settler colonial studies blog

The mobile architecture of settler colonialism: Irit Katz, ‘Mobile Colonial Architecture: Facilitating Settler Colonialism’s Expansions, Expulsions, Resistance, and Decolonisation’, Mobilities, 2022

16Jan22

Abstract: Grounded in space yet facilitated by mobility, settler colonialism has adopted distinct architectural devices. Tents, prefabricated shelters, mobile homes, shipping containers, and other portable structures, have created the scaffoldings of new colonial settlements, allowing for rapid territorial expansion. These mobile spatial objects have also served as instruments of expulsion and expropriation, facilitating the creation of spaces of counterinsurgency and displacement for the containment of rebellious and expelled locals, who themselves used mobile architecture as an instrument of resistance. From the historical British ‘Portable Colonial Cottage for Emigrants’ to the caravans used by Israeli settlers in the occupied territories and the creation of humanitarian spaces, these mobile structures have been part of the toolkit enabling colonial powers to rapidly rearrange people in space. This article draws on critical mobility and architectural studies to examine settler colonialism’s mobile architecture in both historical and contemporary contexts through the case of Israel-Palestine, from Mandatory Palestine’s British and Zionist camps, through early statehood’s spaces of displacement and emplacement, to current colonial environments. By doing so, the article highlights how settler colonialism’s rapid spatial actions and counteractions require mobile spatial forms and their related infrastructure for the abrupt and often racialised territorial and demographic alterations and for related swift counteracts of resistance, protest and decolonisation.

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Settling on the archeological record: Lee M Panich, ‘Archaeology, Indigenous erasure, and the creation of white public space at the California missions’, Journal of Social Archeology, 2022

15Jan22

Abstract: This paper explores how the materiality of the past has been mobilized to simultaneously erase Indigenous presence and create white public space at Spanish mission sites in California. As the site of present-day Santa Clara University, Mission Santa Clara de Asís presents an important case study. The documentary record associated with more than a century of archaeology at the mission reveals its intersections with heritage-making, particularly the maintenance of public memory that privileges and valorizes whiteness. These same records further detail how the university and local residents effectively erased the heritage of the thousands of Ohlone people and members of neighboring Indigenous groups who lived, worked, and died at Mission Santa Clara. Recognizing how archaeology has contributed to the current heritage landscape at Santa Clara and other California mission sites is a necessary first step in the creation of new archaeological and heritage practices that center the experiences and persistence of Native Californian communities.

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Settler colonialism is an academic structure, not an event: Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, ‘Epistemology of surveillance: Revealing unmarked forms of discipline and punishment in Israeli academia’, The British Journal of Sociology, 2022

15Jan22

Abstract: This paper analyzes the unmarked forms of discipline and punishment employed against Palestinian researchers in Israeli academia, attempting to decolonize it through critical knowledge production. Based on interviews with 15 researchers from a cross-section of academic institutions in Israel, the paper identifies subtle mechanisms of discipline and punishment, directed toward normalizing the epistemology of the colonized. The findings suggest that the gatekeepers of Israeli academia not only seek to maintain the existing racial hierarchy between Israeli and Palestinian researchers but also seek to “eliminate” the indigenous epistemology of the latter through mechanisms of hidden surveillance, used to control them as colonized subjects unable to challenge the Zionist ideology that is an essential aspect of Israeli academia. The current paper aims to unpack these invisible mechanisms of surveillance, which are part of a broader colonial apparatus aiming to maintain not only territorial sovereignty but also epistemologic sovereignty.

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Settler colonialism is property planned: Heather Dorries, ‘What is planning without property? Relational practices of being and belonging’, EPD: Society and Space, 2022

13Jan22

Abstract: What is planning without property? This question was recently posed to me following a conference presentation. In this paper, I argue that taking this question seriously reveals unchallenged assumptions about the relationship between planning and property. Focusing on Canada as a settler colonial liberal democracy, I respond to this question by looking at the Indian Act which has supported colonial dispossession and assimilation in Canada for almost 200 years and rely on Brenna Bhandar’s conceptualization of “racial regimes of property” as a means of examining how racial subjects and private property are co-produced. I then look to the practices reflected in the creation of Nadia Myre’s artwork Indian Act to show how Indigenous epistemologies can aid in the conceptualization of planning without property. I argue that planning without property would be an approach to planning that would be focused on identifying, making, and strengthening the human and more-than-human relationships the flourishing of life requires. Thus, planning without property would support practices of being and belonging rather than practices of exclusion and domination.

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On the settler’s ‘philosophical guardianship’: Anna Cook, ‘Indigenizing Philosophy on Stolen Lands: A Worry about Settler Philosophical Guardianship’, Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, 12, 2, 2021, pp. 33-43

13Jan22

Abstract: Many Canadian universities have taken heed of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendations to ‘Indigenize’ their curricula. The worry remains, however, that the language of reconciliation is empty rhetoric that “metaphorizes” decolonization, rather than responds to the demands of Indigenous communities for self-determination and land back. This paper aims to consider what the activity of ‘Indigenizing’ academic philosophy (and ethics more specifically) might involve. In particular, it raises the worry that the integration of Indigenous philosophy into ethics curriculum might assimilate an understanding of “grounded normativity” into settler understandings of groundless or placeless normativity. Such an assimilation would be an operation of what Cherokee philosopher Brian Yazzie Burkhart calls “settler philosophical guardianship.” For this reason, this paper contends that the work of meaningfully ‘Indigenizing’ philosophical curricula must first critically investigate an account of placeless normativity as a function of the settler colonial drive for expansion and elimination.

