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Settler colonial Christianity: Sonja Thomas, ‘”Studying Up” in World Christianity: A Feminist Analysis of Caste and Settler Colonialism’, Journal of World Christianity, 11, 2, 2021, pp. 195-209 

16Aug21

Abstract: In this article, based on a keynote address delivered in 2019 at the conference on “Currents, Perspectives, and Ethnographic Methodologies for World Christianity” held at Princeton Theological Seminary, I discuss studying up and how scholars of World Christianity need to grapple with the ways Christianity has facilitated the work of and supported state policies and institutional structures of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and brahmanical patriarchy. “Studying up” refers to studying the functionings and institutionalized nature of racist, casteist and settler heteropatriarchies. For me, Laura Nader’s “Up the Anthropologist” opened up new ways to think about, critique, and intervene into the colonialist framework of Anthropology’s roots. Accordingly, I examine potential reasons why we study down, and the difficulty in studying up. I start by looking at studying up as it pertains to Christianity in India, where Christians are a minority. I consider the intersections of casteism and brahmanical patriarchy, how privileged academics may fail to recognize spaces and activism outside the academy that always studies up, access to sites of power, and potential retaliation against scholars who attempt to study up. I then move to talk about studying up in the Christian majority country of the United States, white supremacy, Catholic settler colonialism, and the sexual abuse of Native children in Catholic boarding schools. To fully understand and support anticaste, decolonial, and feminist antiracist movements for social justice worldwide, I argue that the time for studying up in World Christianity is long overdue.


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Settler colonialism against revolution: Jane Lydon, ‘”Mr Wakefield’s Speaking Trumpets”: Abolishing Slavery and Colonising Systematically’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2021

16Aug21

Abstract: This essay examines the significance of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of ‘systematic colonisation’ within the transition from Caribbean slavery to settler colonisation to reveal the sequential relationship of these two imperial systems. In the context of industrialisation and social unrest, the anti-slavery movement performed an important purpose for Britain’s ruling classes by simultaneously accruing moral authority and sanctioning oppressive new forms of disciplined labour, including the treatment of Australian convicts as slaves. During the ‘ameliorative’ 1820s phase of the anti-slavery movement, experimental colonial schemes combined both abolitionist principles and pro-slavery interests, particularly visible in the form of arguments against free labour and the advocacy of racial, as well as class, labour hierarchies. Wakefield’s theory embodied principles of labour discipline drawn from the plantation, allied to new techniques of land commoditization, offering a solution to the looming problem of abolition. These principles were invoked in debating the emancipation bill introduced in May 1833, as all sides agreed on the need for freed slaves to work for wages; they were subsequently applied in the Caribbean after emancipation by planters attempting to maintain productivity during and beyond the apprenticeship period. After 1833, the abolitionists’ zeal could be turned to other causes, and reformers seeking to end transportation and develop the settler colonies deployed an entwined discourse of anti-slavery and systematic colonisation.


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Tourism settler colonialism: Matthew Y. Yasuoka, Hawaiʻi/Hawaii: Alterity, Space, and the Economy of Knowledge, MA dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2021

12Aug21

Abstract: This thesis is an inexhaustive study of the creation of an economy of knowledge surrounding Hawaiʻi. Through settler imaginings a new psychic place coalesced around the fantasies of colonists. This place Hawaii is distinguishable from Hawaiʻi by the absence of the okina. The analysis begins at the end of the Nineteenth Century when settlers began to articulate a new future for Hawaii. These imaginings sought to reshape the landscape and population of Hawaiʻi into the easily distributable and consumable commodity of Hawaii. This process serves to render alterity manageable, consumable, and amicable to settlers. By drawing on the work of Georges Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean Baudrillard, I analyze the exhibitions created by the Hawaii Chamber of Commerce to market Hawaii to the global stage at various international expositions. At around the same time, settler anxieties about US annexation raised questions about the future of Hawaii. In imagining what Hawaii could be, settlers sought to realize the creation of a new place within this economy of knowledge. The thesis then turns its attention to the middle of the 20th Century as air travel produced an influx of visitors. Analyzing the advertisements of Hawaii placed in newspapers and postcards, I deconstruct the ways settler fantasies shaped and articulated the desire to become tourists in Hawaii. By drawing on Baudrillard and Heidegger, I discuss how these images sought to produce a distanceless world that allows for the production of the hyperreality that settler colonialism requires. The final chapter analyzes the film Lilo & Stitch. I analyze the film through the lens of settler futurity. I argue that this children’s film serves to reproduce the fantasy of perfect Natives who are the end point of genocide. It serves to perfect the settler fantasy of the civilizing project.


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The real genocide: Michelle A. Stanley, ‘Beyond erasure: Indigenous genocide denial and settler colonialism’, in John Cox, Amal Khoury, Sarah Minslow (eds), Denial: The Final Stage of Genocide, Routledge, 2021

12Aug21

Abstract: In surveys conducted between 2016 and 2018, First Nations found that only 36% of Americans “almost certainly” believe that the “United States is guilty of committing genocide against Native Americans.” In the United States, Indigenous genocide is largely denied, erased, set in the past, or framed as inevitable. This chapter builds upon Indigenous research to argue that Indigenous genocide denial not only erases and marginalizes Indigenous Peoples, but also allows for the continuation and emergence of settler-colonial processes and practices that are founded on and perpetuate genocide denial. This chapter focuses upon “selective genocide denial” methods, which acknowledge and deny Indigenous genocide based on specific criteria. Additionally, this chapter offers examples of ongoing settler colonial and genocidal actions, including cultural appropriation, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) epidemic, tribal nation recognition processes, and tribal land and water access restrictions.


