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Chilean settler colonialism: Amie Campos, Territorial Conflicts, Bureaucracy, and State formation in Chile’s Southern Frontera: 1866-1912, PhD Dissertation, UC San Diego, 2022

04Jul22

Abstract: My dissertation, “Territorial Conflicts, Bureaucracy, and State Formation in Chile’s Southern Frontera 1866-1912″ is an agrarian and social history of settler colonialism in the Araucanía region of Southern Chile beginning in 1866 when Chile established its first colonization laws and concluding in 1912. Using national, regional, and local archival sources as its foundation, it seeks to understand the ways in which the Chilean state, as represented by government bureaucrats such as engineers and officials at the Ministry of Colonization, developed and enacted its visions of economic progress. Local Indigenous Mapuche tribes were significantly impacted by these land transformations, as many communities were forced off their lands and in some cases found no other recourse than to navigate the long, bureaucratic process of lawsuits to regain their lost lands. My research begins with the question of how different groups, including European colonos and Chilean settlers sought to impose (or preserve) a particular vision of space, progress, and development in the region. Although my study fully recognizes the violence that was required to establish control over the region, it is my contention that an equally important part of this process was the state’s deployment of techniques that have usually been seen as relatively neutral in both their intent and impact upon state-peasant relations. In this way, my project makes the historiographical push to go beyond the military histories of the region to think about the day-to-day interactions between bureaucrats and local communities. Techniques such as mapping and parceling were both the result of, and the necessary prerequisite to, various forms of violence associated with pacification, occupation, and the creation of the region as an underdeveloped internal periphery. The information that these practices produced helped to further knowledge about exploitable resources and profitable territories and were pivotal in the formation of more overt ways of exerting control over the
peoples of the region.


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Nigerian settler colonialism? Cephas T. A. Tushima, ‘Reconnoitering Settler Colonization Part II: Its Emergence in Nigeria’, Research Developments in Arts and Social Studies, 5, 2022 , pp. 127-139

30Jun22

Abstract: In Part I of this essay, I surveyed the global phenomenon of settler colonization through time, paying attention to its nature, ideology, processes, and praxis. Flowing from that, I applied the knowledge gained from the study of settler colonization to the settler colonial experience of Nigeria as initiated by British colonialism, particularly the British use of exogenous others in its conquest and ‘civilizing missions’ in the Middle Belt of Nigeria, and its enduring consequences leading to the resurgence of internal settler colonial enterprise in the territories of contemporary autochthonous communities of Nigeria’s Middle Belt region. The methodology adopted consists in literary and historical analysis, while the theoretical framework is within the general field of the emerging settler colonial studies. Suggestions are then proffered on dealing with and possibly surviving the onslaughts of settler colonisers.


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The indigeneities of settler colonialism in Brazil: Qi Zhang, ‘Shifting Constitution of Indigeneity in (Post-)Colonial Brazil’, E-international Relations, 2022

30Jun22

Excerpt: Though the indigenous were thus intended to be useful, they were also subject to a logic of elimination, intensified by further Portuguese settlement over time (especially after Brazil’s independence). This might feel like a paradox or a flaw in the colonisers’ plan, as Barickman suggests. Nevertheless, Wolfe’s explanation of “(structural) genocide” helps reconcile these seemingly contradictory logics. To Wolfe, the violence of settler colonialism is not equivalent to genocide as conventionally understood (actual killing of groups of human beings). It is rather the “grouphood”, or the “ongoingness” of an indigenous community’s mode of existence to borrow a communitarian expression from Walzer, that settler colonialism sought to eliminate. This gives meaning to “genos” in this particular form of genocide. By cultural assimilation, Portuguese colonisers disrupted (though not always successfully) the indigenous peoples’ ways of life. Their tremendously rich knowledges and practices, then unappreciated by Europeans, could have remained intact but instead suffered considerable losses. An epistemological/ontological violence no less eliminatory than direct coercion.


