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Cosmopolitanism against settler colonialism: Miasol Eguíbar Holgado, ‘Cosmopolitanism and strange encounters in George Elliott Clarke’s The Motorcyclist’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2021

16Oct21

Abstract: This article engages a form of cosmopolitanism that departs from universalist precepts, and instead underscores the role of situated difference in establishing productive dialogues among particular world views. It also works with the associated concept of the cosmopolitan stranger to delineate relationships among othered groups. Reading encounters between strangers in George Elliott Clarke’s 2016 novel The Motorcyclist, it attempts to illustrate how othered subjectivities interact in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, and how these interactions are profoundly shaped by colonial, white-supremacist, and patriarchal power structures. Divisions and hostilities among strangers are contingent on hierarchical and seemingly fixed oppositions in terms of race, class, or gender. Use of the figure of the cosmopolitan stranger helps to demonstrate that these conflicts can be approached in self-critical terms, and that simple binaries of exclusion may be replaced by a more nuanced reading of relational difference.


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Drawing settler colonialism: Dominic Davies, ‘Terrestrial Realism and the Gravity of World Literature: Joe Sacco’s Seismic Lines’, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 8, 3, 2021, pp 301-322

16Oct21

Abstract: Through a close reading of Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), a graphic novel about the struggle of the Dene people in Canada’s Northwestern territories, this article shows how Sacco effects a “peripheral realism” that draws the systemic continuities of different phases of colonial modernity into view. The article then describes Sacco’s “terrestrial realism,” which combines his peripheral realism with the dialectical participation of the reader as well. Finally, in a concluding theoretical discussion, I consider how the practice of drawing allows us to think through a response to modernity’s combined and uneven development that is both materialist and decolonial at the same time. Although the former typically insists on singularity and totality, and the latter promotes a contradictory plurality, the peripheral and terrestrial realisms of Paying the Land suggest a way for theorists of world literature to find a point of methodological solidarity that is both in and against capitalist modernity’s gravitational force.


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The settler country coexists: Michael A. Genovese, Alysa Landry, ‘Introduction: Building an “Empire of Reason” on Stolen Land’, in Michael A. Genovese, Alysa Landry, US Presidents and the Destruction of the Native American Nations, Springer, 2021

12Oct21

Abstract: What does the story of European domination of the land and peoples of the “new world” tell us about the ideals and the realities of American political development? A republic founded on the high ideals of equality, fairness, and liberty was also a nation build on violence and racism. How did these “two countries” manage to coexist? And how could men (this is mostly a story of men) who fought for such high ideals, abandon them so easily when confronted with the indigenous peoples who occupied the land they coveted?


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Unreading the settler: Suzanne Ericson, ‘Reading space for new worlds in Jordan Abel’s Un/inhabited’, Studia Neophilologica, 2021

12Oct21

Abstract: Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel created Un/inhabited by rearranging and deleting large swathes of ninety-one western novels. Unsurprisingly, then, this poem is largely interpreted as an invitation to readers to join Abel in critically examining the colonial mindset underpinning the western genre. While this alone makes the poem a valuable resource in literary studies classrooms, I look beyond what readings Un/inhabited creates the conditions for to ask what reading practices it affords. The poem’s experimental form presents a challenge to readers as it resists attempts to read using conventional strategies. Taking a cue from the book’s title, I ask what happens when readers enter the space of the poem as reader-discoverers, and how they can be helped to engage with it in meaningful ways. Guided by Abel’s decolonial poetics and his play on the metaphor of text as landscape, I draw on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theories of nomadology and smooth, striated, and holey space to suggest that Un/inhabited’s own spaces invite anti-settler, nomadic modes of reading. These render texts porous, undermining their capacity to determine the shape of the worlds they narrate. Approaching texts in this way enables readers to shift from passive recipients of information to world shapers.


