settler colonial studies blog

Not just shared subjugation: Hannah Manshel, ‘“Never Allowed for Property”: Harriet Jacobs and Layli Long Soldier before the Law’, American Literature, 2002

08Mar22

Abstract: This article reads Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) alongside Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017) to argue that both texts challenge the ideology of property ownership that has long been central to Black and Indigenous subjugation. By reading these texts through Cedric Robinson’s theorization of the Black Radical Tradition, which “never allowed for property,” this essay argues that both texts bring into being a world that precedes and exceeds the violence of legal regulation. Jacobs and Long Soldier both locate an alternative to law in the radical divinity of maternal care. Through Jacobs’s and Long Soldier’s discussions of holy maternal care, we can recognize the interrelation of Black and Indigenous freedom struggles in a way that’s not solely defined by shared subjugation.

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On the predicaments of migrant indigeneity: Morgan Godfery, ‘Sydney is no place to build a Māori meeting house – it is disrespectful to Aboriginal people’, The Guardian, 06/03/22

07Mar22

Excerpt: When most New Zealanders hear the term “marae” they think of the typical Māori meeting house. The angular facade, decorated in red and white carvings, and the open space for the “encounter” where guests arrive in the warmth of welcome, in the grief of a tangi (funeral), or in the uncertainty of a disagreement. Technically, the “marae” refers to that open space, but most people assume it means the meeting house. In most parts of the North Island, marae – taking the common meaning of the meeting house and the open space – dot small, rural communities. In Te Teko, where I trace my whakapapa (ancestry), there are four marae within a couple kilometres of each other. Each marae on that golden mile in Te Teko acts as a physical statement – this is Māori land. Marae embody deep connections to the land and to the ancestors who exercised rights and responsibilities in respect of it. They make perfect sense in New Zealand. But in Australia, where the Sydney Marae Alliance are preparing to construct that country’s first marae, they make no sense.

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Indigenous erasure prompts athazagoraphobia: Manar H. Makhoul, ‘Dispossession and Discontinuity: The Impact of the 1967 War on Palestinian Thought’, Critical Inquiry, 48, 3, 2022

06Mar22

Abstract: For some, the 1967 war meant a setback to grand Arab projects; but the Palestinians understood the war in physical and epistemic terms. This is because the war made it clear to them that Israel and Zionism are capable of physically erasing Palestine as well as its history. The Palestinian existential fear of epistemic erasure (athazagoraphobia), following the complete occupation of their land, has produced works that affirm epistemic presence through the assertion of history and ownership. Athazagoraphobia refers to an existential human fear of death both physically and memorially––namely, human continuity. As a result, Palestinian discourse, responding to athazagoraphobia, centers around questions of origins, genealogy, and beginnings. Moreover, Palestinian reaction to athazagoraphobia opens up a discussion about the impact of this reaction on larger intellectual projects that deal with universal themes. Consequently, this article offers additional insights into the relationship between the 1948 and 1967 wars.

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Immigrant incarceration and settler colonialism: Dan Horner, ‘Behind Strong Palings: Producing Knowledge in the Modern City at Montreal’s Emigrant Sheds, 1832–1852’, Urban History Review, 49, 2, 2022, pp. 172-193

06Mar22

Abstract: Established during the cholera epidemic of 1832, Montreal’s emigrant sheds sat on the city’s western fringe and played a vital role in urban governance in British North America for the next twenty years. The site served as a place where migrants could be segregated from the general public until they were deemed to be sufficiently healthy to continue with the process of settlement. Public officials employed at and around the sheds and observers who visited the facility thus used the emigrant sheds as a place to consider strategies of classification and containment. The production of knowledge was central to the work that went on there. This article uses government reports, emigrant handbooks, newspapers, and private correspondence to delve into the workings of the emigrant sheds and to place them in the broader context of the politics of public health and the establishment of carceral institutions. It situates these processes at the centre of the project of settler colonialism in British North America.

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Indigenous mobility against and beyond settler colonialism: David S. Walsh, ‘Indigenous Movement, Settler Colonialism: A History of Tlicho Dene Continuity through Travel’, Material Religion, 18, 1, 2022, pp. 46-60

06Mar22

Abstract: Since time immemorial, Indigenous Dene Peoples have traveled ancestral routes throughout what is currently northern Canada and interior Alaska. Tłįchǫ Dene have continued to cultivate an identity as travelers throughout a history of ecological change and the settler ideology of Canadian colonialism. In this article, I aim to contribute to scholarship on Tłįchǫ travel and history by focusing on an additional dimension of movement: materiality. I have previously written about Tłįchǫ ecological ontologies relating to Indigenous conceptions of personhood in a more-than-human-world. In this article I apply my understanding of Tłįchǫ ontologies to the material dimensions of movement on the land, past and present, revealing an ontological, ecological, and spiritual continuity despite—although adapted in response to—settler-colonialism and climate change.

