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Explorations of settler unbelonging: Yan Zhang, A settler colonial and feminist study of the journeys in Oscar and Lucinda, Gilgamesh, journey to the stone country and the swan book, PhD dissertation, Edith Cowan University, 2022

19Mar22

Abstract: This thesis investigates how four contemporary Australian novels, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, Joan London’s Gilgamesh, Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, through adopting innovatively the journey motif and structure, deal with the impact of Australia’s colonial past on the country’s race and gender relationships. These journey stories variously represent Australian colonial history, explore the subjects of white guilt and settler unbelonging, and envisage an apocalyptic future for Australia. For my examination of the novels, I draw on elements of settler colonial and feminist theories, while also referring to Joseph Campbell’s and Evans Lansing Smith’s scholarship on the hero journey for the close reading of race and gender embodied in the novels. I argue that the selected novels, by means of three journeys or three phases of a journey, expose and challenge oppressive dualistic ideologies, such as white and black, male and female, the imperial centre and the empire periphery, human and Nature, and even life and death. In charting the journeys represented in the novels, I argue that i) Oscar and Lucinda, by re-enacting the scenes of early settlers’ migration to Australia and settler explorers’ expeditions into the inland of the continent, reimagines the originating moment of the colony and reveals the racist and patriarchal nature of it; ii) while Gilgamesh feminises an ancient Sumerian hero journey by having a young female embark on an epic journey, it implies the unlikelihood of white settlers’ sense of belonging in Australia; iii) the circuitous journey of the settler heroine and Aboriginal hero in Journey to the Stone Country exposes the darkness of Australia’s frontier history and reflects the uncertainty involved in Australia’s Aboriginal reconciliation movement; and iv) by likening the Aboriginal heroine’s abduction and return journey to the Aboriginal cultural practice of walkabout, in which Aboriginal Australians trek along creator ancestors’ path of creation, The Swan Book asserts Aboriginal people’s ontological sovereignty while it challenges settlers’ derivative sovereignty. The thesis contends that journeys depicted by each of the four novels evoke descent of the hero or heroine into the underworld, reminding us that until the settler authorities in Australia relinquish their colonisation of Aboriginal Australia and accommodate Aboriginal sovereignty, the country will always be beset by fraught race and gender relationships.


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Settling on citational politics: Max Liboiron, Rui Li, ‘Citational politics in tight places’, CLEAR, 02/03/22

18Mar22

Excerpt: Regimes of in/perceptibility, including the ones in baseline pollution studies, have specific relations that are patriarchal, elitist, ethnocentric, and colonial, among other power relations. That is, certain genders, credentials, trainings, and relationships to land are more likely to be understood as truthy and sciencey than others. CLEAR has a specific commitment to thinking about and resisting colonial land relations in research, so we’ll focus on that later. Let’s talk about colonial relationships in citing practices …


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Settler colonialism’s gendered effects: Corrinne Sullivan, Georgia Coe, Kim Spurway, Linda Briskman, John Leha, Will Trewlynn, Karen Soldatic, ‘Transforming colonial social suffering: Strategies of hope and resistance by LGBTIQ+ Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial Australia’, in Karen Soldatic, Louise St Guillaume (eds), Social Suffering in the Neoliberal Age: State Power, Logics and Resistance, Routledge, 2022

18Mar22

Abstract: Although emergent literature has begun articulating the effects of settler-colonialism on Indigenous Australians’ gender and sexuality, little remains known about how contemporary colonial processes are being counteracted by Indigenous queer communities. Drawing on the qualitative responses within a larger survey with Indigenous gender and/or sexuality diverse people, we explore how strategies of hope and resistance are enacted in efforts to contest and transform colonial social suffering and to maintain and promote individual and collective wellbeing. While all participants share experiences of struggling for wellbeing against the ongoing effects of colonisation, they also reveal how they have fostered Indigenous queer networks to respond to and resist alienating and/or oppressive colonial structures of power. Additionally, some participants divulge how they harness adverse lived experiences as a motivator to challenge and change the intergenerational legacies of colonisation.