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Leisure as a settler colonialist enterprise: Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, ‘Designing Terra Nullius: Mid-century Modernism and Settler-Colonial Leisure’, in Sibel Bozdoǧan, Panayiota Pyla, Petros Phokaides (eds), Coastal Architectures and Politics of Tourism, Routledge, 2022

28Jun22

Abstract: This chapter considers the ways in which mid-century modernism configured Southern California’s leisurescape by implicitly articulating and reproducing terra nullius as a colonial mode of territorial management. The relation between the Reservation of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and the modern development of Palm Springs, California is historicized in connection with the US’s legal-institutional colonial administration and corresponding disciplinary discourses of modern architecture. Rather than being a legal fiction or a past historical event, terra nullius is shown to be spatially produced through the architecturally mediated encounter of different settler-colonial legacies and capitalist modes of surplus extraction—a process that continues today. This architectural-territorial condition reduces Native sovereignty via two modes of biopolitical management: racialization and regionalization. Two projects in the Agua Caliente Reservation/City of Palm Springs—Lloyd Wright’s Oasis Hotel (1925) and William Cody’s Palm Springs Spa (1960)—show how architecture’s articulation of terra nullius since the 19th century conditioned this territory as a postwar leisurescape.


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Settler colonialist solidarity? Rebekah Kartal, ‘Refusing Colonial Forms of Solidarity on O’odham Lands/the US–Mexico Borderlands’, Antipode, 2022

28Jun22

Abstract: In the US–Mexico borderlands, coalitions have formed to successfully thwart attempted amplification of militarisation in the region. However, in the borderlands, where migrants are criminalised and the colonisation of Indigenous lands and life is ongoing, coalition building is complicated due to the distinct positionalities of anti-militarisation activists. This paper analyses solidarity from the perspective of anti-militarisation organisations and activists in Southern Arizona/on occupied O’odham lands. I contend that desires for solidarity built around the worker, despite the recognition of unique struggles, reveal certain tendencies in activism remain bound to settler colonial ways of relating and understanding. Nonetheless, I argue that ongoing resistance to settler colonial terms of condition may motivate moves to refuse colonial forms of solidarity by reimagining coalition building as transpiring through reciprocal exchange of (hi)stories between differently positioned activists, rather than seeking a struggle that is common to all.


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The heritage industrial complex of settler colonialism: Camille Petersen, ‘Capitalizing on Heritage: St. Augustine, Florida, and the Landscape of American Racial Ideology’, City & Community, 2022

28Jun22

Abstract: Drawing on Black and Indigenous intellectual traditions, this article applies racial capitalism and settler colonialism as twin frameworks essential for understanding gentrification in a city whose growth is predicated on historical storytelling. Challenging the hegemony of neoliberal and colorblind urbanisms, it is argued that the longue durée world system of racism is always already structuring capitalism and the urban process. The case study of St. Augustine, Florida, shows the role of White nationalist place-making in consolidating the material and ideological structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, past and present. Using ethnographic and textual data, I show how what I call the “heritage industrial complex” produces and is produced by racist ideology, promoting diversity and inclusion in historical storytelling about “the oldest city” at the same time as urban processes of gentrification, redevelopment, and disenfranchisement characterize contemporary race relations in the city and the state. Although we have a firm understanding of spatialized inequalities, bringing together the sociology of race and ethnicity’s attention to ideology with urban sociology’s emphasis on the city and landscape can help us understand how race is constitutive of the capitalist project.


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Archiving settler colonialism: Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘Settler colonialism and the archives of apprehension’, Current Sociology, 2022

28Jun22

Abstract: The ‘archival turn’ has prompted historical scholarship to reevaluate the positivist sourcing of knowledge, especially in contentious contexts. The archive’s configuration, and attendant mechanisms of classification, apprehension, and attribution indicate colonial governance just as much as inscribed histories and discourses. Scholarship on the Zionist movement in early-20th century Palestine has been slow to adopt the analytical shift from archive as source to archive as subject. This article examines archiving, forms of classification, and the organization of settler colonial history in the context of the Zionist movement’s leftist pole. Cases from the author’s fieldwork are used to introduce the term archives of apprehension: how the informational practices and anxiety over territorial reversibility that settler colonial archives are built upon in fact preserve the collective indigenous presence that colonization tries to marginalize. The article concludes by considering how historical sociology can better instrumentalize such archives to learn about the emergence and endurance of entangled settler/native socialites.


