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There is no settler colonialism without exogenous peoples: Sophie Crowe, ‘Racial others & settler colonialism in Israel: migrant rights claims refracted through colonial logics’, Identities, 2022

09Nov22

Abstract: From 2006, thousands of migrants crossed into Israel after travelling through the Sinai Desert. The majority came from Eritrea and Sudan, seeking asylum from state violence. Israel’s government classified them as ‘infiltrators’ using a law enacted in 1954 to criminalize Palestinians seeking to return to expropriated lands. Drawing on fieldwork in Israel in 2018–2019, the article examines dimensions of a process of political subjectivation among these migrants and citizens in solidarity with them. It is concerned with the performative effects of a struggle migrants waged for refugee status by contesting their construction in government discourse as infiltrators. It argues their claims became refracted through debates over contours of a fissured collective self, which challenged the limits of political community. While their claims disrupted the order’s dividing lines, the article argues the latter proved durable, that conditions of possibility for disruptive speech are mediated by overlapping structures of colonialism and racializations.


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There is no settler colonialism without settlers: Joanne Smith Finley, ‘Tabula rasa: Han settler colonialism and frontier genocide in “re-educated” Xinjiang’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 12, 2, 2022, pp. 341-356

09Nov22

Abstract: In his analysis of the frontier genocides waged against the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia, Benjamin Madley (2004) identified three phases. The first is initiated by colonial invasion: economic and political frictions develop as settlers and indigenous peoples struggle for limited resources and power. In Phase Two, indigenous peoples attack settlers to reclaim lost resources and land, and this prompts a genocidal military campaign. In Phase Three, the settlers’ government incarcerates the indigenous peoples in concentration camps, where it continues genocide by attrition (through malnutrition, inadequate medical care, overwork, unsanitary conditions, and violence). All three genocides began with the assertion that the land was empty or should be made empty. Here, I consider how far the concept tabula rasa (“a map scraped clean”) applies to contemporary “re-educated” Xinjiang on China’s northwest frontier.


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There is no settler colonialism without Indigenous peoples: Musapir, Sean R. Roberts, ‘Should Uyghurs be considered an Indigenous people?’ FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 12, 2, 2022, pp. 373-381

09Nov22

Abstract: This article asks whether Uyghurs should be considered an Indigenous people. In doing so, it highlights the contested issues this question raises and seeks to initiate a more comprehensive debate on the question among Uyghurs themselves, who ultimately decide the appropriateness of such identification. The Chinese state is implementing an intense campaign against Uyghurs that bears striking resemblance to those historically waged by other settler-colonial regimes against the Indigenous peoples they displaced. Embracing indigeneity could serve as a useful strategy for at least contextualizing Uyghurs’ present repression and dispossession, but Uyghurs in the diaspora are ambivalent about the concept. The article examines both why Uyghurs can be considered an Indigenous people under UN criteria and why they are reticent to embrace this status. While Uyghurs’ ultimate acceptance of indigeneity as a means of self-identification would require the participation of all Uyghurs, including those living in the PRC who are currently unable to engage in such discussions, we argue that even a limited debate on the relevance of indigeneity to their identity among Uyghurs in exile would widen the possibilities of responses to the acts of repression, erasure, and dispossession carried out against their people inside China.


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Settler colonial commemorations do not reconcile: Elizabeth Nelson, Anne Godlewska, ‘Settler Ignorance and Public Memory: Kingston, Ontario’, Geographical Review, 2022

08Nov22

Abstract: Since the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, municipalities are increasingly addressing reconciliation in their practice, including new engagement with Indigenous heritage and public memory. Nevertheless, municipal perspectives of heritage are frequently colonial and result in commemorative landscapes that reinforce official national narratives of history and identity. These landscapes limit expressions of Indigenous heritage and reinforce settler ignorance. This article explores settler-colonial commemorative practice in the context of reconciliation in Canada and presents what was learned through conversations with Indigenous peoples in Kingston, a mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada. It emphasizes the need for productive settler discomfort in addressing settler ignorance and considers how reimagined places of public memory might unsettle hegemonic heritage narratives in Canadian cities. Noting the limitations of settler-Canadian commemoration in the context of reconciliation, it posits how decolonizing commemorative practices might offer new pathways for building relations.


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The university as a dispossessing settler colonial landlord: Joel Barnes, ‘Australian universities and Atlantic slavery’, History Australia, 2022

05Nov22

Abstract: This article seeks to open a conversation about Australian universities and Atlantic slavery. To an extent previously unexamined, Australian universities benefited financially, administratively and intellectually from the proceeds and legacies of slavery in the Caribbean and the American South. The research follows the examples of American and British universities’ examinations of their historical links to slavery, and builds upon recent scholarship that has emphasised the significance to the growth of Australian settler colonialism of the large-scale compensation paid to slave-owners following emancipation in the British Empire in 1833. The article reports on the findings of a survey of around 1,200 benefactions to the six oldest Australian universities from 1850 to 1939; it also examines the family and financial links to slavery of educators and key administrators in Australian universities’ early histories. The Dixson family of tobacconists, donors to several universities, is considered as an extended case study. The significance of universities’ connections to slavery in the Australian context has to be understood in terms of imperial transformations and expansions of settler colonialism, and to be thought and told in relation to universities’ Indigenous histories.


