settler colonial studies blog

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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More on the Finnish settler colonial imagination: Janne Lahti, ‘Settler Colonial Eyes: Finnish Travel Writers and the Colonization of Petsamo’, in Raita Merivirta, Leila Koivunen, Timo Särkkä (eds), Finnish Colonial Encounters: From Anti-Imperialism to Cultural Colonialism and Complicity, Palgrave, 2021, pp. 95-120

06Jan22

Abstract: Connecting Finnish Petsamo to histories of settler colonialism and colonial travel writings, this chapter look at four Finnish travelogues through the settler colonial lens. It argues that these Finnish travel writers looked at Petsamo through settler colonial eyes: in other words, they made claims for Finnish settler colonization, promoted the idea, and assessed its feasibility. They commented on the nature of the region and its potential riches; described the villages, homes, and domestic customs; and commented on the outlook and habits of the people. The travelogues made the colonized land familiar to their Finnish audience and occupied it, in language that combined views of its past with its new reality as a Finnish space.

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The Finnish settler colonial imagination: Raita Merivirta, ‘Colonialism, Race, and White Innocence in Finnish Children’s Literature: Anni Swan’s 1920s’ Serial “Uutisasukkaana Austraaliassa”’, in Raita Merivirta, Leila Koivunen, Timo Särkkä (eds), Finnish Colonial Encounters: From Anti-Imperialism to Cultural Colonialism and Complicity, Palgrave, 2021, pp. 171-197

06Jan22

Abstract: This chapter focuses on colonialism, race, and White innocence in Finnish 1920s’ children’s literature, arguing that children’s literature was an influential channel through which colonial discourse and public colonial imagination were created, consumed, and circulated in Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As an example of such literature, Merivirta examines the Finnish children’s author Anni Swan’s serial “Uutisasukkaana Austraaliassa” (“Living as Settlers in Australia”, 1926). The serial depicts a Finnish settler family’s life in Queensland, focusing on their encounters with First Nations people. The chapter explores how colonialism and race in the Australian context are depicted and racial and cultural hierarchies constructed in Swan’s text. The chapter shows that Swan’s text circulates a number of common European and American colonial tropes and portrays Finnish settler colonialism in Australia as innocent and noncolonial.

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Dating settler colonialism: Bronwyn Carlson, Madi Day, ‘Love, Hate and Sovereign Bodies: The Exigencies of Aboriginal Online Dating’, in Anastasia Powell, Asher Flynn, Lisa Sugiura (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Gendered Violence and Technology, 2021, pp. 181-201

06Jan22

Abstract: Dating apps have become widely used by those seeking friendship, fun, casual sex and romance. They also mimic settler violence often perpetrated in offline spaces. Although there is the opportunity for non-identification, many users who choose to identify as Aboriginal become targeted for unsolicited abuse. Dating app users are often subjected to discursive, sexual and physical forms of violence. Online racism is prevalent in many forms. This paper considers the exigencies of racism as it manifests online for Aboriginal users of dating sites. Drawing on work in Indigenous standpoint theory and settler-colonial theory, this paper explores the ramifications of online dating app violence in its various manifestations and contexts. While the paper acknowledges the positive aspects of online dating apps for Aboriginal users, it also confirms the extent of abuse that is projected against Aboriginal people and its repercussions for health, safety and body sovereignty.

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Comparing settlers: Brenda Machosky, ‘Why Australia? Inquiries and possibilities in the United States’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2021

02Jan22

Abstract: This article surveys the state of Australian literary studies in the US as evidenced from the history of institutions and organizations and the scattered work of individual American academics. The two nations share a common settler colonial history and their literary identities have been subject to a “cultural cringe” against the British centre. A lack of popular knowledge about Australia in the US corresponds to almost non-existent course offerings in American tertiary education, although a limited but dedicated group of Australianists provide opportunities for students and critical inquiry. The article argues that US literary scholarship would benefit from analysis of the more overt effects of settler colonialism in Australia as a reflection of its own embedded colonialist ideologies. It also advocates for literature, particularly works by Aboriginal writers as alternative voices and an important critical tool against the dominant global epistemologies of science, economics, and politics.

