settler colonial studies blog

Italian settlers: Roberta Biasillo, Claudio de Majo, Daniele Valisena, ‘Environments of Italianness: for an environmental history of Italian migrations’, Modern Italy, 2021

04May21

Abstract: Italian mobility played a fundamental part in the history of the peninsula, since it was a global phenomenon reaching every continent except Antarctica. The Italian diaspora counted over 26 million expatriates who left the country between 1876 and 1976 and, to date, Italy remains one of the states that has contributed the most to the Great European Migration. Although impressive, these figures do not take into account pre-unitary Italian mobilities or Italian settlements in colonial territories. By adopting the perspective of environmental history of migration, this collection of essays allows us to consider various contextually embedded migratory environments, creating a means to find common constitutive features that allow us to explore and identify Italianness. Specifically, in this special issue, we intend to investigate how Italians transformed remote foreign environments in resemblances of their distant faraway homeland, their paesi, as well as used them as a means of materially re-imagining landscapes of Italianness. In return, their collective and individual identities were transformed by the new surroundings.

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Celebrating settler diversity celebrates settler colonialism: Daisy Raphael, ‘”Triumph through Diversity”? The War of 1812 Commemoration and Settler-Colonial Myth Making’, International Journal of Canadian Studies, 2021

04May21

Abstract: Canadian Studies scholars have tended to explain former Conservative Prime Minster Stephen Harper’s nationalist vision as one focused on creating an image of Canada as a “Warrior Nation.” Studies of the commemoration of the bicentennial of the War of 1812 from 2012–15 situate it within this attempt to erase liberal multicultural narratives in favour of an emphasis on whiteness, Britishness, and military masculinity. This article argues, however, that the 1812 commemoration relied upon discourses of diversity, multiculturalism, inclusion, and reconciliation at the same time that it reinforced settler-colonial whiteness. A new monument unveiled on Parliament Hill in 2015, for example, represents the War of 1812 as a moment of “Triumph through Diversity.” In the context of polarizing debates around nation, monuments, and reconciliation, this article illustrates that attempts to produce a more “diverse” commemoration do not necessarily challenge settler colonialism.

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The security of settlers: Ahmad H. Sa’di, ‘Israel’s settler-colonialism as a global security paradigm’, Race & Class, 2021

04May21

Abstract: Israeli surveillance industries are well integrated in the global surveillance market. This incorporation is achieved through marketisation, labour processes and the circulation of capital. Even Israel has been considered by many as a successful securitising model. In this article, it is argued that this success is the outcome of several factors, including the shared premises of Israel’s settler-colonial regime and neoliberal data-based globalised capitalism, which has become a leading sector in the current economic formation. Furthermore, it reflects the advent of the securitising states and concurrently the rise of the security-industrial complex in the US and, to a lesser degree, in Europe. Yet, the acceptance of Israeli-settler colonial surveillance methods and Weltanschauung as a model points to the erosion of hitherto cherished values such as privacy, trust, autonomy, care and solidarity.

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Opposing settler colonialism: Omar Barghouti, ‘BDS: Nonviolent, Globalized Palestinian Resistance to Israel’s Settler Colonialism and Apartheid’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2021

04May21

Abstract: Despite its military, diplomatic, and economic power, Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler colonialism, and apartheid still views the nonviolent, Palestinian-led global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as a “strategic threat” to its system of injustice, waging a protracted war against the movement accordingly. This essay aims to contextualize Israel’s war on BDS by examining the movement’s origins, principles, impact, and theory of change. It analyzes the most critical challenges BDS is facing and its most promising strengths, especially its balancing of ethical principles with strategic effectiveness and its intersectional approach to the struggle for Palestinian freedom, justice, and equality.

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Including the claims of settlers: Nadim N. Rouhana, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (eds), When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, Cambridge University Press, 2021

04May21

Description: Over the years, there have been increasing intersections between religious claims and nationalism and their power to frame and govern world politics. When Politics Are Sacralized interdisciplinarily and comparatively examines the fusion between religious claims and nationalism and studies its political manifestations. State and world politics, when determined or framed by nationalism fused with religious claims, can provoke protracted conflict, infuse explicit religious beliefs into politics, and legitimize violence against racialized groups. This volume investigates how, through hegemonic nationalism, states invoke religious claims in domestic and international politics, sacralizing the political. Studying Israel, India, the Palestinian National Movement and Hamas, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Iran, and Northern Ireland, the thirteen chapters engage with the visibility, performativity, role, and political legitimation of religion and nationalism. The authors analyze how and why sacralization affects political behaviors apparent in national and international politics, produces state-sponsored violence, and shapes conflict.

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Settler colonialism is continuous: Daniel Black, ‘Settler-Colonial Continuity and the Ongoing Suffering of Indigenous Australians’, e-International Relations, 2021

