annual, 20, 2022, pp. 158-173

29Sep22

Abstract: This article argues, contrary to the contemporary critical consensus, that Twain’s notorious representation of the Goshutes in Roughing It is a complex satire directed at both the Indigenous people he encounters and those among his white audience who attribute the Goshute’s abjection to essential racial traits. This satire does not rescue the passage from an irredeemable racial logic, but it does mark Twain’s thinking on race as substantially different from the forms of “Indian hating” common among his contemporaries. Exploring Twain’s sources and considering the function of irony in Roughing It more broadly, this article argues that the leveling effect of his irony presages a shift in the United States’ settler colonial “logic of elimination” from frontier homicide to assimilationism, and the subsequent modes of liberal thought (most notably Richard Rorty’s) that imagine irony as a necessary mode of subjectivity for a citizen in a pluralist democracy.


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The present settler colonial imperative: Judy Rohrer, ‘Imperial Dis-ease: Trump’s Border Wall, Obama’s Sea Wall, and Settler Colonial Failure’, American Quarterly, 74, 3, 2022, pp. 737-763

29Sep22

Abstract: Developing a fuller understanding of US imperialism requires engagement with settler colonial and Indigenous studies. I expand Amy Kaplan’s analysis of US empire as “riddled with instability, ambiguity and disorder” to consider how settler colonialism is fortified via walls. Walls stake settler claims and scale from individual property (home) to national borders (homeland). Examining Donald Trump’s US-Mexico border wall and a sea wall in front of beachfront property Barack Obama has purchased in Hawai’i reveals the inherent instability and impermanence of settler colonialism, and thus this particular form of imperialism. That instability manifests in three ways: (1) settler colonial anxious, repetitive insistence on its dominion, its claims, especially via the law and physical intervention; (2) the multiple ways human and other-than-human actors resist the walls, refuse capture/containment, call out the fiction/myth of the border and sea wall’s power to divide; and (3) the way “once and future ghosts” haunt settler claims, unsettle territorial and temporal assertions of possession/domination/belonging. Based on this finding and analysis drawn from Indigenous and settler colonial studies, I argue that settler colonialism, and thus US imperialism, ultimately fails because of its inherent unsustainability and the myriad of ways it is resisted. What succeeds instead is Indigenous resilience and radical resurgence.


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Poetical settler colonialism: Tayseer Abu Odeh, ‘The Politics of Yehuda Amichai’s Aesthetic Camouflage: Jerusalem and the Settler-Colonial Gaze’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 2022

29Sep22

Abstract: Drawing on the notion of aesthetic camouflage the uses and abuses of memory and forgetfulness, this article seeks to examine and interrogate the ways in which Israel’s ‘national poet’ Yehuda Amichai (born ‘Ludwig Pfeuffer’, 1924–2000) relies heavily on the imperialist Zionist ideology to justify and legitimise the settler-colonial existence of Israel from a European and Zionist hegemonic perspective. The postcolonial image of Jerusalem, as mystified by Amichai’s poetry, signifies an apolitical and ahistorical Orientalist image of Jerusalem as being ‘a troubled sacred and mythical city’ claimed by clashing monolithic religions including Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. In other words, the systematic and historical absence of Palestinian people in Amichai’s poetry is ostensibly bound up with what Edward Said calls ‘the functional absence of ‘native people’ in Palestine’.


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The spatiotemporality of settler colonialism and its alternative: C. M. Peacock, Indigenous feminist philosophy in Idle No More: theorizing the space-time of Canada’s settler colonial politics and alternative decolonial imaginaries, PhD dissertation, University of Calgary, 2022

29Sep22

Abstract: In this thesis, I explore Indigenous feminist philosophy from the ground up through a case study of Indigenous women’s political organizing through Idle No More (INM). Specifically, I examine the ways in which Indigenous feminist resistance in INM identifies a spatiotemporal configuration of both Canadian settler state politics and decolonial alternatives. To do so, I use state, media, and public responses, rhetoric, and actions that emerged in response to the Idle No More movement, as well as the actions, rhetoric, written works, and Indigenous political orders of the Idle No More protestors. These interventions illustrate that: (1) settler colonialism constitutes the spatiotemporal configuration of Canadian politics, functioning to contain and eliminate Indigenous political life; (2) Idle No More was configured by the spatiotemporal configuration of Indigenous political orders, which express temporal relations that span the past, present, and future, enabling them to create alternative, decolonial imaginaries with novel forms of politics and power. Drawing on Idle No More’s political interventions, I theorize new Treaty imaginaries.


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The settler colonial carceral archipelago: Krystal Lockwood, Bhiamie Williamson, ‘The shackles of masculinity: Indigenous men, settler colonialism, and the carceral archipelago’, in Tess Bartlett, Rosemary Ricciardelli (eds), Prison Masculinities: International Perspectives and Interpretations, Routledge, 2022

23Sep22

Abstract: Indigenous hyperincarceration continues in settler-colonial states, bearing a pressing and seemingly entrenched human rights issue. In Australia, nearly 80% of Indigenous men receive a court order by their 24th birthday; 18.5% are imprisoned (31.7% and 1.5% for non-Indigenous men). We demonstrate how invader masculinities and settler-colonial perceptions of Indigenous masculinities criminalise Indigenous peoples. However, we argue that supporting Indigenous masculinities grounded in Indigenous perspectives is one way to decolonise criminology and inform decarceration processes. We present the chapter in three parts; first we detail how – since first contact – Indigenous peoples have been subjected to a separate system of extensive and pervasive social control. Institutional control inside and outside of prison is inseparable, forming a carceral archipelago. In part two, we demonstrate how this carceral archipelago reinforces ideals of hegemonic masculinity. Hierarchal power dynamics are gendered and raced, where Indigenous men and women are considered lesser status. In part three, we detail the counter narrative of resistance to settler-colonial stereotypes of Indigenous masculinities. Here, the predominant view eradicates prisons from Indigenous identities and masculinities, and instead empower Indigenous men within themselves, their families, and their communities. Overall, reinforcing the positive roles of Indigenous men and masculinities can disrupt the criminalisation of Indigenous peoples.


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Settler violence and screen violence: Henrik Gustafsson, ‘Screen Violence from Settler Colonialism to Cognitive Capitalism: Westworld and the Player Piano’, Afterimage, 49, 3, 2022, pp. 23-45

20Sep22

Abstract: While the HBO show Westworld (2016–present, created by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan) has gained much critical attention for its byzantine plotting and philosophical conundrums, the present discussion focuses instead on the basic premise on which the titular park operates, namely that the algorithms that govern human behavior can be disclosed by studying how human beings behave toward image beings. Under the guise of a tactile experience of a make-believe past, the park attractions clandestinely function as a large behavioral sensor, extracting actionable data from the guests who reveal their inner drives when interacting with the host environment. Taking its cue from the opening titles of the first season, the argument pivots on the master trope of the series: the machine-readable scroll of perforated paper that commands the automated performance of the player piano. This motif is examined through a double-pronged approach that aligns the anthropology of images developed by Hans Belting, which understands the relation between humans and images as the interactions between “hosts” and “guests,” with the archaeology of media and its dominant concern to uncover the prehistory of the automated control systems of the computer age. While Westworld proffers a timely allegory of biopolitical capture along the digital frontier, the show ultimately testifies to the failure to constructively engage with the precarious relation between hosts and guests that to an equal extent defines our contemporary moment. The initial problem raised by Westworld, the ethics of killing virtual beings, thus gives rise to a broader historical inquiry that concerns the inability of human societies to face the past and deal with the images they inherit.


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