settler colonial studies blog

E-settler colonialism: Ivana Bevilacqua, ‘E-scaping apartheid: Digital ventures of Zionist settler colonialism’, Human Geography, 2021

06Dec21

Abstract: The ongoing “Intifada of Unity” against Israel’s settler colonialism has resuscitated discussions about the liberatory potential of digital emancipation due to the massive data traffic circulation through its international media coverage. In fact, in a process that has intensified since the outbreak of the global pandemic at the very least, social media platforms and geospatial mapping tools have been subverted from more mundane uses, developing into new forums for organizing, imagining, and practicing more just futures. Yet, the centrality of infrastructure both as a means of digital extractivism and as a site for rupture and resistance demonstrates that the path toward new trajectories of e-scaping cannot be conceived as a virtual venture directed at designing alternative volatile geographies alone, but should always involve facing and challenging power in its everyday forms. By investigating the materiality of cyber colonialism, this paper explores the entanglement between imperial cartography and digital map-making which has reduced Palestinians and their space to a pixelated terra nullius, sanitized from the paradigmatic sites of the occupation and overwritten by a pseudo-biblical narrative that aims to legitimize the re-indigenization of the Zionist settlers. At the same time, it unpacks online processes of hyper-visibility through which Palestine suddenly materializes as a signifier for its dangerous nature, yet fragmented and enclaved by an intangible and discretional regime of im/mobility enforced through the neglect of permits and visas, as well as by the material constraints posed by apartheid roads, barriers, checkpoints, gates, and walls. Finally, it retraces the rationality of Israeli violence diluted through the technical means of built environment, infrastructure, machines and algorithms which, on one hand, contributes to the dedevelopment of Palestine and the censorship of its people, and on the other, normalizes Israel’s position in the region due to its perceived technological superiority vis-à-vis its neighboring counterparts.

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Settler colonial history as a minefield: Elizabeth Russell, ‘Crossing the Minefield of Anxiety, Guilt, and Shame: Working With and Through Pākehā Emotional Discomfort in Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Education’, New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 2021

06Dec21

Abstract: Compulsory teaching of Aotearoa New Zealand histories has potential to change how this country’s young people think and feel about themselves. However, achieving the new curriculum’s vision of a more thoughtful and responsible citizenry is unlikely to be straightforward. For Pākehā secondary school students, descendants of European settlers, the emphasis on te ao Māori could challenge a sense of centredness within the nation, and learning about colonial violence and injustice may be a source of emotional discomfort. For the new teaching framework to reach its transformative potential, these moments must be harnessed rather than allowed to block learning and engagement. This paper analyses three possible emotional responses of Pākehā students when monoculturalism is confronted and conflictual local histories are remembered: anxiety, guilt, and shame. While these emotions are usually framed as unnecessary or immobilising, I argue that they signal important starting points for Pākehā in responding to the complexity of colonialism and their complicity within it. Anxiety draws Pākehā attention to the constructed nature of the ‘New Zealander’ identity, and thus possibilities to de- and re-construct it, guilt pinpoints injustices that Pākehā must collectively address and monitor, and shame alerts Pākehā to their moral ideals. Yet, I also propose that if such feelings are to be harnessed constructively, they must be supplemented with a sense of mutual vulnerability and critical hope. Ultimately, this paper aims to show how discomforting emotions can either thwart or enrich learning and are therefore worth working with and through.