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Indigeneity is a disability under settler colonialism: Brandi Bushman, Pasquale Toscano, ‘”The Way History Lands on a Face”: Disability, Indigeneity, and Embodied Violence in Tommy Orange’s There There’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 2022

18Mar22

Abstract: At the start of Tommy Orange’s There There, Cheyenne child Tony Loneman peers into his television screen and considers a playground taunt: “Why’s your face look like that?” Confronted with his reflection, he discovers the “Drome”—the way fetal alcohol syndrome has contoured his body, “the way history lands on a face.” The novel ends with another question from Tony: “Grandma, what are we?” With these pillared concerns—the “why” of nonnormative embodiment and the “what” of cultural identity—There There invites us to consider the ways that Indigeneity and disability are constitutive of one another. We argue that Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho) explores how the disabled Native bodymind is always under the surveillance of the present colonial eye. We do so via close-readings of three of Tony’s encounters in the novel: with himself, with an able-bodied, non-Native interlocutor who interrogates his cultural and bodymind alterity, and with his grandmother. Embodying the ancestral trauma renewed in these moments, Tony must not only live within a multi-generational temporality but must also (re)assemble his reality through constant encounters with non-Native interlocuters, moments that mimic and remind the reader of the original contact zones of American coloniality. In analyzing these moments, this article considers how disability and Indigeneity are, at once, in tension while also mutually constitutive of one another through three ongoing operations of the colonial project: the branding, transformation, and invasive reading of the bodymind. As settler colonialism continues to find its “specific, irreducible element” of territoriality not only on the geographical space of the Americas, but also on the individual bodymind, disability and Indigeneity, the corporeal and the ideological, the national and the personal, become metonymically connected and intimately imbricated.


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Place-based settler colonialism? Michelle Montgomery, ‘An Indigenous Feminist lens: Dismantling the settler-colonial narratives of place-based knowledges in a climate justice world’, in Yizhao Yang, Anne Taufen (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Cities and Landscapes in the Pacific Rim, Routledge, 2022

18Mar22

Abstract: The chapter examines how settler-colonial narratives ignore the multiple meanings of placed-based Indigenous identities’ connection to the process of climate change adaptation in environmental governance and how the erasure of Indigenous women in the field of geography is socially, politically, and legally constructed categories of colonialism. When I think of the multiple meanings of place-based identities as an Indigenous woman, the impacts of adaptation to climate change on agency and resilience are a crucial issue, and intensely negated by white feminists in discursive practices of water governance. I will discuss the ways in which reclaiming and decolonizing our narratives invoke resilience of Indigenous women through empowerment of agency by broadening our understanding of white feminist’s social and political erasure in the field of geography; then I will summarize how Eco-Critical Race Theory, the adapted tenets of Critical Race Theory, is important to draw upon the authenticity of place-based Indigenous identities and Indigenous self-determination to understand the process of climate change adaptation in water governance.


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The killing places of the killing times (mapping settler colonialism): ‘The Killing Times’, The Guardian, 16/03/22

17Mar22

Excerpt: This is a map of sites where violence occurred on the Australian frontier. This site was updated Wednesday 16 March 2022 with new information. This site does not contain images of people who have died. However, the historical records reproduced here use archaic terms that are racist and offensive, and the themes and content within will be distressing to many people. Discretion is advised.


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Justice to undo settler colonialism: Azmi Bishara, Palestine: Matters of Truth and Justice, Hurst, 2022

16Mar22

Description: In January 2020, US President Donald Trump announced his ‘deal of the century’. Supposedly intended to ‘resolve’ the Palestine-Israel conflict, it accepted Israeli occupation as a fait accompli. Azmi Bishara places this normalisation of occupation in its historical context, examining Palestine as an unresolved case of settler colonialism, now evolved into an apartheid regime. Drawing on extensive research and rich theoretical analysis, Bishara examines the overlap between the long-discussed ‘Jewish Question’ and what he calls the ‘Arab Question’, complicating the issue of Palestinian nationhood. He addresses the Palestinian Liberation Movement’s failure to achieve self-determination, and the emergence of a ‘Palestinian Authority’ under occupation. He contends that no solution to problems of nationality or settler colonialism is possible without recognising the historic injustices inflicted on Palestinians since the Nakba. This book compellingly argues that Palestine is not simply a dilemma awaiting creative policy solutions, but a problem requiring the application of justice. Attempts by regional governments to marginalise the Palestinian cause and normalise relations with Israel have emphasised this aspect of the struggle, and boosted Palestinian interactions with justice movements internationally. Bishara provides a sober perspective on the current political situation in Palestine, and a fresh outlook for its future.


