settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism now: Rauf Baker, ‘Turkish Imperialism: When Will Turkey Annex Northern Syria?’, Middle East Quarterly, 28, 4, 2021

07Sep21

Excerpt: In its quest to fulfill its expansionist ambitions, Turkey is pursuing a systematic Turkification policy in areas under its control in northern Syria. This takes various forms—demographic, economic, educational—and even the orchestration of environmental extermination. Fundamental to this strategy is the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Kurds and the resettling of Arabs and Turkmen in their place.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Children settlers: Morgan Brie Johnson, ‘Settler Colonial Structures of Domestication: British Home Children in Canada’, Genealogy, 5, 78, 2021

07Sep21

Abstract: There has been a surge of research on Home Children in the past several decades, as the phenomenon previously unknown to many came into the spotlight. However, much of the historical research has focused on either the psychological and physical impacts on the children at the hands of their new “families” (there were many reports of child abuse and neglect) or the ways they were saved from their poverty in Britain by being sent to the colonies. This article will put this existing historical research into conversation with theories of settler colonialism, considering Home Children as a tool of domestication for the social reproduction of Canadian white settler society, which was paired with the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands. This analysis stems from and is intertwined with personal reflections on my own family history as a white settler woman descending from a Home Child to explore the gendered labour of social reproduction as a crucial pillar in creating and maintaining settler colonial Canada. Following Lorenzo Veracini’s argument that settler colonialism is a distinct structure that uses domestication as one of its key tenets and relies on its “regenerative capacity”, this paper will explore how British Home Children were a key component of settler colonialism in Canada and how this history has manifested in the current gendered, racialized, and classed politics of “settling”.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Deep pasts and the question of settler colonialism: Laura Rademaker, ‘60,000 Years is not forever: “time revolutions” and Indigenous pasts’, Postcolonial Studies, 2021

06Sep21

Abstract: Settler Australia is sometimes said to have experienced a ‘time revolution’ on realizing that Aboriginal people have dwelt here for millennia, mirroring the earlier European ‘time revolution’ when Europeans discovered humanity’s ‘deep’ past. This essay unpicks these twin ‘revolutions’ and explores how the idea of ‘time revolutions’ serves a settler society such as Australia. I suggest that celebration of quantitative ‘revolutions’ obscures qualitative shifts in European times and sidelines Indigenous way-of-being in time. I wonder about the possibility of a more fundamental ‘time revolution’, that is, a turning to see that time might not be simply linear, universal and homogenous.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

A fraught and yet necessary relationship: Erik Kojola, ‘Whose Labour, Whose Land? Indigenous and Labour Conflicts and Alliances over Resource Extraction’, in Nora Räthzel, Dimitris Stevis, David Uzzell (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies, Palgrave, 2021, pp. 365-387

06Sep21

Abstract: Relationships between labour movements and Indigenous peoples are important for understanding the interconnections between settler colonialism, capitalism, and environmental crises. These relationships are also relevant for assessing contemporary environmental politics and possibilities for union revitalization and mobilizing climate justice coalitions. Yet, there is limited research on labour-Indigenous relationships. This chapter argues that scholarship is needed on how and why unions and Indigenous groups have conflicted and aligned around the environment and resource extraction. The U.S. and Canada are used as emblematic settler colonial countries to examine the history of Indigenous people’s relationships to unions and the importance of land and sovereignty. Possibilities for divisions and solidarity around energy and climate justice are illustrated through the Dakota Access Pipeline protest movement in the U.S.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Covid and settler colonialism: Marc A. Emerson, Teresa Montoya, ‘Confronting Legacies of Structural Racism and Settler Colonialism to Understand COVID-19 Impacts on the Navajo Nation’, American Journal of Public Health, 111, 8, 2021, pp. 1465-1469.

06Sep21

Access the article here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

How can the settler-colonial landscape be redisigned? Rod Barnett, ‘Utu in the Anthropocene’, Places, August 2021

06Sep21

Excerpt: How are colonial landscapes to be redesigned? To answer this question, begin with the Māori concept of reciprocity, the foundation for the valuation of all beings, human and non-human.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

An Indigenous unity of debate against settler factionalism: Elana Krischer, ‘Seneca Conceptions of Land Use and Value: Debates over Land Sovereignty, 1797–1848’, Journal of the Early Republic, 41, 3, 2021, pp. 373-401

