settler colonial studies blog

Honestly, I am not sure: Maria Teresa Houar, ‘The erotic of abstinence: Refusing the white-possessive and embracing settler abstinence in performance pedagogy’, in Amy Mihyang Ginther (ed.), Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and Decolonial Actor Training, Routledge, 2022

01Jan23

Abstract: The Erotic of Abstinence is an aesthetic in art and performance that makes desirable an ethic of care and intimacy in resistance to the non-consensual violence of settler colonialism and the consequences of this violence to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC); queer; and disabled lives. Settler colonial values normalize non-consensual ways of relating, and these values have shaped our spaces and pedagogies for actor training. This chapter reflects on the ways that the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the insidious harms of these values hidden within the intimacy of labor in our everyday lives and offers a timely proposal for allies to embrace settler abstinence as an erotic ethic that would refuse the demands of settler productivity and systems of property and embrace an aesthetic that promotes wellbeing and consensual relating within performance pedagogy.

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The settler onslaught: Carrie Mott, ‘Theft: Grave robbery, territorial conquest, and irrigation’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2022

27Dec22

Abstract: This paper explores the process of settler colonialism in Washington State’s Yakima Valley in the early twentieth century as an example of a regional power bloc that sought to maximize white access to natural resources while dispossessing Native Americans of their lands and access to water. Through a multiscalar approach, I consider how colonization and white supremacy were normalized through infrastructural projects crucial to agricultural development and economic prosperity in the US West A discussion of a 1906 Native American grave robbery operates as an anchor for a larger analysis of how irrigation infrastructure and other reclamation projects served the colonizing aims of the US federal government. In the US West, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and Bureau of Reclamation (BoR) were both federal agencies that played critical roles in an era where public lands were being converted to private property and allotted Native American reservation land was significantly diminished after being sold to non-Natives. The grave robbery itself and ensuing trial serve as indications of everyday life in the Yakima Valley in 1906, revealing the interconnections between infrastructural advancements, white supremacist settler colonialism, and grave robbery.

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The inclusion/exclusion of settler education: Sophie Rudolph, Archie Thomas, ‘Education, Racial Justice, and the Limits of Inclusion in Settler Colonial Australia’, Comparative Education Review, 2022

27Dec22

Abstract: Education both actively excludes (through suspensions and expulsions) and tries to include (through inclusion policies, programs, and pathways). Students who experience both exclusion and attempts at inclusion tend to be racialized Black, Brown, and/or Indigenous; identify as queer or trans; be experiencing poverty; and/or be living with a disability. These are also the young people who tend to experience incarceration in settler colonial states. In this article we draw on and develop the metaphor of the “school-to-prison pipeline,” which originated in the United States, to examine the contours and tensions of educational exclusion in Australia. In doing this we map a range of “modes of exclusion” that we illustrate are based on the interconnected racial logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. We propose a new research agenda for understanding the links between racial domination, criminality, carcerality, and educational exclusion in settler colonial contexts that seeks to go beyond normative models of inclusion.

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Narrating settler extractivism: Julia Siepak, ‘Storied Geographies: Settler Extractivism and Sites of Indigenous Resurgence in Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild’, Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, 44, 2, 2022, pp. 150-169

27Dec22

Abstract: This article offers a reading of Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild (2019) that focuses on the novel’s poetics of space, which contests settler colonial extractive geographies. Adopting a strong Métis- and women’s perspective, Dimaline’s narrative explores the contemporary Métis condition, which is marked by dispossession and displacement under settler colonialism, and the precarity connected with rampant resource extraction in Canada. In order to tackle the tensions between settler- and Indigenous conceptualizations of space, I provide a brief overview of settler Canadian land politics, and describe the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels applying the concepts of petrostate and petroculture. By incorporating a Rogarou figure, a lupine monster in Métis stories, Dimaline embeds her novel within the traditional stories of her people, demonstrating their potential to critique and contest settler colonial geographies marked by extraction. The analysis approaches Indigenous storytelling as a strategy that resists dispossession and tackles the representation of Métis bodies as sites of resurgence.