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The infrastructure of settler colonialism: Ronen Shamir, ‘Contested infrastructures: the case of British-mandate Palestine’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2022

11Jan22

Abstract: This study looks at infrastructures as sites of contest between empire and settler-colonialists. It analyses the construction of Mandate Palestine’s Haifa seaport and Lydda Airport as imperial projects and traces the techno-political networks that allowed Jewish settlers to build their own competing seaport and airport in Tel-Aviv during the anti-colonial Arab Revolt (1936–1939). It identifies a dialectical relationship between colonisers and empire: Jewish settlers welcomed Palestine’s intended role as an arena of imperial development but soon developed their own stakes in securing access to sea and skies. The study contributes to the scant knowledge about infrastructures in colonial settings and specifically to the little-known role of British consultant engineers in facilitating them. All in all the article de-centres the Arab-Jewish conflict as a major historical focus and instead considers Palestine through the lens of the British empire’s conception of the Middle East.

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Settler colonial utopianisms: Shane Chalmers, ‘The Utopian Law and Literature of Systematic Colonisation’, Law & Literature, 2022

11Jan22

Abstract: Edward Gibbon Wakefield is usually remembered as the English political economist whose theorisation of “systematic colonisation” provided the blueprint for the establishment of British colonies in Australia and New Zealand. This paper re-reads Wakefield’s writings on systematic colonisation as works of utopian literature, which not only represented a social fantasy that was deeply capitalist, but worked to realise the settler-colonial projects through the literary projection of this fantasy. Through the re-reading, the paper focuses on two main points. One, the force of Wakefield’s work was the force of literature. It was not Wakefield’s scholarly contributions to political-economic thought that made his work such a force of history; it was the literary form of his writings on colonisation that enabled his work to capture and incite the social imagination, as works of fiction in a utopian tradition going back to Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis. And two, the force of Wakefield’s literary work was the force of law. Not only did Wakefield’s utopian literature crystallise a social fantasy in a way that made it available, and seductively so, to legislators, but Wakefield’s literature gave meaning and effect to the resulting legislation of the colonies.

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CFP: New Media and Settler Colonialism; New Settler Colonial Media?

11Jan22

Humanities, Special Issue: New Media and Settler Colonialism: New Settler Colonial Media?

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The spectacle of settler colonialism: ‘Spectacles of Settler Colonial Memory: Archaeological Findings from an Early Twentieth-Century “First” Settlement Pageant and Other Commemorative Terrain in New England’, Meghan C.L. Howey, Christine M. DeLucia, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2022

06Jan22

Abstract: In 1923, rural New England mill town Dover, New Hampshire, staged a Tercentenary pageant of extraordinary proportions to celebrate its “first” settlement. This public spectacle memorialized a specific, and deeply exclusionary, narrative of English settler colonialism, shaped by social anxieties of the post-First World War United States. Recent archaeological research has found possible remnants from this spectacle on a seventeenth-century site. In disturbing this site, the Tercentenary pageant appears to have disregarded actual significant material traces from the very era it aimed to memorialize–traces that offer distinct, fuller understandings of deeply nuanced Native-settler interactions in the Piscataqua River region. Dover’s pageant is situated in a regional analysis of Native and Euro-colonial commemorative place-making of the early twentieth century, exploring how different communities pursued multivocal, monovocal, or other approaches in their performative engagements with the seventeenth century.

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The settler imperial-republican complex: Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, Between Empire and Republic: America in the Colonial Canadian Imagination, Lexington Books, 2022

06Jan22

Description: In 1837, a small group of rebels proclaimed the short-lived Republic of Canada. Between then and the Act of Confederation of 1867, colonial Canadians tried to imagine the future of their communities in North America. The choice between monarchy and republicanism shaped both colonial self-images and images of the United States; it also drove the political deliberations that eventually united the colonies of British North America into a self-governing Dominion under the British Crown. Between Empire and Republic is a thematic exploration of the political discourse embedded in the literary output of the period. Colonial authors Susanna Moodie, Th. Ch. Haliburton, and John Richardson enjoyed transatlantic popularity and explained colonial realities to their British, Canadian, and American readership. Collectively, their writings serve as the lens into colonial Canadian perceptions of American and British political ideas and institutions. Between Empire and Republic discusses North America as a literary contact zone where British principles of constitutional monarchy competed with American ideas of republicanism and democratic self-government. The author argues that political ideas in pre-Confederation Canada filtered into the literary works of the time, creating two settler-colonial communities whose recognizable cultural characteristics echoed public attitudes towards the political projects underpinning them.

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