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Indigenous-led colonisation? Igor Stas, ‘An Indigenous Anthropocene: Subsistence Colonization and Ecological Imperialism in the Soviet Arctic in the 1920s and Early 1930s’, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 2022

22Feb22

Abstract: This article examines the role of Indigenous practices in the development of the Soviet Arctic in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1920s the Committee of the North and the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) believed that the development of the natural resources of the far north was feasible only with the help of the Indigenous population. They saw Indigenous peoples who were able to benefit from the north, despite its harsh environmental conditions, as guides for Soviet technocrats. Ethnographers and researchers of the north formed a discourse concerning the subsistence (promyslovaia) colonization of the Arctic, which would involve the rationalization of traditional economic sectors, such as reindeer herding, fishing, and hunting. During the Great Break of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Committee of the North planned an extensive expansion of subsistence colonization to the undeveloped territories of the far north. Its attitude united with the practices of ecological imperialism when agriculture began to be introduced into northern territories. Traditional economic activities became part of industrial agriculture. The construction of state farms (sovkhozy) oriented toward reindeer herding and hunting aimed to implement this ecological imperialism. However, subsistence colonization suffered a crushing defeat during a reorganization of the Arctic economy in the mid-1930s. Indigenous peoples of the north and their traditional economic activities became superfluous in the development paradigm pursued by Soviet technocrats.


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Unbuilt, but still settler colonial: Jane Griffith, ‘Unbuilt Environments and the Place of Settler Colonial Communications: A Case Study of Nineteenth-Century Medicine Hat’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 47, 1, 2022

20Feb22

Abstract: Though initial construction began on a colonial boarding school for Indigenous students, known as an Indian boarding school, in Medicine Hat in 1890, the school never ended up opening due to underfunding by the federal government. Informed by Indigenous studies scholarship on place and media, this article uncovers archival traces of this unbuilt environment to reveal how white settlers used newspapers as well as visual media to will the school into being, particularly with techniques of re-placement on stolen Indigenous land. This article connects the history of the school that never opened with the present day, insisting on the ongoingness of settler-colonial tactics in media.


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Settler imperialisms: Nicholas Halter, Max Quanchi, ‘Boosting the Frontier: Australian Settler Colonialism in the Pacific 1860s–1900s’, Australian Historical Studies, 2022

20Feb22

Abstract: Australia, itself a union of settler colonies, also gave birth to speculative land and settlement schemes for colonists to migrate to the nearby Pacific Islands and become sugar or copra planters, throughout the period from the 1860s to the early 1900s. The number that migrated to these proposed settler colonies was small, notwithstanding the boosting, promotional rhetoric that accompanied the schemes. Two of these schemes, in the late 1860s and the early 1900s, bookend the era of sub-empire propaganda and imperial jousting that saw hundreds of Australian settlers sail to Fiji and Vanuatu. Both were ‘company’ schemes, speculative ventures, born out of the nineteenth-century capitalist fervour characteristic of Melbourne and Sydney. A comparison of the two ventures and the boosting literature that supported them reveals the ambiguous promises that were made to settlers and the local challenges that were overlooked in the popular Australian imagination of the region.


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Settler colonialism as a ‘veritable apocalypse’: Esme Greene Murdock, ‘Terrortories: Colonialism’s Built Environments as Structural Disablement’, Critical Philosophy of Race, 10, 1, 2022, pp. 106-127

20Feb22

Abstract: This article proceeds from the thesis proposed by Frantz Fanon that colonialism, specifically settler colonialism, is a world-destroying structure that the colonized witness as a “veritable apocalypse.” Settler colonialism is apocalyptic not only in the sense that it attempts to permanently destroy and make irretrievable various other Indigenous worlds and ways of being-in-the-world, but also in that it builds the settler colonial world in, on, and with Indigenous lands and bodies. I read Fanon as proposing that settler colonialism builds apocalyptic worlds with the murdered worlds of the colonized and then forces the colonized to navigate and embrace these violent and traumatic landscapes, which I call terrortories. I argue this is directly connected to Fanon’s revolutionary psychiatric work and practice to decolonize and disalienate colonial medical and psychiatric facilities as structures of disablement, which requires the abolition of settler colonialism altogether.


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The settlers take the land and the water: Dallas Rogers, ‘Nautico-imperialism and settler-colonialism: water and land in the New South Wales colony’, Australian Geographer, 2022

16Feb22

Abstract: This article outlines the role of rivers and oceans in colonial land ‘settlement’ in Sydney. The analysis exposes a form of thalassic colonisation, whereby territoriality was a defining feature of settler-colonialism in the first decades of the colonial invasion, but wherein claiming and/or controlling vast bodies of water was necessary to that territoriality. Britain was a maritime empire and Sydney a maritime town in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and there was a maritime pathway to early land theft in Australia. This archival analysis follows the colonial ships and Aboriginal nawi (bark canoes) to undertake a history from the water. Three nautico-imperial logics of settler-colonialism are presented. 1) ‘Aboriginal resistance and labour’ highlights the role of Aboriginal action against and incorporation into the colonial maritime economy and industries, and British Royal Navy exploration more broadly. 2) ‘Atomised colonial landscapes’ shows how Aboriginal Country was used as a colonial resource in the early maritime industries, with land claimed for ship building yards and whaling and sealing infrastructure, and trees felled for ship building. 3) Theorising the rivers and oceans as a ‘nautico-imperial infrastructure’ shows that water preceded land as a pivotal colonial infrastructure for the British maritime empire.


