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Gaming the settler Trail: William J. Bauer, Jr., Margaret Huettl, Katrina M. Phillips, ‘Retracing The Oregon Trail’, California History, 99, 3, 2022, pp. 53-63

09Aug22

Abstract: The video game The Oregon Trail occupies a cornerstone in American popular culture. Released in 1971, the game came bundled with Apple II computers and, between the 1970s and 1990s, fostered computer education. In the original version of the game, players led a wagon train from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley, Oregon, attempting to overcome numerous obstacles. However, the game glorified settler colonialism and erased Indigenous peoples. In 2020, Gameloft decided to rebuild the game, and the company hired three Native studies scholars to “bring a new level of respectful representation to the game.” Here, we reflect on our role as consultants in the game’s redevelopment, asking what it means to integrate Indigenous perspectives and presence into popular, contested narratives of the American West in educational and entertainment contexts.


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The US is a settler empire: Heidi Nicholls, ‘Antiracism amidst empire? Understanding the United States’ relationship to whiteness’, Sociology Compass, 2022

09Aug22

Abstract: Dominant conceptualizations of the United States as a nation-state have recently given way to greater understandings of settler colonialism and U.S. empire. However, notions of U.S. empire may still work to naturalize settler colonialism if viewed in isolation from the expansiveness of what has been considered U.S. territory. In this review article, I outline three dominant understandings of U.S. empire and describe how each reifies the myth of the U.S. as a “nation-state.” The U.S. does not simply have an empire. It is an empire. I then review helpful insights concerning processes of rule within empire-states including from postcolonial sociology, comparative-historical sociology, and gender and sexuality. Insights from critical Indigenous studies offer a way forward for research that analyzes the rule of settler colonial and empire-states alongside the politics of race and racism. As theorized by Indigenous feminisms in Oceania, racism also operates through possessive processes that integrate peoples and ways of living into state logics and mechanisms of rule. Finally, I argue that sociology committed to
addressing racism must further grapple with the reality that the United States is an empire-state. As such, we must more closely analyze the state and statist politics as key producers of White supremacy today.


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Creoles, but still settlers: Johannes Becke, Avi Shilon, ‘Caribbean Zion: A creolization perspective on Jewish-Israeli cultures’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2022

07Aug22

Abstract: The article explores Jewish-Israeli cultures through the innovative prism of creolization, defined here as the contingent and dynamic process of transculturation between European Jews, Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Similar to the history of ethnogenesis in the Caribbean, Israeli society emerged from a process of colonization and immigration in a setting of geographic isolation, resulting in a contested process of ethnicization and indigenization. Based on case studies of Jewish-Israeli cultures (including food, language, and religious practices), the article argues for a periodization of Jewish-Israeli creolization. After a long period of intense interaction and creolization between Ashkenazi settler-immigrants and native Palestinian Arabs under Ottoman and British rule, Israel’s state-founding elites aimed at top-down Europeanization and decreolization after 1948. Since the rise of country’s right in the 1970s, Israeli society has been undergoing a process of renewed creolization between Ashkenazi Israeli and Mizrahi Israeli elements.


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Decolonial pedagogies against settler colonialism: Mohamad Junaid, Hafsa Kanjwal, ‘Contesting settler colonial logics in Kashmir as pedagogical praxis’, Curriculum Inquiry, 52, 3, 2022, pp. 373-384

07Aug22

Abstract: In the aftermath of the Indian government’s decision to change the status of Jammu and Kashmir on 5 August 2019, activism for the right to self-determination in Kashmir came under tremendous pressure. An intense crackdown in Kashmir, including a complete communication blackout and internet blockade, meant the only Kashmiri and dissenting voices left were located in diasporic spaces. As two Kashmiri scholar–activists involved in advocacy work on Kashmir, we examine the challenges of decolonial activism and transnational solidarity building, especially in Western academic spaces. For both of us, Kashmir has been a home and is a place where our scholarly ethos is entwined with intimate knowledge. While the diasporic/exilic location presents its own challenges of representation, the urgency imposed by the settler colonial logics that create existential questions for Kashmiris forces reconsiderations both of political alliance building as well as scholarly frameworks. In this article, we explore the emergent contours of a pedagogy of solidarity that centers Indigenous perspectives in relation to Kashmiri diasporic activism. We examine how our solidarity work takes shape in the neoliberal academy, grassroots progressive spaces, and transnational media.


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Settlers indigenising through information: Lizzy Nichols, ‘Becoming Indigenous Again: The Native Informant and Settler Logic in Richard Powers’s Overstory’, Environmental Humanities, Environmental Humanities, 14, 2, 2022, pp. 303-320

07Aug22

Abstract: The figure of the “native informant,” as outlined by Spivak, confers a legitimacy of “inside” information for the colonial subject that, ultimately, is generalized to the point of confirming the colonist’s view of the world, challenging nothing and, instead, providing authenticity to existing beliefs. Since Indigenous groups are often associated with primordial nature in the hemispherically American context, there is a long tradition of settler colonial societies appropriating the figure of the Native to claim authentic land rights or establish an identity distinct from Europe. This article argues that, in its modern iteration, appropriation of the native informant within the natural context serves anxieties concerning potentially illegitimate land stewardship for settler colonial societies. Focusing on the native informant figure in Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory, the article explicates how, in the age of climate change, patterns around settler land theft are repeated and repurposed for the settler episteme in which, instead of reconsidering who has the rights to land stewardship, the settler seeks to transfer Indigenous knowledge to themselves, authenticating the settler society’s continued right to the colonized land. While Powers makes significant contributions to reconsidering the European model of an anthropocentric relation to nature, the article argues that The Overstory does this through repeating such settler colonial traditions as associating Indigenous peoples solely with the past and depicting the American landscape in a way that relies on the legal mythology of terra nullius.


