settler colonial studies blog

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Science fiction tells it the way it is (science fiction is colonial fiction): David Crouch, ‘Germ Growers in the Colonial Laboratory’, Science as Culture, 2021

02Sep21

Abstract: Written and set in the Australian colonies, Robert Potter’s The Germ Growers (1892) was amongst the earliest novels that engaged with the theme of extra-terrestrial invasion. It describes the discovery of aliens who breed ‘germs’ in a sophisticated laboratory hidden in the outback with the aim of conquering the human species. The novel’s introduction of these otherworldly interlopers into a setting already host to the political, social and scientific experiments of invaders, puts the colonial preoccupations with settlement and dispossession into sharp relief. Potter’s portrayal of relations between white settlers, aliens, exogenous and Indigenous others, accentuates how anxieties about invasion and contamination, insiders and outsiders, humans and nonhumans were accompanied by the application of scientific knowledge and technological expertise in the establishment and administration of social order. Highlighting the idea of colonies as sites for refining elaborate strategies of coercion and control, the novel provides a situated perspective upon the ways in which the affordances of the laboratory operated as central features of the imperial project and influenced its role in the development of biopolitical governance. In doing so, The Germ Growers brings attention to the archive of colonial fiction as a means of approaching the social and historical contexts that continue to undergird relations between science and culture.

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Azania against (settler colonial) South Africa: Anjuli Webster, ‘South African Social Science and the Azanian Philosophical Tradition’, Theoria, 168, 68, 3, 2021, pp. 111-135

31Aug21

Abstract: This article discusses the contemporary history of South African social science in relation to the Azanian Philosophical Tradition. It is addressed directly to white scholars, urging introspection with regard to the ethical question of epistemic justice in relation to the evolution of the social sciences in conqueror South Africa. I consider the establishment of the professional social sciences at South African universities in the early twentieth century as a central part of the epistemic project of conqueror South Africa. In contrast, the Azanian Philosophical Tradition is rooted in African philosophy and articulated in resistance against the injustice of conquest and colonialism in southern Africa since the seventeenth century. It understands conquest as the fundamental historical antagonism shaping the philosophical, political, and material problem of ‘South Africa’. The tradition is silenced by and exceeds the political and epistemic strictures of the settler colonial nation state and social science.

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The settler colonial ‘lebensraum’: Grace Richards, Reevaluating Lebensraum: Friedrich Ratzel, Darwinism, and the Argument for Imperialist Continuity, 1871-1945, MA dissertation, University of Chicago, 2021

31Aug21

Abstract: German geographer Friedrich Ratzel is best remembered today as the originator of the concept Lebensraum, which became the basis of National Socialist demands for “living space” in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. Historians have described Ratzel’s Lebensraum as a Darwinian concept influenced by his support of settler colonialism, and some have emphasized the continuity of the term in the search for the Wilhelmine roots of Nazi imperialism. Much of the secondary literature on Ratzel, however, demonstrates fundamental misunderstandings of his influences. Ratzel’s work was neither Darwinian nor an obvious antecedent to Nazi ideology, and the story of Lebensraum ultimately illustrates the critical rupture of the First World War rather than longstanding continuity in German imperialist ideology.

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Settlers ‘majorities’: Patrick Broman, European Identity in the Aotearoa New Zealand Census, PhD dissertation, The University of Waikato, 2021

31Aug21

Abstract: Although the literature on ethnicity is vast, studies have typically focused on minority groups, with white majorities, including Europeans in Aotearoa New Zealand, surprisingly absent. Demographic changes, however, and the decline of majorities, are altering politics and making white ethnicity more salient. (Re)assertions of dominance such as Brexit and the storming of Capitol Hill, and white nationalist violence such as the Christchurch mosque terror attacks, all illustrate the growing need to understand structures and processes of majority
identity. Recognising this gap, this study examines changing patterns of identification within the European population in the New Zealand census. To do so it uses the novel New Zealand Longitudinal Census (NZLC) dataset, which links individuals across censuses, offering an unprecedented opportunity to examine whether and how individuals change their ethnic affiliations over time. The study adopts a critical demographic conceptual framework, incorporating insights from diverse fields including social constructivism, critical whiteness studies, and a growing literature on settler colonialism. Census counts are fundamentally political, with clear implications for policy and resource distribution, and offer a rich context for exploring the structure of majority ethnic identity. Existing census-based studies, though focused generally on minority groups, have demonstrated clearly how censuses form a key site in the social construction of ethnicity and ethnic groups. The study is in two main parts. The first part considers what patterns can be observed in European identification over the five censuses held between 1991 and 2013. This broad analysis – over two decades of remarkable social and demographic change – finds that Europeans have generally had the lowest level of ethnic response change of any of New Zealand’s major ethnic groups. This contrasts sharply with the fluidity observed between and within other groups, particularly Māori and Pacific peoples. The second part focuses on an exception to this general pattern of European stability, shifts to ‘New Zealander’ ethnicity by Europeans in the 2006 census. It considers the factors associated with this one-off shift to national naming and the broader relationship between national identity and majority identity. Regression modelling shows that claims to New Zealander ethnicity were far from random. Rather it was a phenomenon significantly correlated with being male, being middle aged, having a post-secondary education, living in a solely European household, and in areas with a higher proportion of Europeans and lower levels of deprivation. These characteristics, and the ‘race-like’ stability of European ethnicity, suggests power and dominance play a key role in structuring majority ethnic claims, and offer further evidence of ethnic counts as illustrative of both the individual and the society that produced them.

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Necropolitical settler colonialism: Sophia Martensen, ‘Necropolitics, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples in Canada’, Criminological Review, 21, 2021, pp. 50-64

30Aug21

Abstract: This paper critically engages with Mbembe’s (2003) theory of necropolitics within the context of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. Part one of this paper provides a historical overview of the relationship between Indigenous Peoples in Canada and settlers. In the second section, Mbembe’s (2003) theory of necropolitics is examined. In the third and final section, this paper applies the necropolitical framework to the social determinants of health and the incarceration of Indigenous Peoples in Canada to argue that the State plays a crucial role in the creation of an Indigenous death-world and maintaining their suffering. Thus, this paper argues that the State is not directly killing Indigenous Peoples, but actively injuring this subset of the population through service delivery and carceral conditions.

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The art of settlers: Johanna Bockman, ‘The Aesthetics of Gentrification: Modern Art, Settler Colonialism, and Anti-Colonialism in Washington, DC’, International Journal of Urban and Regional research, 2021

30Aug21

Abstract: In 1988 a local homeowner in Washington, DC, commissioned a 30-foot mural of an artwork by modernist painter Piet Mondrian on the side of a public housing building, along with several other similar murals across the street. Three months later all the residents of the public housing development were moved out. Later, the buildings were destroyed. Here I explore how these murals enabled the residents’ permanent displacement. Explaining this displacement and destruction by pointing to the federal Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE) VI policy is completely insufficient. I argue for looking beyond the conventional actors in policy history to other actors, such as, but not limited to, aesthetics, art, artists and art purveyors. I examine Mondrian’s years in Paris, during which he developed his abstract art and philosophy of spiritual evolution, white supremacy and total urban renewal. The homeowner brought Mondrian’s art and philosophy to Washington, DC, at a time of an ideological shift towards global revanchism and gentrification. These specific murals reveal the settler colonial nature of gentrification in confrontation with anti-colonial art and geographies. This study provides new insight into gentrification by illuminating the battles of multiple globalizations in cities and even on individual blocks.

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