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The settler subject: Marcelo Svirsky, ‘The Israeli elephant in the settler-colonial room’, Postcolonial Studies, 2022

20Jun22

Abstract: This article presents a rationale to expand settler-colonial studies so as to conceptually fuse in the same proposition the question of settler-colonial permanence with that of the settler subject. Arguments are elaborated based on one particular case study, Palestine. This gap in the research in relation to Palestine not only has left unresolved the problem of how to explain the continuation of the Israeli settler regime beyond its unequivocal overt and superior mechanisms of legal and brute power but has also kept the concrete perpetrators in the shadows, away from public accountability. The article also lays out a number of potential dimensions to lead research into the conceptual nexus suggested here, for the specific case of Palestine. These dimensions, which I suggest form the emotional economy of Israeli settler-colonial subjectivity, comprise (1) the compensatory distributions of settler-colonial capture, (2) the historical formation of strata of subjectivation, (3) the avenues of socialization that cement the commitment to a militarized society, and (4) the ways by which settler learning and settler practice are conjoined in everyday training.


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The art of settler colonialism: Erin Morton (ed.), Unsettling Canadian Art History, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022

19Jun22

Description: Bringing together fifteen scholars of art and culture, Unsettling Canadian Art History addresses the visual and material culture of settler colonialism, enslavement, and racialized diasporas in the contested white settler state of Canada. This collection offers new avenues for scholarship on art, archives, and creative practice by rethinking histories of Canadian colonialisms from Black, Indigenous, racialized, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit perspectives. Writing across many positionalities, contributors offer chapters that disrupt colonial archives of art and culture, excavating and reconstructing radical Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic creation and experience. Exploring the racist frameworks that continue to erase histories of violence and resistance, this book imagines the expansive possibilities of a decolonial future. Unsettling Canadian Art History affirms the importance of collaborative conversations and work in the effort to unsettle scholarship in Canadian art and culture.


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What is a treaty? Peter Cook, Neil Vallance, John Sutton Lutz, Graham Brazier, Hamar Foster (eds), To Share, Not Surrender: Indigenous and Settler Visions of Treaty Making in the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, UBC Press, 2022

19Jun22

Description: Too often, history and knowledge of Indigenous-settler conflict over land take the form of confidential reports prepared for court challenges. To Share, Not Surrender offers an entirely new approach, opening scholarship to the public and augmenting it with First Nations community expertise. The collection appraises the historical and present-day relevance of treaty-making in the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. The authors take us back to when James Douglas and his family relocated to Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island in 1849, critically tracing the transition from treaty-making in the colony of Vancouver Island to reserve formation in the colony of British Columbia. Informed by cel’aṉ’en – “our culture, the way of our people” – this multivocal work explicitly addresses the tensions between academic research, Indigenous knowledge, and local experience. The collection includes essays, translations/interpretations of the treaties into the SENĆOŦEN and Lekwungen languages, and contributions by participants of the Songhees, Huu-ay-aht, and WSANEC peoples. The chapters demonstrate that the continuing inability to arrive at equitable land-sharing arrangements stem from a fundamental absence of will with respect to accommodating First Nations world views. To Share, Not Surrender is an attempt to understand why, and thus to advance the urgent task of reconciliation in Canada. The multiple perspectives presented in this important work will find equally diverse audiences: Canadian historians, scholars and students of Indigenous studies, ethno-historians, legal historians, lawyers practising in the areas of Aboriginal law, and researchers preparing historical reports on First Nation land claims.


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Settler colonialism steals it: Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘“But if I don’t steal it, someone else is gonna steal it” – Israeli Settler-Colonial Accumulation by Dispossession’, Merip, 302, 2002

19Jun22

Excerpt: in a video clip widely shared on social media platforms in late April 2021, Mona al-Kurd (a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood) is seen confronting Jacob Fauci (an Israeli Jewish settler from Long Island) in the yard of her family home …


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Racial diversity and settler colonialism: Jorge Humberto Alcaraz, Unsettling Understandings: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy and the Implementation of a Racial Diversity Initiative, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2022

19Jun22

Abstract: Scholarship on racial diversity initiatives outline the positive outcomes associated with initiatives, describes the types of initiatives, and the various ways faculty, staff, and university leadership can and do work together for effective outcomes. However, there is a need to understand how racial diversity initiatives are implemented, what influences their creation,and how systems of power like settler colonialism and white supremacy manifest during the implementation of racial diversity initiatives. Utilizing an embedded qualitative case study approach, this study explored the implementation of the White Racial Literacy Project, by way of the Welcoming Campus Initiative,at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Guiding questions focused on identifying the organizational and societal elements that influenced the creation of the WCI and WRLP, while illuminating the ways white supremacy manifested in the implementation of the WRLP. This study was guided by two theories, Implementation Theory and Settler Colonial Dimensions of Power (SCDP). Implementation Theory framed the process of implementation, accounting for the context of an initiative and the agency utilized by personnel to influence the implementation of an initiative. SCDP accounted for and illuminated the influence of settler colonialism and white supremacy in both the context of and agency used to implement the WRLP. Utilizing provisional coding and pattern coding as tools for direct interpretation and categorical aggregation, I mapped findings to the theoretical frameworks, positionality, and guiding questions of this study. Findings revealed three influencing organizational elements: that organizational factors the influenced the WCI and WRLP (a) the new Chancellor, (b) IUPUI’s 50thcelebration, and (c) failed organizational practices to educate white faculty, staff, and students; and two societal elements, (a) Turbulent socio-political environmentand (b) a storied history of racism at IUPUI. In addition, white supremacy manifested across two themes: (a) white supremacy as pushback and (b) white supremacy as refusal. Findings illuminate the challenges faculty, staff, and university leaders faced when implementing the WRLP, illuminating the need for further exploration of implementation processes of racial diversity initiatives. Insights from this study afford higher education research and practice with ways to boldy imagine new futurities for racial diversity initiatives.


