settler colonial studies blog

Critiquing settler art criticism: Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis, ‘Land-Based Art Criticism: (Un)learning Land Through Art’, Visual Arts Research, 47, 2, 2021, pp. 102-114

22Nov21

Abstract: This article provides an overview of how land-based settler colonial critique can reorient art criticism and art education to expand the scope of art and art practice to critical considerations of land politics and social justice, particularly in terms of the repatriation of Indigenous lands. In particular, land-based perspectives can help to rethink place/land by offering decolonizing methods for critiquing Western works of art that address place. Art educators’ ability to understand and critique settler colonialism in art has been hindered by Eurocentric art criticism. This article seeks to reveal settler colonial imperatives and ambitions regarding land through a critical analysis of American landscape paintings and land art. This piece further examines contemporary Indigenous artists’ site-specific works through adopting decolonial, land-based inquiry. Land-based art criticism interrupts the dominant mode of art inquiry to more comprehensively analyze art associated with place/land and expand the scope of social, cultural, and political understandings of social equity.

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Resilient settler colonial mythologies (in Argentina, for example): Geraldine Lublin, ‘Adjusting the focus: looking at Patagonia and the wider Argentine state through the lens of settler colonial theory’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2021

19Nov21

Abstract: Notwithstanding predictions about the exhaustion of the so-called Myth of White Argentina, recent developments signal the continuing vitality of Argentina’s European creation myth. How can it be that, despite the victories secured by more than three decades of Indigenous and Afrodescendant activism, it may prove so hard to topple? This article borrows insights from settler colonial theory to address the endurance of the Myth of Whiteness in Argentina not only as a discursive construction of racial domination but also as a fundamental structure that obscures the shady claims of the Argentine state to the land it occupies. As well as investigating the explanatory power of the analytical framework for the particular case, the article unpicks the layers contained in the narrative of White Argentina, drawing attention to the crucial role the European creation myth has played not only in Argentine history but most importantly in the current cycle of ‘progressive neoextractivism’. Contextualising Argentina within settler colonial studies also contributes to debunking accounts of Argentinean exceptionalism by locating Argentina within global logics of settler colonial domination and providing a wider framework which may help identify illuminating commonalities in the international context.

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Irish settler colonialities: Ronan McDonald, ‘Vincent Buckley, Colonialism and the Problem of Irish-Australian Identity’, Australian Literary Studies, 2021

19Nov21

Abstract: Perhaps no Australian writer or thinker has probed the condition of Irishness in Australia more extensively than the poet-critic Vincent Buckley (1925-88). His first memoir Cutting Green Hay (1983) considers how his own family negotiated their Irish heritage, often through modes of strategic amnesia in which Irish cultural modes mutate into Australian identity. This, for him, results in a cultural deprivation that he seeks to remedy in himself, not least through many extended visits to Ireland, his ‘source country’ or ‘imagination’s home’. Yet in Memory Ireland (1985) and other essays, he offers a scarifying analysis of contemporary Irish society also marked by a loss of memory, which he ascribes in this case to the post-colonial torpor and imaginative enervation of independent Ireland. So Buckley seeks to reveal the scotomisation, or mental blind spots, that characterise both Irish-Australia and modern Ireland. Drawing mainly on prose works, including archives and unpublished sources, this essay seeks to bring to the fore the question of colonialism in Buckley’s reflections on Irishness, attentive to some of his own blind spots. It considers his deep debt to Yeats, but also the impossibility for Buckley, as he saw it, to follow Yeats’s example in creating a national imaginary that unified settler and native. This impacts Buckley’s sense of how an artist achieves success in the international literary field, but also maps back onto the question of setter-colonialism in Australia. I argue that Indigenous Australia shadows his thinking about Irish colonialism, sometimes explicitly, as in the poem ‘Gaeltacht’ from The Pattern (1979), but in a more fraught and culpable way than simply through assertions of shared victimhood. If the conquest and dispossession of Gaelic Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mirrors that of Indigenous Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth, it also deflects, redirects and sublimates it for an Australian poet.The Irish have certainly been historical victims of British colonialism, but they have also been beneficiaries of settler-colonialism in Australia, as his poem ‘Dick Donnelly’, the Irish-named Aboriginal man, ‘the last songman of his people’, poignantly attests.