04May21

Abstract: Central to the discourse of contemporary indigenous affairs is the notion that settler-colonialism is an unfortunate historical event that has since ceased. Such assumptions fail to recognise the enduring settler-colonial structures that continue to shape the oppression of modern indigenous Australians. It is precisely this notion that this essay seeks to deconstruct. The present essay will argue that the experience of indigenous Australians has been shaped throughout history, and continues to be shaped in the present by what will be referred to as the settler-colonial ‘logic of elimination.’In making this argument, the basic precepts of settler-colonial theory will first be sketched, in which it will be contended that the concept of settler-colonialism is best viewed as a continuous structure aimed at expropriating and maintaining control over land, rather than as a concluded genocidal event that exists only in the history books. Tracing Australian settler-colonialism in chronological stages, the argument will then follow that by denying sovereignty to the ‘uncivilised native’ in the pre-colonial stages, the ‘civilised settler’ eliminates the native first in a notional sense within international law discourse, thus justifying the subsequent colonial advancement into the ‘discovered’ territory. This notional elimination manifested in a particularly potent form in Australia – by designating the entire continent as ‘uninhabited land’, British colonial authorities essentially eliminated indigenous Australians under international law as if they had never existed in the first place – thus bypassing the legal requirement of treaty-making. It shall then be argued that the frontier era, characterised by overt violence and forced spatial segregation, can be best understood as the first stage of actual elimination aimed at clearing the native from his land. It will then be submitted that assimilationism continued this structural process of elimination by removing the growing population of ‘half-caste’ children from their tribes and recategorizing them within white settler-society.

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‘American Girl’ is a settler: Stephanie Schroeder, ‘Encountering the Other: Settler Grammars, Native Protestant Ideology, and Citizenship in the American Girl Books’, Children’s Literature in Education, 2021

04May21

Abstract: This paper explores the American Girl book series and its relation to the history of American education and the school’s role in the creation of the ideal American girl. Focused on the Kirsten Larson series of American Girl books, this paper explores how the settler grammars that characterize Kirsten’s encounters with an “Indian girl” named Singing Bird become entangled with the institution and ideologies of schooling to produce a certain vision of the American girl, both in the books. I argue that the author’s use of settler grammars to promote the Native Protestant Ideology throughout the series teaches Kirsten not only lessons about citizenship and morality, but the role schools should play in cultivating certain citizenship beliefs and traits in American schoolchildren. In particular, the books in the Kirsten series promotes the myth of the innate superiority of white immigrants and Native Protestant culture over the Indigenous peoples, cultures, and lands those immigrants colonized. Living in story, these representations and ideologies continue the ongoing work of colonization in a settler nation as American schoolchildren today continue to consume these oppressive narratives wrapped neatly under the title “American Girl.”

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Settler colonialism erases exogenous alterities as well as indigenous ones: Anthony W. Wood, Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, University of Nebraska Press, 2021

04May21

Description: Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many African Americans moved westward as Greater Reconstruction came to a close. Though, along with Euro-Americans, Black settlers appropriated the land of Native Americans, sometimes even contributing to ongoing violence against Indigenous people, this migration often defied the goals of settler states in the American West. In Black Montana Anthony W. Wood explores the entanglements of race, settler colonialism, and the emergence of state and regional identity in the American West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By producing conditions of social, cultural, and economic precarity that undermined Black Montanans’ networks of kinship, community, and financial security, the state of Montana, in its capacity as a settler colony, worked to exclude the Black community that began to form inside its borders after Reconstruction. Black Montana depicts the history of Montana’s Black community from 1877 until the 1930s, a period in western American history that represents a significant moment and unique geography in the life of the U.S. settler-colonial project.

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Settler colonialism’s poisoned water: Philippe Burns, Eran Shor, ‘Racial stereotyping of indigenous people in the Canadian media: A comparative analysis of two water pollution incidents’, Canadian Review of Sociology, 2021

29Apr21

Abstract: This article examines the discourse surrounding issues affecting Indigenous peoples within the Canadian mainstream media. We compare the coverage of two cases of water poisonings—one in a primarily‐white town and the other in an Indigenous community—in 282 newspaper articles from the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and Windspeaker. We show that the dominant coverage of these two very similar cases diverged significantly. The Indigenous workers in charge of the water supply were regarded as incompetent and incapable to fill their position while the entire community was described as drunk, lazy, helpless, and perpetually dependent on government aide. By contrast, white workers were seen as relatable and in command of their erroneous actions, while the residents of the town were described simply as the victims of an unfortunate tragedy. Such reporting fails to contextualize the events or point out the injustices of Canadian colonialism, thus contributing to the perpetuation of these injustices.

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Disacknowledging the acknowledgement: Joe Wark, ‘Land acknowledgements in the academy: Refusing the settler myth’, Curriculum Inquiry, 2021

27Apr21

Abstract: Land acknowledgements have become almost ubiquitous in post-secondary education settings in Canada. However, the origins and widespread popularity of these practices has gone largely unexamined. In this article, the literature on land acknowledgement practices in Canada is reviewed, focusing in particular on the growing criticisms of these acknowledgements. While initially understood as culturally based political statements to resist the erasure of Indigenous presence and colonial violence, these practices have been repurposed in settler institutions. Land acknowledgements have now become deeply embedded in state-sponsored “forgive-and-forget” reconciliation efforts that seek to absorb Indigenous peoples into the body politic of “good Canadians”. This shift in acknowledgement practices has been increasingly criticized for devolving into box-ticking exercises, strictly symbolic gestures, moves to settler innocence, and attempts to rewrite Indigenous and settler colonial history. Analysing the literature using a lens of settler colonial theory, I argue that institutionalized land acknowledgements in Canada do not pertain to actual Indigenous peoples. These statements reference a mythical fabrication of Indigenousness that is consistent with settler dreams of benevolence, innocence, and the end of colonization in Canada. This co-optation of Indigeneity has important implications for recent efforts to “Indigenize the academy” through the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges in curriculum. In response to this subversion of Indigenous knowledges, a stance of refusal on the part of Indigenous members of the academy can be a demonstration of agency in institutions in which we are relatively powerless.

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