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Settler colonial memorial forgetfulness: Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘Memory for forgetfulness: Conceptualizing a memory practice of settler colonial disavowal’, Theory and Society, 2022

13Jul22

Abstract: This article articulates a sociological conception of settler colonial remembering as a tool of legitimation. Theories of memory in the context of settler colonialism generally center counter-memories by the subaltern or colonized, or official hegemonizing representations at the level of state institutions. Underexamined is the dialectical nature of memory and discursive representations that help reproduce settler colonial processes of accumulation and displacement at the micro-level. The article draws on archival data from avowedly socialist-leftist Zionist colonies to explicate patterned representations of Palestinian villages that Zionist forces gradually displaced prior to and during the 1948 War/Nakba. I demonstrate how the colonial settlers attributed political meaning through five representational modes: contrasting the indigenous as backward and primitive and settlers as progressive and developed; denying an indigenous connection to the land; emphasizing amiable relations through the promotion of cultural progress and settler superiority; asymmetrically assessing settler and indigenous belongings to national collectives; and legitimizing land purchases that dispossessed indigenous cultivators, despite the settlers’ socialist ideology, while reducing conflict to the issue of economic compensation. I theorize a form of settler colonial memory based not merely on erasure, but on recognition and disavowal. Finally, I argue that local memory is a significant site of production in which the conceptual tools to both trace the historical processes of supremacy and subvert asymmetrical sociality lie.


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Settler colonialism’s vertical frontier: Vivian Underhill, Sheeva Sabati, Linnea Beckett, ‘Against settler sustainability: California’s groundwater as a vertical frontier’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2022

13Jul22

Abstract: California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its groundwater crisis is a warning of its impending collapse. In this paper, we argue that policies like California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act reinscribe the settler state, even as they aim toward environmental sustainability. Drawing from Indigenous feminist scholarship on water and frontier processes, our methodology traces settler colonialism materially and discursively through the movement of water. First, we analyze hydraulic engineering discourses at the turn of the 20th century to illustrate how racial logics were key to producing irrigation—and the broader project of white settlement—as ostensibly benevolent processes of improvement. We then highlight how turn-of-the-century legislation was central to producing agriculture as a site of accumulation by dispossession through the production of settler forms of property and relations with land and water. Finally, we consider groundwater overdraft as a vertical frontier. Thinking with water as an analytic, we study the nexus of relationships that inscribe settler water infrastructures as normative, demonstrating their role as frontier processes within a settler colonial present. Our analysis shows the necessity of dismantling settler modes of sustainability and centering and supporting Indigenous sovereignty.


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The statue as settlers: Amalia June Wickstead, Trend Settlers: The Russell Statues, Casting the Classical and Cultural Colonisation, MA dissertation, The University of Auckland, 2022

13Jul22

Abstract: Eighteenth and nineteenth century British and European colonial extension into the New World and the South Seas resulted in the growth of new colonial cities. With this development came the establishment of Western institutions, namely, the museum. These new museums needed content, and where better to look than the models beloved at ‘home’ in England. The need for legitimizing ancestors for a young Empire, and already established reverence for Greco-Roman art saw British colonisers looking to the ancient past for works which represented both. Works within the canon of ancient sculptures deemed the paragon of material culture were reproduced in plaster, distributed, and displayed throughout the colonies during the Victorian period. Behind each of these donated collections can be found an individual, or a small group of men, who sought to enrich their emerging cities and enhance their personal legacy. In a single transaction, groups of casts could be sent to preserve ‘good taste’ and provide the means for education while also establishing the donor as a cultured connoisseur and a generous philanthropist. These displays of wealth were a way of building legacy, both personal and cultural, as they connected cities like Auckland, New Zealand, back to English art and values. As the circulation of casts reached its height, Auckland was given its sizeable collection by Thomas Russell. The Auckland Institute and Museum received thirty-three statues and busts in 1878, made by Domenico Brucciani, the era’s foremost castmaker in Britain. The donation was significant in size, quality, and precedence. With the Russell Statues (as this gift is known), the Auckland Institute and Museum could diversify its collection, following in the footsteps of other cities moving towards a colonial metropolitan ideal. My research tracks and examines the uses of this collection as exhibition items, educational tools for the South Kensington system, tastemakers, and decoration, unveiling the complex roles they have filled. This thesis explores their odyssey from fabrication in Brucciani’s London workshop to their resting place – principally in the Auckland Museum’s storage facilities. It also investigates the dissemination of Western artistic ideals and the European fascination with Greece and Rome.


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The know-do gap of settler colonialism: Janet Smylie,  Ricci Harris,  Sarah-Jane Paine,  Irma A Velásquez,  Nimatuj,  Raymond Lovett, ‘Beyond shame, sorrow, and apologies—action to address indigenous health inequities’, BMJ, 2022, 378

13Jul22

Abstract: On 1 April 2022, Pope Francis made a historic apology to indigenous peoples in Canada for what he described as “deplorable” abuses occurring in church run residential schools.1 This statement is one of multiple apologies recently offered by world leaders for colonial injustices and abuses of indigenous people. For many, these apologies represent landmark events. However, as indigenous health scientists who bear witness to the real life impacts of colonisation on indigenous health today, we cannot help but raise the question: “How do these apologies get translated into tangible changes that reduce indigenous/non-indigenous health inequities?” While we do not presume to hold all the answers, we are certain of two things. Firstly, while indigenous leadership and direction is essential, the hard work of change needs to be shared by all who have benefitted from colonisation. Secondly, current inaction appears to be rooted in so called know-do gaps—meaning there are gaps between what we know and what we do in policy and practice. In this instance, clear policy directions come from indigenous leadership globally and a growing evidence base that could inform action, yet indigenous/non-indigenous health inequities persist, and in many cases are getting worse. Building on these premises, we have three cross-cutting recommendations for non-indigenous decision makers, administrators, and practitioners of health and social system policy, on how to translate white and/or settler privilege into tangible change.