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Powering settler power: Åsa Össbo, ‘Hydropower company sites: a study of Swedish settler colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2022

16Feb22

Abstract: The settler colonial perspective has until recently gained modest attention from scholars analysing the relations between the Swedish state and the Indigenous Sámi people throughout history. This article explores the dynamics of settler colonialism in the Swedish state’s relation to the Sámi people through the expansion of hydropower. I argue that the hydropower invasion beginning in the 1910s reinforced Swedish settler colonialism, ultimately shown in the hydropower company town of Porjus.
This industrial colonialism in Swedish hydropower politics and practice with following consequences continues the settler colonial policy from the passing of the ‘Lappmarks Placat’ in 1673 when agrarian settlers of various origins were encouraged to take up farmstead settlements and populate areas perceived as uninhabited. During the nineteenth century several policies and administrative practices made invisible and devastated Sámi selfdetermination and land rights. When Sámi land rights had been devalued and westernised, the time was ripe for a new colonial policy, a policy promoting industrial extraction of hydroelectricity from the rivers of Sápmi – the traditional country of the Sámi people, situated in the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Russian Kola Peninsula.


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Settler agents: Tim Calabria, ‘Agents of settler colonialism?: childhood, time and exclusion in the fairbridge scheme, 1913–1924’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2022

16Feb22

Abstract: Drawing from Kingsley Fairbridge’s writings, this article explores the first Fairbridge Farm School from its establishment in 1913 until Fairbridge’s death in 1924. Fairbridge’s scheme sought to turn poor, urban British children into agriculturists who would occupy contested land in the colonies. Fairbridge attempted to instil the children with ‘love of the land’ by determining their conditions of existence in quite complete ways. I draw from the history and philosophy of childhood to understand how Fairbridge – much like A O Neville – targeted childhood as a distinctive site of ideological intervention. At his first farm school, Fairbridge sought to exclude the person that each child was going to become. But this explicit repression of existing urban identities often failed; most of the first thirty-five farm school alumni elected to live in Australian cities. Just one member of that group ran a successful farm, and only one other worked as a farm hand into middle age. Ultimately, though, the children’s escape from the life that Fairbridge attempted to impose on them did not mean escaping the settler colonial structure; most remained in Australia throughout their lives. Nonetheless, many felt the loss of family and the person they might have been.


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The sound of settler colonialism: Lauren Rosati, ‘“Civilizing” Noise: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Sound, Colonialism, and Power’, The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, 2, 2021, pp. 3-14

16Feb22

Excerpt: This special issue of MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory focuses on sound as a vector of colonial power. It explores listening as a form of witness or surveillance to sonic cultures, especially through the fields of ethnography and acoustic ecology, which studies the mediated sonic relationship between humans and their environment. Listening as a method of appropriation, rather than observation, is a central concern; Robinson has recently called this “hungry listening” in specific reference to settler colonial forms of perception that seek to “civilize” or “settle” Indigenous sounds (38–40). The journal issue also considers the role of sound technologies and creative practices in perpetuating and reproducing colonial power relations. Recording media, including reel-to-reel tape recorders and storage devices such as shellac discs, are investigated as colonial documents, while creative techniques such as field recording and sound mapping are examined as both preservative of the soundscapes they catalogue and at the same potentially aimed toward a colonialist extraction or salvage of sonic material.


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Mohamed Adhikari, Destroying to Replace: Settler Genocides of Indigenous Peoples, Hackett, 2022

16Feb22

Description: ‘This is a volume about genocide, a recurrent phenomenon in world history that, disturbingly, has created our modernity. Mohamed Adhikari equips the reader with a sound conceptual introduction, then provides four detailed yet clear accounts of genocide in the Canary Islands, Queensland, California, and German Southwest Africa. He has expertly provided the big picture as well as the specifics true to each history. Primary sources from each episode invite the reader’s participation in analysis‘. 


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On Patrick Wolfe’s work: Susan Slyomovics,  Lorenzo Veracini (eds), Race, Place, Trace: Essays in Honour of Patrick Wolfe, Verso, 2022

14Feb22

Description: This edited collection celebrates Patrick Wolfe’s contribution to the study and critique of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination. The book emphasises Wolfe’s militant and interdisciplinary scholarship, together with his determination to acknowledge Indigenous perspectives and the efficacy of Indigenous resistance. Racial capitalism and settler colonialism are as entwined now as they always have been, and keeping both in mind at the same time highlights the need to establish and nurture solidarities that reach across established divides.


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