settler colonial studies blog

Settler racism: Michaela M McGuire, ‘Deconstructing legitimized racism on Haida Gwaii’, AlterNative, 2021

19Aug21

Abstract: In this critical commentary, I examine the manifestation of racial tensions on Haida Gwaii—an archipelago in what is now known as Canada—between settlers and citizens of the Haida Nation. Racism has been entrenched and legitimized over generations leaving its implications unquestioned. When settler communities border colonially imposed reserves, racialized boundaries and tensions result. Indigenous claims to the land and to self-determination call into question the legitimacy of colonialism and subsequently reinforce the us versus them mentality. The assertion of Haida Nationhood and self-determination disrupts the rhetoric of settler superiority. Haida peoples are deemed a threat needing to be controlled. Challenging racialized hierarchies, settler complacency, and racism in all its manifestations is an integral component to ensuring that the next generation of Haida citizens can live freely without fear of the pain of racism, ignorance, and shame.

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Before and after settler colonialism: Kyle Keeler, ‘Before colonization (BC) and after decolonization (AD): The Early Anthropocene, the Biblical Fall, and relational pasts, presents, and futures’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021

19Aug21

Abstract: Anthropocene debate centers on the start-date and the cause of the geologic Epoch. One argument for the Epoch’s start-date is the “Early Anthropocene,” contending humanity “took control” of Earth systems during the Neolithic Revolution. Adherents contend agriculture contributed to rising carbon emissions and laid the groundwork for societal ills such as colonialism and extractive capitalism. Such a deterministic theory erases centuries of relational agriculture practiced by Indigenous peoples in the Americas. This article upsets the narrative of the “Early Anthropocene” that would mark all agriculture and agricultural societies as destructive and extractive, and instead offers embodied Indigenous narratives that view agriculture as a relational system of partnerships between humans and other-than-human beings over centuries. First, I trace the “Early Anthropocene” narrative from its origins with paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman to its contemporary adherents and show how such a theory lines-up with the narrative of the Christianized Biblical Fall. I show that “Early Anthropocene” theorists portray agriculture as society’s “ultimate sin,” wherein humans fall from a hunter–gatherer Eden and must toil to cultivate crops, eventually giving way to colonialism and extractive capitalism, ultimately causing environmental degradation and destruction and leading to a second coming of the hunter-gathering Eden. I then argue against such stories, tracing examples of relational agriculture practiced prior to settler colonization into our contemporary moment by Cherokee, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Western Apache, Karuk, Coast Salish, and Ponca peoples. Such stories show a pattern of missteps, understanding, and knowledge production between human groups and the more-than-human, rather than the environmental and societal destruction that Early Anthropocene theorists portray as the inevitable end of agricultural societies. This study disproves the agricultural “Early Anthropocene” as a starting point for Earth’s Epoch. It also presents relational environmental understanding through decolonized agriculture on repatriated land as a future method for interacting with the other-than-human environment.

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Sacrificial settler colonialism: Marshall Scheider, Adam Culver, ‘Liberalism, Settlement, Sacrifice: Towards a Genealogy of Sacrificial Politics’, McNair Symposium, 2021

17Aug21

Abstract: In recent years, political theorists have begun to explore the sacrificial dimensions of liberalism and neoliberalism in the global North. Little of this work, however, grapples with the ways settler colonialism informs contemporary political sacrifice or conceptions of the sacrificial. This paper traces a genealogy of contemporary political sacrifice through the archive of early British colonialism in North America. When theorists ignore this archive, they do more than render colonization mute: they also fail to apprehend what I term political sacrifice’s differential function—the mechanism by which sacrifice’s burdens fall on subordinated groups while its benefits accrue to the socially, politically, and economically powerful. Methodologically, the paper works across disciplines, establishing links between critical analyses of settler colonialism and studies in political theology. If a theological notion of sacrifice underpins modern notions of citizenship, and settler colonization furnishes an historical key to the differential function of modern political sacrifice, then a bridge is formed between two research programs which rarely interact. While the modern liberal state promises a politics founded on the dignity and rights of the abstract citizen, a close examination of the role of sacrifice in liberalism’s past and present underscores the limitations of liberal citizenship as a category of analysis. Foregrounding the violent structures of settlement, this genealogy exposes the constitutive character of asymmetrical sacrifice within American liberalism. In so doing, it unsettles some of liberalism’s core conceits: the displacement of violence by law, and the saliency of abstract citizenship.