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Settler colonial commitment: Susan Burch, Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions, The University of North Carolina Press, 2022

16Mar22

Description: Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal psychiatric hospital in South Dakota. But detention at the Indian Asylum, as families experienced it, was not the beginning or end of the story. For them, Canton Asylum was one of many places of imposed removal and confinement, including reservations, boarding schools, orphanages, and prison-hospitals. Despite the long reach of institutionalization for those forcibly held at the Asylum, the tenacity of relationships extended within and beyond institutional walls. In this accessible and innovative work, Susan Burch tells the story of the Indigenous people—families, communities, and nations, across generations to the present day—who have experienced the impact of this history. Drawing on oral history interviews, correspondence, material objects, and archival sources, Burch reframes the histories of institutionalized people and the places that held them. Committed expands the boundaries of Native American history, disability studies, and U.S. social and cultural history generally.


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Repressed in one location, emerging elsewhere: Shanna Constantinescu, The New Urban Tribalism: American Indians Making and Remaking Space and Race in US Cities After the 1956 Indian Relocation Act, MA dissertation, University of Helsinki, 2022

16Mar22

Abstract: In 1956 the Indian Relocation Act transformed the makeup of American cities. Initially meant to assimilate Native Americans into the mainstream population by providing them with an education that would facilitate their employment and further integration into the city proper, Relocation provided migrating Indians with fertile soil for cultivating a panIndian identity. Urban spaces became sites of resistance as Indians from all tribes came together in cities and tribal borders became blurred. Settler colonialism has influenced how American Indians are perceived by the mainstream population and how their histories are studied within academia. This thesis seeks to unravel the stereotype of the passive Native. By reframing contemporary Indian history, this study suggests that twentieth-century Native Americans have been active in producing both urban space as well as a new tribalism in the urban environment. Informed by Henri Lefebvre’s theory regarding the right to the city this thesis analyses the urban space from an Indigenous-oriented perspective while stretching Marxist theories to accommodate the lived realities of Indigenous peoples as well as the corporeality of American Indians under capitalism.


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The settler colonisation of decolonisation: Timothy R. Maton, ‘A Note on Decolonization, Poststructuralism, and Method in Indigenous Critical Theory’, Journal of Multidisciplinary Research at Trent, 3, 1, 2002

16Mar22

Abstract: The meaning of the word ‘decolonization’ is rapidly changing in Canada. Today, the word has re-penetrated the psychology of mainstream Canadians. And, with mainstream society now finding the term effective and useful for advertising products the synonymity of the term with ‘anti-colonial’ is becoming a problem. Decolonization appears to be a decolonial term, but when I carefully critique its ideological usage by settler colonials, I find it’s almost guaranteed that the contemporary usage of the term will come full circle. As it enters the mainstream market economy, the term gets structured primarily by profit motives rather than community values. Very soon, popular usage of decolonization will once again refer to a matrix of settler colonial values, rather than the independent community-based processes which grassroots Indigenous and anti-colonial peoples have used. As decolonization terminology becomes popular in Canada’s mainstream, it will methodologically contradict the grassroots’ anti-colonial aspirations. In this paper, I’ve tried to understand how Indigenous people might be influenced by the structuralist patterns of thought in anti-Indigenous or modernist knowledge frameworks, I have looked at how bureaucratic institutions reinventing decolonization use the ideology of profit to assimilate Indigenous peoples using old progress ideologies that drive the historical master-narrative of settler colonial nations like Canada. The final section looks at how those ideologies produce categories of identity that promote a progress narrative that is continuing to seek the assimilation of Indigenous peoples into the settler colonial system’s public market economy. Here I’ve advocated for a post-structuralist method for comprehending Indigenous decolonization movement.


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