settler colonial studies blog

Multiple displacement (on Irish Australias): Jimmy H. Yan, ‘”‘Ourselves Alone”? Encounters Between the Irish Literary Revival and Australian Settler-Modernisms, ca. 1913 – 1919’ Australian Literary Studies, 2021

05Nov21

Abstract: This essay examines intellectual exchanges between early twentieth-century Australian literary nationalists and the Irish literary revival, with attention to the transnational and imperial differences in between. It traces the travel narratives of Vance Palmer, Esmonde Higgins and Miles Franklin in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence, their performance of New World settler ‘selfhood’ in Ireland, and their encounters with Irish literary contacts including George William Russell (Æ) and Darrell Figgis. In historicising these encounters in relation to settler-colonial ambivalence, it argues that Australian literary travel narratives of revolutionary Ireland were constituted around multiple displacements of meaning between Irish nationalist and Australian settler-nativist constructions of autochthony. As urban intellectual milieux outside the networks of Irish ethnic associationalism, these literary connections offer a culturally hybrid location in which to re-examine the play of overdetermined meanings around Ireland in early interwar (‘White’) Australia. Situated in relation to Irish historical contexts external to Australian nationalist narratives, these dislocations of meaning illuminate an excess of Irelands in settler radical political imaginaries beyond stable constructions of nation or place.

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Questionable settlers? Nicole Yakashiro, ‘Daffodils and Dispossession: Nikkei Settlers, White Possession, and Settler Colonial Property in Bradner, BC, 1914–51’, BC Studies, 211, 2021

03Nov21

Abstract: This article focuses on the forced sales of property, namely daffodil bulbs and farms, owned by Nikkei farmers before 1943 in the rural community of Bradner, British Columbia, known as the “daffodil capital” of Canada. By centring the microhistorical workings of property dispossession in one local context, it connects fields commonly treated as distinct – settler colonialism and Japanese Canadian history – to reveal how settler colonial property logics and practices were employed by the state and ordinary settlers to secure white possession. Drawing primarily on state records, I trace how the federal government dispossessed four Nikkei daffodil-farming families in the 1940s by using contradictory, uneven, and contested rationales and strategies. More specifically, I identify three property characteristics – definition, value, and boundaries – that the state manipulated to reconfigure Nikkei property for white ownership. In doing so, I denaturalize common narratives of property as stable and argue that the dispossession was not an anomalous moment of state racism, as has been largely understood, but a project that renewed a regime founded on the elision of Indigenous sovereignty and the construction of white settler property. By highlighting the state’s lies, both big and small, this article demonstrates the fundamental fictions of the settler property regime in British Columbia. These were fictions that Nikkei settlers were both invested in and were betrayed by in the 1940s.

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Decolonial pedagogy: Courtney Strutt, Decolonizing (for settlers): a pedagogical framework for enacting responsibilities, MA dissertation, Lakehead University, 2021

03Nov21

Excerpt: In 21st century Canada, the logics and ideologies of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism have formed an entangled web of wicked problems that are inherently about Land. Specifically, stolen Land. As a settler colonial state, Canada’s foundation as a nation rests on illegitimate claims to sovereignty through decrees such as the Doctrine of Discovery and the Papal Bulls and ideologies such as terra nullius and the Christianizing of ‘heathen’ people. For more than 400 years, people from around the world (initially European) have been arriving on, making claims to, and altering this Land with their worldviews, assumptions and systems, entrenching the status of ‘settlers’ upon themselves. In contemporary Canada, citizens live in a modern day colonial state, that is to say, a state governed by racist policies and systems aimed at the elimination and erasure of Indigenous peoples. These policies and systems have been weaponized to create dispossession, dependence, assimilation, and genocide of Indigenous peoples on their own lands through the ideologies of settler colonial capitalism.

