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About yet another settler exceptionalism: Josef Cole, The Longue Durée of Chilean Exceptionalism: Settler Colonialism, Political Violence, and Popular Culture, PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 2022

19Jul22

Abstract: The nationwide protests that began in Santiago in October 2019 laid bare the tensions churning underneath the narrative of Chilean economic prosperity, democracy, and stability known as Chilean exceptionalism. Protestors carrying signs stating “it’s not about 30 pesos, it’s about 30 years” exhibited the public’s understanding that the triumphalist discourse of the democratic transition from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1990 was not as complete as advertised. However, even the slogan’s transformed understanding of the transition does not consider the continuity of settler-colonial logics of elimination and counter-insurgent violence that started with the dispossession of Indigenous land. I argue that the roots of the tensions that boiled over in October 2019 are not 30 but rather 500 years old. Through a dialogue between an archive of “high politics” comprised of official documents and an archive of “low data,” the 2017 docudrama series Una historia necessaria, I demonstrate how settler-colonial violence is an essential to Chilean statecraft. Finally, I contend that the fallout from the protests has provided an opening for new forms of justice that can address the settler-colonial sources of violence.


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An old story about German settler colonialism in the east (it is worrying that it should come out now and that it should be told in these terms): Piotr Guzowski, ‘Eastward Migration in European History: The Interplay of Economic and Environmental Opportunities’, in Adam Izdebski, John Haldon, Piotr Filipkowski, (eds), Perspectives on Public Policy in Societal-Environmental Crises: What the Future Needs from History, Springer, 2022, pp. 325-332

19Jul22

Abstract: During the preindustrial era one of the major migration waves headed eastward to Eastern Europe, where scores of migrants, in their pursuit of happiness, hoped to fulfil their dreams, have their own farm or set up a company, achieve a higher social status, and benefit from religious freedom and tolerance. The first wave of migration was connected with German colonization and the establishment of settlements following the German law. The alluringly large expanses of “pristine” land, together with tax privileges and the prospects of relative autonomy, attracted scores of bold, enterprising and hard-working settlers to relocate to the East. Most of them were peasants and townsfolk from the German states and the Netherlands, but there were also Jews escaping discrimination in Western Europe as well as West-European Protestants and Catholics attracted by religious tolerance in the East. Prospects of freedom and economic success encouraged them all to choose Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as their second homeland.


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The ruin of settler colonialism: Samia Rahimtoola, ‘Ruin Gazing: Robert Frost and the Afterlives of Settler Environmentalism’, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, 64, 2018, pp. 144-171

16Jul22

Abstract: This article considers a paradox that structures the internal logic of the ideology of improvement, a central justification for settler colonialism’s strategies of cultural and material dispossession. Far from establishing a limit to settler colonialism as predicted by the writings of John Locke, scenes of ruined, abandoned land are seen to extend settler sovereignty. Specifically, the article examines settler representations of, and encounters with, ruin in the poetry of Robert Frost to argue that irony’s “infinite absolute negativity,” as Søren Kierkegaard states, enables settler subjects to defend against the threat of settler dissolution and magnify settler subjectivity. In a contemporary moment in which damage and devastation have become dominant modes of settler presence on the land, Frost’s poetry prepares us to consider the settler histories of ruin gazing that remain sedimented within contemporary environmental discourse.


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Settler colonialism in the Golan Heights: Gideon Sulimani, Raz Kletter, ‘Settler-Colonialism and the Diary of an Israeli Settler in the Golan Heights: The Notebooks of Izhaki Gal’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 19, 1, 2022

16Jul22

Abstract: In 1967 the Golan Heights saw a dramatic change: a hundred villages were destroyed and replaced by new Israeli settlements. We study the beginning of this settlement through the lens of settler-colonialism, using documents of the time. The settlers claim to be ‘original natives’, ‘returning’ to the land and, like other colonial settlers elsewhere, bringing culture and civilisation to a terra nullius. To justify the settlement, they create a ‘deep’ narrative that combines the ancient past and the new settlement, erasing the in-between Arab past. The settlement— and the destruction — are on-going processes. The settler appears as a young, heroic figure, who patronises the ‘Others’ as weaklings (tourists, women, etc.) and is oblivious to the tragedy of the displaced Syrian inhabitants of the Golan Heights.