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Parasite to host (on settler belonging, again): Ethan Plaue, ‘The Parasitical Trick: Mediating Dispossession in Early America’, American Literature, 2022

25Dec22

Abstract: How do settlers organize their discursive relationship with the lands they settle, in order to claim, conceptually and materially, the position of owner and occupant? What must they do to transform themselves, in their eyes and in the eyes of others, from parasite to host? And in what ways have these practices been contested? This article addresses these questions in the historical context of early American settler colonialism and demonstrates the relational structure that colonial legitimation requires, including how this structure is mediated by subjects not strictly part of that relation. Through readings of John Marshall, Mary Rowlandson, James Printer, and Martin R. Delany, this article brings together the fields of media philosophy and settler colonial studies to theorize the “parasitical trick” as a fundamental and flexible technique of settler colonialism that removes Indigenous people from relationality by, paradoxically, making them central to it.

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Parasite to host (on settler belonging): Sarah Galletly, ‘Serial Representations of Indigenous Peoples and Settler Belonging in The Queenslander’, JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 22, 2, 2022

25Dec22

Excerpt: This article examines serial representations of Indigenous peoples in colonial periodical fiction to explore settler anxieties around colonisation and the fragile nature of settler belonging. It builds upon periodical scholar Elizabeth Sheehan’s articulation of seriality’s “role as a technique of repetition that helps to produce and reproduce subjects and groups” to consider the extent to which the serial (re)production of representations of Indigenous peoples in colonial texts works both to support and unsettle settler colonial subject formations and identities. Focusing mainly on the 1880 Christmas Supplement of the Queenslander, this study explores how two interdependent modes of seriality—continuity and subject formation—can be productively traced within a single issue of a periodical.

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A settler feeling for landscape: Costanza Bergo, Atlas of Denial: Australian Landscape and the Settler-Colonial Structure of Feeling, PhD dissertation, UNSW, 2022

23Dec22

Abstract: My project articulates and examines the notion of a settler-colonial structure of feeling through visual analysis of landscape in Australian film, art and popular culture from post-World War II to the present day. The focus of such an investigation is not the overt intentions of representations of landscape, but rather the unrepresentable tensions they aim to conceal. The thesis theorises a relationship of interdependence between the physical occupation of territory and the production of images that represent those territories as landscape. It considers the role of landscape representation within the ongoing performance of possession that settler colonies rely upon for the (re)production of sovereignty. As Tuck and Yang argue, land is the main preoccupation of settler colonialism. Landscape representation, in turn, indexes the settler-colonial cultural perception of land. The very concept of an Australian landscape is rooted in the epistemology of colonialism: the settler-colonial nation relies on its subjects to continuously conceptualise its national landscape not as occupied territories belonging to Indigenous peoples but as an undisputed sovereign white nation called Australia. Settler-colonial landscape is one of the tools through which the settler colony circulates and enacts the denial mechanisms it depends on. My project brings together Wolfe’s articulation of settler-colonialism as structure with Williams’s notion of structures of feeling. It does so to theorise and analyse a settler-colonial structure of feeling—the inherently ambivalent network of unconscious drives that both uphold and disrupt the settler-colonial project. My project maps settler denial through various terrains. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the co-constitution of anxiety and pleasure in representations of the landscape within the settler imagination. Chapter 3 focuses on land as property and examines the settler home and garden to disentangle the complex relationship between care and violence that characterises everyday life in the contemporary settler state. Finally, chapter 4 moves to the coast and beach to examine the death-line of the border. Each chapter builds its argument through visual analysis of diverse media, ranging from tourism advertisements to feature films and artworks, all analysed from a perspective that brings together art history, settler-colonial studies and cultural studies.

