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Settler lawfare today: Nick Estes, ‘The rightwing supreme court has another target: Native American rights’, Guardian, 21/07/22

22Jul22

Excerpt: ‘the court affirmed in Kagama, like it has for nearly two centuries, that Indian country sat apart from states and was instead subject to congressional and federal authority. Put simply, states had no business in tribal affairs. That decision and others like it – however imperfect and drenched in conquest they were – supposedly shielded Native people and their reservations from the arbitrary authority of states and hostile white settlers. Last month, the supreme court tore up that decision and centuries of legal precedent with it‘.


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Settlers making the empire work: Noelle Turtur, Making Fascist Empire Work: Italian Enterprises, Labor, and Organized-Community in Occupied Ethiopia, 1896-1943, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2022

19Jul22

Abstract: Between 1935 and 1941, fascist Italy built an empire in East Africa at a speed and intensity never before seen in the world. Making Fascist Empire Work examines how Italy was able to undertake and organize this intensive, totalizing colonization. Analyzing four colonizing enterprises – an extensive mining concession in Wallega, the Bank of Italy in Addis Ababa, itinerant truckers, and settler farmers in Shoa – reveals that Italian entrepreneurs were essential to the colonization project. They provided the know-how, labor, and financing needed to carry out the regime’s ambitious plans. Moreover, these profit- and adventure-seeking entrepreneurs adapted their enterprises to the local environmental, economic, and political circumstances. They negotiated with local Ethiopian elites and Italian authorities. They also organized their own racial hierarchies of labor in their workplaces and homes. Often, Italian entrepreneurs contravened the fascist regime’s racial apartheid in order to keep costs low and profits high. Yet, the fascist regime knew that self-interested entrepreneurs and market forces alone could not rapidly build its totalitarian empire. Thus, each case study reveals how the fascist regime created specialized parastatal entities and deployed corporatist instruments to control industries, spur development, and strictly separate Italians and Ethiopians. The net result, I argue, was what I call “fascist settler colonialism,” meaning violent empire-building, made possible by the occupation, yet dependent on unleashing private enterprise that, in turn, had to be disciplined by the corporatist state. Over the short term of the empire’s life, the fascist regime was thereby able to supercharge imperial development. Making Fascist Empire Work makes three interventions in the fields of Italian and imperial history. First, its comparative approach reveals how practices creating racial and class boundaries strategically varied across the diverse empire in relation to an industry’s labor demands and the existing socio-political structures of the Ethiopian empire. It is the first study to do so. Second, it refutes the existing scholarship’s assertion that private enterprises were insignificant to the colonization. Instead, Making Fascist Empire Work demonstrates that Italian entrepreneurs actively participated in the imperial project and were central to its success. Moreover, it provides a new account of how fascist corporatism was enacted and contested in Italian East Africa. Its third intervention speaks to imperial history more broadly. Italian East Africa demonstrated that an organized corporatist economy could undertake rapid, intense, and extensive colonial development. It challenged and inspired other imperial powers to reconsider how they approached economic development in their colonies. Ultimately, Making Fascist Empire Work raises new questions about the significance and influence of Italian corporative colonialism on other empires in the interwar and postwar years.


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The settler colonial woman as a new woman: Larissa Fritzenschaf, The New Zealand New Woman: Representations of White Women in Settler Colonial New Zealand, PhD dissertation, Johannes Gutenberg University, 2022

