Abstract: This paper concerns Let me tell you a story about Israel, a theatrical play tasked with influencing existing perceptions of the Palestine/Israel conflict amongst international audiences. Drawing on the work of philosopher Baruch Spinoza, I explore the complex issue of how to address the need to change people’s political perceptions by using theatre as a form of activist persuasion. The play attempts to create an image of the conflict mostly absent in the commentaries of international observers who are unaware of the full implications of the conflict’s settler colonial character. Typically, they understand it in terms of two sides competing over land, frontiers and recognition. The sense of balance that this perception conveys pre-empts coming to grips with the colonial history of Palestine beginning with the advent of Zionism from late 19th century. Such a view also obscures the nature of current forms of Israeli domination and fails to take into account a major historical factor: that the settler colonial dynamic in Palestine rests on the ways social life in Israel is organised and reproduced. Hence, the play aims to make perceptible the relation between the social mechanisms of subjectivity formation in the Israeli society on the one hand, and the everyday performance of settler colonial power on the other. Making this relation observable is a necessary step towards rethinking where change could possibly come from.

Abstract: Clearing the gorse, a particularly aggressive invasive plant, so that native plants can flourish has been used as a potent metaphor for decolonization, and described as labour appropriate for settlers to perform in the interest of just relations with Indigenous peoples. Yet, this labour is not simply one of negation, for it involves learning to bring one’s group difference alongside that of others rather than continuing to mistake that difference for the unmarked context of Indigenous-settler relations. Clearing the gorse is thus also connected to the labour of “gathering at the gate”: the requirement according to Māori protocols of encounter that visitors develop a sense of collective identity and purpose before any meeting can take place. Settler societies, as a rule, operate without a collective sense of the specific identity and history of being a settler people. How would these two forms of labour appropriate for tauiwi Pākehā to perform be connected, and how would performing them together serve broader projects of decolonization and honouring settler commitments in Te Tiriti o Waitangi? I reflect upon this question in light of insights from Tauiwi Tautoko, a recent nationwide anti-racism programme wherein tauiwi (non-Māori settlers) addressed anti-Māori racism online. Core to the programme’s novel anti-racism approach were listening strategies that both invited and modelled acknowledgment of the particular ground from which tauiwi Pākehā see and speak. These strategies have proven effective in creating openings and shifts regarding racist views in otherwise adversarial and toxic spaces. They offer innovative practical resources for the work settlers can and must do with our own people, if we are to contribute to a decolonial future.

Abstract: I use Edward Said’s (in: Culture and imperialism, Vintage, 1993) theory, that nations ‘are narrations: who owned land, could settle, plan its future, are all stories of imperialism. The history teacher could not only consider ‘what to read’, but also ‘how to read’ taking account of the processes of imperialism; of the macro-history of world systems and micro-history of individuals within these. I examine Said’s theory in the context of New Zealand history, looking at four interconnected aspects: expropriation of land, trading in goods, appropriation of botanical knowledge, and the place of education in telling the story of the nation. I suggest that using this as a model, teachers can seek out local stories, ensuring several perspectives are heeded and linked to the bigger narratives of the colonial past and present.

Abstract: The doctrine of popular sovereignty holds that the ‘supreme authority of the state’ belongs to the people, not to the political institutions exercising public power. What are the implications of this view when there is more than one people in the territory of that state? The case of Indigenous peoples highlights this question, as they are unequivocally peoples who are distinct from the majority population. This paper subjects to criticism of the received view according to which the inclusion of Indigenous peoples in democratic institutions is sufficient for the realization of their popular sovereignty. Instead, we argue that their constituent power must be recognized – the power to create and negotiate the constitutional order. The realization of popular sovereignty in settler states thus necessitates a process where the constitutional order is negotiated by Indigenous peoples and the majority population in conditions where the two parties are mutually recognized as sovereign.

Abstract: This article uses white Canadian settler artist Mary Pratt’s photorealistic paintings of salmon to grapple with the ways in which settler colonialism necessitates anti-relationality between humans and the non-human world. I trace Indigenous (Beothuk and Mi’kmaq) histories of salmon in Ktaqmkuk|Newfoundland to grapple with what Pratt’s seemingly placid visions of everyday domestic settler life violently erase, concluding by with representations of salmon by Beothuk artist Shanawdithit.

Abstract: Since Algeria’s independence from France in 1962 after 132 years of colonial rule (1830–1962), claims and counterclaims for reparations have continually resurfaced in a variety of legal forums and public spaces. A brutal war of decolonization (1954–62) brought an end to France’s settler colony in Algeria, instigating incompatible and ongoing demands for repatriation, restitution, and reparations. Since the archive of French Algeria remains largely in French hands, there is no escaping historical linkages between France’s settler colonial project in Algeria and ongoing disputes about archival sovereignty, provenance, and digitization.