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The settler courts will not consider settler colonialism: Jane Dickson, Michelle Stewart, ‘Risk, rights and deservedness: Navigating the tensions of Gladue, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder and settler colonialism in Canadian courts’, Behavioural Science & the Law, 2021

03Nov21

Abstract: In 2008, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada engaged in a public project of national reconciliation to address the ongoing impacts of settler colonialism including the disproportionate number of Indigenous adults and youth
who are held in remand facilities awaiting trial or sentence as well as those who are convicted and sentenced to periods of incarceration. Efforts to further reconciliation by reducing Indigenous incarceration rates have relied largely on the courts and their application of a sentencing principle rooted in the Supreme Court’s ruling in R. v. Gladue [1999] 1 SCR 688. In this article, we argue that the Gladue sentencing principle is being fundamentally undermined in the courts through risk models that actively displace the very context that Gladue reports seek to illuminate. Included in the analysis are the compounding impacts facing Indigenous individuals struggling with a complex disability like Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.

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Why should settlers be compensated? Joseph Mudau, ‘Land Expropriation without Compensation in a Former Settler Colony: A Polemic Discourse’, African Renaissance, 18, 3, 2021

03Nov21

Abstract: In geopolitical discourse, monopolistic institutions and developed states continue to compete for Africa’s land and its natural resources. In the 1990s, neoliberal preying and privatisation of state institutions, financialisation of national economies and the silent alienation of land by domestic and foreign capitalists were some of the strategies that exacerbated neoliberalism in the land reform policy in South Africa. Africa’s land question and its socio-economic transformation remain critical in the public discourse that seeks to generate alternative development trajectories, particularly in the context of land reform. Empirical evidence indicates that Africa’s land question has tended to focus on land tenure and livelihoods but hardly on the question of agrarian development and the expropriation of land without compensation. South Africa is no exception. South African history is tainted by the fight over land. The arduous nature of land ownership patterns and the unresolved historic problems have prompted a new debate. Closely related to this debate is the land expropriation without compensation policy. Contemporary scholarship pertaining to the land question in South Africa is underpinned by the identification of areas of discord in the landscape patterns and the different contexts and conditions under which Black rural people live. The land question in South Africa is associated with elements of neoliberalism that benefit the white elite and global capital system. The imprint of forceful removal of natives from their land is indelible, while the legacy of reversing that onerous effects remains questionable. This study is non-empirical in nature and relies on a critical review of the literature as a methodological approach to gathering insights. The objective is to explore how neoliberalism has succeeded in capturing and repacking the South Africa land reform policy and, in the process, tainted the notion of land expropriation without compensation. A summation and conclusion are also provided.

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The settler colonialism of Irish Protestantism: Anne Jamison, ‘Irish Protestant colonialism and educational ideology in Australia: Hannah Boyd’s letters on education (1848)’, Australian Literary Studies, 36, 2, 2021

03Nov21

Abstract: The transnational movement between Ireland and Australia of school periodicals, pedagogical ideas and educational theories are writ large in histories of colonial education in Australia; from the Irish National School Readers that circulated in the colonies, to the transference of the Irish National Board’s Model School system from Dublin to Melbourne. Less attention has been paid, however, to the specific brand of Irish Protestant colonial thinking that often colours and motivates this transnational movement, as well as the educational ideologies and literature that were shaped by it in Australia. This essay takes Irish-born Hannah Villiers Boyd’s educational treatise, Letters on Education (1848), as its core focus. Recognised by scholars as one of the earliest educational treatises in Australia, and an important text in the cultural history of women’s social reform and education, the text has been analysed for its formal and generic features as a nineteenth-century parenting manual. This essay adds another dimension to this line of thinking. By paying close attention to the text’s engagement with Irish writer and educationist, Maria Edgeworth, as well as other Irish writers and political figures (Carleton, O’Connell), this essay will explore how Boyd’s familial and socio-cultural Irish background modulates the text’s approach to education, as well as shapes its utopian projections of a future Australian nation. As such, this essay will demonstrate the Irish intersections that potentially shape in significant ways the text’s educational ideologies and, more specifically, illustrate how Boyd’s didactic perspectives on rural home education for young girls in Australia are both inflected and moulded by Irish Protestant colonial politics and culture.

