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Settler colonialism requires climate change: Netta Cohen, ‘Changing Climates: Zionist Medical Climatology in Palestine, 1897-1948’, in Sander L. Gilman (ed.), Jews and Science, Purdue University Press, 2022, pp. 205-228

21Nov22

Abstract: This essay focuses on Zionist medical perceptions concerning the climate in Palestine from the establishment of the Zionist Organization in 1897 to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. During this period Zionist medical approaches towards the climatic conditions in Palestine were not always consistent and they tended to reflect the general shift in Zionist perceptions towards both the Jewish body as well as the new Jewish homeland. More precisely, as we shall see, the aim of establishing a settler nation among European Jews was, at first, based on a romantic belief in an autochthonous belonging to the land. Thus, at the turn of the twentieth century many Zionist leaders and thinkers attempted to highlight what they perceived as an “organic” link between the Jewish people and the environmental conditions in Palestine. However, following the actual encounter of Jewish settlers with the natural realities of Palestine—especially after the establishment of the British Mandate in 1921, the increasing immigration of urban middle class European Jewish refugees during the interwar period, and the emergence of the Arab-Jewish conflict in this territory—discussions on climate gradually lost their romantic attributes and instead became associated with colonial scientific ideas on the perceived dangerous implications of non-temperate climates on Jewish European bodies and minds.


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Education as a settler prison: Janne Lahti, ‘Prisoners of Education: Chiricahua Apaches, Schooling, and the Lived Experience of Settler Colonial Inclusion’, in Daniel Gerster, Felicity Jensz (eds), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave, 2022, pp. 123-143

21Nov22

Abstract: After decades of conflict, the US federal government forcedly removed all Chiricahua Apaches from their homelands in the Southwest in 1886 and took most of the youngsters and children from their parents to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. There these prisoners of war became students—prisoners of education—cut off from their own kin for years and subject to forced assimilation. Schooling was the next step of settler colonial Indigenous elimination. This chapter looks at the tensions of inclusionary and exclusionary practices in settler colonial education by tracking the Chiricahua Jason Betzinez’s lived experience from Arizona to Pennsylvania and Oklahoma. It examines how as he moved across the continent he moved between Apache and white educational systems that worked in isolation from each other. Carlisle was to bring the Chiricahuas to the settler society on the terms of that settler society as Indigenous students were to adhere to certain inclusionary practices, to eat, dress, talk, and behave likes whites. Inclusion also meant altering the Chiricahua relationship to the land, on how they understood and approached land by working it. Yet, the students still also remained excluded as prisoners of war and racialized subjects—not citizens—of the settler regime.


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Medieval settler colonialism: Lisa Wolverton, ‘The Elbian Region as Predatory Landscape, 900–1200 CE: Enslavement, Slaughter, and Settler Colonialism’, Mediaevalia, 43, 2022, pp. 101-135

21Nov22

Excerpt: My aim in this article is simple: to draw the attention of the community of scholars interested in the history of enslavement to the lands along and east of the river Elbe in the central Middle Ages.


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Settler museums: Pierre Walter, ‘Decolonizing US settler-colonial narratives in living history museums: the Pilgrims as first people?’ Journal of Heritage Tourism, 2022

21Nov22

Abstract: Museums around the world are recognizing their responsibility to repudiate violent legacies of colonialism and decolonize collections, exhibits and interpretation. In North America, decolonization has meant repatriating sacred artifacts, sites and bodies to Indigenous and other dispossessed people; presenting counter-narratives to white settler-colonial history; challenging racist, sexist and other negative stereotypes and histories; and teaching the legacies of violence against Indigenous Peoples, enslaved Black Africans and other groups brutalized by settler-colonialism. Decolonization also means Indigenous and other marginalized people telling their own stories, co-designing exhibits, and developing non-colonial alternatives to museums to research, preserve, celebrate and educate about their heritage and history. This paper examines the historical narratives found in Plimoth Patuxet living history museum alongside those presented by local Wampanoag People. Findings include an elaboration of settler-colonial, bicultural and decolonizing narratives. The paper concludes with a discussion on centering decolonizing narratives in museums.


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Criminalizing Indigenous hunting and settler colonialism in Taiwan: Wei-Chieh Jarita Chen, Land is Life: Settler Colonial Governance of National Parks and Hunting in Taiwan, Honors dissertation, Macalester College, 2022

21Nov22

Abstract: This thesis situates Taiwan as a settler colonial state by examining the discourse around the governance of national parks and the criminalization of Indigenous hunting. Placed in the context of historical patterns of land dispossession and cultural genocide, these two issues represent the ongoing process of settler colonialism and the reproduction of settler colonial relations through environmentalism. I focus on the narratives around three case studies: the controversial and ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the Maqaw National Park, the Tumpu Daingaz buluo’s struggle with the Yushan National Park, and the Tama Talum Indigenous hunting constitutional reinterpretation case. I argue that settler colonial framings of Indigenous/environmental issues enable the continued enactment of colonial relations and policies. Settler narratives and environmentalism perpetuate settler colonialism through what Métis scholar Max Liboiron explains as the assumption of access to Indigenous land, cultures, and knowledge. These cases are often framed as a progressive and benevolent government inclusion of Indigenous cultures and ecological knowledge. However, a settler colonial lens of analysis demonstrates that these moves of settler inclusivity serve to preserve settler legitimacy and futures in Taiwan while deeper contentions over Indigenous sovereignty remain unresolved. Indigenous voices within these stories reveal a throughline of ongoing resistance and resurgence, offering alternative understandings that center Indigenous land and life. While settler narratives portray and encourage limiting frameworks that prioritize settler interests, Indigenous narratives and activism expand the ways for Indigenous self-determination, futures, and land relations.


