settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonist a bit ahead of themselves: Margaret Boone Rappaport, Konrad Szocik (eds), The Human Factor in the Settlement of the Moon: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Springer, 2021

26Nov21

Description: Approaching the settlement of our Moon from a practical perspective, this book is well suited for space program planners. It addresses a variety of human factor topics involved in colonizing Earth’s Moon, including: history, philosophy, science, engineering, agriculture, medicine, politics & policy, sociology, and anthropology. Each chapter identifies the complex, interdisciplinary issues of the human factor that arise in the early phases of settlement on the Moon. Besides practical issues, there is some emphasis placed on preserving, protecting, and experiencing the lunar environment across a broad range of occupations, from scientists to soldiers and engineers to construction workers. The book identifies utilitarian and visionary factors that shape human lives on the Moon. It offers recommendations for program planners in the government and commercial sectors and serves as a helpful resource for academic researchers. Together, the coauthors ask and attempt to answer: “How will lunar society be different?”

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Land is the issue: Environment and Planning A: Matthew Scobie, Glenn Finau, Jessica Hallenbeck, ‘Land, land banks and land back: Accounting, social reproduction and Indigenous resurgence’, Economy and Space, 2021

24Nov21

Abstract: This paper situates Indigenous social reproduction as a duality; as both a site of primitive accumulation and as a critical, resurgent, land-based practice. Drawing on three distinct cases from British Columbia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and Bua, Fiji, we illustrate how accounting techniques can be a key mechanism with which Indigenous modes of life are brought to the market and are often foundational to the establishment of markets. We argue that accounting practices operate at the vanguard of primitive accumulation by extracting once invaluable outsides (e.g. Indigenous land and bodies) and rendering these either valuable or valueless for the social reproduction of settler society. The commodification of Indigenous social reproduction sustains the conditions that enable capitalism to flourish through primitive accumulation. However, we privilege Indigenous agency, resistance and resurgence in our analysis to illustrate that these techniques of commodification through accounting are not inevitable. They are resisted or wielded towards Indigenous alternatives at every point.

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Settlers celebrating settler colonialism: Daisy M. Raphael, A Landmark Celebration: Canada 150, Settler-Colonialism, and the Politics of Diversity & Reconciliation, PhD Dissertation, University of Alberta, 2021

24Nov21

Abstract: My dissertation analyzes the politics of settler-colonial national celebrations through an analysis of Canada 150, marking the sesquicentennial of Confederation. Landmark celebrations like Canada 150 are milestones marking intervals along a journey of supposed national progress. Yet, landmark celebrations, I argue, are also land celebrations – events aimed at storying Canadian state sovereignty claims and producing and reproducing settler attachments to Indigenous land. Land is simultaneously central to landmark celebrations and fundamentally obscured as contested territory over which the nation-state requires control in order maintain its legitimacy. ‘Feel good’ discourses of diversity, inclusion, and reconciliation underwrite the renarration of ‘Canada’ as a happy project, worthy of celebration. Drawing upon critical-race feminist, settler-colonial studies, and Indigenous theory and scholarship, I unmap Canada 150 in three stages. First, I analyze former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s “Road to 2017”, which begins with the commemoration of the bicentennial of the War of 1812. Canadian Political Science (CPS) scholars tend to read the 1812 commemoration as one component of Harper’s effort to “rebrand” Canada as a white, British Warrior Nation. I complicate this understanding by highlighting the ways the commemoration emphasizes discourses of diversity, inclusion, and reconciliation. The 1812 monument, “Triumph Through Diversity”, for example, portrays 1812 as a project of mutual cooperation amongst diverse peoples. By starting with Harper’s “Road to 2017” narrative, I demonstrate that Conservatives and Liberals alike mobilize diversity as Canada’s strength. From Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory on whose land British, French, American, and Indigenous peoples fought the War of 1812, this dissertation travels north of the tree line to examine Canada C3, a reconciliatory expedition through the Northwest Passage marking Canada’s sesquicentennial. The C3 Expedition, I argue, is a project of storying Canadian sovereignty that obscures Inuit sovereignty by positioning them as diverse Canadian people. In fact, narratives of reconciliation and diversity slide together in southerners’ stories of the C3 Expedition, as if encounters between diverse peoples are themselves a form of reconciliatory work. This slippage signals a need to critique the emergence of diversity and reconciliation as interrelated discourses that support Canadian state-making. Finally, my dissertation travels to the heart of the settler-colonial imagination and the centre of Canada Day celebrations – Parliament Hill – on Algonquin territory in Ottawa. This chapter compares Indigenous and non-Indigenous occupations of urban public space during Canada 150 celebrations. On one hand, the City of Ottawa turned city parks and parking lots into campgrounds to manage the anticipated influx of visitors to Ottawa during the celebrations, inviting settlers to occupy public space. On the other hand, the settler-colonial state identified Algonquin water protectors as public safety threats for raising a tipi on Parliament Hill in a reoccupation of traditional, unceded Algonquin territory. Comparing these two examples sideby-side demonstrates the ways settler-colonial national celebrations such as Canada 150 rely upon and reinforce settler relations to land, at the same time as Indigenous resistance successfully undermines the Canadian nation-state’s claims to territory and legitimacy.