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Recipes for settler colonialism: Edith Snook, ‘The Recipes of Jonathan Odell and 18th-Century Settler Colonialism in the Maritimes’, Acadiensis, 2022

03Mar22

Abstract: Recipes provide one lens through which to examine the history of settler colonialism. In the 18th-century Maritimes, for example, settlers wrote, collected, and circulated instructions for making medicines, food and drink, and agricultural and household products (such as fertilizers, cleaners, and paints). From print and manuscript sources, largely in English with a few in Latin, German, and French, the 18th-century settler recipes that survive in archives in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia are mostly the work of Loyalist men writing in the later decades of the century. This research note will focus on the recipes of Jonathan Odell, whose papers contain several recipes in his hand – specifically six recipes recorded in an 18thcentury commonplace book where five medical recipes and one for ink have been copied alongside verse fragments, epigrams, and poems and a recipe for “Indian Chocolate” Odell sent by letter in 1816 to Ward Chipman, the solicitor general of New Brunswick. While scholars have written about Jonathan Odell’s Loyalist poetry – work that situates his verse within the context of the American Revolution – looking at his recipes requires the framing of his writing not only by political debates among White men but also by the deeply political relationships in an 18th-century colonial context between settlers and Indigenous peoples in what we now call eastern North America. Recipe scholarship has illustrated the importance of networks of knowledge exchange to recipe culture, including colonial ones.

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Settler colonial videogames? Dietmar Meinel (ed.), Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies, De Gruyter, 2022

03Mar22

Description: While video games have blossomed into the foremost expression of contemporary popular culture over the past decades, their critical study occupies a fringe position in American Studies. In its engagement with video games, this book contributes to their study but with a thematic focus on a particularly important subject matter in American Studies: spatiality. The volume explores the production, representation, and experience of places in video games from the perspective of American Studies. Contributions critically interrogate the use of spatial myths (“wilderness,” “frontier,” or “city upon a hill”), explore games as digital borderlands and contact zones, and offer novel approaches to geographical literacy. Eventually, Playing the Field II brings the rich theoretical repertoire of the study of space in American Studies into conversation with questions about the production, representation, and experience of space in video games.

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The settler vision, framed: Jarrod Hore, Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism, University of California Press, 2022

02Mar22

Description: Visions of Nature revives the work of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers in the colonies of the Tasman World and in California. Despite having little association with one another, these photographers developed remarkably similar visions of nature. They rode a wave of interest in wilderness imagery and made pictures that were hung in settler drawing rooms, perused in albums, projected in theaters, and re-created on vacations. In both the American West and the Tasman World, landscape photography fed into settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about territory and history. During this key period of settler revolution, a generation of photographers came to associate “nature” with remoteness, antiquity, and emptiness, a perspective that disguised the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced colonial fantasies of environmental abundance. This book lifts the work of these photographers out of their provincial contexts and repositions it within a new comparative frame.

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Settler colonialism as a symptom (and why we need good nursing): Taqdir Bhandal, Third eye seeing : examining decolonial, intersectional pedagogies in Canadian nursing and medical (NursMed) education, PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2022

02Mar22

Abstract: The Third Eye Seeing project investigates how Decolonial, Intersectional Pedagogies can inform Canadian Nursing and Medical (NursMed) Education. The intention of the project is to contribute to the development of Canadian NursMed Education and efforts to redress deepening, intersecting health and social inequities. Briefly, Decolonial, Intersectional Pedagogies are philosophies of learning that encourage teachers and students to reflect on health through the lenses of settler-colonialism, health equity, and social justice. Drawing on Decolonial, Intersectional Pedagogies, Canadian NursMed Education could ostensibly prepare learners to address the symptoms of modernity, especially settler-colonialism. Diverse academic perspectives have led me to the following research questions: (A) What are the ways in which Decolonial, Intersectional Pedagogies can inform Canadian NursMed Education? (B) What are the potential struggles and adaptations required to integrate Decolonial, Intersectional Pedagogies within Canadian NursMed Education? Drawing on critical ethnographic research methods, I conducted in-depth interviews with faculty members and engaged in participant observation of classrooms in university-based Canadian NursMed Education. The dissertation as a whole, and the analysis was informed by theoretical perspectives including decolonization, intersectionality, and critical theory. Interpretive description guided the analysis of the themes reflected in the data. The research findings are organized into three chapters, beginning with a presentation of four common ‘institutional features’ influencing the uptake of pedagogical approaches: crowded curriculum, academic freedom, the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action, and admissions processes. The next set of findings addresses the complex strategies participants applied to integrate Decolonial, Intersectional Pedagogies in their teaching approaches. Lastly, the findings illustrate the emotional and spiritual toll some faculty members face when attempting to deliver Decolonial, Intersectional Pedagogies. Based on an analysis, I discuss the concept of Third Eye Seeing as a heuristic (in solidarity with Two-Eyed Seeing) to apply in creating adaptive pedagogies for Canadian NursMed Education. Through the application of multiple worldsenses teachers and students can support movements towards health equity, social justice, and unlearning/undoing settler-colonialism. With this context in mind, this dissertation project intended to generate new knowledge to stimulate dialogue and action regarding the role of Canadian NursMed Education as an upstream determinant of health.

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Introducing a special issue on settler colonialism: Nadim Rouhana, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Palestinian-Zionist Struggle: Theoretical Problems and Contributions’, Omran, 38, 2021

27Feb22

Abstract: This special issue addresses problems in the study of the colonial-Zionist colonial project in Palestine, based on multiple and overlapping methodological frameworks from the social sciences and humanities. The theoretical contributions of the issue examine numerous important themes, such as: historical sociology, the formation of the settler colonial state, comparative colonial studies, the relationship of nationalism to colonialism, the colonial-settler imagination and its relationship to racism, violence and xenophobia, the relationship of legitimacy and sovereignty to the colonial origins of international law, and the role played by indigenous resistance in the development of the colonial control systems or the obfuscation of the national and the religious.

Access the whole issue here.

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