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An Italian settler colony: Lucy Riall, ‘Hidden Spaces of Empire: Italian Colonists in Nineteenth-Century Peru’, Past & Present, 2021

30Nov21

Abstract: Among the clichés in modern European history, one of the most common is of Italy as ‘the least of the Great Powers’, unable to punch above its weight in the international arena and classed as a ‘latecomer’ to imperial conquest. In this article, I suggest instead that historians have been looking in the wrong place, and in the wrong period, for evidence of Italian ambition. By concentrating on territorial acquisitions in Africa, they are assessing only a small, relatively unproductive and arguably atypical slice of Italy’s global presence. I argue that even before national unification, and long before acquiring a formal Empire, Italy built a global influence structured by the activities of overseas migrants. Yet, despite the recent ‘turn’ to global history and the stress on diversity in colonial experience, the chronology and geography of the European nation-state still shape our understanding of nineteenth-century Empire. Looking at the hugely successful Italian colony in Peru, at both its commercial and scientific interests and at a violent attempt to establish a settler colony in Chanchamayo, in the Peruvian Amazon, I argue that this Italian world was driven not a nation state but relied instead on a common culture, a culture that was created by a capacity for local assimilation, by Catholic notions of civilisation and by ideas of white racial superiority. Modern imperialism was shaped as much by ‘lesser’ powers, often before – or without – the nation-state, and in continuity with the practices of the early-modern period. Moreover, mundane migrants could be the most successful empire-builders. I conclude with a call to take note of the full and diverse range of nineteenth-century colonial activities, and not to assume the primacy of formal Empires in the period of ‘High Imperialism.’


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The settler’s wilful ignorance: Syeda Karishma Bristy, A Relational Analysis of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance in Canada’s Settler-Colonial Context, MA dissertation, Carleton University, 2021

30Nov21

Abstract: In this thesis, I expand and apply the work of Miranda Fricker, Gaile Pohlhaus, José Medina, and Christine Koggel to argue that willful hermeneutical ignorance is the most appropriate entry point for analyzing epistemic injustice between settlers and Indigenous people. I examine how early settler-colonial relationships of power and oppression have evolved to help sustain a form of epistemic injustice towards Indigenous communities in Canada. I investigate the colonial history, legal legacies, and myths that create the fundamental asymmetries of material and hermeneutical power. This background context highlights how this history impacts the respective racial/social/epistemic positionality of White settler society and racialized migrant communities. I argue that each group holds a performative and interactive role in silencing and marginalizing Indigenous knowers as equal and valid epistemic agents. Lastly, I incorporate the relational insights gained from my analysis to inform/propose counteractive measures to address epistemic injustice towards Indigenous communities in Canada.


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The recreation of a settler society: Lisa Tink, Fit to be Canadian? The Recreation Industrial Complex in Canada, PhD dissertation, University of Alberta, 2021

28Nov21

Abstract: In recent years, both recreation scholars and practitioners began calling for a sectoral return to municipal recreation’s historical roots as a public good (e.g., Mahaffey, 2011; ISRC & CPRA, 2015; Cureton and Frisby, 2011; Smale and Reid, 2002; Taylor and Frisby, 2010). Blaming neoliberal ideology for the current pay-per-use model, these calls for a more inclusive recreation system not only highlighted the negative impacts of a consumer-based recreation system, they suggested that the profession’s ‘business-like’ practices should be of concern because they are in direct opposition to the field’s historic mandate of ‘equal opportunity’ for access. A central assumption underlying these calls for the recreation profession to return to ‘its historical roots’ is that municipal recreation services, until late ‘80s and ‘90s, were available to all members of society. This narrative – of a more inclusive and equitable era in recreation’s past – is, however, a romanticized account of public recreation’s history. As I will argue throughout this dissertation, public recreation has always been, and continues to be, a location where racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, outcomes are (re)produced. Using Foucauldian genealogy, I trace some of the conditions that have given rise to what I have labeled the recreation industrial complex. More specifically, I use a vast collection of formal and informal archival documents to demonstrate how our public recreation facilities (both past and present) are intricately linked to the white supremacist logics of Western exceptionalism, settler colonialism, ableism, racism, capitalism, and (hetero)patriarchy. I begin by analyzing three seemingly unrelated pieces of Canada’s past: Indigenous legislation, immigration policy and race science. I do so in an attempt to politicize the category ‘Canadian’ and demonstrate how it has been taken-for-granted in our traditional recreation histories. I then weave these seemingly unrelated pieces of Canadian history into a recreation context. More specifically, I analyze two distinct eras of recreation facility development – the social medicine era (1880s-1920s) and the social welfare era (1930s-1970s) – and provide examples of how recreation was both produced by, and reproduced technologies of white supremacy. Finally, I demonstrate how these historical discourses, practices, and policies have created the conditions for the a public recreation system that positions everyone except white, middle to upper class, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied boys and (younger) men as an excludable type (Titchtosky, 2003). By exposing the ways particular bodies came to be centered in a recreation context, the purpose of this work is to demonstrate how historical inclusions and exclusions (whether intentional or not) were in fact part of a broader biopolitical project intended to sustain white supremacy, with the goal of encouraging critical dialogues about what is inherently problematic, difficult, and dangerous in the discourses, practices, and policies that govern our contemporary public recreation systems.