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Islamophobic settler colonialism: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Islamophobia, Antisemitism, Zionism, Settler Colonialism’, Islamophobia Studies Journal, 7, 1, 2022, pp. 96-107

27Jun22

Abstract: This article discusses Islamophobia and its relationship with antisemitism in the
context of the radical European right’s recent shift towards pro-Israel positions and away from
its traditional antisemitism. Whereas this shift also has US and Australian manifestations, this
article suggests that current Islamophobic utterances can be seen as surrogate antisemitism.


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Environmental settler colonialism: Robert Christensen, Worlds in Conflict: Indigenous Peoples, Environmental Challenges, and the ‘Conquista del Desierto’ in the Making of Argentina, 1870-1900, PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 2022

27Jun22

Abstract: From their first encounter in 1536, armed conflict between Indigenous groups and settlers of European and African descent in Argentina (who referred to themselves as cristianos, or Christians) was a constant menace to both. At the best of times, the two groups engaged in mutually beneficial trade, cultural interchange, and intermarriage. At the worst of times, each stole livestock from the other, burned each other’s homes, and killed noncombatants. The 1879-1885 Campaña del Desierto, or Desert Campaign, changed this equilibrium: in a series of short campaigns, the Argentine army broke the political power of the confederacies that had governed Indigenous society, killing or confining survivors in prisoner camps before relocating them to distant areas. I argue that the momentous changes of this era were often mediated by or articulated through human-environmental relationships. Dispossession and resettlement in far-away lands forced Indigenous people to make creative adaptations to these environmental relationships and many other facets of their lives. This dissertation follows the rise of the Indigenous confederacies of Pampas-Patagonia by focusing on the Catriel lineage of Buenos Aires. It deploys archaeological and historical sources toward understanding the ecology of the Indigenous agropastoral and commercial system, emphasizing its complementarity with cristiano economies in Argentina and Chile. It also depicts the structural shift undergone by cristiano society in Argentina that undermined the broadly stable interethnic relationships of the prior century prior. Using a combination of historical and paleoclimatic sources, it exposes the effects of a famine that impeded Indigenous peoples’ ability to engage in collective action. The catastrophic El Niño of 1877-1878 and a smallpox epidemic were vital in shaping Indigenous communities’ preparedness for and response to the military campaign. As the military phase of the campaign drew to a close in 1880, the Argentine government struggled to find a place for the thousands of Indigenous people they held in prisoner camps. I trace their stories through a series of case studies, following a series of agricultural colonies, a group sent the sugar cane fields of Tucumán, and dispersed communities in northern Patagonia living on public lands to which they lacked legal title.


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Emotional settler colonialism: Crystal McKinnon, Claire McLisky, ‘Settler-Colonial Emotions: Fear, Desire and Romance in Nineteenth-Century Historical Representations of the William Buckley Story’, in Katie Barclay, Peter N. Stearns (eds), The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World, Routledge, 2022

27Jun22

Abstract: This chapter considers the role of emotions in settler-colonial history writing, using as a case study colonial historians’ depictions of the story of William Buckley, a British convict who spent 32 years living with the Waddawurrung people of south-western Victoria, Australia. In these histories, Buckley’s story was portrayed as a Romance, an exotic narrative full of excitement and affect, with an unlikely hero moving towards a redemptive goal. It was also marked by the settler-colonial emotions of desire for, and fear of losing, land and legitimacy. By paying attention to the emotional underpinnings of foundational mythologies, particularly contemporarily persistent ones like Buckley’s, we gain insight into the ways that emotion is used to create, build and maintain the settler-colonial state.


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