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With a chapter by Ana Deumert on ‘Beachspaces: Racism and Settler-Colonial (Im)mobilities at the Shoreline’: in Anna De Fina, Gerardo Mazzaferro (eds), Exploring (Im)mobilities: Language Practices, Discourses and Imaginaries, Multilingual, 2021

24Nov21

Access the chapter here.

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Heteronormative settler colonialism: Porscha Fermanis, ‘Queering the Imperial Romance: Settler Colonialism, Heteronormativity, and Interracial Intimacy in Sygurd Wiśniowski’s Tikera’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 17, 3, 2021

24Nov21

Excerpt: Drawing on the insights provided by scholarship on colonial biopolitics and
queer Indigenous studies, and building on the idea of queer studies as a “subjectless”
critique that has “no fixed political referent” (Eng et al. 3), this article considers
how Tikera—and the archive of nineteenth-century settler fiction from Australia and
New Zealand more generally—positions Indigenous, mixed-race, and minority
peoples as queer to heteronormative settler colonial regimes.

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Settler colonialism’s violent inheritance: E Cram, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West, University of California Press, 2022

24Nov21

Description: Violent Inheritance deepens the analysis of settler colonialism’s endurance in the North American West and how infrastructures that ground sexual modernity are both reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them. E Cram redefines sexual modernity through extractivism, wherein sexuality functions to extract value from life including land, air, minerals, and bodies. Analyzing struggles over memory cultures through the region’s land use controversies at the turn of and well into the twentieth century, Cram unpacks the consequences of western settlement and the energy regimes that fueled it. Transfusing queer eco-criticism with archival and ethnographic research, Cram reconstructs the linkages—”land lines”—between infrastructure, violence, sexuality, and energy and shows how racialized sexual knowledges cultivated settler colonial cultures of both innervation and enervation. From the residential school system to elite health seekers desiring the “electric” climates of the Rocky Mountains to the war-time incarceration of Japanese Americans, Cram demonstrates how the environment promised to some individuals access to vital energy and to others the exhaustion of populations through state violence and racial capitalism. Grappling with these land lines, Cram insists, helps interrogate regimes of value and build otherwise unrealized connections between queer studies and the environmental and energy humanities.

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Gentrification’s logic of elimination: John Kamaal Sunjata, ‘Gentrification as Settler-Colonialism: Rrban Resistance Against Urban Colonization’, Hamptonthink, 09/11/21

22Nov21

Exccerpt: … ‘Black lives do not matter, the ways in which Black people’s bodies can serve white interests; however, matter a great deal. The settler-colonial logic of elimination and the white supremacist logic of Black fungibility converge around the question of gentrification’ …

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Critiquing settler art criticism: Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis, ‘Land-Based Art Criticism: (Un)learning Land Through Art’, Visual Arts Research, 47, 2, 2021, pp. 102-114

