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Settler colonialism in the Valley: Leila Ullmann, Shadows of the Silicon Valley: A Critical History of the High-Tech Industry, PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2021

20Jul21

Abstract: Weaving together history, policy, economics, and personal accounts, this thesis situates the Silicon Valley within a broader history of settler colonialism, land extraction, and labor exploitation. Challenging the popular mythology that surrounds the industry, I focus on the tangible harms it has brought to the local community that surrounds it. I argue that, since its inception, the Silicon Valley has depended upon both the geographical landscape of the Santa Clara Valley and the construction of a racialized underclass to perform the labor necessary for the industry’s rise and growth. This critique uncovers the undercurrents of structural harms embedded in the Silicon Valley.


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Walking country as a better acknowledgment? Ken Wilson, Mathhew R. Anderson, ‘The Promise and Peril of Walking Indigenous Territorial Recognitions carried out by Settlers’, International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 9, 2, 2021, #7

20Jul21

Abstract: This article proposes that if the permission and guidance of local Indigenous groups is obtained, and their protocols observed, a collaborative physical act of settler, or Indigenous-settler walking across territory on which events are to be held may constitute a more constructive form of ‘territorial acknowledgement’ than a verbal statement read out at such an event. By drawing sustained attention not only to Indigenous land but also to Indigenous title, resources, and jurisdiction, and by pointedly underlining the actual land in question, walking territorial acknowledgements can help settlers to develop an embodied sense of place-in-relation. In so doing they can move forward both the relationality implicit in Indigenous territorial recognition and the claims territorial recognitions make on settler bodies. These walk-acts diminish the superficial ‘virtue-signalling’ and public performance of contrition which too often attach to such acknowledgements, threatening to render them obsolete.


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Settlers even before getting there: Fariha Shaikh, ‘Spatial synchronicities: Settler emigration, the voyage out, and shipboard literary production’, in Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis (eds), Worlding the south: Nineteenth-century literary culture and the southern settler colonies, Manchester University Press, 2021

20Jul21

Excerpt: This chapter explores the spatialising methodologies of shipboard periodicals produced on three ships as they voyaged between Britain and Australia across the oceanic expanses of the southern hemisphere in the mid-nineteenth century: the Sobraon, the Somersetshire, and the True Briton. By the 1860s, newspapers produced on board the ship by passengers between Britain and the Antipodes were a regular affair: fair copies of newspapers were produced by hand and distributed around the ship, or, if the ship carried a printing press, newspapers were produced at sea. A critical body of work within the fields of settler colonial studies and the blue humanities has slowly begun to develop around this genre, with attention being drawn to the pivotal role that they played in shaping settler colonial aspirations and the broader contours of maritime literary culture. Shipboard periodicals are an ephemeral and marginal genre, in that they were an almost ubiquitous presence on voyages and held an important function and value at the time of their production, but are often characterised as being without ‘enduring literary value’. In contradistinction to this view, this chapter embeds maritime literary culture and the production of shipboard periodicals firmly within some of the key ideological frameworks of settler colonial discourse. It argues that if the production of shipboard periodicals produced sociability at sea, then this sociability was also embedded in settler discourses of race and power.


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Settlers settling elsewhere: Jason Rudy, Aaron Bartlett, Lindsey O’Neil, Justin Thompson, ‘Australia to Paraguay: Race, class, and poetry in a South American colony’, in Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis (eds), Worlding the south: Nineteenth-century literary culture and the southern settler colonies, Manchester University Press, 2021

20Jul21

Abstract: In 1893, Queenslander William Lane embarked with 234 white Australian immigrants for Paraguay, where they were to establish a utopian socialist community. Hundreds more Australians would follow, drawn to what was promised as a worker’s paradise in South America. According to the New Australia, a newspaper published in New South Wales prior to the emigrants’ departure, in Paraguay ‘the means of working, including land and capital, should belong to the workers, who, by co-operative working, could then produce to supply all their wants, and need not produce for the profit of anybody else’.1 Lane was a notorious racist, and his motivation for the Paraguayan colony was in part a response to the influx of Asian immigrants to Australia in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Our interest in Colonia Cosme, the town eventually established and maintained in the Paraguayan jungle, centres around its newspaper, the Cosme Monthly, and its accounting of minstrel performances there. We read Cosme’s poetry and song, and its engagement with the form of minstrelsy, as part of a larger effort by Lane and his fellow émigrés to situate the colony in relation to Australia, the United States, and Great Britain, specifically in racialised terms. Our chapter begins with an overview of Australia’s late-century labour crisis, which precipitated Lane’s migration scheme. We turn then to the Cosme Monthly and its complex negotiations of race and class via poetry and song.


