settler colonial studies blog

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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Mourning the child (really, but not really): Miranda Sophia Leibel, Writing our Wrongs: ‘Justness’, Accountability, and Transparency in Provincial Child Death Inquiries in the Context of Neoliberal Settler Colonialism, PhD dissertation, Carleton University, 2022

21Dec22

Abstract: This dissertation examines the child death inquiry as a performative ritual of liberaldemocratic governance in the contexts of ongoing settler colonialism and the implementation of New Public Management in Canadian public policy. I ask: what is the performative work of public inquiries in constituting political relationships in contemporary Canada? I situate the child death inquiry as a particular form of public inquiry shaped by settler affective responses to Indigenous child deaths and assembled by contradictory logics that emphasize the universal generalizability of Indigenous loss, while articulating a specific and targeted anger with liberal, democratic governments, who ought to be accountable to their taxpaying-settler-publics. I trace the movement of figures as they are re/produced in the inquiry process: the ‘Indigenous Public Child’, the taxpayer-citizen and the benevolent settler public, and the ir/responsible government. I then consider how these relationships are produced, contested, and reaffirmed, as well as what kinds of impacts, concerns, and possibilities exist in the political spaces and relationships produced. I demonstrate how the dispositif of the child death inquiry moves from organizing hegemonic forms of visibility (through mainstream media), structuring the vocabulary of problematization (through legislative debate), establishing normative ‘solutions’ (through public reports), and articulating ‘progress’(through policy commitments). The shift to private-sector-infused managerialism as a proposed solution to the contradictions of settler colonialism reflects a transformation from justice (as a political demand) to justness (as a technocratic form of ‘resolution’ and a commitment to continuous self-improvement). In Manitoba, one child becomes a symbolic stand-in for the various political failures of what is portrayed to be a bloated bureaucracy; in Alberta, government accountability comes to be framed through the quantification (and publicization) of child deaths; finally, in Ontario, the absence of the figure of the Indigenous Public Child, compounded by the preemptive commitment to self-improvement, reveals how the dispositif of the child death inquiry changes when the benevolent settler public does not accept moral responsibility for the Indigenous Public Child. Each case study demonstrates how, in different ways, lives and deaths are made to be public in the settler state, and to what end.

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Southern Ukraine as a settler colonial locale: Olivia Irena Durand, ‘”New Russia” and the Legacies of Settler Colonialism in Southern Ukraine, Journal of Applied History, 2022

17Dec22

Abstract: Russia’s conquest of the northern shores of the Black Sea in the late eighteenth century and their renaming as ‘New Russia’ contributed to a wider movement of colonisation, settlement, and re-signification of territories worldwide under the aegis of imperial ideology. The adoption of the new name was also a way to erase the memory of the former inhabitants of the region—in the case of Southern Ukraine, its Tatar and Cossack populations, as well as its Greek and Jewish minorities. However, the coloniality of ‘New Russia’ was always up for debate in Russian official discourse: because the conquests happened in contiguous territories, Southern Ukraine was both an object of colonisation and an agent of further conquest, especially in the direction of the Caucasus. Inventing ‘New Russia’ thus asserted the colonial and ‘oriental’ significance of the Black Sea steppes, while entrenching Russia’s own imperial status and suggesting a place where Russia’s future might be.

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The heritage of settler colonialism: Robert Flahive, ‘Remaking the “World” in the World Heritage List: International Organisations, Settler Colonialism, and Architectural Preservation in Brasilia’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2022

17Dec22

Abstract: This article explores the entanglements of settler colonialism with the integration of the 20th century-built environment onto the UNESCO World Heritage List by focusing on architectural preservation in Brasilia. The addition of Brasilia to the World Heritage List in 1987 was the realisation of a longstanding effort to enhance institutional legitimacy by expanding the representation of 20th century sites in geographies from the Global South. However, I argue that the addition of the pilot plan as Brasilia implicated both the World Heritage Committee and purveyors of Brasilia’s significance to architectural history in circumscribing the pilot plan from surrounding urban fabric. This argument is advanced by drawing on settler colonial studies, architectural history, architectural preservation, histories of Brasilia, and meeting notes from the World Heritage Committee. The article concludes that the preservation of the pilot plan as Brasilia 1) legitimates of spatial fragmentation in Brasilia through architectural history, 2) shows how settler colonialism is constitutive of the legitimacy of the World Heritage List, and 3) illustrates how international organisations have the potential to serve as vehicles for the reproduction of the logic elimination and the consolidation of settler spatial control.

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The settlers and the feds: Julius Wilm, ‘Old Myths, Turned on Their Heads: Settler Agency, Federal Authority, and the Colonization of Oregon’, Oregon Historical Quarterly, 123, 4, 2022, pp. 326-357

17Dec22

Abstract: The modern historiography of Oregon’s settler colonization distances itself radically from the euphemistic accounts that were common into the mid-twentieth century. Some assumptions, however, are rarely challenged. In his article, author Julius Wilm addresses three areas where local agency continues to be overemphasized in modern historiography at the expense of national forces or it is misunderstood in its effects. The article covers the negotiation of the “Oregon Question” in the U.S. Congress during the late 1830s and early 1840s, the passage of the Donation Land Claim Act in 1850, and the extreme violence of settler militias against Indigenous people in the war of 1855–1856. As Wilm argues, ‘re-introducing the U.S. government as an important agent of Oregon’s colonization…provides crucial context for the colonial push into the Pacific Northwest and the violence it unleashed’.

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Teaching settler colonial studies as part of Israel Studies? Amelia Rosenberg Weinreb, ‘Start with Them: Ethnic Studies, Israel Studies, and the “Others”‘, in Amelia Rosenberg Weinreb, Teaching Israel Studies: Global, Virtual, and Ethnographic Approaches to Active Learning, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022

17Dec22

Abstract: This chapter explores the four key areas of difference between Ethnic Studies and Area Studies on the one hand and Jewish Studies and Israel Studies on the other as each set of fields relates to (1) nourishing ethnic pride, (2) advocacy and cultivating allies, (3) relationship to Europe, whiteness, colonialism, and the West, and (4) prescriptivist messaging. Familiarity with these areas of differences can help instructors build a more robust, intentional, balanced, and student-centered course that is legible on contemporary college campuses and aligns with your intellectual values. The chapter concludes with practical frameworks for maintaining narrative diversity in a syllabus and strategies for keep multiple perspectives part of a dynamic process that actively includes student voices throughout the semester.

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Another settler colonial triangulation: Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Lynette Russell, ‘Indigenous, Settler, Animal; a Triadic Approach’, Animal Studies Journal, 11, 2, 2022, pp. 38-68

17Dec22

Abstract: In his Indigenous critique of the field of animal studies, Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation) describes it as having an analytic blind spot when it comes to settler-colonialism, a blind spot that manifests through universalising claims and clumsy arguments about ‘shared’ oppressions, through assumptions that settler colonial political institutions can be a neutral part of the solution, and through a failure to engage with ‘Indigenous studies of other than human life’ (20). In the same article, he calls on decolonial projects to do more to include animality within their purview, to include critiques of animal agriculture and to incorporate critiques of anthropocentrism as ‘a key logic of white supremacy’. Belcourt’s critique of both Animal studies and decolonial projects on the basis of an unequal but mutual marginalisation is an important starting point for research projects like ours that hope to bring Animal studies and Indigenous studies approaches into dialogue about the cultural impacts of introduced animals. Our approach sets out to be ‘triadic’, always involving at least three sides; Settler- Coloniser, Indigene and Animal.

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