06Sep21

Abstract: Settler groups characterized Seneca political disputes that developed throughout the nineteenth century as “factions,” which are typically viewed as signs of societal disintegration for Native communities. This essay instead views Seneca political disagreements as a single narrative of alternate solutions to the advancement of American expansion. The Senecas experienced three distinct disputes over the course of the nineteenth century, and each side used their awareness of American expectations for Seneca society to protect Seneca interests. The Senecas forced the United States to reflect on the extent of American expansion and interrupted settler constructs such as sovereignty, jurisdiction, and property law by defining those ideas for themselves.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Inventing deep settler pasts: Edward Watts, Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing, University of Virginia Press, 2020

06Sep21

Description: After the Revolution, Americans realized they lacked the common, deep, or meaningful history that might bind together their loose confederation of former colonies into a genuine nation. They had been conquerors yet colonials, now politically independent yet culturally subordinate to European history and traditions. To resolve these paradoxes, some early republic “historians” went so far as to reconstruct pre-Columbian, transatlantic adventures by white people that might be employed to assert their rights and ennoble their identities as Americans. In Colonizing the Past, Edward Watts labels this impulse “primordialism” and reveals its consistent presence over the span of nineteenth-century American print culture. In dozens of texts, Watts tracks episodes in which varying accounts of pre-Columbian whites attracted widespread attention: the Welsh Indians, the Lost Tribes of Israel, the white Mound Builders, and the Vikings, as well as two ancient Irish interventions. In each instance, public interest was ignited when representations of the group in question became enmeshed in concurrent conversations about the nation’s evolving identity and policies. Yet at every turn, counternarratives and public resistance challenged both the plausibility of the pre-Columbian whites and the colonialist symbolism that had been evoked to create a sense of American identity. By challenging the rhetoric of primordialism and empire building, dissenting writers from Washington Irving to Mark Twain exposed the crimes of conquest and white Americans’ marginality as ex-colonials.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Working ‘over’ Indigenous peoples rather than ‘with’ them: James Collie, Questioning the Crown: English liberalism, Canadian settler colonialism, and sovereignty, MA dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2021

02Sep21

Abstract: Despite claims towards a process of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, the Canadian state has made no attempt to reform its unilateral claim to sovereignty over the lands now known as Canada. This has direct consequences for any process of reconciliation, as it results in the Crown acting over Indigenous peoples, rather than with them. This thesis questions the Canadian state’s liberal notions of state sovereignty, especially in relation to both colonization and the nation-to-nation relationship with Indigenous peoples. I start this research with a historical survey of the liberalism of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, their conceptions of sovereignty, and the effects of this on colonization in Canada. These two writers discussed three similar principles of state sovereignty, which I define by: 1) the consent of the governed; 2) majority rule; 3) locating Indigenous political authority as outside the realm of sovereignty. I then take these principles and analyze their role in Confederation, and how they were institutionalized through the Canadian constitution. I then look towards Indigenous notions and critiques of sovereignty and how they interrupt the Crown’s claim to unilateral sovereignty. Ultimately, I argue that the conflicts between the Crown and Indigenous peoples have to do with a clash of the first and third principles; Indigenous peoples never consented to unilateral Crown sovereignty, and it is now assumed over them through the third principle. I show how this necessitates a refusal of the Crown’s unilateral claim to sovereignty, and the institutions that this idea created, namely the Canadian constitution.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Organic settler colonialists: Rafi Grosglik, Ariel Handel, Daniel Monterescu, ‘Soil, territory, land: The spatial politics of settler organic farming in the West Bank, Israel/Palestine’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021

02Sep21

Abstract: In settler colonial settings, agriculture is a means of reclaiming territorial sovereignty and indigenous identity. Turning attention to the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and their multiple uses and abuses of organic farming, this article explores epistemic and political spatial operations on the colonial frontier. Applying a relational conceptualization of three spatial modalities—soil, territory, and land—we explore the ways in which these modalities serve as political apparatuses: Soil designates the romantic perception of cultivable space, territory is concerned with borders and political sovereignty, and land is seen as a space of economic value and as a means of production. While agriculture is a well-known instrument of expansion and dispossession, organic farming contributes to the colonial operation by binding together affective attachment to the place, and new economic singularity in relation to environmental and ethical claims. We argue that organic farming practices converge claims for local authenticity, spatial appropriation, and high economic values that are embedded in what we term the colonial quality turn. Ultimately, organic farming in the West Bank normalizes the inherent violence of the colonial project and strengthens the settlers’ claim for political privilege.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute