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The horror of settler colonialism! Johan Höglund, ‘Settlement and Imperialism’, in Stephen Shapiro, Mark Storey (eds), The Cambridge Companion to American Horror, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 60-75

14May22

Access the chapter here.


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Taiwan settler colonialism: Rosalyn Fei, ‘Settler Colonialism by Settlers of Color: Understanding Han Taiwanese Settler Colonialism in Taiwan through Japanese American Settler Colonialism in Hawai’i’, Asian American research Journal, 2, 2022

12May22

Abstract: My paper evaluates the United States settler colonial framework in relation to Han Taiwanese citizenship, independence, and rights to the island now called Taiwan. I use parallels from the Japanese American occupation of Hawai’i to investigate how white settler colonial logics, such as multiculturalism and the settler-colonial Unconscious, are instilled in East Asian settlers through the promise of democratic rights and sovereignty. Settlers of color, therefore, complicate the binary between the “colonizer” and “colonized” as demonstrated through the simultaneous oppression of people of color by the white settler state and the oppression of Indigenous peoples by settlers of color. With this, I reflect on the following questions: What does it mean to claim independence on land that is stolen Indigenous land, and how is this narrative further complicated when these settlers are people of color? Similar settler colonial tactics and commitments to capitalism are utilized by both the U.S. and Taiwan; therefore, it is imperative for Taiwanese and Taiwanese American people to recognize this and reject the white settler colonial framework to truly be in solidarity with Indigenous peoples.


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Co-settlers: Mark Dunick, Continental European Assisted Immigrants in 1870s New Zealand, PhD dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington, 2022

12May22

Abstract: Approximately 7000 Scandinavians, Germans, Poles and other continental European settlers arrived in New Zealand from 1871 to 1876 as part of the assisted immigration scheme promoted by politician Julius Vogel. The continental Europeans included many family groups and became a small but significant minority among the Pākehā population of nineteenth century New Zealand. Many of these European settlers clustered in rural communities around the country, including Norwegian and Danish communities in Hawkes Bay and the Wairarapa, along with German and Polish communities in Canterbury, Otago and Taranaki. Some of these communities are well known and have been studied in isolation, and others have been neglected by historians. This project includes a quantitative study of the continental European migrations of the 1870s and examines key settler communities that continental Europeans, particularly Scandinavians Germans and Poles, formed in nineteenth century New Zealand. It also details the mechanisms of the Vogel assisted immigration scheme by examining voluminous correspondence, reports and memos collected in the Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives. A relational database of ten tables, created for this project, contains information from a range of sources, including passenger records in New Zealand and Europe, New Zealand naturalisation registers and probates. Newspaper information and family histories provided additional biographical details for continental European immigrants. Passenger lists in New Zealand and Hamburg were used to analyse the demographics of the migrants and their diverse European origins. A number of European settler communities were selected, and New Zealand naturalisation records were used to identify and profile European born settlers and their lives in New Zealand. These individuals were matched with passenger records and probate records to build a profile of European settlers in each of these communities. This study revealed that the European assisted immigrants of the 1870s left from specific regions in their countries of origin, and in many cases specific villages, and local clusters of migration were identified. The examination of a number of the rural communities formed by European migrants in New Zealand revealed that most became small farmers and achieved a modest level of wealth. A close study of the migrants in these clusters revealed many clusters were more diverse than previously thought, with a range of European ethnicities living alongside each other. Despite initial hurdles these European migrants found it easy to integrate into the dominant Pākehā culture of nineteenth century New Zealand, and by the early twentieth century most of the distinctly European communities had dispersed or blended into the wider population.


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Dispossessory citizenship: Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘Citizenship as Accumulation by Dispossession: The Paradox of Settler Colonial Citizenship’, Sociological Theory, 2022

10May22

Abstract: This article extends critical trends of citizenship studies and the theory of accumulation by dispossession to articulate how settler colonial citizenship is instantiated through the active accrual of land and resources and how the emerging settler colonial citizenship entrenches both structural subjugation and resistance. The article then examines the reformation of the boundaries of citizenship through indigenous agency. I do so through examining the Palestinian citizens in Israel, specifically centering the Internally Displaced Persons—Palestinians who received Israeli citizenship even as they were displaced from their places of origin. I conclude by asserting citizenship’s double paradox in settler colonial contexts: It regulates certain rights and mobilities but simultaneously entraps the indigenous in a structure in which recursive accumulation is constitutive, thus entrenching dispossession and the further loss of collective rights and other claims.