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The silence of the settlers: Bailey Hilgren, Settler Colonial Listening and the Silence of Wilderness in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, MA dissertation, University of Oregon, 2021

19Nov21

Abstract: The Boundary Waters Canoe Area soundscape in northern Minnesota has a long and contested history but is most often characterized today as a pristine and distinctly silent wilderness. This thesis traces the construction and perpetuation of the Boundary Waters as a silent space by government agencies and conservationists, as well as the ways the notion of silence has and continues to limit Ojibwe sovereignty and, in related but distinct ways, undermine non-human animal agency. As extractive industries increasingly threaten the Boundary Waters, advocacy groups continue to appeal to the idea of the place as silent despite the similarity in logics underlying both extractivism and the myth of pristine wilderness. The project also considers broader historiographical and activist consequences associated with the idea of a silent Boundary Waters and utilizes public-facing writing formats to challenge iterative processes perpetuating settler colonial soundscape control.

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Settlers incarcerate: Annie Pfingst, Wangui Kimari, ‘Carcerality and the legacies of settler colonial punishment in Nairobi’, Punishment & Society, 2021

19Nov21

Abstract: From the beginning of its colonial settlement in Kenya, the British administration criminalized Kenyans. Even now, colonial modes of punishment, incarceration, closure, interrogation, curfew, confiscation, separation, displacement, and detention without trial are deeply embedded in the spatial and ideological arrangements of post-colonial Kenya. Initially assumed to herald a rupture from colonial modes of criminalization and punishment, the post-colonial period instead normalized them. Through ethnographic, scholarly, and visual encounters, the paper engages five interconnecting structures that engendered the legacy of a seamless system of control, containment, and punishment evident in the ‘afterlives’ of empire. These are settler colonialism, violence, racism, colonial corporeality, and capitalism. The paper attends to the violence and brutality that endures in the very geographies that were the urban targets of colonial siege and links the carceral practices of settler colonialism and the everyday post-colonial governance of Nairobi’s poor neighbourhoods, encounters with the debris and ruination of empire found in the material and spatial fabric of Mathare. We take up a critical encounter with colonial files to both discern the continuity and lineage of carceral practices and to disrupt the authorial totality and continuity the colonial archive files assembled.

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Old fashioned settler colonialism right now, at the edge of the jungle: Joe Parkin Daniels, Luca Zanetti, ‘The Mennonites of Liviney, Colombia – a photo essay’, The Guardian, 17/11/21

18Nov21

Extract: In Colombia’s eastern flood plains, a group from the dry northern states of Chihuahua and Tamaulipas have started a new colony called Liviney …

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White Indigenes: Evan Freeley, White Cherokees on Red Earth: Blood and Belonging, MA dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2021

16Nov21

Abstract: In this thesis, I address White Cherokee identity, the historical trajectory it emerges from, and some of its political consequences. White Cherokee identity comes from social arrangements, place relationships, and governmental policy in the United States of America, each part of settler colonialism’s ongoing effects. White Cherokees are not unique in the fact that
other tribes certainly have White members. Instead, they are a specific example for exploring membership, place relationships, cultural practices, identity, race, ethnicity, and subjectivity. My family serves as a case study for my analysis, and I supplement it by engaging with other scholars. I focus my research on Oklahoma because the formation of Indian Territory, and subsequently the State of Oklahoma, is key to the building of White Cherokees. Beginning with the role of place-relationships, I establish that they are fundamental to developing White Cherokee identities. They help develop personal and familial histories closely tied to Indigeneity, oftentimes stories of removal. Furthermore, the social and cultural changes in thinking about identity from the 19th century to the present have also made a White Cherokee identity possible and coherent to claim. This is partly due to the ways biological race was understood in the past and how those viewpoints were written into scientific practices and public policy. Race’s legislation through blood quantum and technological advancements in genetics have allowed for new personal ethnic explorations for American consumers. While the changes in this thinking are essential, looking at them and the ways Indigenous identities have been politically and legally defined by both Indigenous and nonIndigenous people, a more robust understanding of White Cherokee identity is achieved