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The settler colonialism of women: Sally Mennill, ‘”Pioneering” Women: Tales of Female Settler Colonialism in BC, A Review Essay, BC Studies, 211, 2021, pp. 115-221

03Nov21

Excerpt: In 2018 and 2019 a handful of popular histories telling the stories of women settlers in early British Columbia were published. Composed by authors of varying persuasions and motivations and published by TouchWood Editions and the Royal BC Museum, these texts trace the experiences of a variety of women who, at the behest of their family members, came to British Columbia seeking a new life and adventure in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. These books, which highlight and bring to light some of the extraordinary adventures of early BC settler women, reify the tropes of settler colonialism in their lack of critical engagement with their subjects’ racism.

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Settler critical infrastructures: Kai Bosworth, Charmaine Chua, ‘The Countersovereignty of Critical Infrastructure Security: Settler-State Anxiety versus the Pipeline Blockade’, Antipode, 2021

03Nov21

Abstract: Scholars argue that blockades of infrastructure pose an economic threat to capital circulation. This explains how activists can gain power through strategic spatial occupations and why states seek to protect “critical infrastructure” from disruption. However, Indigenous-led blockades of pipelines gain power not (only) by disrupting economic flows alone, but by eliciting state anxieties about the racialised political, psychic and economic project of settler colonialism. Analysing public discourse surrounding the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, including legislative measures introduced to criminalise protest since the blockade at Standing Rock, we reframe critical infrastructure security as a component operation of settler countersovereignty. The criminalisation of Indigenous dissent through the state’s escalation of protest legislation is an investment in maintaining settler political authority, leading us to conclude that blockades must be understood not only as a form of anti-capitalist resistance, but also as a locus of anti-colonial struggle.

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Settler unseeing: Laurel R. Davis-Delano, Sita L. Strother, Joseph P. Gone, ‘Perceived indicators of American Indian identity in everyday interaction: navigating settler-colonial erasure’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2021

30Oct21

Abstract: A primary process in settler colonial societies is erasure of Indigenous presence. We employ a symbolic interactionist approach, embedded in macro-level critical analysis, to explore the conveyance and interpretation of American Indian identity in everyday interaction in the settler colonial society of the United States. We surveyed 213 White American participants, asking them to write about indicators they utilize to determine American Indian identity, and 104 American Indian participants, asking them to write about experiences associated with conveying and others interpreting their American Indian identities. Our findings reveal similarities and differences between White and American Indian perspectives associated with three types of indicators: perceived phenotypical, perceived cultural, and verbal. We find that racialized phenotypical perceptions of American Indian identity contribute to misidentification and invisibility of American Indian people. Cultural stereotypes also contribute to invisibility. We situate these findings in dominant U.S. culture and structures rooted in settler colonial processes.

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Settler colonial taxpayers: Kyle Willmott, Alec Skillings, ‘Anti-Indigenous policy formation : Settler colonialism and neoliberal political advocacy’, Canadian Review of Sociology, 2021

30Oct21

Abstract: Political advocacy groups have a quiet role in much of the analysis of Indigenous-settler relations, reconciliation, and ongoing settler colonialism. Using a data set of 407 texts covering a range of 21 years (1998-2019), we conducted a content analysis on the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF), a well-known ‘taxpayer’ group that has long engaged in hostile analysis of First Nations. We describe the various themes that the CTF writes about in relation to Indigenous peoples, discuss the temporal changes in how the CTF discusses policy, and offer theoretical analysis that demonstrates how neoliberal political advocacy groups have looked to weaken and attack the position of Indigenous nations in relation to settler colonial Canada.

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