Neve Gordon recently reviewed my latest book in the Times Higher Education. He has ‘reservations’, like the settler societies I have studied. His first critique is that I do not dwell on the Indigenous peoples who had to endure the settler invaders. True. I alert the reader to this issue, as Gordon also acknowledges, but I wrote about something else: about the imagination of the settlers, about their political fantasies, and there are no Indigenous peoples there. There are indeed very few Indigenous peoples in this archive: the settlers I have been studying tend to foreclose their Indigenous counterparts. I may have written another book, a global history of settler colonialism for example, but I wrote instead about the ways settlers imagined what they would do, and then about how they saw what they were doing. That they could not ‘see’ actual Indigenous peoples even when they confronted them is demonstrable and knowing this feature of the settler gaze seems important. That someone should remark on their absence from my narrative probably demonstrates that they can subsequently reappear in the imaginings of someone intent on salvaging some ways of doing settler colonialism from a critique of all the ways of doing settler colonialism (which does not mean that I find that all settlers are equally abhorrent – on the contrary, I believe that they are all differently abhorrent). The socialist settlers I have worked on and Gordon refers to were settler colonialists even if they did not think they were settling on Indigenous lands. Indeed, they were settler colonialist especially because they did not even think about the Indigenous dispossessed.

Gordon also finds slippages in my work: it is his secondary critique, the allegation that I collapse voluntary displacement with all population movements. Not true. If the previous critique could be explained with reference to a determination to salvage some ways of constructing settler sovereign orders, that is, if that criticism could be framed in the context of a political disagreement (a disagreement that has pitted antizionists against left wing Zionist for decades), this one could only be explained by assuming that Gordon skipped the pages in which I carefully differentiate between various modes of displacing. Different collectives move across space with different political prerogatives, but when it comes to settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination, it is not the way the settlers leave where they are from (or the reasons why they do so) that really matters. They may have been refugees, or they may have been genuinely trying to build a better society. Alas, it is a determination and ability to establish and sustain a settler colonial sovereignty and to repress Indigenous ones where they are going that really counts, because the settlers are made by domination as much as displacement. Focusing on what they aimed to do (and did not), or what they were (and no longer are) is an elision and a slippage at the same time.

Abstract: One of the mysteries in contemporary world politics is why in recent years Australia has been leading the world in its hawkish approach to China, its largest trading partner. More than most of its allies, the Australian government seems to regard the China emergency — fuelled by threat perceptions ranging from foreign influence operations to economic coercion — as more pressing than, say, climate change. This article extends and supplants existing explanations of this puzzle by providing a more theoretically oriented account. Situating Australia’s China emergency in the context of its ontological (in)security, this article traces the rise of such insecurities and Australia’s responses through the conceptual frameworks of state transformation and neoliberal governmentality, which together offer a more socially and historically grounded account of the dynamics of ontological (in)security. The article argues that the China emergency narrative, as a specific routinised form of neoliberal governmentality, both helps sustain Australia’s dominant identity construction as a free, democratic, and resilient state, and provides a raison d’être for the national security state that has become part and parcel of the evolving techniques of neoliberal governmentality.

Abstract: Through a discussion of the first Indigenous women students at the Hampton Agricultural and Normal Institute’s Indian Program in 1879 and the rhetoric surrounding their enrollment, this essay analyzes how raced and gendered discourses were highlighted in different ways at Hampton after Indigenous women began attending. I argue that settler colonial racial grammars underpin the discussion of race and education by Hampton teachers, administrators, and staff. Settler colonial racial grammars are structures and patterns of meaning that relate racial and ontological discourses to domination of land through settler conquest, hinging on the process of gendering and ungendering. These grammars work through defining Black and Indigenous women in relation to space, time, and ontological condition. Using Christina Sharpe’s theorization of anagrammatical Blackness in concert with my own concept of Indigenous hyperpunctuation, I lay out the ways that Black and Indigenous women were at the center of Hampton’s industrial education project. I contend that settler colonial racial grammars reveal the process by which educational comparison can contribute to material structures of settler colonialism and anti-Blackness.

Abstract: This is a short overview history of the relationship between Canadian historians and Canadian nationalism. It maps the historiography of Canadian nationalism against its significant manifestations in Canadian society and developments in nationalism scholarship internationally. Three conjunctures when the fate of the nation loomed large in Canadian historiography are featured. Evidence from the Canadian Historical Review (chr) is highlighted throughout, and, for each conjuncture, relevant articles from the chr are provided for further reading. In reflecting on this history, this article considers Canadian historians’ accomplishments and failures in understanding Canadian nationalism as well as the contemporary politics and praxis of their relationship with nation.