22Nov21

Abstract: This article provides an overview of how land-based settler colonial critique can reorient art criticism and art education to expand the scope of art and art practice to critical considerations of land politics and social justice, particularly in terms of the repatriation of Indigenous lands. In particular, land-based perspectives can help to rethink place/land by offering decolonizing methods for critiquing Western works of art that address place. Art educators’ ability to understand and critique settler colonialism in art has been hindered by Eurocentric art criticism. This article seeks to reveal settler colonial imperatives and ambitions regarding land through a critical analysis of American landscape paintings and land art. This piece further examines contemporary Indigenous artists’ site-specific works through adopting decolonial, land-based inquiry. Land-based art criticism interrupts the dominant mode of art inquiry to more comprehensively analyze art associated with place/land and expand the scope of social, cultural, and political understandings of social equity.

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Resilient settler colonial mythologies (in Argentina, for example): Geraldine Lublin, ‘Adjusting the focus: looking at Patagonia and the wider Argentine state through the lens of settler colonial theory’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2021

19Nov21

Abstract: Notwithstanding predictions about the exhaustion of the so-called Myth of White Argentina, recent developments signal the continuing vitality of Argentina’s European creation myth. How can it be that, despite the victories secured by more than three decades of Indigenous and Afrodescendant activism, it may prove so hard to topple? This article borrows insights from settler colonial theory to address the endurance of the Myth of Whiteness in Argentina not only as a discursive construction of racial domination but also as a fundamental structure that obscures the shady claims of the Argentine state to the land it occupies. As well as investigating the explanatory power of the analytical framework for the particular case, the article unpicks the layers contained in the narrative of White Argentina, drawing attention to the crucial role the European creation myth has played not only in Argentine history but most importantly in the current cycle of ‘progressive neoextractivism’. Contextualising Argentina within settler colonial studies also contributes to debunking accounts of Argentinean exceptionalism by locating Argentina within global logics of settler colonial domination and providing a wider framework which may help identify illuminating commonalities in the international context.

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Irish settler colonialities: Ronan McDonald, ‘Vincent Buckley, Colonialism and the Problem of Irish-Australian Identity’, Australian Literary Studies, 2021

19Nov21

Abstract: Perhaps no Australian writer or thinker has probed the condition of Irishness in Australia more extensively than the poet-critic Vincent Buckley (1925-88). His first memoir Cutting Green Hay (1983) considers how his own family negotiated their Irish heritage, often through modes of strategic amnesia in which Irish cultural modes mutate into Australian identity. This, for him, results in a cultural deprivation that he seeks to remedy in himself, not least through many extended visits to Ireland, his ‘source country’ or ‘imagination’s home’. Yet in Memory Ireland (1985) and other essays, he offers a scarifying analysis of contemporary Irish society also marked by a loss of memory, which he ascribes in this case to the post-colonial torpor and imaginative enervation of independent Ireland. So Buckley seeks to reveal the scotomisation, or mental blind spots, that characterise both Irish-Australia and modern Ireland. Drawing mainly on prose works, including archives and unpublished sources, this essay seeks to bring to the fore the question of colonialism in Buckley’s reflections on Irishness, attentive to some of his own blind spots. It considers his deep debt to Yeats, but also the impossibility for Buckley, as he saw it, to follow Yeats’s example in creating a national imaginary that unified settler and native. This impacts Buckley’s sense of how an artist achieves success in the international literary field, but also maps back onto the question of setter-colonialism in Australia. I argue that Indigenous Australia shadows his thinking about Irish colonialism, sometimes explicitly, as in the poem ‘Gaeltacht’ from The Pattern (1979), but in a more fraught and culpable way than simply through assertions of shared victimhood. If the conquest and dispossession of Gaelic Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mirrors that of Indigenous Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth, it also deflects, redirects and sublimates it for an Australian poet.The Irish have certainly been historical victims of British colonialism, but they have also been beneficiaries of settler-colonialism in Australia, as his poem ‘Dick Donnelly’, the Irish-named Aboriginal man, ‘the last songman of his people’, poignantly attests.

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