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A settler ‘Palestine on the Pacific’? Maxwell Ezra Greenberg, The New Jewish Pioneer: Capital, Land, and Continuity on the US-Mexico Border, PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2021

17Aug21

Abstract: Ethnic Studies epistemologies have been central to the historicization and theorization of the US-Mexico border as an ordering regime that carries out structures of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and white supremacy. While scholars of Jewish history have explored the connections between colonial borders, transnational economic structures, and Jewish merchants, little is known about the role of Jewish entrepreneurs in the process of modern US-Mexico border formation. This dissertation explores how state, corporate, and military imperatives of US imperialism between the American Southwest and Northern Mexico created the conditions for Jewish inclusion into a white settler class and a model of Jewish continuity beyond Europe since the mid-nineteenth century. To explore the imprint of US settler colonialism on Jewish settlement, inclusion, and continuity, Chapter one reviews how Jews have been historicized as exceptional subjects in the contexts of colonial Mexico and the modern American West. Subsequently, Chapter two utilizes archival sources to reinscribe the Jewish border entrepreneur into the history of capitalist and military expansion across the new US imperial frontier. Working across the economies of extraction, policing, and revolution, Jewish border entrepreneurs reflect how commercial middlemen were neither separate nor above the racial and colonial contexts in which they existed, but were rather active and benefiting participants. Next, Chapter three investigates a regional movement for Jewish agricultural colonization and immigrant re-settlement that originated in late-nineteenth-century California and imagined a semi-sovereign Jewish nation-state in Baja California, Mexico. The plan to establish a “Palestine on the Pacific” persisted through 1939 and suggests that ideologies of Jewish nation-building were informed by structures of US settler colonialism, including liberal articulations of peoplehood, citizenship, and territorial belonging. Finally, Chapter four employs place-based, autoethnography in a Jewish cemetery in the Sonoran Desert to understand Jewish interpolation into US settler society as an ongoing process that can be explored through the Jewish American non-profit industrial complex. To conclude, I discuss how writing Jews into a modern, critical history of the US-Mexico border region contributes to Jewish and Chicana/o Studies by expanding methodological approaches to the analysis of settler colonial and neoliberal economies, and racial ordering in North America.

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Public containment as settler colonialism: Ashley Noel Mack, Tiara R. Na’puti, ‘Publicity as Containment’, Rhetoric, Politics & Culture, 1, 1, 2021, pp. 97-105

17Aug21

Abstract: A commitment to decolonization within analytical practice moves beyond merely marking violence from colonial legacies and histories; it requires actively working to dismantle settler colonial structures that dispossess and disappear Indigenous peoples and knowledges in the here and now, while reasserting Indigenous rights to land, self-determination, and sovereignty.

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The nothingness they have produced (and staged): Lilian Mengesha, ‘Being and Whiteness: Settler Possession and Performative Wokeness in The Thanksgiving Play’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 35, 2, 2021, pp. 39-52

17Aug21

Abstract: In the Sicangu Lakota playwright Larissa FastHorse’s piece The Thanksgiving Play, a white theatre educator, Logan, receives diversity grants to tell the true story of Thanksgiving in an elementary school production. Through the devising process, Logan seeks recognition of her “wokeness” in an effort to absolve white liberalism’s original sin of land theft and attempted Native genocide. When she uses the grant to hire a Native American actress, who turns out to play Native American and not be Native American, the play within a play begins to combust. The plot moves through a series of dead ends, staging the problems of settler colonial violence through the very impasse that is white guilt and racial representation. Moving from an analysis of the play’s final scene, where the four white characters stare at the “nothingness” they have produced, I explore how The Thanksgiving Play stages representation (and theatre writ large) as part of the crises of white supremacy and white possession.