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Genocide and settler colonialism: Molly Barbara Cop Rasmussen, Toward Indigenous Ultimate Permanence: Examining Settler Colonialism and Genocidal Elimination in Canada and Israel, MA dissertation, Carleton University, 2022

16Jul22

Abstract: This thesis critically compares technologies of settler colonialism and genocidal elimination in Canada and Israel. Keeping with the argument that recognizes settler colonialism as an entity that destroys to replace, genocide is taken up as a theoretical framing device that addresses comparable methods of both the material and discursive elimination of Indigenous peoples in Canada and Palestinians within and outside of Israel. At the same time as the two settler states continue to commit genocide against the original inhabitants of the lands they have stolen, Canada and Israel utilize similar selfpromotion strategies that present themselves as humanitarian and democratic, a specific tool used to wash away the sins of settler colonialism and genocide. While no two settler regimes are exactly the same, this thesis identifies key structural similarities between the two states and makes the case for an international solidarity movement rooted in principles of anti-colonialism and Indigenous ultimate permanence.


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The settler’s care: Liz Scarfe, ‘Erasing trauma – Erasing indigeneity: How the settler colonial state erased Warlpiri trauma in the wake of the police shooting Kumanjayi Walker’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2022

14Jul22

Abstract: In this paper, I argue that the rhetoric and discharge of state mental health care provisions in the wake of the police shooting of Kumunjayi Walker reflect the logic of elimination that underpins settler-colonial societies. Firstly, the use of emotional politics and the diplomacy of sympathy transform the police shooting of an Aboriginal man into a simple loss of life. Secondly, the deployment of psychological services to the community specifically and only for secondary trauma victims not only erased Warlpiri trauma and foregrounded nonIndigenous trauma, it also positioned Warlpiri people as the cause of non-Indigenous trauma. Lastly, I explore how narratives in the mental health care sector regarding the state response simultaneously critique and reproduce settler-colonial elimination. As an arm of the settler-colonial state, the sector cannot help but be complicit in the ongoing elimination of indigeneity and is not exceptional as a sector in this way. Settler-colonial attempts at care are inherently characterised by this conflict of interest, which, if there is any way to resolve it, requires a depth of critical reflection beyond politically progressive narratives.


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Disaster to settler colonialism: Jenna N. Hanchey, ‘Catastrophe colonialism: Global disaster films and the white right to migrate’, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 2022

13Jul22

Abstract: This article argues that post-9/11 global disaster films exemplify a social imaginary preparing white, Western subjects to envision settler (re)colonization of the Global South as the only option in the face of increasing ecological devastation. Using the films The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, I demonstrate how this catastrophe colonialism pairs the racialization of migration with the coloniality of disaster. Together, a perceived white right to migrate and colonial amnesia invert the material threat of crisis as experienced in the lived world to make (re)colonization appear as the natural response to global disaster.


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Settler colonial memorial forgetfulness: Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘Memory for forgetfulness: Conceptualizing a memory practice of settler colonial disavowal’, Theory and Society, 2022