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Indigenous art, settler sport: Judy Davidson, Jay Scherer, Rylan Kafara, ‘Alex Janvier’s Iron Foot Place: Indigenous Public Art, Survivance, and Settler Reconciliation in Edmonton’s Rogers Place’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 2022

19Jun22

Abstract: On 8 September 2016, Tsa Tsa Ke K’e (Iron Foot Place) was officially unveiled on the floor of the new Rogers Place Arena, home to the National Hockey League’s Edmonton Oilers. The circular, 45-foot-diameter tile mosaic is the creation of renowned contemporary artist Alex Janvier (Denesųłiné/Saulteaux), whose remarkable career has involved fighting for artistic sovereignty and resisting settler colonialism. This mural has prompted multiple expressions and practices of Indigenous survivance, performances and gestures of state and corporate reconciliation, and exists at the edge of some of the lived realities of exacerbated biopolitical necropolitics in Edmonton. In this article, we explore the intersections of art and professional men’s hockey as they coexist under ongoing settler colonialism at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. In post–Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canada, how do investments in public art in corporate-civic professional sport partnerships further celebrate Indigenous culture and persistent presence? And concomitantly, how do such investments continue to both obscure and intensify the genocidal conditions under which the settler nation of Canada was created, and just as importantly, continues to function?


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Settler colonialism is Sápmi: Alva Blomkvist, Gendering Ethnicity: Colonialism and Structural Violence in the Swedish 1928 Reindeer Grazing Act, MA dissertation, Linnaeus University, 2022

19Jun22

Abstract: This thesis examines how the gendering of ethnicity in the Swedish Reindeer Grazing Act of 1928 (RBL 1928) was part of a colonial structure of violence. The research context in which this thesis places itself is in the intersection of previous scholarship on the colonial interest in controlling Indigenous marriage, and scholarship on Swedish colonial history in Sápmi. The theoretical framework for the thesis is made up by an understanding of violence, settler colonial extinction in fact, intersectionality, and control over women’s reproduction as intertwined phenomenon. The study consists of an analysis of the law in question using a feminist policy analysis and the method ‘What’s the problem represented to be’; as well as a source critical reading of archival materials such as magazine clippings, protocols, legal decisions, letters, questionnaires, and transcribed interviews with Sámi interviewees. RLB 1928 gendered ethnicity so that Sámi women who married non-Sámi men lost their reindeer herding rights, and with that their Sáminess. This is a form of epistemic violence, changing the way Sámi women can relate to their Sáminess. The effects the provision in RBL 1928 controlling marriage had on Sámi women were both economic and social. The economic violence that Sámi women were exposed to consisted of access to land as well as material property being taken from them. When women lost their juridical Sáminess, they risked being isolated from their communities and culture, making out a form of violence here framed as violence of exclusion. The gendering of ethnicity also affected the Sámi society as a whole, as it posed a threat of extinction in fact of the Sámi population.


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Settler colonial Kashmir: Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski, Deepti Misri (eds), Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies, Routledge, 2022

19Jun22

Description: The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies presents emerging critical knowledge frameworks and perspectives that foreground situated histories and resistance practices to challenge colonial and postcolonial forms of governance and state building. It politicizes discourses of nationalism, patriotism, democracy, and liberalism, and it questions how these dominant globalist imaginaries and discourses serve institutionalized power, create hegemony, and normalize domination. In doing so, the handbook situates Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship within global scholarly conversations on nationalism, sovereignty, indigenous movements, human rights, and international law.


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Settlers at the end of the road: Jean Smith, Settlers at the end of empire: Race and the politics of migration in South Africa, Rhodesia and the United Kingdom, Manchester University Press, 2022

19Jun22

Description: Settlers at the end of empire traces the development of racialised migration regimes in South Africa, Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and the United Kingdom from the Second World War to the end of apartheid in 1994. While South Africa and Rhodesia, like other settler colonies, had a long history of restricting the entry of migrants of colour, in the 1960s under existential threat and after abandoning formal ties with the Commonwealth they began to actively recruit white migrants, the majority of whom were British. At the same time, with the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, the British government began to implement restrictions aimed at slowing the migration of British subjects of colour. In all three nations, these policies were aimed at the preservation of nations imagined as white, revealing the persistence of the racial ideologies of empire across the era of decolonisation.


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Land-based social work against settler colonialism: Mehmoona Moosa-Mitha, ‘Resisting the White Settler Colonial Nation-State: Lessons From Indigenous Land-Based Teachings and Their Implications for Social Work Education’, Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work, 10, 1, 2022, pp. 19-36

16Jun22

Abstract: Land-based teachings are normatively understood as being unique to Indigenous philosophy, ethics, and politics. Liberal political realities and worldviews, particularly as they appear in normative scholarship on the welfare state and social work, treat land as an uninterrogated blank space that is uninformed by everyday social work practices. In this article I argue that the white settler colonial welfare state as a (neo) liberal political project is grounded in and even defined by land-based assumptions, at the level of discourse and practice, that deeply inform state and, by extension, social work practices. I examine creation stories of the Haudenosaunee people as well as from Christian and liberal Enlightenment sources, which are all land-based, to extract differing visions that guide their everyday practices. Taking my cue from Indigenous land-based teachings, I offer four lessons that can be learned by social work educators seeking to include reconciliation as part of their decolonizing pedagogy: (a) politicizing critical social work education by linking it to land-based practices; (b) understanding socially just social work practices as horizontal in nature and across multiple nations; (c) viewing social work client relationships in terms of reciprocal gift relationships; and (d) incorporating a cyclical view of time in their practice.


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