19Jul22

Abstract: In recent decades, settler colonial theory has been a a field of continuously growing academic interest and research. However, the role of white women within the settler colonial framework so far has often been neglected, especially in front of a specific New Zealand backdrop. Thus, this dissertation examines how the structures of settler colonialism affect and influence the role and ideal of white New Zealand women. A survey of the development of New Zealand suffrage, as well as of the female ideals shaping and being shaped in the Anglosphere over the course of the nineteenth century will provide the backbone to a comparative approach which will contrast New Zealand with the Empire’s home Britain, and the United States of America, as fellow settler colonial nation, in order to show what sets New Zealand women apart from their peers. The rich archival material available in the New Zealand context will be explored thoroughly, and the representations of white New Zealand women in personal accounts and historical pieces of life-writing, as well as in historical newspapers will be compared to their portrayal in autobiographical/autofictional narratives and historical novels by contemporary women authors. Focusing on the particular area where life-writing studies, gender studies, and settler colonial theory overlap, literary analysis and archival work will be the two cornerstones on which this dissertation is founded. Reading personal reminiscences in continuity with pieces of life-writing and fiction will allow me to address the question whether there is such a thing as a New Zealand New Woman and what role she assumes within settler colonial New Zealand. Ultimately my research will reveal whether settler colonialism, due to its nature as on-going phenomenon, still resonates in New Zealand writing until today in order to come to terms with a settler colonial past and present.


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About yet another settler exceptionalism: Josef Cole, The Longue Durée of Chilean Exceptionalism: Settler Colonialism, Political Violence, and Popular Culture, PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 2022

19Jul22

Abstract: The nationwide protests that began in Santiago in October 2019 laid bare the tensions churning underneath the narrative of Chilean economic prosperity, democracy, and stability known as Chilean exceptionalism. Protestors carrying signs stating “it’s not about 30 pesos, it’s about 30 years” exhibited the public’s understanding that the triumphalist discourse of the democratic transition from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1990 was not as complete as advertised. However, even the slogan’s transformed understanding of the transition does not consider the continuity of settler-colonial logics of elimination and counter-insurgent violence that started with the dispossession of Indigenous land. I argue that the roots of the tensions that boiled over in October 2019 are not 30 but rather 500 years old. Through a dialogue between an archive of “high politics” comprised of official documents and an archive of “low data,” the 2017 docudrama series Una historia necessaria, I demonstrate how settler-colonial violence is an essential to Chilean statecraft. Finally, I contend that the fallout from the protests has provided an opening for new forms of justice that can address the settler-colonial sources of violence.


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An old story about German settler colonialism in the east (it is worrying that it should come out now and that it should be told in these terms): Piotr Guzowski, ‘Eastward Migration in European History: The Interplay of Economic and Environmental Opportunities’, in Adam Izdebski, John Haldon, Piotr Filipkowski, (eds), Perspectives on Public Policy in Societal-Environmental Crises: What the Future Needs from History, Springer, 2022, pp. 325-332

19Jul22

Abstract: During the preindustrial era one of the major migration waves headed eastward to Eastern Europe, where scores of migrants, in their pursuit of happiness, hoped to fulfil their dreams, have their own farm or set up a company, achieve a higher social status, and benefit from religious freedom and tolerance. The first wave of migration was connected with German colonization and the establishment of settlements following the German law. The alluringly large expanses of “pristine” land, together with tax privileges and the prospects of relative autonomy, attracted scores of bold, enterprising and hard-working settlers to relocate to the East. Most of them were peasants and townsfolk from the German states and the Netherlands, but there were also Jews escaping discrimination in Western Europe as well as West-European Protestants and Catholics attracted by religious tolerance in the East. Prospects of freedom and economic success encouraged them all to choose Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as their second homeland.


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The ruin of settler colonialism: Samia Rahimtoola, ‘Ruin Gazing: Robert Frost and the Afterlives of Settler Environmentalism’, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, 64, 2018, pp. 144-171

16Jul22

Abstract: This article considers a paradox that structures the internal logic of the ideology of improvement, a central justification for settler colonialism’s strategies of cultural and material dispossession. Far from establishing a limit to settler colonialism as predicted by the writings of John Locke, scenes of ruined, abandoned land are seen to extend settler sovereignty. Specifically, the article examines settler representations of, and encounters with, ruin in the poetry of Robert Frost to argue that irony’s “infinite absolute negativity,” as Søren Kierkegaard states, enables settler subjects to defend against the threat of settler dissolution and magnify settler subjectivity. In a contemporary moment in which damage and devastation have become dominant modes of settler presence on the land, Frost’s poetry prepares us to consider the settler histories of ruin gazing that remain sedimented within contemporary environmental discourse.