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Parallel containments: Kate Motluk, Containment & COVID-19 in the Settler State: Indigenous Incarceration and Immigration Detention in Canada and Australia, MA dissertation, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2021

12Oct21

Abstract: Canada and Australia each have long histories of containing Indigenous peoples and migrants. The overincarceration of Indigenous peoples continues to worsen in both countries, despite targeted reforms. Migrant detention is on the rise worldwide, with Canada and Australia’s systems understood as among the harshest. This thesis explores why Canada and Australia contain these populations by examining these practices through the lens of contemporary settler colonialism. Like most everything, containment by states has undergone rapid changes as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to understand how COVID-19 impacted those within carceral institutions, and contextualize that treatment within the same settler colonial logics and histories that animate their containment in the first place. My methodology consists of a literature review and a comparative study of Canada and Australia’s responses to COVID-19 in carceral institutions. The literature review summarizes theories of settler colonialism and the settler state, and traces Canada and Australia’s containment practices through to the contemporary overincarceration of Indigenous peoples and detention of migrants. My comparative study utilized publicly available data, media sources, and literature to map the policy responses to COVID-19 in carceral spaces, and interpret the implications of those policies. This data was sourced from published statics from the Canadian and Australian government and affiliated institutions, independent reports from domestic and international bodies, and works published by independent researchers and journalists. This thesis concludes that people held in carceral institutions in both Canada and Australia were severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic beyond the negative impacts felt by the general public. In Australia, while cases of COVID-19 remained low, the rights of those in prisons and immigration detention centres were substantially eroded as a result of the pandemic, and for some even basic sustenance and medical needs were interrupted. In Canada, COVID-19 was rampant in carceral facilities, with higher case counts per 1,000 people among those contained in comparison with the general Canadian population. While finalizing this thesis, COVID-19 remains an active threat to both countries and their incarcerated populations, particularly in the wake of the Delta variant. From this study, I find that contemporary settler colonial logics work to keep Indigenous peoples and migrants incarcerated and renders them as ‘less grievable’; a framing which ultimately exposed those contained to both a greater risk of infection from the virus, but also maltreatment in the name of public health. Crucially, this understanding of those within carceral facilities as less grievable rendered them less worthy of protection. This apprehension of these lives as less grievable has further allowed Canada and Australia to maintain their domestic and international identity as progressive, liberal democracies, while enforcing decidedly antiprogressive policies within carceral institutions. In spite of this, this study found isolated instances of decarceration, which may one day serve as important precedent on the road to abolition.


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Settler colonial multiple world-building: Dalaina Heiberg, World Building in Settler Colonial Contexts, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2021

12Oct21

Access the dissertation here.


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Settler Gondwanaland: Alison Bashford, Pratik Chakrabarti, Jarrod Hore, ‘Towards a modern history of Gondwanaland’, Journal of the British Academy, 9(s6), 2021, pp. 5–26

12Oct21

Abstract: Gondwanaland was a southern mega-continent that began to break up 180 million years ago. This article explores Gondwanaland’s modern history, its unexpected political and cultural purchase since the 1880s. Originating with geological and palaeontological research in the Gond region of Central India, ‘Gondwana’ has become recognisable and useful, especially in settler colonial contexts. This prospectus sets out a program for a highly unusual ‘transnational’ project, involving scholars of India, Australia, Antarctica, southern Africa and South America. Unpredictably across the five continents of former Gondwanaland, the term itself signals depth of time and place across the spectrum of Indigenous land politics, coalbased extractive politics, and, paradoxically, nationalist environmental politics. All kinds of once-living Gondwanaland biota deliver us fossil fuels today – the ‘gifts of Gondwana’ some geologists call southern hemisphere coal, gas, petroleum – and so the modern history of Gondwanaland is also a substantive history of the Anthropocene.