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Indigenous to settler: Caroline Kahlenberg, How Locals Became Settlers: Mizrahi Jews and Bodily Capital in Palestine, 1908-1948, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2021

28Nov21

Abstract: This dissertation explores early twentieth-century Palestine through the lens of bodies and material culture. While histories of modern Palestine often treat “Jews” and “Arabs” as naturally distinct categories, I examine how these categories were constructed as racialized, embodied, and opposing identities. At a time when Palestine witnessed major changes— including the transition from Ottoman to British rule, mass Zionist settlement, shifting labor patterns, and the rise of Palestinian nationalism—residents made sense of their identities by spreading ideas about whose bodies were like, or unlike, their own. This dissertation focuses on Sephardi and Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews, many of whom lived in Palestine prior to modern Zionist settlement, which offers a unique lens to explore the process of Arab-Jewish boundary-making. At the turn of the twentieth century, Mizrahi Jewish bodies were not always clearly marked as exclusively “Jewish” or “Arab.” Their clothing, accents, and cultural tastes were often indistinguishable from those of their Muslim and Christian neighbors in Palestine. However, the growing colonial-national conflict in the 1920s and 1930s forced Mizrahi Jews to confront their position vis-à-vis Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. They adopted several strategies in light of this new reality. Many abandoned “Arab” clothing and accents in order to assimilate into the Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish community (Yishuv). In doing so, they helped produce a visual and sonic Arab-Jewish division on the ground. Others challenged the emerging divide by refusing to change their bodies. They expressed pride in their cultural and linguistic heritage in the Islamic world. Yet others selectively employed their “Oriental” bodies as a way to assert Zionist belonging and nativeness in Palestine. This dissertation makes three broader contributions. First, using photographs, oral histories, material culture, and written sources, it illuminates how clothing, sounds, sexuality, and age become racialized in circumstances of colonial-national conflict. Second, while scholars often point to one “year zero” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the founding of a political movement, the outbreak of ethnic violence, or the publication of a specific document, I demonstrate that building a Jewish-Arab division demanded the constant policing of how individuals looked and sounded. Finally, the dissertation’s focus on Mizrahi Jews pushes scholars of settler colonialism to think beyond a local-versus-settler paradigm. Many Mizrahi Jews in Palestine were locals who also became part of a settler movement; they were, as I term them, “local settlers.” The story of this dissertation, then, is the story of how the locals became settlers.


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Settlers would rather not talk: Marc Carpenter, ‘Rake Up No Old Stories of Evil’: Memory, Celebration, and Erasure of Settler Violence in the American Pacific Northwest, PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 2021

28Nov21

Abstract: This dissertation is both a new historical synthesis of pioneer violence within and beyond the wars on Native people in the mid-nineteenth-century American Pacific Northwest, and a new history of how these wars—and broader tides of colonial violence—were remembered, commemorated, and forgotten. Violence against Native people was even more frequent and more accepted across pioneer spaces than has typically been argued—indeed, I contend that most of the wars and associated violence were part of a single broad-based war on Native people across the Northwest. Early generations of regional history writers deliberately distorted the historical record to paint pioneer volunteer soldiers as heroes. But disagreements about which acts were heroic accidentally preserved archives of atrocity, from the mouths and pens of pioneers themselves.I draw on numerous virtually unused archival sources from pioneer perpetrators to make a number of interventions into the history of the pioneer Northwest: reframing wars, uncovering acts of genocide, relating unrecognized instances of lynching and sexual violence, and unmasking murderers along with the people and politicians who supported and joined them, at the time and since. Proving the untruths deliberately propagated by pioneers and their historians weighs on the balance of historical narratives about key events. Stripped of the veneer of deceit added for posterity, pioneer memories often mirror Indigenous histories of the same events—with the differences crafted through the efforts of generations of history writers, who preferred gauzy tales to hard truths. By delving into the work and specific mechanics of erasure and nostalgia, I demonstrate both deliberate intent behind the cover-ups and the failures of those who attempted them. This should not only reshape the history of colonialism and genocide in the Pacific Northwest, but suggest useful methodological and theoretical interventions in the history of American colonialism specifically and settler colonialism broadly. This dissertation affirms the existence of the structures of oppression that support colonial projects, but recognizes the fissures and cracks in those structures that Indigenous activists and their allies were able to use—sometimes in acts of difficult compromise—in their ongoing struggles for life, rights, and sovereignty.