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Harassing settlers: Mahdi Sabbagh, ‘Sumud: Repertoires of Resistance in Silwan’, Public Culture, 2022

05Nov22

Abstract: This essay aims to identify methods and strategies used to manipulate the Palestinian urban fabric. First, the essay will focus on Israeli settler-colonial activity through a study of the deployed tactics of de-development, destruction, and harassment. Second, it will focus on Silwan’s popular movements and their culture of resistance. Instead of viewing their resistance as reactionary or as an act of survival, the essay attempts to frame it as an active praxis. Silwan’s collective movement’s various means of manipulation—sumud, communal awareness, outreach, and the sit-in tent—form a powerful set of resistance tactics that embody possibly universal lessons in urban resilience.


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Tangled settler histories: Max Kaiser, Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022

03Nov22

Description: Provides the first book-length study of Australian Jewish antifascism, utilising a transnational lens; Considers the mutually reinforcing ideologies of settler colonialism, both in Palestine and Australia; Aims to spur debate on Jewish politics, antifascism and settler colonialism internationally.


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The settler farm and its horrors: Jonathon Wills, Gothic Negotiations of the Boundaries of the New Zealand Farm in Settler Literature, MA dissertation, Vitoria University of Wellington, 2022

01Nov22

Abstract: This thesis examines the ways the Gothic, as an aesthetic mode, is used to manage the spatial and conceptual boundaries of the farm in New Zealand settler literature, predominantly from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. I argue that settler literature frequently uses the Gothic mode’s capacity to communicate instability to problematise the boundaries of the New Zealand farm in ways that challenge the ecophobic binaries that uphold New Zealand’s Arcadian myth.


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Necrophiliac settler colonialism: Chaney Hill, ‘Necro-Settler Coloniality in Texan Mythology and Identity: Forgetting the Alamo’, Western American Literature, 57, 3, 2022, pp. 255-283

01Nov22

Excerpt: Like many Americans I spent much of 2020 in quarantine reading about, watching, and in some cases participating in Black Lives Matter protests. On May 30 of that year, I monitored social media from my Houston apartment as protesters gathered in San Antonio—a city I consider home— to march against police brutality. The protesters marched from Travis Park to the San Antonio Police Department, passing by the Alamo Plaza, the Alamo, and the Alamo Cenotaph on their way. These protesters were met by an armed group of men intent on (re)defending the Alamo Cenotaph, which is settled in a prominent location near the Alamo. The defense of the Alamo was being reenacted by a group of right-wing militiamen set on protecting the Alamo Cenotaph from Black Lives Matter protesters at the Alamo Plaza. I was, at first, confused. What did the Alamo have to do with the Black Lives Matter protesters? Initially the connection between the Alamo Plaza, which has been criticized for its perpetuation of anti-Mexican sentiments and ideologies, and Black life seems tenuous. However, on further inspection the connection between the Alamo, the Alamo Cenotaph, and the mistreatment of and violence against Black and Brown people becomes painfully apparent. Following the 2017 announcement by the Texas General Land Office (GLO) regarding their plans to relocate the Alamo Cenotaph, the debate about whether the Alamo should maintain its mythologic designation as the “cradle of Texas liberty” and white herohood, or engage its sordid past, which perpetuated white supremacist and settler colonial ideologies, has gained renewed attention.


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Imperial Indigenous citizenship against settler colonialism: Jared McDonald, Khoesan and Imperial Citizenship in Nineteenth Century South Africa, Routledge, 2023

01Nov22

Abstract: This volumeexplores the formative and expressive dynamics of Khoesan identity during a crucial period of incorporation as an underclass into Cape colonial society. Khoesan and Imperial Citizenship in Nineteenth Century South Africa places special emphasis on loyalism and subjecthood – posited as imperial citizenship – as foundational aspects of Khoesan resistance to the debilitating effects of settler colonialism. The work argues that Khoesan were active in the creation of their identity as imperial citizens and that expressions of loyalty to the British Crown were reflective of a political and civic consciousness that transcended their racially defined place within Cape colonial society. Following a chronological trajectory from the mid-1790s to the late 1850s, author Jared McDonald examines the combined influences of colonial law, evangelical-humanitarianism, imperial commissions of inquiry and the abolition of slavery as conduits of the notion of imperial citizenship. As histories and legacies of colonialism come under increasing scrutiny, the history of the Khoesan during this period highlights the complex nature of power and its imposition, and the myriad, nuanced ways in which the oppressed react and engage. This book will be of interest to scholars and students working on British imperialism in Africa, as well as histories of settler colonialism, nationalism and loyalism.


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