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Responsible settlers? Avril Bell, Rose Yukich, Billie Lythberg, Christine Woods, ‘Enacting settler responsibilities towards decolonisation’, Ethnicities, 2021

02Jan22

Abstract: This special issue showcases research exploring the work of settler individuals and groups in support of projects of decolonisation in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Israel. The papers gathered here were developed from presentations at an international symposium held in Auckland, New Zealand and online in February 2021. As symposium organisers and editors of this collection, we speak and write as settler subjects ourselves, and this collection is situated within the field of Settler Colonial Studies (SCS). This editorial provides an opening framing of the field into which these papers speak, and a survey of some of the key themes within the wider literature. We aim firstly to locate this work within the wider field of scholarship and activism on decolonisation and decoloniality, delimiting the particular focus of decolonisation within settler-dominated contexts. We then discuss the critiques that have been mounted against SCS and some important defences of the field. We argue that while settler colonialism persists, work in SCS has a contribution to make – in highlighting and critiquing settler logics and in identifying changes that it is within the power of settler peoples themselves to make as a contribution towards Indigenous-led decolonisation. Further, we argue that decolonising settler societies must involve settlers learning to be ‘in relation’ with Indigenous worlds and people outside of deeply habituated logics and practices of domination. The papers gathered here provide examples of settler subjects at various points on the path of decolonising themselves and learning the work of ‘being in relation’.

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Normal settlers: Marcelo Svirsky, ‘The normal life of settlers’, Ethnicities, 2021

02Jan22

Abstract: This paper concerns Let me tell you a story about Israel, a theatrical play tasked with influencing existing perceptions of the Palestine/Israel conflict amongst international audiences. Drawing on the work of philosopher Baruch Spinoza, I explore the complex issue of how to address the need to change people’s political perceptions by using theatre as a form of activist persuasion. The play attempts to create an image of the conflict mostly absent in the commentaries of international observers who are unaware of the full implications of the conflict’s settler colonial character. Typically, they understand it in terms of two sides competing over land, frontiers and recognition. The sense of balance that this perception conveys pre-empts coming to grips with the colonial history of Palestine beginning with the advent of Zionism from late 19th century. Such a view also obscures the nature of current forms of Israeli domination and fails to take into account a major historical factor: that the settler colonial dynamic in Palestine rests on the ways social life in Israel is organised and reproduced. Hence, the play aims to make perceptible the relation between the social mechanisms of subjectivity formation in the Israeli society on the one hand, and the everyday performance of settler colonial power on the other. Making this relation observable is a necessary step towards rethinking where change could possibly come from.

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Uprooting the settler gorse: Emily Beausoleil, ‘Calling in to Cut back: Settlers learning to listen for a decolonial future’, Ethnicities, 2021

02Jan22

Abstract: Clearing the gorse, a particularly aggressive invasive plant, so that native plants can flourish has been used as a potent metaphor for decolonization, and described as labour appropriate for settlers to perform in the interest of just relations with Indigenous peoples. Yet, this labour is not simply one of negation, for it involves learning to bring one’s group difference alongside that of others rather than continuing to mistake that difference for the unmarked context of Indigenous-settler relations. Clearing the gorse is thus also connected to the labour of “gathering at the gate”: the requirement according to Māori protocols of encounter that visitors develop a sense of collective identity and purpose before any meeting can take place. Settler societies, as a rule, operate without a collective sense of the specific identity and history of being a settler people. How would these two forms of labour appropriate for tauiwi Pākehā to perform be connected, and how would performing them together serve broader projects of decolonization and honouring settler commitments in Te Tiriti o Waitangi? I reflect upon this question in light of insights from Tauiwi Tautoko, a recent nationwide anti-racism programme wherein tauiwi (non-Māori settlers) addressed anti-Māori racism online. Core to the programme’s novel anti-racism approach were listening strategies that both invited and modelled acknowledgment of the particular ground from which tauiwi Pākehā see and speak. These strategies have proven effective in creating openings and shifts regarding racist views in otherwise adversarial and toxic spaces. They offer innovative practical resources for the work settlers can and must do with our own people, if we are to contribute to a decolonial future.

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A contrapuntal undoing of settler colonialism? Margaret Stuart, ‘Unravelling Imperial Knots: Teaching New Zealand History Contrapuntally’, New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 2021

02Jan22

Abstract: I use Edward Said’s (in: Culture and imperialism, Vintage, 1993) theory, that nations ‘are narrations: who owned land, could settle, plan its future, are all stories of imperialism. The history teacher could not only consider ‘what to read’, but also ‘how to read’ taking account of the processes of imperialism; of the macro-history of world systems and micro-history of individuals within these. I examine Said’s theory in the context of New Zealand history, looking at four interconnected aspects: expropriation of land, trading in goods, appropriation of botanical knowledge, and the place of education in telling the story of the nation. I suggest that using this as a model, teachers can seek out local stories, ensuring several perspectives are heeded and linked to the bigger narratives of the colonial past and present.

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