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Northern settlers: Laura Junka-Aikio, ‘Whose settler colonial state? Arctic Railway, state transformation and settler self-indigenization in Northern Finland’, Postcolonial Studies, 2022

07Aug22

Abstract: Settler colonial theory has effectively highlighted the continuity of colonial structures, but less attention has been paid on how also the settler state has transformed over time, and how such changes have affected the manifold relationships between the state, the settlers and the natives. This article addresses trajectories of settler colonial change in Finland, building on theories of state spatial transformation and taking the recurring plans to build a Railway across the Sámi homeland as its point of departure. The article suggests that central to the change is the destabilization of the relationship between the state and Northern Finland’s older, ‘endogenous’ settler communities. This has facilitated a popular turn to settler self-Indigenization, whereby settlers make new claims to being ‘Indigenous’, usually building on records of a distant (possibly) Indigenous ancestor. Since self-Indigenization directly challenges Indigenous self-determination, it articulates a new form of elimination of the native. The task for critical scholarship is not only to situate, contextualize and challenge such identity claims, but also to question the logic that continues to set especially older settler communities in opposition to Indigenous rights and self-determination, in the context of extractive and neoliberal development that ultimately may undermine both.


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Tourism as settler colonialism: Rasul Mowatt, ‘A people’s history of leisure studies: Colonial pedagogies, touring empires’, Annals of Tourism Research, 96, 2022

04Aug22

Highlights: Conceptualizing the viscerality of living for (de)coloniality discussions; Historical colonial objects to create an informed understanding; A critique of contemporary understandings of decolonization; Presenting a politically Third World anti-colonial understanding of decolonization; Criticism of tourism as twin to settler colonialism that maintains colonial order.


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Anthropology facing indigenous sovereignty against settler colonialism: Jessica R. Cattelino, Audra Simpson, ‘Rethinking Indigeneity: Scholarship at the Intersection of Native American Studies and Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 2022

02Aug22

Abstract: The twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of scholarship at the sometimes-perilously sharp edge of anthropology and Native American and Indigenous studies. This review sets forth from a disciplinary conjuncture of the early 2000s, when anthropology newly engaged with the topic of sovereignty, which had long been the focus of American Indian studies, and when the long-standing anthropological interest in colonialism was reshaped by Indigenous studies attention to the distinctive form labeled settler colonialism. Scholars working at this edge address political relationality as both concept and methodology. Anthropologists, in turn, have contributed to Indigenous studies a commitment to territorially grounded and community-based research and theory building. After outlining the conjuncture and its methodological entailments, the review turns to two directions in scholarship: reinvigorated ethnographic research on environment and on culture and economy. It concludes with reflection on the implications of this conjuncture for anthropological epistemology and disciplinary formation.


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Indigenous modernisms against and despite settler colonialism: Kirby Brown, Stephen Ross, Alana Sayers (eds), The Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms, Routledge, 2023

02Aug22

Description: The Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms provides a powerful suite of innovative contributions by both leading thinkers and emerging scholars in the field. Incorporating an international scope of essays, this volume reaches beyond traditional national or euroamerican boundaries to locate North American Indigenous modernities and modernisms in a hemispheric context. Covering key theoretical approaches and topics, this volume includes. Diverse explorations of Indigenous cultural and intellectual production in treatments of dance, poetry, vaudeville, autobiography, radio, cinema, and more. Investigation of how we think about Indigenous lives, literatures, and cultural productions in North America from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Surveys of critical geographies of Indigenous literary and cultural studies, including refocused and reframed exploration of the diverse cultures, knowledges, traditions, geographies, experiences, and formal innovations that inform Indigenous literary, intellectual, and cultural productions. The Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms presents fresh insight to modernist studies, acknowledging and reconciling the occluded histories of Indigenous erasure, and inviting both students and scholars to expand their understanding of the field.


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Settler colonial sociabilities: Fariha Shaikh, ‘Catherine Helen Spence’s Autobiography: Literary Culture and Associational Life in Nineteenth-Century South Australia’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 2022

30Jul22

Abstract: This article examines Catherine Helen Spence’s Autobiography through the lens of settler colonial sociability. It argues that Spence strategically depicts associational life in the Autobiography to showcase for her readers a version of organized settler colonial sociability that envisages a role for White, middle-class urban women in the construction and expansion of settler colonial Australia. Spence’s literary and political sociability extends between Australia, Britain and the US. While it is transnational in scope, however, at the same it is exclusionary in its politics: as its very foundation rests on the exclusion of the White working classes and Australian Indigenous peoples.


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