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The settler colonial university: Caitlin Patricia Alma Harvey, Bricks and Mortar Boards: University-Building in the Settlement Empire, 1840-1920, PhD dissertation, Princeton, 2021

11Oct21

Abstract: This dissertation examines the tremendous expansion of university education across Britain’s colonies of settlement and their self-governing successors – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States – from new universities’ shaky beginnings at the start of the nineteenth century to their firm foundations and continued growth a century later. Imperial, national, state or provincial legislation such as the American Morrill Act created over one hundred new institutions of higher education within eighty years. The imperative to build universities for settlers did not come from Britain. Nor were these institutions, as some scholars have suggested, the clear derivatives of European universities. In addition, before 1900, most settlers regarded undergraduate education as a “questionable experiment” due to the elitism of higher education, but also because access to elementary and secondary schooling was far from commonplace. The question at the core of this dissertation, then, is: why were so many universities built at all? In order to explain universities’ spread and staying power, Bricks and Mortar Boards covers the financial and administrative records of thirty-six universities on four continents, studied together for the first time. It argues that universities’ expansion depended on a confluence of contingent factors and at least one necessary condition: capital. A combination of religious rivalry, political fragmentation, interinstitutional and intercolonial learning, and distinctive financing strategies – based upon Indigenous land endowments and mineral wealth – propelled the incredible expansion of public universities across the nineteenth-century settler world. Bricks and Mortar Boards also serves as a wider case study of how non-governmental institutions perpetuated the authority of settler-colonial states and became a part of a broader move to territorialize Indigenous land. Britain’s global empire facilitated connections between settler institutions – of students, professors, technologies, and ideas – meaning that these universities did not develop in isolation from one another. Looking across these universities thus reveals patterns in their development that are not discernable at the level of a single institution. Instead, in a period of global migrations, gold rushes, and state expansion, educationalists who were oceans apart faced similar challenges and drew on imperial networks to overcome them.


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Indigeneity and social media: Bronwyn Carlson, Ryan Frazer, Indigenous Digital Life: The Practice and Politics of Being Indigenous on Social Media, Palgrave, 2021

11Oct21

Description: Settler societies habitually frame Indigenous people as ‘a people of the past’—their culture somehow ‘frozen’ in time, their identities tied to static notions of ‘authenticity’, and their communities understood as ‘in decline’. But this narrative erases the many ways that Indigenous people are actively engaged in future-orientated practice, including through new technologies. Indigenous Digital Life offers a broad, wide-ranging account of how social media has become embedded in the lives of Indigenous Australians. Centring on ten core themes—including identity, community, hate, desire and death—we seek to understand both the practice and broader politics of being Indigenous on social media. Rather than reproducing settler narratives of Indigenous ‘deficiency’, we approach Indigenous social media as a space of Indigenous action, production, and creativity; we see Indigenous social media users as powerful agents, who interact with and shape their immediate worlds with skill, flair and nous; and instead of being ‘a people of the past’, we show that Indigenous digital life is often future-orientated, working towards building better relations, communities and worlds. This book offers new ideas, insights and provocations for both students and scholars of Indigenous studies, media and communication studies, and cultural studies.


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Mainstream settler colonialism: Marco Allegra, Erez Maggor, ‘The metropolitanization of Israel’s settlement policy: The colonization of the West Bank as a strategy of spatial restructuring’, Political Geography, 92, 2022, 102513

11Oct21

Abstract: Israel’s West Bank settlements are a central point of contention in the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Overall, however, their rapid proliferation has been generally understood through the lens of an ideologically centered approach that highlights, specifically, the centrality of the national religious settlers’ movement. Against this background, the article focuses on the overlooked reality of large, state-sponsored suburban settlements – and in particular on the role of the Israeli Ministry of Housing in their establishment between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. Building on contributions in the field of political economy and political geography, we conceive the actions of the Ministry in the occupied West Bank as a result of a broader strategy of spatial restructuring. By considering both economic and political imperatives underlying this strategy, our analysis offers a more comprehensive assessment of the factors behind Israel’s settlement policy. Drawing on a broad range of empirical sources, from archival material to in-depth interviews with Israeli planners, we argue that the proliferation of settlements has been largely the outcome of a process of metropolitanization – i.e. of the dynamics of urban development of Israel’s main metropolitan centers and the adoption of a new, post-Keynesian policy paradigm based on market-oriented economic development. This process has constituted a major factor for the settlements’ growth and, ultimately, in the emergence and naturalization of a new territorial configuration in the area of Israel/Palestine.


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