settler colonial studies blog

Settler denial and denial about settlers: Saree Makdisi, Tolerance Is a WastelandPalestine and the Culture of Denial, University of California Press, 2022

06Dec22

Description: The question that this book aims to answer might seem simple: how can a violent project of dispossession and discrimination be imagined, felt, and profoundly believed in as though it were the exact opposite––an embodiment of sustainability, multicultural tolerance, and democratic idealism? Despite well-documented evidence of racism and human rights abuse, Israel has long been embraced by the most liberal sectors of European and American society as a manifestation of the progressive values of tolerance, plurality, inclusivity, and democracy, and hence a project that can be passionately defended for its lofty ideals. Tolerance Is a Wasteland argues that the key to this miraculous act of political alchemy is a very specific form of denial. Here the Palestinian presence in, and claim to, Palestine is not simply refused or covered up, but negated in such a way that the act of denial is itself denied. The effects of destruction and repression are reframed, inverted into affirmations of liberal virtues that can be passionately championed. In Tolerance Is a Wasteland, Saree Makdisi explores many such acts of affirmation and denial in a range of venues: from the haunted landscape of thickly planted forests covering the ruins of Palestinian villages forcibly depopulated in 1948; to the theater of “pinkwashing” as Israel presents itself to the world as a gay-friendly haven of cultural inclusion; to the so-called Museum of Tolerance being built on top of the ruins of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, which was methodically desecrated in order to clear the space for this monument to “human dignity.” Tolerance Is a Wasteland reveals the system of emotional investments and curated perceptions that makes this massive project of cognitive dissonance possible.

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Dispossessory gifts: Peter Kent-Stoll, ‘Dispossessory Citizenship: The Settler Colonial State and the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Relocation Program, 1952–1972’, Social Problems, 2022

06Dec22

Abstract: Through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) relocation program starting in 1952, the United States sought to terminate federal trust restrictions for American Indians and while relocating reservation and rural-residing Indigenous people to cities to be assimilated into the American “mainstream.” I analyze the BIA’s program as part of the specifically settler colonial structure of the U.S. state. Using primary and secondary sources, I ask what explains the BIA’s shifting spatial strategies and imaginaries from the rise of the relocation program to its demise? The BIA’s project derided reservations as fiscal burdens, depicted the postwar city as a place of “Indian freedom,” engaged in gendered surveillance of Indigenous families, and negated Indigenous peoples’ histories in U.S. cities. As the program ended, the BIA shifted rhetoric from assimilation to self-determination to maintain the settler colonial relation while paying lip service to critiques of the colonial tactics of relocation. These different moments of the relocation project articulated a type of dispossessory citizenship as a racial and empire state strategy of enacting and justifying settler colonialism. This work analyzes the settler colonial dimensions of the state and its technologies of violence and territory used when it presents itself as supposedly moving past its colonial past.

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Apocalypse now and historically: Francesca Mussi, ‘North American Indigenous Perceptions of the Apocalypse and a Renewal of Kinship Relationships through the Imagination’, Between, XII, 24, 2002, pp. 402-422

06Dec22

Abstract: Interweaving Ecocriticism, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous Studies, this essay interrogates the concepts of climate change and the apocalypse, repositioning them alongside Indigenous experiences of broken kinship relationships. Focusing on the Canadian Indigenous context, I first discuss the settler colonial implications of environmental apocalypse, arguing that Indigenous peoples are already living in a post-apocalyptic condition. Secondly, I explore the Indian Residential School policy as an example of how settler colonialism contributed to creating the post-apocalyptic situation in which Indigenous peoples live today. Thirdly, through the analysis of Lee Maracle’s “The Void” and Daniel H. Justice’s “The Boys Who Became the Hummingbirds”, I discuss how both stories employ imagination to place environmental disasters in conversation with settler colonial practices, thus re-shaping understandings of the past, present, and future. Ultimately, both stories, as I argue, promote Indigenous traditional knowledge systems and kinship values as a way to maintain respectful and reciprocal kinship relationships among humans and between humans and the land.