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Dispossession through pollution: Lena Gross, ‘Fuelling toxic relations: Oil sands and settler colonialism in Canada’, Anthropology Today, 37, 4, 2021, pp. 19-22

10Aug21

Excerpt: Northern Alberta is infamous for its oil sands extraction, a process that is accompanied by large-scale deforestation, habitat destruction, toxic wastewater production
and greenhouse gas emissions.


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Settlers always displace: Rae Rosenberg, ‘Psychic geographies of queer multiculturalism: Reading Fanon, settler colonialism and race in queer space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021

10Aug21

Abstract: Utilizing Fanon’s theories of psychic, social and embodied processes of racialization and racism, this article examines Toronto’s gay village as a site of queer settler multiculturalism and its impacts on Black and Indigenous lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, Two-Spirit and additional (LGBTQ2+) youth experiencing homelessness. I build on Fanon’s arguments of cultural alienation, the collective unconscious and white colonial anxiety and desire to analyze current iterations of queer settler colonialism and anti-Black racism within the village. Specifically, I argue that the village maintains a collective queer multicultural unconscious through social interactions and forms of representation that seek to tightly control Blackness and Indigeneity within queer space. By placing Fanon in dialogue with Black and Indigenous Studies scholarship, and interviews with Black and Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth, I present how youth encounter and, to some extent, refuse the white and settler colonial queer multiculturalism in Toronto’s village.


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Whose heritage? Craig Fortier, ‘The Humber is a Haunting: Settler Deathscapes, Indigenous Spectres, and the Memorialisation of a Canadian Heritage River’, Antipode, 2021

10Aug21

Abstract: This paper argues that state-sponsored memorialisation is a critical enterprise in creating and maintaining a national cultural identity that softens or erases the ongoing process of death-making and dispossession wrought by settlers on the land and Indigenous peoples. Drawing on the work of Toronto-based Cree scholar Karyn Recollet, I further argue that this death-making is not a given. Indigenous peoples assert their presence and relationships to the Humber River and its adjacent lifeforces alongside and in opposition to official memorialising projects. The 20th anniversary of the Humber River’s designation as a Canada Heritage River in 2019, the first in the era of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action, begs the question as to the role memorial and commemoration ceremonies play in the coalescence of a particular settler colonial story/myth that stabilises geographies as “memorial spaces” while simultaneously narrating Indigenous peoples through erasure, assimilation, and as historical ghosts.


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Settler colonialism and the city: Deborah Cowen, ‘Following the infrastructures of empire: notes on cities, settler colonialism, and method’, Urban Geography, 41, 4, 2020, pp. 469-486

10Aug21

Abstract: This paper investigates urban life through the contested formation of settler colonial infrastructure. Trespassing nationalist narratives, it ‘follows the infrastructure’ across imperial space, time and struggle, illuminating the extraordinary power of cities both in and as infrastructural systems. It tracks a set of circulations through cities across Canada and beyond, to explore how the making of ‘national infrastructure’ holds together seemingly disparate archives of Indigenous dispossession and genocide, of the transatlantic slave trade, and of unfree migrant racial labor regimes. Infrastructure, almost by definition, reproduces material relations, although at times in very queer ways. With an eye toward a future for urban infrastructure otherwise, I ask: what does a map of infrastructure’s afterlives look like, and what is at stake in its refusal and in claims to repair?


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Settling the border: Ivan Peshkov, ‘B(ordering) Utopia in Birobidzhan: Spatial Aspects of Jewish Colonization in Inner Asia’, Changing Societies & Personalities, 5, 2, 2021, 2, pp. 220-232

10Aug21

Abstract: The borderline territory serves a double purpose, being simultaneously zones of cultural contact and cultural barriers—administrative and often civilizational. This ambivalence frequently affects borderline area inhabitants turning them into hostages of border management regimes and outside projections concerning their cultural and civilizational status, and the authenticity of forms of their culture representation. In the case of Birobidzhan, we are dealing with an absolutely modern project of creating ethnic territoriality without reference to the historical context and far from the places of traditional settlement of the Jewish population. The implementation of this project put the Jewish settlers at the center of a complex process of border management and securitization of the border areas. The factors of border and “remoteness” are largely underestimated in Birobidzhan studies. The article fills this niche, emphasizing the spatial aspects of the implementation of the “antiZionist utopia” and its complex relationship with previous models of territoriality in the region and local inhabitants.


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Corporations, colonialism, (settler) space: Réka Patrícia Gál, ‘The Interstellar Railroad, or Speculation and Shareholder Whiteness in the Space Economy’, Environmentalmedialab, 14/04/21

10Aug21

Excerpt: The subsequent years have seen the proliferation of space colonization advocacy programs that promise to create an intricate mix of extraterrestrial settlements and space tourism, as well as asteroid mining, thereby allowing for capitalist extension while also conveniently offering a solution for Doomsday crises such as climate change or asteroid strikes. In other words, space colonization becomes a speculative strategy to maximize capitalist profits while mitigating future existential risks.


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