settler colonial studies blog

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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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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