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Teaching settler children: Janice Reigert, Normalizing White Settler Innocence: An Anti-colonial Analysis of the Saskatchewan Social Studies Four Curriculum, MA dissertation, University of Saskatchewan, 2022

10May22

Abstract: Using poststructural tools of analysis, this thesis analyzes how Saskatchewan’s grade four social studies curriculum (2010) continues to preserve White settler innocence and normalize Indigenous dispossession despite its intent to be inclusive of Indigenous content and knowledge. Conducted through an anti-colonial lens, this research investigates the notion that provincially mandated moves to include Indigenous content and knowledge in provincial curriculum, driven in part by dominant national discourses of reconciliation, are enough to confront and unsettle Canada’s racist, colonial structures and practices which produce and naturalize the racialization, dispossession and dislocation of Indigenous peoples while preserving White settlers as innocent. Using poststructural methods of analysis, this study aims to determine the productive, identitymaking potential of the national discourse found within the outcomes and indicators of the Saskatchewan grade four social studies curriculum document. The interpretation of the curricular discourse, framed by theories of settler colonialism and Whiteness studies, finds that wellintended attempts to include Indigenous perspectives and knowledge continue replicate and reinforce racist, colonial strategies that preserve Canada’s racial hierarchy. By circulating
discourses which naturalize White settler belonging; distort Indigenous sovereignty; maintain Indigenous Otherness; regulate Indigenous exteriority through recognition; and attempt to maintain colourblind race neutrality, this thesis demonstrates how the curriculum effectively functions to exalt (Thobani, 2007) White settler subjectivity and secure the settler state. The implications of this research suggest that education systems and teachers must move beyond a reliance on models of Indigenous inclusion to promote racial equity and therefore must receive an adequate, ongoing pre-practice and professional education in identifying and challenging ongoing forms racism and colonialism.


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Disenchanted settlers: Jacqulyne Ruby Anton, The Land of Disenchantment: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and Race in New Mexico, 1598–1910, MA dissertation, California State, 2022

10May22

Abstract: Across the North American continent, white supremacy is often taken for granted as a foregone conclusion by the late nineteenth century. Recently, however, scholars of the Greater Reconstruction, Indigenous history, Latinx history, U.S.-Mexico Borderlands history, and historians of capitalism have challenged this assumption by deconstructing narratives that portray white European American hegemony as inevitable. My research on settler colonialism adds to the discussion of the establishment of white supremacy in the West by analyzing the evolution of white supremacy in New Mexico over time. It argues that the Spanish, Mexican, and American settler colonial regimes actively used white supremacy as a tool to organize all racial categories from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries to ensure Spanish-European and European-American hegemony. This thesis does not seek to replicate or dictate the order of racial hierarchies in New Mexico. It rejects a hierarchy of suffering and recognizes that the ideological categorization of race does not always translate onto lived experiences. Rather, it seeks to study the social construct of white supremacy over time in New Mexico. It adopts a social-theoretical approach to white supremacy to explain how racism was structured at various historical stages and to prove that the establishment of white supremacy as the overarching social, political, and legal authority was not an inevitable result of the expansion of U.S. settler colonialism in the nineteenth century. As such, this thesis will explore the changing and often contradictory nature of white supremacy—and whiteness—over time, beginning with Spanish settler colonialism in New Spain and ending with American settler colonialism in New Mexico, while refusing a definitive hierarchical ranking of racial categories. In analyzing the Casta System and settler colonial-Indian frontier relations, the following pages demonstrate the Spanish use of white supremacy to ensure European dominance during Spanish and Mexican settler colonialism. This thesis concludes with an overview of American domination and the subsequent extension of settler colonialism and white European-American white superiority in New Mexico by the end of the nineteenth century.


