settler colonial studies blog

The loneliness of settler colonialism: Ann Cvetkovich, ‘Billy-Ray Belcourt’s loneliness as the affective life of settler colonialism’, Feminist Theory, 2022

27Feb22

Abstract: This article explores loneliness as the affective life of settler colonialism through the work of queer Indigenous (Driftpile Cree) writer Billy-Ray Belcourt’s two volumes of poetry This Wound Is a World and NDN Coping Mechanisms. In particular, the article focuses on how Belcourt draws on queer affect theory and critical race theory in the work of scholars such as Jose Muñoz, Leo Bersani, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe – as he explores the relation between sex and death, and between cruising cultures and the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples. It argues that Belcourt’s innovative fusion of poetry and theory provides new genres for racialised understandings of loneliness and other structures of feeling.

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Settler zombies: Darrell Varga, ‘Screen Zombies, Alien Settlers, and Colonial Legacies’, American Review of Canadian Studies, 52, 1, 2022, pp. 9-28

27Feb22

Abstract: You Are On Indian Land, a Challenge for Change documentary shot during a border-crossing blockade on Akwesasne territory (near Cornwall, Ontario) in 1969, helped interrupt the colonial legacy of Canadian cinema. Since then, activism in defense of Wet’suwet’en struggles to protect unceded territory, including remarkable uses of video and social media, carry on the transformative spark of this and other Indigenous films. Until recently, Indigenous filmmaking in Canada has mostly been relegated to informational and documentary programming because this is the genre sanctioned by colonial institutions. The commercial success of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), disrupted this gatekeeping, and the release of Mi’kmaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013) and Blood Quantum (2019) completely shattered the imposed barrier. Barnaby’s films are about the crimes of colonialism inflected through the zombie-horror and revenge-fantasy genres. This article weaves together these formative moments of Canadian documentary and fiction filmmaking with respect to issues of justice, land claims, and visual sovereignty, raising the question of what it means to represent Indigenous social struggles in popular film genres and what they say about the concept of Canadian identity.

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Settler mythologies in action: Frederik Blank, ‘Settler Colonial Myths in the Coastal GasLink Conflict’ , 43rd Annual Conference of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-speaking Countries (GKS), 2022, pp. 5-15

27Feb22

Excerpt: Canada is commonly portrayed as “the better America” and seen as a friendly and welcoming place. Many people regard Canada as a region for adventurous outdoor trips and the country advertises its seemingly “peaceful” and “untouched wilderness.” The country is promoting human rights and gender equality, and has a “cool” Prime Minister – could Canada be the most liberal country in the world? In fact, these attributions conceal a very dark side of Canada and need to be put aside. The country of Canada evolved from a settler colonial project which committed genocide and pursued brutal assimilation tactics against the Indigenous populations. While the state of Canada publicly announces the will for reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and appears to show contrition for the crimes committed against Natives, settler colonialism has not ended in Canada. To understand these realities the concept of settler colonialism will be applied. The focus of this research will lie particularly on one aspect of the concept of settler colonialism: settler colonial myths, or what Travis Wysote and Erin Morton call tautologies and pioneer lies. I argue that the Coastal GasLink (CGL) conflict between the Wet’suwet’en Nation and Canada exposes and reproduces settler colonial myths which are woven into the fabric of Canadian national identity.

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Settler colonial collecting: Sonja Dobroski, ‘”This stuff speaks to me”: Settler materiality, identity and nationalism among collectors of Native American material culture, History and Anthropology, 2022

27Feb22

Abstract: This article examines the collection activities of Paul Dyck (1917–2016), a collector of Native North American Plains objects. Paul Dyck’s extensive archive is employed to explore networks of collectors and their practices, spanning the entirety of the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Weaving ethnographic material conducted with private collectors and heirs alongside Dyck’s correspondence, Dyck’s activities are situated within the history of anthropological thought, a discourse on the nature of settler colonial practices of collection, and U.S. settler identity formation. The article draws on these insights to introduce settler materiality, a new theoretical term and definition with relevance for anthropologists, Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars, historians, and settlercolonial theorists interested in the way material culture functions in settler colonial societies.

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On the ‘propriety’ of settler property: Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem, Tovi Fenster, ‘Settler-colonial dispossession in West Jerusalem: between the personal and the collective’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2022

27Feb22

Abstract: This article analyzes a spontaneous encounter between a Palestinian refugee—stepping over the threshold of her childhood home for the first time in seventy years, following its expropriation—and the current Israeli Jewish owner. This unusual encounter led us to propose a new understanding of dispossession based on both its personal (symbolic–emotional) and collective (economic–political) meanings. The former dimension is expressed in the Palestinians’ acts of remembering and visiting their pre-1948 homes, not only as a reflection of the past and a nostalgic impulse, but also as a way of shaping, intervening in, and influencing the present. The latter, collective meaning, explores the multiplicity of dispossession processes in a settler-colonial society in which the capitalist mode of production already existed before the settlers arrived. This article focuses on one particular form of dispossession through a micro-geographical study of one house in Jerusalem that was once a Palestinian family home. We also offer an expanded interpretation of dispossession as personal and collective by analyzing three modes of experience relating to dispossessed property: settler-colonial property, stolen property, and property as nativeness.

