settler colonial studies blog

Settler writing: Tyler Nickl, The School of Stegner: Settler Colonialism and Academic Creative Writing at Postwar Stanford, PhD dissertation, University of Nevada, 2021

13Jul21

Abstract: This dissertation examines the relationship between settler colonialism and academic creative writing by taking as a case study the program founded at Stanford by the writer Wallace Stegner. Founded in 1946, the Stanford program was among the first to offer university training and teaching opportunities for creative writers. The program attracted an impressive roster of acclaimed writers—many whose backgrounds resembled Stegner’s own origins in a white working-class, settler family, and many who shared his interests in regional identity and nature writing. Because the new discipline of creative writing espoused literary modernism’s commitment to self-reflexivity, these writers frequently wrote upon the meanings and legacies of settler colonialism as they reflected on their personal experiences and contextualized their stories within US history and within creative writing’s emergent disciplinary identity. Read together, I argue the authors I consider here constellate to demonstrate the discursive range of postfrontier US settler colonialism in the mid- to late-twentieth century. Each chapter compares two writers from the Stanford program to demonstrate the literary relevance of settler colonialism on such issues as patriarchy, femininity, racism, and sense of place. This study brings settler colonial studies and American literary history into dialog to bring nuance into settler colonial studies’ treatments of literary representation and to place academic creative writing in the longer historical context provided by a view of settler invasion as a structure that perpetuates itself into the present.

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The settler energy form: Jennifer Matchett, Form Transition: Decarbonization Beyond Settler Modernity, MA Dissertation, Harvard, 2021

13Jul21

Excerpt: Recent discourse about climate change and the spotlight it has put on global energy systems have raised calls for new relationships to energy under a variety of open-ended terms: decarbonization, energy transition, green economy, etc. Following architectural theorist Elise Iturbe [and others], this project understands such calls for energy transition as a deeper contradiction in the structures of global modernity as not just dependent on fossil fuels but in fact shaped by their logic, perpetuated through practices, norms, and institutions in a self-replicating carbon form. Carbon form works to name carbon modernity as form inclusive of the cultural, economic, and political conditions of social life sedimented into a spatial algorithm made possible by a certain source of energy, though not dependent on its continued usage. Thus, as Iturbe writes, “if solar panels are increasing the value of a real estate object, in a precarious neoliberal economy, that is carbon form” – that is, it is not just decarbonization of energy infrastructure but the dismantling of carbon form itself that is needed to break the structural norms of carbon modernity. Drawing on indigenous epistemologies, critical feminist studies, decolonial theory and situated entanglement, this thesis identifies carbon modernity as the persistence of the formal configuration of territory, infrastructure, and neocolonial revenue as the preconditions for carbon form—settler form – and argues that dismantling these cycles of extraction and exploitation require form transition. Form transition must be messier terrain than energy transition, by design.

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The settler’s security blanket: Vanessa Nicholas, ‘The naturalisation of settler colonialism by a flowered Irish quilt in Upper Canada’, International Review of Environmental History, 7, 1, 2021, pp. 21-36

11Jul21

Abstract: Studying an embroidered quilt that Mary Morris (1811–97) made as a young girl in Ireland four years before she transported it to Upper Canada in 1829, this article argues that the floral decorative traditions imported by British women to British North America had a political dimension. The quilt, which is a patchwork of printed cottons surrounding panels of white cotton embroidered with representations of flowers, birds, insects and hunting scenes, combines embroidered motifs inspired by Indian chintz textiles with printed cotton fabrics of English manufacture featuring floral designs. As such, Morris’ flowered quilt represents the imperial economy that enabled settler colonialism in Canada. This is significant because it suggests that the seemingly mild-mannered domestic objects prized or made by British women in Upper Canada contributed to a visual and material culture that was invested in destabilising the environmental and cultural sustainability of Indigenous life.

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Gendered settler orders: Margaret Cook, ‘Emotional challenges to masculinity in the 1930s Callide Valley closer settlement, Australia’, International Review of Environmental History, 7, 1, 2021, pp. 63-82

11Jul21

Abstract: When the Callide Valley closer settlement scheme was opened in central Queensland in 1927 its design was based on a gendered rural ideal. A farming man was to be hard-working, stoic and tough, able to withstand the unpredictable climate and environmental conditions to tame the land, build the new nation and provide for his family; acts by which he could construct and demonstrate his settler masculinity, while cultivating the land. Through an analysis of settler correspondence to a Queensland government enquiry in 1934, this article problematises the myths of masculinity in this rural community to explore the emotional and mental strain on male settlers when the environment posed limits to settler economic and agricultural success.

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Settler reproductive control: Sandhya Ganapathy, ‘Unfolding Birth Justice in Settler States’, Feminist Anthropology, 2021

11Jul21

Abstract: There is growing scholarly and public attention toward the stark racial disparities in birth outcomes in the US. To lower disparate rates of Indigenous and Black infant mortality rates and maternal mortality rates, public and elected officials have proposed extending comprehensive prenatal care and medical resources and addressing racial biases in healthcare delivery. These efforts aim to bring minoritized and marginalized peoples and communities “into the fold.” In this essay, I consider the potential dangers of such contemporary efforts by critically analyzing historical initiatives to address birth outcomes and reproductive health in Indigenous communities. By foregrounding settler colonial social orders and their links to settler capitalism, I show how historical efforts to bring Indigenous peoples “into the fold” jeopardized Indigenous birth and reproductive capacities, while also upholding heteropatriarchal notions of sexuality, family, and racial difference.