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The settlers ultimately don’t care: Krista Johnston, ‘Settler Care: The Politics of Welcome (and Worry) in Canada’s “Most Racist City”’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 2022

10May22

Abstract: Care and welcome are central facets of Canadian national mythology. In this paper, I analyze expressions of care in news media coverage of the arrival of Syrian refugees to the city of Winnipeg beginning in 2015. Discussions about who is deserving of care, about what kinds of care should be extended, and about the apportioning of care between refugees and Indigenous peoples all demonstrate that in this instance, discourses about care serve to normalize and perpetuate settler colonialism. Delving into these narratives, this paper develops a conceptualization of settler care, a hollow expression of care for others which serves to bolster settler dominance and to maintain the subordinated positions of refugees and Indigenous peoples within the settler colonial order. I identify two sets of narratives within settler care: settler welcome and settler worry. Each takes several different forms, but in every iteration expressions of settler care serve to normalize settler dominance. When the belonging of refugees is juxtaposed with that of Indigenous peoples, neither is afforded dominance or centrality in the settler order, and Indigenous practices of welcome and demands for justice are subordinated to the settler project. In contrast to these expressions of settler care, the final section of the paper examines anti-colonial practices of care and welcome and reflects on the possibilities and challenges of alternative relations of care.


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The settler children’s revenge: Peter Boag, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon, University of Washington Press, 2022

10May22

Description: On an autumn day in 1895, eighteen-year-old Loyd Montgomery shot his parents and a neighbor in a gruesome act that reverberated beyond the small confines of Montgomery’s Oregon farming community. The dispassionate slaying and Montgomery’s consequent hanging exposed the fault lines of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society and revealed the burdens of pioneer narratives boys of the time inherited. In Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon, Peter Boag examines the Brownsville parricide as an allegory for the destabilizing transitions within the rural United States at the end of the nineteenth century. While pioneer families celebrated and memorialized founders of western white settler society, their children faced a present and future in frightening decline. Connecting a fascinating true-crime story with the broader forces that produced the murders, Boag uncovers how Loyd’s violent acts reflected the brutality of American colonizing efforts, the anxieties of global capitalism, and the buried traumas of childhood in the American West.


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‘Saving’ settler America: Lorien S. Jordan, Dewey Dykes, ‘”If You Don’t Fight Like Hell, You’re Not Going to Have a Country”: An Intersectional Settler Colonial Analysis of Trump’s “Save America” Speech and Other Messages of (Non)belonging’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2022

07May22

Abstract: Donald Trump turned the presidency into a live-action reality television series comprising a chaotic blend of televised and tweeted intrigue. The nation’s collective anxiety coalesced in a nationalistic, authoritarian denouement on January 6, 2021. During Trump’s speech at the Save American Rally, he returned to familiar themes, telling the story of a ravaged America and his role as its victimized hero. As Trump concluded his speech urging supporters to “fight like hell,” rioters assailed the U.S. capitol revealing the violence of colonial invasion. To understand and, thus, respond to the insurrection, we must first recognize the dominant structures that create the conditions of its perpetration and excusal. This intersectional analysis addresses the colonial impulse for violent exclusion through the interpretive framework of settler colonialism. Examining four interlocking themes, we incorporate historical and contemporary popular culture rhetorical devices to triangulate our findings. We illustrate how social identity and settler colonialism occur in popular culture at the intersections of American, Christian nationalism, racialization, hetero-genderism, and ableism. Overall, our analysis explores how Trump prepared his base through years of cultural manipulation, promoting a populist, White vision of the world with Trump symbolic of its savior. To subvert these exploitations, we must participate in their deconstruction to destabilize the power of colonial institutions.


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Crafty settlers: Megan A. Carney, ‘Whiteness and settler colonial logics in the Pacific Northwest hops and craft beer industries’, Food, Culture & Society, 2022

07May22

Abstract: The rapidly expanding Pacific Northwest (PNW) craft beer industry and the heralding of Seattle as an epicenter of “hoppy beer” has benefited from geographic proximity to the Yakima Valley, revered by many as the “hops capital of world.” In this article, I center theory from Black studies, Native studies, and critical whiteness studies to examine the intersectional violences of settler colonialism and whiteness as structuring logics of the PNW hops and craft beer industries. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2012 and 2019, I argue that the settler colonial history of PNW hops cultivation and present-day culture of exclusion that extends outward into relationships with craft brewers, sustain a hegemonic whiteness. Moreover, I suggest that craft beer culture in the United States, as a site of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, has benefitted from ongoing dispossession through gentrification and cultural appropriation. By way of conclusion, I discuss the possibilities and limitations of existing attempts to dismantle whiteness within the US craft beer industry.


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