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Sporting settlers: Brett Pardy, ‘The White Settler Imagination of Hometown Hockey’, Canadian Ethnic Studies, 53, 3, 2021, pp. 103-120

03Dec21

Abstract: Rogers Hometown Hockey emotionally regulates and expresses sports fandom through colonial logics. The program’s pre- and post-NHL game segments tell stories of a nation where “small” towns build the right character to create elite hockey players (and assumes that this is the peak of Canadian accomplishment) and is “proof” they also create the ideal citizen. Using Sara Ahmed’s (2004) concept of affective economies and data collected from a season of Hometown Hockey broadcast, I argue that it invests hockey, traditionally a warm affect for many Canadians, with the colonial myth of the white settlers’ struggle to make a life for themselves in the untamed wilderness. Rare episodes which deal with racism (almost always in the past) are linked to a current or recent NHL player’s appearance on the show. Anyone can play hockey, but the very act of playing hockey is presented on Hometown Hockey as proof that the white settler state is heartwarmingly “good” at its core. The emotional investment in this mythic past creates negative emotional reactions in many settlers to ideas of decolonization. By presenting hockey in this way on TV, it politicizes the sport to make imagining a better nation difficult.

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Settler may benefit from therapy: Lorien S. Jordan, ‘Unsettling colonial mentalities in family therapy: Entering negotiated spaces’, Family Therapy, 2021

03Dec21

Abstract: This article discusses the settler colonial roots of family therapy, positing that much of what is considered the standard or ideal family form comes from colonialism. Utilising settler colonial theory as a guide, I identify how the colonial nations, built through the violent exclusion of Indigenous and exogenous peoples, utilised the family to further their goals. Rather than suggest settler colonialism was an historic event, I consider how it continues today, privileging white families of European descent. To move the conversation forward on how white therapists from majoritised cultures can engage with racialised clients, I describe the negotiated spaces as a meeting ground where therapists and clients navigate differing worldviews. In these negotiations, our clients trust us, and to be accountable to this trust, we can unsettle the influence of settler colonialism. To conclude this paper, I discuss four possible pathways to begin the complicated process of unsettling.

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Settler colonialism on display: Sa’ed Atshan, Katharina Galor, ‘Jerusalem, Museums, and Discourses’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 87, 2021, pp. 138-151

03Dec21

Abstract: This article compares four museum exhibits of Jerusalem from different geographical and political contexts: the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem, the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Jewish Museum Berlin. It examines the role of heritage narrative, focusing specifically on the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how it is either openly engaged or, alternatively, avoided. The authors employ an analytical framework of settler colonialism and specifically highlight the asymmetric power dynamics resulting from Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, and how this political reality is addressed or ignored in the respective exhibits. The article also explores the agency of curators in shaping knowledge and perspective, and examines the role of the visitors community. The authors argue that the differences in approaches to exhibiting the city’s cultural heritage reveal how museums are central sites for the politics of the human gaze, where significant decisions are made regarding inclusion and exclusion of conflict.

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Cyberspace as settler space: Wendy Hui Kyong Chung, ‘Omophily, or the Swarming of the Segregated Neighbourhood’, in Wendy Hui Kyong Chung, Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, MIT Press, 2021, pp. 81-120

03Dec21

Abstract: By the early twenty-first century, the imaginary of the Internet had moved decisively from the otherworldly expanse of cyberspace to the domesticated landscape of well-policed, gated “neighborhoods.” This was a progression rather than a transformation: U.S. settler colonialism and enclosure underlay the visions of both neighborhoods and cyberspace. Cyberspace, described as a “portal“—an elaborate façade that frames the entrance to a closed space—was always a horizon trapped within a U.S. military-academic network, a classic example of what information studies scholar Paul Edwards has called a “closed world.“ 1 Both visions also painted certain features as “inherent” to the Internet—they simply evaluated them differently. The “decentralized” nature of the World Wide Web and expanded user participation moved from being democracy’s guarantor to being its greatest threat: a breeding ground for insurrections and abuse. In a related development, the “alternative” aspects of Internet culture went from being pseudo-socialist to pseudo-fascist. As social media researcher Rebecca Lewis has pointed out, the alternative universes of YouTube have established systems of knowledge and authority that both counter and parallel the mainstream sources they have relentlessly critiqued.