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Starving, force feeding, and settler colonialism: M. T. Samuel, ‘The jurisprudence of elimination: starvation and force-feeding of Palestinians in Israel’s highest court’, International Journal of Law in Context, 2021

28Nov21

Abstract: This paper assesses the functioning of law and legal institutions in Palestine/Israel through the lens of settler colonialism by analysing two thematically interconnected decisions issued by the Supreme Court of Israel, the first involving the starvation of besieged Palestinian civilians and the second involving the force-feeding of Palestinian prisoners. Following a discussion regarding the role of law in settler colonialism, it proceeds to argue that the Court enabled, legitimised and legalised state-sanctioned violence that targeted the native Palestinian population by and through a jurisprudence of elimination in order to facilitate the attainment of Israeli settler-colonial objectives. By so doing, the paper provides further evidence in support of the appropriateness of settler colonialism as a theoretical framework for the case of Israel, including in legal matters.


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Layers of settler colonialism: Jesse Robertson, ‘The Closed West: Rajneeshpuram and the Failure of Utopia in Antelope, Oregon’, Utopian Studies, 32, 3, 2021, pp. 652-667

28Nov21

Abstract: Settler colonialism lay at the heart of the dispute between Oregonians and the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who built a utopian community called Rajneeshpuram in central Oregon between 1981 and 1985. Rajneeshpuram’s inhabitants believed their environmentalist ambitions would align them with settler-spirited and eco-minded Oregonians. However, Oregon’s land use laws were rooted in the dispossession of Native land, a foundational theft that was reinstantiated in present-day hierarchies of land use and ownership. Many Oregonians simultaneously saw the residents of Rajneeshpuram as invaders and invoked frontier narratives in their defense, blending them with prevalent political and cultural concerns of contamination. Rajneesh and his followers’ disregard for zoning laws and inflammatory tactics brought about their community’s undoing. Rajneeshpuram thus challenged an arrangement that was the historical product of settler colonialism while replicating it. The conflict was mired in the idealistic—and incompatible—self-interest of opposing settler groups.


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A French wild west: Timothy Roberts, ‘”Almost as it is Formulated in the So-Called ‘Homestead Act'”: Images of the American West in French Settlement of French Algeria’, Journal of World History, 32, 4, 2021, pp. 601-629

28Nov21

Abstract: Nineteenth-century American expansion has been shown as a type of Anglo-American “settler revolution,” but the United States was also connected with France in France’s ideas for the imperial development of Algeria. The two countries alike were ambitious empires, their leaders committed to expansion as a means of political and economic regeneration. More than this, the French empire “borrowed” images from its republican cousin to help incorporate Algeria. Writers during the July Monarchy saw American Indians’ decline as a forerunner to white settlement’s consequences in North Africa, although they rationalized how Algerians might be treated more benevolently. Napoléon III vowed to prevent an American analogue by setting aside Arab tribal land. Liberal reformers during the early Third Republic, however, called for assimilation of Algerians through land privatization, hailing the U.S. Homestead Act for how it could facilitate egalitarian, private land ownership, and thus help establish what Michel Chevalier had earlier imagined as the French “West.”


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An artistic life in repressive authenticity: Oliver Basciano, ‘Jimmie Durham obituary’, 27/11/21

28Nov21

Excerpt: ‘Controversial artist whose work explored Native American imagery and themes ‘.


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Undoing erasure: Eva Corlett, ‘Long fight for justice ends as New Zealand treaty recognises Moriori people’, The Guardian, 27/11/21

28Nov21

Excerpt: Indigenous settlers of the Chatham Islands celebrate ‘significant milestone’ as treaty enshrined in law apologises for wrongs and returns land.


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