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Reconciliation is another reordering: Gabrielle Legault, ‘From (Re)Ordering to Reconciliation: Early Settler Colonial Divide and Conquer Policies in Canada’, Journal of Indigenous Social Development, 11, 2, 2022, pp. 44-66

06Dec22

Abstract: In consideration of current conversations on systemic racism and reconciliation in Canada, this work extends collective understandings of the impact of Canada’s policies towards Indigenous Peoples in Canada, including both the Manitoba Act (1870) and the Indian Act (1876), to examine how a “forcefield of settler colonialism” was deployed as a compounding tactic to divide and conquer Indigenous Peoples. These Acts fractured and divided Indigenous communities, ultimately re-ordering their relationships with one another and the Land, while creating competition between Indigenous Nations over rights, lands, and resources. The residual effects of these policies continue to be felt by Indigenous peoples in Canada in the form of cultural dislocation, disconnection from traditional homelands, and interpersonal lateral violence. Following over a century of policies that sought to disrupt historically positive relations, attending to Indigenous philosophies of relationality and reviving inter-Indigenous alliance building offers hope for reconciling Indigenous relationships to land, identity, and one another.

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The earthquake of settler colonialism: Dana Luciano, ‘Unsettled Ground: Indigenous Prophecy, Geological Fantasy, and the New Madrid Earthquakes’, American Quarterly, 74, 4, 2022, pp. 821-843

03Dec22

Abstract: This essay explores the differing relations to land, time, and history—human and planetary—that organized responses to the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811–12 and that now characterize responses to the Anthropocene. Indigenous and settler accounts connected the earthquakes to a catastrophic rupture in time, but they located that catastrophe differently. For the US, the disaster was seismic, a geological revelation of human powerlessness. Federal intervention sought to restore the region to the future-oriented time of the nation, while Romantic history and geological fantasy supplemented the inscription of settler-national time on the land by identifying the “Indian” with cultural and geological pasts. Indigenous interpretations connected the quakes to the ongoing rupture that colonialism instantiated. Circulated through the pan-Indigenous revival, the polychronicity of anticolonial assessments of the quakes drew on the energy of prophecy, reflecting what Mark Rifkin identifies as prophecy’s ability to gather other-than-chronological possibilities as they interwove the earth’s past and the land’s present state to make Indigenous futures possible again. Recent approaches to the Anthropocene replicate this division, alternately perpetuating the necropolitics of geological fantasy and embracing a reparative adaptation of what Kyle Powys Whyte (Citizen Potawatomi) describes as “kinship time.“

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The violence of settler colonialism: Amanda Keddie, ‘Indigenous and Settler Understandings for Addressing Gender-Based Violence in Australia: The Significance of a De-colonial Approach’, Men and Masculinities, 2022

03Dec22

Abstract: Addressing the gendered dimensions of family violence remains a key focus in the primary prevention of violence against women (PVAW) in Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian communities. What is seen as more important for Indigenous communities in PVAW is addressing the legacies and ongoing impacts of colonisation on Indigenous people, families, and communities. This focus on decolonisation deviates from settler PVAW programs where the emphasis is on challenging hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy. In this paper, I consider the importance of critiquing the western logic of colonisation within both Indigenous and non-Indigenous PVAW programs through examining the links between hegemonic masculinity, colonisation and neoliberal capitalism. I draw attention to the inherent violence and corrosion within processes of colonisation that adversely affect the social and emotional wellbeing and relationships of Indigenous and non-Indigenous men (albeit in very different ways) and argue the importance of a decolonising approach for addressing gender-based violence within Indigenous and non-Indigenous programs.