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Settlers fantasise about gardens: Nicholas Enright, Plant and Settler: Eighteenth Cnetury Fictions of Eurpean Colonisation (Defoe, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Kleist), PhD dissertation, University of Sydney, 2022

23Dec22

Excerpt: This thesis shall investigate the problematics of settler colonialism through the prism of three key literary fictions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in particular: Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia, 1780) and Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (The Betrothal in St. Domingo, 1811) – texts in which the fantasy of planting and settling, so I argue, is at its most productive and virulent. Connecting these fictions is not only their enormous popularity or the wellknown fact that they all cite, revise and rewrite each other. Equally unifying is the way in which each of them combines a dynamic of gardening with the setting of a far-away island at a remove from European society. Islands, like gardens, are small, unassuming spaces in which social, economic and
power-political relationships have always been hotly contested and negotiated. In their assumed manageability and self-sufficiency, they are consistently appropriated for all kinds of ideological agendas and utopian …

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Settler colonialism to settler communism? Nodrada, ‘Decolonization and Communism’, Orinoco Tribune, 19/05/21

21Dec22

Excerpt: While the turn towards analyzing ongoing settler-colonialism has finally reached the mainstream of North American political discussions, there is still a lack of popular understanding of the issues involved. Settler-colonialism is, ironically, understood within the framework of the ways of thinking brought by the European ruling classes to the Americas. By extension, the conceptions of decolonization are similarly limited. Although the transition from analyzing psychological or “discursive” decolonization to analyzing literal, concrete colonization has been extremely important, it requires some clarifications. Settler–colonialism is a form of colonialism distinct from franchise colonialism. The colonizers seek primarily to eliminate the indigenous population rather than exploit them, as in the latter form of colonialism. Decolonization is the struggle to abolish colonial conditions, though approaches to it may vary. Societies formed on a settler-colonial basis include the United States, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia. For our purposes, we will focus on the United States in analyzing local ideas of settler-colonialism and decolonization. Among North American radicals, there are two frequent errors in approaching decolonization. On the one hand, there are the opponents of decolonization who argue that settler-colonialism no longer exists. In their view, to identify specific concerns for Indigenous peoples and to identify the ongoing presence of settler-colonial social positions is divisive and stuck in the past. They believe that settlers no longer exist, and Euro-Americans have fully become indigenous to North America through a few centuries of residency. On the other hand, there are proponents of decolonization who believe that Euro-Americans are eternally damned as settlers, and cannot be involved in any radical change whatsoever. The most extreme of these argue for the exclusion of Euro-Americans from radical politics entirely. Settler-colonialism is not over, contrary to the first view. Rather, Indigenous peoples still struggle for their rights to sovereignty within and outside reservations, especially ecological-spiritual rights. Their ostensibly legally recognized rights are not respected, either. The examples of the struggles of the Wet’suwet’en, Standing Rock Lakota, Mi’kmaq, and other peoples in recent memory are testimony to this. Indigenous peoples are still here, and they are still fighting to thrive as Indigenous peoples. Capitalists drive to exploit the earth, destroying ecology and throwing society into what John Bellamy Foster calls a metabolic rift.² This means that the demands of capital for expansion are incompatible with the ‘rhythm’ of ecology, destroying concrete life for abstract aims as a result.

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Canoeing all the way to settler colonialism: James M. Hundley, ‘Histories of the Canoe Journey: Border Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, and the Decolonization and Unsettling of Coast Salish Territory’, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2022

21Dec22

Abstract: The fields of Border Studies and Critical Indigenous Studies offer much to social scientists seeking to understand the operation of power in the lives of borderlands communities. This article illustrates why critical Indigenous scholarship should be a necessary framework in exploring issues of state and nation-building by examining four possible origin stories for what is now an annual event on the Northwest Coast of North America: The Canoe Journey. I implore border studies scholars to look beyond national boundaries and consider Indigenous epistemologies and historiographies in understanding the impacts that international borders have on shaping how all peoples make meaning of our world. I argue that doing so will allow border studies to contribute toward an analysis of settler colonialism and highlight the role state borders play in upholding it.

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