13Jul22

Abstract: This article articulates a sociological conception of settler colonial remembering as a tool of legitimation. Theories of memory in the context of settler colonialism generally center counter-memories by the subaltern or colonized, or official hegemonizing representations at the level of state institutions. Underexamined is the dialectical nature of memory and discursive representations that help reproduce settler colonial processes of accumulation and displacement at the micro-level. The article draws on archival data from avowedly socialist-leftist Zionist colonies to explicate patterned representations of Palestinian villages that Zionist forces gradually displaced prior to and during the 1948 War/Nakba. I demonstrate how the colonial settlers attributed political meaning through five representational modes: contrasting the indigenous as backward and primitive and settlers as progressive and developed; denying an indigenous connection to the land; emphasizing amiable relations through the promotion of cultural progress and settler superiority; asymmetrically assessing settler and indigenous belongings to national collectives; and legitimizing land purchases that dispossessed indigenous cultivators, despite the settlers’ socialist ideology, while reducing conflict to the issue of economic compensation. I theorize a form of settler colonial memory based not merely on erasure, but on recognition and disavowal. Finally, I argue that local memory is a significant site of production in which the conceptual tools to both trace the historical processes of supremacy and subvert asymmetrical sociality lie.


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Settler colonialism’s vertical frontier: Vivian Underhill, Sheeva Sabati, Linnea Beckett, ‘Against settler sustainability: California’s groundwater as a vertical frontier’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2022

13Jul22

Abstract: California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its groundwater crisis is a warning of its impending collapse. In this paper, we argue that policies like California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act reinscribe the settler state, even as they aim toward environmental sustainability. Drawing from Indigenous feminist scholarship on water and frontier processes, our methodology traces settler colonialism materially and discursively through the movement of water. First, we analyze hydraulic engineering discourses at the turn of the 20th century to illustrate how racial logics were key to producing irrigation—and the broader project of white settlement—as ostensibly benevolent processes of improvement. We then highlight how turn-of-the-century legislation was central to producing agriculture as a site of accumulation by dispossession through the production of settler forms of property and relations with land and water. Finally, we consider groundwater overdraft as a vertical frontier. Thinking with water as an analytic, we study the nexus of relationships that inscribe settler water infrastructures as normative, demonstrating their role as frontier processes within a settler colonial present. Our analysis shows the necessity of dismantling settler modes of sustainability and centering and supporting Indigenous sovereignty.


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The statue as settlers: Amalia June Wickstead, Trend Settlers: The Russell Statues, Casting the Classical and Cultural Colonisation, MA dissertation, The University of Auckland, 2022

13Jul22

Abstract: Eighteenth and nineteenth century British and European colonial extension into the New World and the South Seas resulted in the growth of new colonial cities. With this development came the establishment of Western institutions, namely, the museum. These new museums needed content, and where better to look than the models beloved at ‘home’ in England. The need for legitimizing ancestors for a young Empire, and already established reverence for Greco-Roman art saw British colonisers looking to the ancient past for works which represented both. Works within the canon of ancient sculptures deemed the paragon of material culture were reproduced in plaster, distributed, and displayed throughout the colonies during the Victorian period. Behind each of these donated collections can be found an individual, or a small group of men, who sought to enrich their emerging cities and enhance their personal legacy. In a single transaction, groups of casts could be sent to preserve ‘good taste’ and provide the means for education while also establishing the donor as a cultured connoisseur and a generous philanthropist. These displays of wealth were a way of building legacy, both personal and cultural, as they connected cities like Auckland, New Zealand, back to English art and values. As the circulation of casts reached its height, Auckland was given its sizeable collection by Thomas Russell. The Auckland Institute and Museum received thirty-three statues and busts in 1878, made by Domenico Brucciani, the era’s foremost castmaker in Britain. The donation was significant in size, quality, and precedence. With the Russell Statues (as this gift is known), the Auckland Institute and Museum could diversify its collection, following in the footsteps of other cities moving towards a colonial metropolitan ideal. My research tracks and examines the uses of this collection as exhibition items, educational tools for the South Kensington system, tastemakers, and decoration, unveiling the complex roles they have filled. This thesis explores their odyssey from fabrication in Brucciani’s London workshop to their resting place – principally in the Auckland Museum’s storage facilities. It also investigates the dissemination of Western artistic ideals and the European fascination with Greece and Rome.


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