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Teaching the founding violence: Avril Bell, Elizabeth Russell, ‘Aotearoa New Zealand’s New National History Curriculum and Histories of Mourning’, New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 2021

30Nov21

Abstract: From 2022, New Zealand schools are teaching a new compulsory history curriculum that aims to teach diverse New Zealand histories, while foregrounding the centrality of Māori histories and the impacts of colonisation. The new curriculum will upend a long history of ‘forgetting’ the nation’s contentious and conflictual past, and in particular the nineteenth century ‘wars for New Zealand’ (O’Malley, 2016) that secured settler hegemony over the nation-state. In this paper, we focus on the roles of remembering and forgetting in the narration of national histories to explore what might be a productive orientation to take to this contentious and unsettling past. We argue that the new history curriculum inaugurates a new phase of narrating the nation, replacing earlier phases of monocultural and bicultural nationhood that depended on this past being ‘forgotten’. And we argue for the productive value of a histories of critical mourning approach to remembering this founding violence.

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Recognition as Elimination? Emile Badarin, ‘Politics of Recognition, Elimination and Settler-Colonialism’, Critical Sociology, 2021

30Nov21

Abstract: This article cross-examines the external and internal dimensions of settler-colonial politics of recognition. In settler-colonialism, recognition represents another medium for the elimination of the natives, whose existence is considered as a source of threat, uncertainty and curtailed settler sovereignty. Settler sovereign statehood is contingent on the reengineering of the land–population relationship in the conquered territory. The settler-colonial politics of recognition seeks to institutionalise particular patterns of values that ultimately embody the logic of elimination at the normative level in an attempt to disrupt the natives’ relationship with their land. This article critically interrogates Israel’s politics of recognition and demonstrates how this politics is applied to establish internal and external normative scaffolding to normalise and legitimise the settler desire for sovereignty and invulnerability. Israel’s recognition politics dovetails with sources of sovereignty – territory and population – and evokes previous vulnerabilities and victimhood to elicit a sense of urgency and moral validation.

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Indigenous sovereigns host: Anne Meneley, ‘Eating Wild: Hosting the Food Heritage of Palestine’, PoLAR, 2021

30Nov21

Abstract: This article examines the strategic use of an event of hospitality celebrating the Wild Foods of Palestine as part of a form of fertile activism. Artist Mirna Bamieh presented the dinner as a “live art” event where the positive power of food and Palestinian culinary distinction was highlighted more than victimhood. In a moment of pleasurable pedagogy, the guests learned about the preservation of knowledge about foraging precious wild plants and their preparation. They enjoyed traditional and innovative spins on Palestinian cuisine, absorbing the wild tastes of the land. By eliciting embodied responses, a moment of pleasurable convivial pedagogy was produced to inspire the guests to engage with activism against ongoing dispossession under Israeli settler colonialism. The wild plants themselves and the knowledge of how to process them were envisioned as a type of cultural heritage to be preserved as an archive for potential transformation. The event raised important possibilities for the futures of this particular kind of Palestinian activism: edible, fertile, aesthetic.

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Reparative, not distributive: E. Klein, E. Fouksman, ‘Reparations as a Rightful Share: From Universalism to Redress in Distributive Justice’, Development and Change, 2021

30Nov21

Abstract: The distribution of resources through an unconditional, universal mechanism (such as a universal basic income) recognizes the shared origins of wealth created by past generations and built out of the commons. Yet some groups have lost and suffered far more than others during the process of production and wealth creation, due to colonization, slavery and expropriation. This article argues that calls for reparations are an important caveat to the universalist case for distributive justice. It does so by examining three cases for reparations: reparations for slavery, for transnational inequalities generated by European colonization, and for the dispossession of Indigenous peoples by settler colonialism. The authors put these three cases in dialogue with the argument for universalist (re)distribution, in particular the contention that a universal but redistributory rightful share could act as redress for the unjust expropriation and wealth accumulation of capitalism. This article thus demarcates the overlaps and tensions between reparatory justice and distributory justice, underscoring both the intersection and the friction between calls for redistribution on universal lines and variegated forms of redistribution plus recognition.

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