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‘Returning’ the land? Chizuko Sato, ‘Land Tenure Reform in Three Former Settler Colonies in Southern Africa’, in Shinichi Takeuchi (ed.), African Land Reform Under Economic Liberalisation, Springer, 2021, pp 87-110

18Oct21

Abstract: This study explores the challenges of land tenure reform for three former settler colonies in southern Africa–Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa. While land redistribution programmes have been the primary focus of land reform for these countries since independence, land tenure reform for the inhabitants of communal areas is an equally important and complex policy challenge. Before independence, the administration of these areas was more or less in the hands of traditional leaders, whose roles were sanctioned by the colonial and apartheid authorities. Therefore, one of the primary concerns with respect to reforming land tenure systems in communal areas is related to the power and authority of traditional leaders in the post-independence period. This study highlights striking similarities in the nations’ land tenure reform policies. All of them gave statutory recognition to traditional leaders and strengthened their roles in rural land administration. In understanding this ‘resurgence’ or tenacity of traditional leadership, the symbiotic relationship between the ruling parties and traditional leaders cannot be ignored and should be problematised. Nonetheless, this chapter also argues that this obsession with traditional leadership may result in the neglect of other important issues related to land tenure reform in communal areas, such as the role of customary land tenure as social security.


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Moon settler colonialism: Myrriah M. Gómez, ‘Toward a Chola Consciousness: Examining Nuclear Colonialism in Lunar Braceros, 2125-2148’, Science Fiction Studies, 48, 3 2021), pp. 500-516

18Oct21

Abstract: Adding to a growing body of scholarship on Chicanafuturism and borderlands science fiction, this essay interrogates the politics of labor in Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s novella Lunar Braceros 2125-2148. It examines the breakdown of the heteronormative nuclear family and its transformation into another version of the nuclear family, one that results from radioactive contamination and exposure. I argue the protagonist Lydia becomes a chola cyborg whose cyber-consciousness is created by nuclear alienation. I demonstrate how the environmental effects of the neoliberal economy, as portrayed in Lunar Braceros, are reflective of the sociopolitical conditions of Indigenous communities in the US.


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The fire of settler colonialism: Kirsten Vinyeta, ‘Under the guise of science: how the US Forest Service deployed settler colonial and racist logics to advance an unsubstantiated fire suppression agenda’, Environmental Sociology, 2021

18Oct21

Abstract: Over the last century, the United States Forest Service (USFS) has reversed its stance on the ecological role of fire – from a militant enforcer of forest fire suppression to supporting prescribed fire as a management tool. Meanwhile, the Karuk Tribe has always prioritized cultural burning as a vital spiritual and ecological practice, one that has been actively suppressed by the USFS. This article examines the discursive evolution of USFS fire science through the critical lens of settler colonial theory. A content analysis of agency discourse reveals how the USFS deployed anti-Indigenous rhetoric to justify its own unsubstantiated forest management agenda. USFS leadership racialized light burning by deridingly referring to it as ‘Piute Forestry.’ The agency has also discredited, downplayed, and erased Indigenous peoples and knowledges in ways that invoke tropes of the ‘Indian savage,’ the ‘Vanishing Indian,’ and the concept of ‘Terra Nullius.’ It wasn’t until the 1960s – in the context of the Civil Rights and American Indian Movements – that the USFS began contemplating the value of prescribed fire. This research illustrates the complicated relationship between the settler state and Western science, as well as the malleability of scientific discourse in the face of changing social contexts.


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Japanese settler colonialism in deep time: Yuriko Furuhata, ‘Archipelagic Archives: Media Geology and the Deep Time of Japan’s Settler Colonialism’, Public Culture, 2021

18Oct21

Abstract: This article examines the intertwined cultural politics of geology, mining, and archival media in the context of Japan’s development as an archipelagic empire. The first Japanese geological map (1876) was completed by American geologist Benjamin Smith Lyman, who surveyed mineral deposits in Hokkaidō, Japan’s northern island, long inhabited by the Indigenous Ainu people. Following decolonial and archipelagic thoughts, the author reads across earthly archives of geological strata and colonial archives of historical documents to elucidate the conceptual duality of archipelago as a geological formation and a geopolitical territory. In tracing this formative era of Japan’s resource extraction and settler colonialism, which precedes and informs the current rush to extract rare earth minerals necessary to maintain global digital infrastructures, this article aims to both de-Westernize the methodological orientation known as media geology and offer a prehistory of contemporary rare earth mining in the Pacific Ocean.


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Visualising settler colonialism: Callie Maidhof, ‘View from the Hilltop: Settler-Colonial Visuality in Palestine’, Visual Anthropology Review, 2021

16Oct21

Abstract: This article examines settler-colonial visuality in West Bank Jewish-Israeli settlements. It argues that settler visuality is attuned to a bourgeois ideal of domestic life, made possible by practices of unseeing. Reading Israeli encounters with the Wall and other artifacts of the occupation, I show that these visual encounters help settlers position themselves politically within Israel—and settlements, as Israel itself. Unseeing is a perceptual practice that makes and remakes space, one required to build the kind of settlements most Israeli settlers desire. This vision is oriented to the domestication of space, cohering with the demands of an extended military occupation.