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Settler health: P. Atkinson, M. Baird, K. Adams, ‘Aboriginal Health Consumers Experiences of an Aboriginal Health Curriculum Framework’, Australian Indigenous HealthBulletin, 2, 3, 2021

16Aug21

Excerpt: In settler colonised countries, medical education is situated in colonist informed health systems. This form of colonisation was characterised by overt racism and the gaining of territory through the domination and elimination of the Indigenous (Indigenous meaning here Indigenous people globally) population. The remaining populations were subjected to a process of elimination via aggressive assimilation into colonist society. Strenuous efforts were made to micro-manage their lives in an attempt to remove identity, language, culture and connections to family and Country. To justify this action, Indigenous peoples were exotified and misrepresented as uncivilised by colonists, in contrast to the colonisers, who were portrayed as heroes bringing civilisation to them. However, despite the continued resistance of Indigenous people to settler colonialism, its ideological and racist informed practices and processes continue to impact social goods such as education and health care up to this day.

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The sexual violence of settler colonialism: Lorien S. Jordan, ‘Belonging and Otherness: The Violability and Complicity of Settler Colonial Sexual Violence’, Women & Therapy, 2021

16Aug21

Abstract: In this article, I problematize sexual violence as a gendered and raced tool of colonial dominance. Though the theoretical framework of settler colonialism, I demonstrate how colonialism in the United States influences current discourse and policy around sexual violence. First, I explore the ways that colonialism positions women as victims and chattel of men. Secondly, I consider why White women who are positioned thusly lean into the male dominance which disenfranchises them, thereby further disenfranchising other-embodied persons. Moving between a historical and contemporary review, I merge empirical and anecdotal evidence to make clear that sexual violence is the rule, not the exception. To conclude, liberation focused therapy and digital feminism is discussed for therapists who wish to confront the colonial forces that obfuscate the conditions under which sexual violence is produced.

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Settler colonial Christianity: Sonja Thomas, ‘”Studying Up” in World Christianity: A Feminist Analysis of Caste and Settler Colonialism’, Journal of World Christianity, 11, 2, 2021, pp. 195-209

16Aug21

Abstract: In this article, based on a keynote address delivered in 2019 at the conference on “Currents, Perspectives, and Ethnographic Methodologies for World Christianity” held at Princeton Theological Seminary, I discuss studying up and how scholars of World Christianity need to grapple with the ways Christianity has facilitated the work of and supported state policies and institutional structures of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and brahmanical patriarchy. “Studying up” refers to studying the functionings and institutionalized nature of racist, casteist and settler heteropatriarchies. For me, Laura Nader’s “Up the Anthropologist” opened up new ways to think about, critique, and intervene into the colonialist framework of Anthropology’s roots. Accordingly, I examine potential reasons why we study down, and the difficulty in studying up. I start by looking at studying up as it pertains to Christianity in India, where Christians are a minority. I consider the intersections of casteism and brahmanical patriarchy, how privileged academics may fail to recognize spaces and activism outside the academy that always studies up, access to sites of power, and potential retaliation against scholars who attempt to study up. I then move to talk about studying up in the Christian majority country of the United States, white supremacy, Catholic settler colonialism, and the sexual abuse of Native children in Catholic boarding schools. To fully understand and support anticaste, decolonial, and feminist antiracist movements for social justice worldwide, I argue that the time for studying up in World Christianity is long overdue.

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Settler colonialism against revolution: Jane Lydon, ‘”Mr Wakefield’s Speaking Trumpets”: Abolishing Slavery and Colonising Systematically’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2021

16Aug21

Abstract: This essay examines the significance of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of ‘systematic colonisation’ within the transition from Caribbean slavery to settler colonisation to reveal the sequential relationship of these two imperial systems. In the context of industrialisation and social unrest, the anti-slavery movement performed an important purpose for Britain’s ruling classes by simultaneously accruing moral authority and sanctioning oppressive new forms of disciplined labour, including the treatment of Australian convicts as slaves. During the ‘ameliorative’ 1820s phase of the anti-slavery movement, experimental colonial schemes combined both abolitionist principles and pro-slavery interests, particularly visible in the form of arguments against free labour and the advocacy of racial, as well as class, labour hierarchies. Wakefield’s theory embodied principles of labour discipline drawn from the plantation, allied to new techniques of land commoditization, offering a solution to the looming problem of abolition. These principles were invoked in debating the emancipation bill introduced in May 1833, as all sides agreed on the need for freed slaves to work for wages; they were subsequently applied in the Caribbean after emancipation by planters attempting to maintain productivity during and beyond the apprenticeship period. After 1833, the abolitionists’ zeal could be turned to other causes, and reformers seeking to end transportation and develop the settler colonies deployed an entwined discourse of anti-slavery and systematic colonisation.

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