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Integration and assimilation: Yukiko Tanaka, ‘Healing Toward Interdependency: Building Skills and Resistance Through Immigrant and Indigenous Employment’, Journal of International Migration and Integration, 2022

24Feb22

Abstract: Indigenous and immigrant communities have both been targeted by the Canadian government with employment interventions as a means of integration and assimilation. This article examines an employment program run by an immigrant settlement agency in Saskatoon, Canada, that brings Indigenous people and immigrants together to build their employment skills and learn about each other’s cultures. Through participant observation, interviews, and sharing circles, I analyze the possibilities for building solidarity and resistance to neoliberalism within the structure of a state-funded program. I build on Simpson’s (2016; 2018) concept of constellations of co-resistance to analyze the possibilities and limitations of resistance within the shadow state. While the program does adhere to some typical neoliberal “soft skill” development, both staff and participants negotiate within the constraints of the shadow state to enact resistance. This resistance to settler colonialism is expressed through a framework of healing: program staff draw from Indigenous knowledge to build interdependency and kinship between Indigenous people and immigrants as a means toward employment. This paper’s conceptual intervention is a synthesis of scholarship on assimilation of Indigenous people and integration of immigrants through employment training, and contrasting it with constellations of co-resistance. In doing so, I show that resistance to the state’s assimilationist aims is possible through alliances between Indigenous people and immigrants, but there are limits to the extent of resistance because of the shadow state structure.

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Under settler colonial occupation: Amanda Pimenta da Silva, Cities of God Under Occupation: Settler Colonial Practices and Pacification in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, MA dissertation, The American University in Cairo, 2022

24Feb22

Abstract: The 2002 film ‘City of God’ tells an anecdotal story of violence in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and is a reminder that the societies we tend to take for granted can actually be a luxury. The film portrays the daily life of the peripheries of Rio and its relation with drug trafficking, crime, and poverty, and how it has deteriorated into a war zone so dangerous that anyone risk being shot to death. Thousands of miles away from the Brazilian slums there is another so-called city of God, or the city chosen by God to be the home’s capital of the chosen ones, which is believed by some to be the ‘Land of Israel’, and nowadays illegally occupies much of Palestinian territories. The occupied areas of Palestine – Gaza and the West Bank – similarly endure daily violent life with militarization and targeted killings policies. For the last decades, there has been a state of permanent conflict in both situations, in which the government wields the law in order to justify its construction of a narrative of warfare, based primarily in ‘the name of security’. This paper identifies policies of governance developed by the narratives of peace and security, and that is heavily applied in both cases, by drawing on the chore mechanism that sustain sovereignty in modern liberal democracies: its right to occupy and kill, which can be widely accepted, or at least not condemned, in circumstances of war. The central argument in this paper is that the existence of a metaphorical war – against terror or drugs – is necessary in both cases for the State to put forward a plan of social control and domination, which is carefully constructed within the legal order.

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Settler colonialism is taxing: Kyle Willmott, ‘Taxes, taxpayers, and settler colonialism: Toward a critical fiscal sociology of tax as white property’, Law & Society Review, 56, 1, 2022, pp. 6-27

22Feb22

Abstract: In settler colonial states such as Canada, tax is central to political ideas that circulate about Indigenous nations and people. The stories that are told about Indigenous peoples by ‘taxpayers’ often involve complaints about budgets, welfare, and ‘unfair’ tax arrangements. The paper theorizes how informal ‘tax imaginaries’ and ‘taxpayer’ subjectivities are forged through state policy and how ostensibly fiscal concerns are imbricated with white political entitlement that erodes Indigenous legal and political sovereignty. By tracing the construction of taxpayer concerns and tax myths as forms of fiscalized racism, the paper demonstrates the importance of tax to settler colonialism and the shape of Indigenous-settler relations. Taxpayer subjects are not just legal or material positionings in relation to tax and the state, but powerful subjects that refigure political problems as ‘fiscal’ and construct Indigenous people and nations through racialized repertoires of property and possession.

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The fragility of relapsing settlers: Avril Bell, ‘Building stamina, fighting fragility: The account of a white settler “recovering racist”‘, Ethnicities, 2022

22Feb22

Abstract: White fragility, a common response of white people to calls to engage in conversations about racism and address their complicity with it, has received considerable scholarly attention. Much less attention has been given to the antidote: white stamina. This paper explores the development of stamina in the journey of ‘recovery’ from racism of one white settler individual who has become a public figure in Aotearoa New Zealand, in part through his declaration that he is a ‘recovering racist’. Significantly, the racism at the heart of this person’s story was directed towards indigenous, Māori New Zealanders; racism and settler colonialism are intertwined in this case. Consequently, the paper also responds to Lawrence and Dua’s (2005) call to ‘decolonise antiracism’ by foregrounding the indigenous–settler relationship in the analysis of racism within a settler society. The paper teases out overlaps and differences between white racism and settler colonialism, and between white stamina and settler stamina. Finally, I argue that there may be things for antiracists to learn from struggles to decolonise settler colonialism. Most significantly, this analysis points to the importance and power of the existence of an aspirational positive identity and position for ‘recovering racists’.

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Decolonisation against settler ‘democracy’: Yann Allard-Tremblay, ‘The Two Row Wampum: Decolonizing and Indigenizing Democratic Autonomy’, Polity, 2022

22Feb22

Abstract: This paper aims to contribute to the decolonization and Indigenization of democratic theory. Regarding decolonization, I explain that democratic self-determination is typically associated with sovereign autonomy and can serve to justify policies and discourses of settler colonial control, erasure, and assimilation. Regarding Indigenization, I reconceptualize democratic self-determination from an Indigenous starting point. I discuss the Two Row Wampum of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and offer an account of the political principles it embodies. I interpret it as advancing a relational conception of democratic autonomy, which makes it possible to embrace a plurality of political arrangements and political actors, to blur the distinction between internal authority and external sovereignty, and to de-emphasize the enforcement of decisions in favor of the maintenance of commitments to a political relationship.

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