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A spectre is haunting the settler colony: Jonathan Dunkon, ‘Spectres of Settlement’, Sydney Review of Books, 29/06/21

11Jul21

Excerpt: This fantasy of belonging is a motif in a number of archetypic explorer narratives. The explorer’s heroic death in conflict, either with Indigenous people or the hostile landscape, transforms him into a sacrificial Aeneas whose death atones for colonial transgression and contributes to an authentic sense of settler dwelling.

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Settler colonialism explains overpolicing (go figure): Jean-Denis David, Megan Mitchell, ‘Contacts with The Police and The Over-Representation of Indigenous Peoples in The Canadian Criminal Justice System’, Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 2021

08Jul21

Abstract: There is abundant evidence on the over-representation of Indigenous peoples in Canadian correctional facilities but, there is, however, limited research on the over-representation of Indigenous peoples at other stages of the criminal justice system. This article examines self-reported contacts with the police by Indigenous peoples in Canada as a way of to broaden our understanding of their over-representation in the criminal justice system. Settler colonialism is used as a theoretical framework to better assess the various processes by which Indigenous peoples and police may come into contact. Using data from the 2014 General Social Survey, we quantitatively examine the prevalence of various types of police contacts for Indigenous and non-Indigenous respondents. Results suggest that Indigenous peoples are more likely to encounter the police for a variety of reasons including, law enforcement or for non-enforcement reasons, including being a victim or a witness to a crime, and for behavioural health-related issues. Results are discussed within the context of historical and ongoing settler colonial practices and the over-representation of Indigenous peoples in the criminal justice system.

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The erosion of settler colonialism: Philip Steer, ‘The culture of erosion: Settler colonialism, geological agency, and New Zealand literature, 1930s–1950s’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2021

08Jul21

Abstract: The Pākehā (settler) writing that flourished in New Zealand in the middle decades of the twentieth century is often seen as an attempt to ground settler culture in the precolonial earth. Produced at a time when erosion was seen as a pressing national and global environmental crisis, however, this essay argues New Zealand literary culture in fact was suffused with awareness of settlement’s profoundly damaged landscape. Returning to prominent critical statements, prose, and poetry from this period — notably by Allen Curnow, Charles Brasch, Monte Holcroft, and Frank Sargeson — reveals that imagery of erosion was central to imagining the nature and impact of settlement in geological terms. In contrast to the antagonistic relationship with nature plotted in these texts, writers such as Ursula Bethell and Herbert Guthrie-Smith offered alternative possibilities for environmental thought through models of geological understanding that drew on religious vocabularies and Māori thought. At the broadest level, focusing on settler literature produced in a moment of environmental crisis framed in geological terms has the potential to illuminate critical responses to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

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Administrative detention as settler colonial elimination: AmyNethery, ‘Incarceration, classification and control: Administrative detention in settler colonial Australia’, Political Geography, 89, 2021, # 102457

05Jul21

Abstract: Administrative detention, a form of non-judicial incarceration, was a powerful tool of settler colonialism. Administrative detention enables governments to incarcerate whole categories of people, often indefinitely and under unregulated conditions, to manage perceived threats to national identity, integrity, or security. In Australia, various forms of administrative detention have been implemented almost continuously since British settlement. By treating different forms of administrative detention as variations of the same category of governmental power, this article depicts this form of incarceration as fundamental to the creation and character of settler colonial societies. The article develops a history of Australian administrative detention by identifying the striking similarities between three historical forms – Aboriginal reserves, quarantine stations, and enemy alien internment camps – and immigration detention in the present day. Administrative detention has been used to establish order and hierarchy in the settler colonial state by classifying populations into subgroups, and has contributed to the character of its culture: in particular, the precarious sense of belonging afforded to some categories of non-citizen, and the primacy of executive power in controlling these categories. The article offers an endogenous explanation for the entrenchment of immigration detention policy, despite its flaws and harms.

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A settler May Day: Robert Hudson Vincent, ‘Proteus and the Moles: Settler Colonial Relations in Thomas Morton’s May Day Poem’, Early American Literature, 56, 2, 2021, pp. 373-394

05Jul21

Abstract: This article contributes to the history of settler colonial relations in early New England by revealing previously missed allusions in Thomas Morton’s May Day poem. I uncover references to Captain Robert Gorges and the Council for New England that provide new information about the colonial history of Massachusetts from 1624 to 1627. I also demonstrate how Morton wrote his poem not only as a critique of Puritan colonial ambitions, but also as a defense of his own cavalier form of settler colonialism. In contrast to the typological and isolationist practices of the “moles” at New Plymouth, Morton encourages social and sexual relations with the Wampanoags in his May Day poem to promote an aristocratic and cavalier future for America. Morton poetically fashions himself a colonial Proteus, uniquely capable of adapting to the American landscape and husbanding the First Peoples in a way the Pilgrims never could.

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