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Singing all the way to settler colonialism: Jasmin Habib, Amir Locker-Biletzki, ‘Shirat hano’ar h’kommunisti: exploring the cultural dynamics and influence in the songs of Israeli-Jewish Communist youth in Palestine/Israel’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2022

09Jul22

Abstract: Settler colonial projects are not only focused on the economy of a population and the formation of a settler state, they are also cultural undertakings whereby the settlers form their own settler culture. In this article, we explore the dynamics of Zionist settler culture from the point of view of its most radical critics, Jewish-Israeli Communists. We analyze the ways Zionist settler culture has been both absorbed and negated by BANKI (Young Israeli Communist League). In an analysis of musical practices, as well as the lyrics of Israeli pseudo-folk songs, known colloquially as SLI (Songs of the Land of Israel), we discuss how BANKI members created their own Israeli national non-Zionist singing culture, and formed a singing culture that was both part of, as well as distinct from, the Socialist-Zionist youth movements. In this way, we explore how, from the 1920s through the 1960s, Zionist settler-colonial culture was informed as well as co-created by Jewish-Israeli Communist youth.


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Elephants in the settler medical room: A. Jensen, V. A. Lopez-Carmen, ‘The “Elephants in the Room” in U.S. global health: Indigenous nations and white settler colonialism’, PLOS Glob Public Health, 2, 7, 2022 

09Jul22

Excerpt: When most U.S physicians consider the term “global health” or even the term “decolonizing global health,” they think of low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) outside their borders, usually in the global south. While countries outside U.S. borders should absolutely be included, rarely are the over 567 Indigenous Nations within U.S. borders considered, each with their own cultures, languages, spiritualities, and political systems predating colonization by thousands of years. In the field of U.S. global health and the decolonizing global health movement, Indigenous Nations and settler colonialism in the U.S. remain the elephants in the room.


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Special issue on Indigenous Literary Arts of Truth and Redress: Studies in Canadian Literature, 46, 2, 2022

09Jul22

Access the issue here.


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Can foundational settler stories be rewritten? Heather Bensler, Re-Storying the Past: Transforming the White Settler Colonial Stories that Formed Us, PhD dissertation, University of Calgary, 2022

09Jul22

Abstract: In this study, I explore the ways Settler nurse educators understand their identity within the context of Canada’s colonial narrative. I provide a generative space for critical reflectivity on my own social location through creative, embodied explorations of my Settler-colonial story and experiences, Indigenous historical accounts, and dialogical engagement with Canada’s socio-historical configuration as a Settler nation-state. I consider the ways Whiteness , (DiAngelo, 2018a), Settler identity (Tuck & Yang, 2012; Wolfe, 2006), and Settler colonial logics act as barriers to transforming Settler understanding of Canada’s Settler colonial history and Indigenous sovereignty (Donald, 2009). Using Indigenous Métissage as a research sensibility, I engage in narrative and embodied practices to better understand and transform my relationship to self, land, and Canada’s colonial history. Through braided stories of place, practices, and historical perspectives, I examine the impact that Camp Chief Hector had on my White settler formation and its exclusionary and exploitative relationship with the Stoney Nakoda Nation. I consider a path towards reconciliation; one created by attending to respect and reverence, reciprocity, kinship relationality, and treaty responsibility. By thinking through my lived experiences as an entry point to engage Settler identity, I tell a more truthful account of Canadian history and of the current state of how Settler colonial logics influence the relationship between Settlers and Indigenous people.


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Special issue on Writing Slavery into Biography: Australian Legacies of British Slavery: Australian Journal of Biography and History, 6, 2022

09Jul22

Access the issue here.


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Free speech is settler speech: Darcy Leigh, ‘The Settler Coloniality of Free Speech’, International Political Sociology, 16, 3, 2022

09Jul22

Abstract: Public and scholarly debates surrounding free speech often assume free speech is a public good and/or should be approached as a problem of “drawing the line” between free and regulated or benign and harmful speech. In contrast, this article provides a genealogy of free speech in which liberal freedom of expression has, since its inception, been integral to white supremacist settler colonialism in the United Kingdom and its former settler colonies, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand. The article argues that, far from a noble struggle against regulation, liberal politics around free speech establish oppositions between white “civilized” speech and its Indigenized racially darkened “others” as well as controlling or silencing Indigenous, Black and/or otherwise racially othered speech across the Anglosphere. The article first traces free speech through two significant moments in its emergence: early European Enlightenment colonial expansion (embodied in John Locke’s “toleration”) and 1800s British colonial industrialization (embodied in John Stuart Mill’s “marketplace of ideas”). The article then examines how this genealogy informs the contemporary case study of contestation over free speech in universities, showing that engagements with free speech across the political spectrum extend its settler colonial rationality.


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