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When settler colonialism speaks English: Dmitri Detwyler, ‘Locating Language-Teacher Identities in the Settler-Colonial Universe’, Canadian Modern Language Review, 78, 4, 2022, pp. 363-384

03Dec22

Abstract: The practice of English language teaching has long been an important part of socializing transnational migrants and international students into ongoing English-dominant settler-colonial projects in North America and beyond. The professional activities, knowledge, and identities of English language instructors are therefore central to the reproduction of the settler-colonial order. In this article, I investigate the relationship between language-teacher identities and settler-colonial discourses of raciolinguistic differentiation and hierarchy in Canada. Working in a discursive constructionist conceptual framework, I adopt occasioned semantics to analyze excerpts from research interviews with two ELT instructors in post-secondary and adult ESL contexts. I demonstrate how these instructors’ talk about students and languages performed language-teacher identities-in-discourse and argue that these performances reflected and contributed to reproduction of settler-colonial discourse patterns. I further suggest that settler colonialism constitutes for ELT practice in Canada a hermetic “universe” with its own internal logics and relations that must be examined and made explicit through reflection. Some pedagogical implications of this analysis include the need for ELT instructors as well as English-language teacher educators to develop an awareness of local settler-colonial histories, teach for truth and reconciliation, and embrace strategies for de-naturalizing the settler-colonial “universe” as they create spaces of possibility for decolonization to be carried out. One research implication is that language-teacher identity scholarship would be strengthened by embracing epistemological and methodological decolonization.

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When settler colonialism learns an Indigenous language: Sarah Shulist, Celeste Padri-Spade, ‘Lingua Nullius: Indigenous Language Learning and Revitalization as Sites for Settler-Colonial Violence’, Canadian Modern Language Review, 78, 4, 2022, pp. 271-288

03Dec22

Abstract: This article examines the role that Indigenous language learning and use can play in the establishment of false or spurious claims to Indigeneity. These acts of “race shifting” are situated within the political discourse of “Truth and Reconciliation” and serve to enable settlers to situate themselves in positions where, both materially and symbolically, they rely on their claims to “Indigeneity” to take up resources dedicated to Indigenous people. Indigenous language use and language revitalization programs provide tools that can enable these performances of Indigenous identity to become more widely accepted among predominantly settler audiences. We argue that increasing consciousness of the inherently political nature of Indigenous language work – often framed as a move toward language reclamation – must be pushed even further, to consider the possibility that some users are not reclaiming but in fact claiming. These acts of claiming the language function in much the same way as claims to land have within settler colonialism – to dispossess Indigenous people and to disrupt Indigenous sovereignty.

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Asian settlers: Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, ‘Asian-Indigenous Relations across Hemispheres, Oceans, and Islands’, American Quarterly, 74, 4, 2022, pp. 1067-1077

03Dec22

Excerpt: How do we make sense of Asian-Indigenous relations across settler colonial states? In what ways have Asian-Indigenous entanglements been structured by militarism, settler colonialism, and liberal empire?

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When settler colonialism goes nuclear: Jessica Hurley, ‘Nuclear Settler Colonialism at Sea, or How to Civilize an Ocean’, American Quarterly, 74, 4, 2022, pp. 969-995

03Dec22

Abstract: This essay asks us to reconceptualize nuclear colonialism in the Pacific as a form of settler colonialism, arguing that through nuclear testing the US applied older settler colonial principles of property and appropriation to previously unclaimed ocean spaces. Through an analysis of the Applied Fisheries Laboratory archives, I show how colonial legal doctrines provided a framework within which the American nuclear complex could conceptualize itself as properly owning the ocean that it had put to “productive use” through nuclear testing, with radiation serving as a settler colonial prosthesis that continues to impose colonial land relations even in the absence of settlers themselves. At the same time, I show how the Pacific itself shaped the emergence of US nuclearism, as its surprisingly resilient ecologies allowed the nuclear complex to continue to think of its destructive activities as compatible with the ongoing survival of life. The essay closes with an analysis of the Marshall Islands Student Association’s 2019 campaign “My Fish Is Your Fish,” which considers what decolonization looks like in an oceanscape that is permanently occupied by American radiation. For MISA, decolonial nuclear justice involves recomposing Marshallese land relations with the irradiated ocean as a critical form of nuclear decolonization.

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