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Childhood friendships against settler colonialism: Rose Butler, ‘Moral childhoods: the role of morality in friendship-making among children from refugee backgrounds in rural, multicultural settler Australia’, Children’s Geographies, 2021

16Oct21

Abstract: This article examines how children draw on local sources of morality and moral worth to forge connections, build friendship and enforce distinctions across difference in a rural multicultural city of settler Australia. Children’s friendship-making practices across ethnic and class differences have been widely explored in urban Australia. Far less is known about how children connect and distance in regional and rural places, notably those experiencing profound social change. This paper examines friendship work among children from humanitarian refugee backgrounds in one rural city of south-eastern Australia through the lens of morality and moral worth. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it shows how deeply classed and racialised ideas about morality and moral worth scaffold children’s social worlds, delineate which behaviours are valorised, and can exclude children whose actions do not meet the necessary moral criteria of belonging. A focus on morality provides rich insight into how children shore up familiarity and build affinities with one another while simultaneously policing and enforcing boundaries. This has important implications for understanding how children from refugee backgrounds build relationships and friendships in rural settler Australia, and the implications of such work for children’s everyday geographies of belonging.


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Cosmopolitanism against settler colonialism: Miasol Eguíbar Holgado, ‘Cosmopolitanism and strange encounters in George Elliott Clarke’s The Motorcyclist’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2021

16Oct21

Abstract: This article engages a form of cosmopolitanism that departs from universalist precepts, and instead underscores the role of situated difference in establishing productive dialogues among particular world views. It also works with the associated concept of the cosmopolitan stranger to delineate relationships among othered groups. Reading encounters between strangers in George Elliott Clarke’s 2016 novel The Motorcyclist, it attempts to illustrate how othered subjectivities interact in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, and how these interactions are profoundly shaped by colonial, white-supremacist, and patriarchal power structures. Divisions and hostilities among strangers are contingent on hierarchical and seemingly fixed oppositions in terms of race, class, or gender. Use of the figure of the cosmopolitan stranger helps to demonstrate that these conflicts can be approached in self-critical terms, and that simple binaries of exclusion may be replaced by a more nuanced reading of relational difference.


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Drawing settler colonialism: Dominic Davies, ‘Terrestrial Realism and the Gravity of World Literature: Joe Sacco’s Seismic Lines’, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 8, 3, 2021, pp 301-322

16Oct21

Abstract: Through a close reading of Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), a graphic novel about the struggle of the Dene people in Canada’s Northwestern territories, this article shows how Sacco effects a “peripheral realism” that draws the systemic continuities of different phases of colonial modernity into view. The article then describes Sacco’s “terrestrial realism,” which combines his peripheral realism with the dialectical participation of the reader as well. Finally, in a concluding theoretical discussion, I consider how the practice of drawing allows us to think through a response to modernity’s combined and uneven development that is both materialist and decolonial at the same time. Although the former typically insists on singularity and totality, and the latter promotes a contradictory plurality, the peripheral and terrestrial realisms of Paying the Land suggest a way for theorists of world literature to find a point of methodological solidarity that is both in and against capitalist modernity’s gravitational force.


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The settler country coexists: Michael A. Genovese, Alysa Landry, ‘Introduction: Building an “Empire of Reason” on Stolen Land’, in Michael A. Genovese, Alysa Landry, US Presidents and the Destruction of the Native American Nations, Springer, 2021

12Oct21

Abstract: What does the story of European domination of the land and peoples of the “new world” tell us about the ideals and the realities of American political development? A republic founded on the high ideals of equality, fairness, and liberty was also a nation build on violence and racism. How did these “two countries” manage to coexist? And how could men (this is mostly a story of men) who fought for such high ideals, abandon them so easily when confronted with the indigenous peoples who occupied the land they coveted?


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Unreading the settler: Suzanne Ericson, ‘Reading space for new worlds in Jordan Abel’s Un/inhabited’, Studia Neophilologica, 2021

12Oct21

Abstract: Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel created Un/inhabited by rearranging and deleting large swathes of ninety-one western novels. Unsurprisingly, then, this poem is largely interpreted as an invitation to readers to join Abel in critically examining the colonial mindset underpinning the western genre. While this alone makes the poem a valuable resource in literary studies classrooms, I look beyond what readings Un/inhabited creates the conditions for to ask what reading practices it affords. The poem’s experimental form presents a challenge to readers as it resists attempts to read using conventional strategies. Taking a cue from the book’s title, I ask what happens when readers enter the space of the poem as reader-discoverers, and how they can be helped to engage with it in meaningful ways. Guided by Abel’s decolonial poetics and his play on the metaphor of text as landscape, I draw on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theories of nomadology and smooth, striated, and holey space to suggest that Un/inhabited’s own spaces invite anti-settler, nomadic modes of reading. These render texts porous, undermining their capacity to determine the shape of the worlds they narrate. Approaching texts in this way enables readers to shift from passive recipients of information to world shapers.


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