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Settler colonialism in the Golan Heights: Gideon Sulimani, Raz Kletter, ‘Settler-Colonialism and the Diary of an Israeli Settler in the Golan Heights: The Notebooks of Izhaki Gal’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 19, 1, 2022

16Jul22

Abstract: In 1967 the Golan Heights saw a dramatic change: a hundred villages were destroyed and replaced by new Israeli settlements. We study the beginning of this settlement through the lens of settler-colonialism, using documents of the time. The settlers claim to be ‘original natives’, ‘returning’ to the land and, like other colonial settlers elsewhere, bringing culture and civilisation to a terra nullius. To justify the settlement, they create a ‘deep’ narrative that combines the ancient past and the new settlement, erasing the in-between Arab past. The settlement— and the destruction — are on-going processes. The settler appears as a young, heroic figure, who patronises the ‘Others’ as weaklings (tourists, women, etc.) and is oblivious to the tragedy of the displaced Syrian inhabitants of the Golan Heights.


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Genocide and settler colonialism: Molly Barbara Cop Rasmussen, Toward Indigenous Ultimate Permanence: Examining Settler Colonialism and Genocidal Elimination in Canada and Israel, MA dissertation, Carleton University, 2022

16Jul22

Abstract: This thesis critically compares technologies of settler colonialism and genocidal elimination in Canada and Israel. Keeping with the argument that recognizes settler colonialism as an entity that destroys to replace, genocide is taken up as a theoretical framing device that addresses comparable methods of both the material and discursive elimination of Indigenous peoples in Canada and Palestinians within and outside of Israel. At the same time as the two settler states continue to commit genocide against the original inhabitants of the lands they have stolen, Canada and Israel utilize similar selfpromotion strategies that present themselves as humanitarian and democratic, a specific tool used to wash away the sins of settler colonialism and genocide. While no two settler regimes are exactly the same, this thesis identifies key structural similarities between the two states and makes the case for an international solidarity movement rooted in principles of anti-colonialism and Indigenous ultimate permanence.


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The settler’s care: Liz Scarfe, ‘Erasing trauma – Erasing indigeneity: How the settler colonial state erased Warlpiri trauma in the wake of the police shooting Kumanjayi Walker’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2022

14Jul22

Abstract: In this paper, I argue that the rhetoric and discharge of state mental health care provisions in the wake of the police shooting of Kumunjayi Walker reflect the logic of elimination that underpins settler-colonial societies. Firstly, the use of emotional politics and the diplomacy of sympathy transform the police shooting of an Aboriginal man into a simple loss of life. Secondly, the deployment of psychological services to the community specifically and only for secondary trauma victims not only erased Warlpiri trauma and foregrounded nonIndigenous trauma, it also positioned Warlpiri people as the cause of non-Indigenous trauma. Lastly, I explore how narratives in the mental health care sector regarding the state response simultaneously critique and reproduce settler-colonial elimination. As an arm of the settler-colonial state, the sector cannot help but be complicit in the ongoing elimination of indigeneity and is not exceptional as a sector in this way. Settler-colonial attempts at care are inherently characterised by this conflict of interest, which, if there is any way to resolve it, requires a depth of critical reflection beyond politically progressive narratives.


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Disaster to settler colonialism: Jenna N. Hanchey, ‘Catastrophe colonialism: Global disaster films and the white right to migrate’, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 2022

13Jul22

Abstract: This article argues that post-9/11 global disaster films exemplify a social imaginary preparing white, Western subjects to envision settler (re)colonization of the Global South as the only option in the face of increasing ecological devastation. Using the films The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, I demonstrate how this catastrophe colonialism pairs the racialization of migration with the coloniality of disaster. Together, a perceived white right to migrate and colonial amnesia invert the material threat of crisis as experienced in the lived world to make (re)colonization appear as the natural response to global disaster.


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