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Settlers in the face of decolonisation: Emanuele Ertola, ‘Blowing Against the Winds of Change: Settlers Facing Decolonization in Eritrea, 1941–52’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2022

16Nov22

Abstract: The literature on decolonization in settler contexts is characterized by an almost exclusive focus on the Anglo-French world, and by a marked emphasis on violence as the predominant feature of the settlers’ reaction to change. This article aims to challenge this assumption. Eritrea – like the other former Italian colonies – is certainly a peculiar case of early, top-down decolonization; but the actors on the field were anything but passive spectators. In the 10 years in which the international community decided the fate of Eritrea, there were a lively political confrontation and an armed struggle with anti-colonial nuances, while the settlers organized themselves politically to defend their interests. The complex variety of strategies with which they reacted to the end of colonial power constitutes an example of the non-binary relationship between former colonizers and former colonized; it enriches our knowledge of how whites reacted to decolonization in Africa; and it helps to complicate the monolithic idea of settlers as an undifferentiated transnational category.


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Settler civilisationism: Alexandra McFadden, ‘Wardens of Civilisation: The Political Ecology of Australian Far-Right Civilisationism’, Antipode, 2022

16Nov22

Abstract: The notion of a superior “civilisation” has been a hallmark of the politics of Western institutions and fringe white supremacists alike. Known ideologically as “civilisationism”, it has occupied a prominent position in the ideology of the Australian farright. Paying tribute to their settler-colonial origins, the far-right has consistently promoted “white civilisation”, even inspiring terrorist attacks. Despite this propensity for violence, far-right civilisationism remains largely unexplored. Through investigating a dataset of Australian far-right content, this paper reveals civilisationism as a significant part of their ideology, an ideology which relies on the idealisation of European technologies and environments to render Indigenous land and people uncivilised. A critical narrative analysis of the data illustrates the ways that these ecological factors are drawn into narrative to articulate Australian far-right civilisationism, an ideology inseparable from the political ecology of European history and colonialism, that today represents a particularly virulent version of its legacy.


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Feral settler indigenising: Simon Farley, ‘Mateship with Brumbies: Horses, Defiance and Indigeneity in the Australian Alps’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2022

16Nov22

Abstract: The feral horses of the Australian Alps—“brumbies”, as they are usually called—have occupied considerable space in settler-Australian culture since the 1890 publication of “The Man from Snowy River”. From the 1980s onwards, brumbies have been culled periodically to preserve “native” alpine ecosystems, which have not evolved to support hoofed animals. Such culls, however, are often highly controversial. This article uses Sara Ahmed’s concept of affective economies to explain why the culling of brumbies generates such heated debate and intense public outpourings of emotion. I relate the hyperaffective public performances of brumby supporters to a crisis in settler identity in Australia: as Indigenous activism has undermined the legitimacy of settler claims to belonging, some settlers have begun to use brumbies to assert their own kind of indigeneity.


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Differently settlers? Amir Reicher, ‘Settler-colonialism in the West Bank from the standpoint of its Mizrahi settlers’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2022

16Nov22

Abstract: This article is about Israel’s West Bank settler-colonial project from the standpoint of settlers who are of Mizrahi origin (i.e. Jews of African or Middle Eastern descent). While historically predominantly Ashkenazi (i.e. Jews of European descent), with time many Mizrahim have moved to the West Bank and joined the settlement project. And yet, there is more or less scholarly silence regarding the existence of Mizrahi West Bank settlers, and when they are addressed, their motivations are reduced to simplified “economic” considerations; in a way that devoid them of political consciousness compared to their Ashkenazi counterparts. While there has been an immense body of work dealing with ethnic tension between settlers and the indigenous population, by centreing the experience of a particular group of Mizrahi settlers, this article examines how internal ethnic tensions within the society of settlers play into and are transformed in the settler-colonial process.


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Comparative transindigeneity (against settler colonialisms): Priyanka Shivadas, A TransIndigenous Study of Indigenous Australian and Adivasi/Tribal Literatures: Seeking Literary and Thematic Connections, PhD dissertation, UNSW, 2022

13Nov22

Abstract: This thesis juxtaposes Indigenous Australian literature and Adivasi/tribal literature—two self-governing bodies of Indigenous literature differently situated: one in an Anglophone, white settler-nation in the Pacific region and the other in a non-Anglophone, postcolonial nation-state in Asia. Studies exploring critical connections between Indigenous writing from Australia and Adivasi/tribal writing from India are rare. A considerable amount of scholarship brings together the literatures of Indigenous Australians, Māori, Native American and First Nations peoples of Canada, who share much in their responses to European settler-colonialism, but little ventures into comparative study of the literatures of the Indigenous peoples of Australia and India. This thesis is guided by Native American scholar Chadwick Allen’s trans-Indigenous methodologies, which open up possibilities for global Indigenous literary studies by building from specificities and across, through and beyond differences in diverse Indigenous contexts. Beginning from a place of accepted difference and distance, this thesis thus seeks connection and comparability, framing similarities through identifying a shared set of issues/themes and genres. This study finds the following literary and thematic concerns are shared between Indigenous Australian and Adivasi/tribal writing: (a) land and labour, (b) bilanguaging, (c) editorial negotiations in cross-cultural, collaborative life writing, (d) gender and sexuality as sites of decolonial critique, and (e) responses to over-policing and death in police custody. These shared concerns structure and organise the thesis. They also form the basis for trans-Indigenous analysis of a selection of illuminating case studies. In each case, analysis seeks to yield Indigenous-centred, productive readings of juxtaposed Indigenous Australian and Adivasi/tribal texts, resulting from the tension generated between their distinctiveness and shared (post)colonial concerns. Ultimately, this study disrupts familiar patterns of comparison and encourages new models of critical thought in global Indigenous literary studies.


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