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settler children and their indigenous counterparts: Hedi Viterbo, Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine, Cambridge University Press, 2021

20Jul21

Description: In this book, Hedi Viterbo radically challenges our picture of law, human rights, and childhood, both in and beyond the Israel/Palestine context. He reveals how Israel, rather than disregarding international law and children’s rights, has used them to hone and legitimize its violence against Palestinians. He exposes the human rights community’s complicity in this situation, due to its problematic assumptions about childhood, its uncritical embrace of international law, and its recurring emulation of Israel’s security discourse. He examines how, and to what effect, both the state and its critics manufacture, shape, and weaponize the categories ‘child’ and ‘adult.’ Bridging disciplinary divides, Viterbo analyzes hundreds of previously unexamined sources, many of which are not publicly available. Bold, sophisticated, and informative, Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine provides unique insights into the ever-tightening relationship between law, children’s rights, and state violence, at both the local and global levels.


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Settler colonial food systems: Molly Stollmeyer, Tensions in fostering ‘local food’ in the Northwest Territories: Contending with Settler Colonialism in Northern Research, MA dissertation, Carleton University, 2021

19Jul21

Abstract: Most food systems challenges in the Northwest Territories(NWT), including extractivism, climate change, and restrictive policies, are bound to processes of settler colonialism. Researchers working in northern contexts typically recognize the disruptive role colonialism had in shaping foodways, but often fail to contend with the ongoing realities of colonial forces and the role research has in upholding them. This thesis is situated in tensions I encountered in two research engagements working to support “local” food systems in the NWT: a community-academic partnership through FLEdGE Research and a traditional research project supported through a Mitacs fellowship. My aspirations to develop these engagements into a community-based participatory research (CBPR) thesis project brought me to the realization that settler colonialism had been insufficiently attended to. This thesis is the result of a reflexive analysis of my engagements as a southern-based settler researcher working in the North. It involves critically revisiting my preliminary fieldwork, interviews and observations, as well asliteraturesread, and writings formulated throughout my journey as a graduate student. It argues that southern-based researchers must attend to the ways our research reinforces harmful colonial narratives about the North and actively work to disrupt colonial continuities.


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The settler ‘holiday’ from capitalism’s contradictions: Lucas Heitkamp, The South Dakota Farmers’ Holiday Association: A Study of Agrarian Activism in the Rushmore State, MA dissertation, University of South Dakota, 2021

15Jul21

Abstract: The establishment of the South Dakota Farmers’ Holiday Association challenges many assumptions about the state. The commodity strike and foreclosure protests of the Farm Holiday movement captivated much of the state as the condition of agriculture worsened. Disgruntled agrarians demanded the federal government raise farm prices, place a moratorium on foreclosures, and address rural poverty. Most importantly, Farm Holiday leaders called for a guaranteed “cost of production.” This price setting plan would set commodity prices to a level where farmers were guaranteed to at least come out even on their yields. At South Dakota, the cost of production platform appealed to impoverished farmers. The few publications dedicated entirely to the Farm Holiday neglect the South Dakota movement. In fact, leading Farm Holiday historians maintain the South Dakota organization was ineffective. This study attempts to provide an in-depth look into South Dakota agrarianism. More specifically, this thesis makes the case the Farm Holiday had a greater impact on the state than previously understood. Regions of the state once believed to be outside of the parameter of agrarian protest held active Farm Holiday units. Although national newspapers did not extensively cover farm protest in South Dakota, weekly rural publications tell a much different story. Even as this research uncovers a number of unknown militant episodes in the state, it is clear the South Dakota movement encompassed a number of interests. A thorough examination of 1930s farm protest reveals much about the social, economic, and political history of South Dakota.




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The settler queer and the settler’s queer: Sony Coráñez Bolton, ‘Filipinx Critique at the Crossroads of Queer Diasporas and Settler Sexuality in Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado’, Journal of Asian American Studies, 24, 2, 2021, pp. 219-245

13Jul21

Abstract: This essay reckons with the relationship between Filipinx diaspora and settler colonialism by analyzing the ways that Miguel Syjuco’s novel Ilustrado (2010) aligns queerness with indigeneity. Filipino diasporic fiction and Filipino American studies scholarship have both critiqued the limitations of supposing a racial homogeneity in the construction of “Filipino America.” Queer diasporas critique has similarly affirmed the heterogeneity and multiple affinities that inform diasporic subjectivity. This article explores the ways that Filipinx diaspora is shaped by US settler coloniality and upon return to the “homeland” intensifies extant settler logics in the Philippine archipelago. In doing so, it argues that the straightness of the homeland and the diaspora can potentially collude in a homophobic settler logic that discards queer indigeneity in order to construct the diaspora as a space of literary freedom. Ilustrado curiously centers the “ilustrado,” a mixed-race, even hybrid, subject, around which a unified Filipino national consciousness subscribes to a homogeneity that necessarily reduces the nation. Even so, Syjuco’s novel allows for productive questioning around the relationship between queerness, settler colonialism, and diaspora. Ultimately, this article suggests that the field of Filipinx American studies is in a unique position to pay critical heed to the queer life of settler coloniality in the diaspora and at “home.”


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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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