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Representing settlers and Indigenous peoples in fantastic places: Xine Yao, ‘Arctic and Asian Indigeneities, Asian/North American Settler/Colonialism: Animating Intimacies and Counter-Intimacies in Avatar: The Last Airbender’, Journal of Asian American Studies, 24, 3, 2021, pp. 471-504

16Nov21

Abstract: By bracketing whiteness, Avatar: The Last Airbender reorients us to how global colonial modernity produces biopolitical difference as a technology of management to defamiliarize Asian and Indigenous relationalities. Approaching it as a site of alternative contact, I consider Lisa Lowe’s intimacies of colonial comparative processes in apposition with insurgent counter-intimacies. This essay traces portrayals of Asian imperialism, colonialism, and Asian diasporic settler colonialism in tandem with comparative Indigeneities and decolonial solidarity. ATLA engages Asianness and Indigeneity together in a mode that is relational but not statically schematic, extending influential work by scholars thinking across Indigenous, Asian, and Asian diasporic studies.

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Settler regulation, settler oppression: Nisse Bourne, Settler Colonialism Continued: A genealogy of Indigenous regulation and oppression in Canada, MA dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2021

16Nov21

Abstract: Since the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s final report in 2015, there has been a political and societal focus on the atrocities that occurred in residential schools. The abuse, sexual abuse, murder, and genocide of Indigenous children through the residential school system has become the main focus for many settlers in Canada. However, focusing our attention on the most heinous acts alone can obfuscate manifestations of Indigenous regulation and oppression that are subtler or more covert. This project takes a genealogical approach to allow for the exposure of naturalized settler colonial logics, while also placing residential schools within a continuum of Indigenous regulation and oppression. This project uses Foucault’s concepts of power (disciplinary power, biopower, governmentality) and contemporary colonial concepts of recognition and accommodation to uncover the governmental technologies used within the residential school system and the Correctional Service of Canada’s approach to Indigenous corrections. This project challenges the progression fallacy which states our current epoch is more ethical than any other that came before by arguing the political rationalities of Western superiority and settler colonial benevolence that justified the creation of residential schools still exist today. This project examines the Correctional Service of Canada’s approach to Indigenous corrections as a contemporary illustration of how the political rationalities of Western superiority and settler colonial benevolence not only serve as justifications for harmful policies, programs, and initiatives, but also aid in the production of new Indigenous subjects and populations. Although the manifestations of Indigenous oppression have changed throughout time, the political rationalities that underpin them have stayed the same.

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Settler space through Indigenous symbols: Michelle R. Jacobs, ‘”You Should Be Proud!” Native-Themed Mascots and the Cultural Reproduction of White Settler Space’, Sociological Inquiry, 2021

15Nov21

Abstract: My research explores the Cleveland baseball franchise’s role in the cultural reproduction of White settler space in the NE Ohio region. Using a multi-site, mixed-methods approach, I examine prominent narratives about Indian-ness and ownership circulated for over a century in NE Ohio socio-cultural spheres. I elucidate how the franchise’s storytelling regarding its “Indians” identity produces localized meanings of Indian-ness that Cleveland baseball fans reiterate and manipulate in protest narratives (what fans said in interactions with Indigenous people and allies protesting the team’s “Indians” identity outside Cleveland baseball stadium) and published narratives (what fans said in published opinions following the team’s name change announcement). Ultimately, this study reveals how settler-constructed histories that disregard US imperialism and colonialism commingle with regional stories of romanticized Indian-ness to amplify processes of colonial unknowing and reproduce White settler space. Such spaces normalize settler possession of Indigenous territories and identities, prioritize settler interests (both material and psychological), affirm White innocence, and animate racialized emotions of repulsion and disgust for Indigenous peoples.

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