settler colonial studies blog

German and United States colonialisms compare (and often reflect on settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination): Janne Lahti (ed.), German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World: Entangled Empires, Springer, 2021

03Feb21

Description: This book contributes to global history by examining the connected histories of German and United States colonial empires from the early nineteenth century to the Nazi era. It looks at multiple and multidirectional flows, transfers, and circulations of ideas, people, and practices as Germany and the US were embedded in, and created by, an interconnected world of empires. This relationship was not exceptional, but emblematic of the diverse entanglements that created colonial globality. Colonial entanglements between Germany and the United States took on many forms, but these shared and intersecting histories have been underanalyzed. Traditionally, Germany and the United States have been understood to have taken, respectively, an authoritarian and liberal path into modernity. But there is no neat dichotomy, as the contributors to this book illustrate. There are many more similarities than have previously been appreciated – and they are the result of multilayered entanglements made visible via conquest, settler societies, racialization, and rule of difference. Building on present historiographies of empires, colonialism, and globalization, this book introduces new analytical possibilities for examining these two relatively understudied empires alongside each other, as well as at their intersections.

Access the Introduction here.

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Settler criminal justice and settler health institutions combine: Thalia Anthony, Harry Blagg, ‘Biopower of Colonialism in Carceral Contexts: Implications for Aboriginal Deaths in Custody’, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2021

03Feb21

Abstract: This article argues that criminal justice and health institutions under settler colonialism collude to create and sustain “truths” about First Nations lives that often render them as “bare life,” to use the term of Giorgio Agamben. First Nations peoples’ existence is stripped to its sheer biological fact of life and their humanity denied rights and dignity. First Nations people remain in a “state of exception” to the legal order and its standards of care (Agamben 1998). Zones of exception place First Nations people in a separate and diminished legal order. Medical and health agencies have been instrumental in shaping colonial “biopower,” both in and beyond carceral settings to ensure that First Nations lives are managed in accordance with the colonial settler state project. This project is able both to threaten First Nations rights to live and to maintain settler self-perceptions of decency and care. We illustrate this discussion with reference to the tragic and unnecessary deaths in custody of twenty-two-year-old Yamatji woman Ms Dhu in 2014 in South Hedland Police Station, Western Australia, and twenty-six-year-old Dunghutti man David Dungay Jnr in Long Bay jail in Sydney, NSW, in 2015. Health professionals and police demonstrated callous disregard to Ms Dhu and Mr Dungay—treating them as “bare life.”

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Tourist settler colonialism: Pierre Walter, ‘Settler colonialism and the violent geographies of tourism in the California redwoods’, Tourism Geographies, 2021

31Jan21

Abstract: Hidden from view, underneath the tourism landscape of the California redwoods, is a genocidal settler colonial history of warfare, massacres, and forced removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands. This history has been ignored in the touristic narrative of people and place presented by a redwoods attraction in northern California, which are rife with unacknowledged histories and geographies of violence. Framed by scholarship on violent geographies in tourism development, this study shows how redwoods tourism has erased Indigenous people and history from the landscape, and how new ‘power-laden’ tourism imaginaries have been created in their place. The new tourism narrative is found in the spatial layout, interpretive signage, exhibits, website, museum of Native American artifacts, and interpretive trails in a roadside attraction called Trees of Mystery. Secondary historical literature and maps of local Yurok ancestral territory and land ownership construct a counter-narrative of the site’s geography and history. Findings reveal a fanciful settler colonial history highlighting heroic male loggers on the ‘frontier’, and representations of ingenious Native Americans as historic people who produced beautiful tools, clothing and artwork but are now defeated, dead, and exotic. In fact, white settlers, backed by the U.S. Army and local militias, appropriated and logged Native American redwood lands, and in doing so massacred resident Yurok People and forced the survivors from their traditional territories. Conversely, the Yurok People have been reclaiming ancestral lands, reviving cultural practices, and resisting settler colonialism from the early 1800s to the present-day. Across the Americas, countless other settler colonial tourism sites like these sit upon violent geographies. Unearthing the hidden geography of this particular site shows how decolonizing research might be undertaken at other tourism sites situated on stolen Indigenous lands in the U.S. and beyond.

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‘Never the submissive prey of settler colonialism’: Alison Whittaker, Nicole Watson, ‘First Nations Women: Law, Power, Story’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2021

31Jan21

Excerpt: For the greater part of our shared history, the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women were absent from scholarship as understood by the Australian colony. Those who wrote about our grandmothers, mothers and aunties viewed them through broken lenses that reflected only the pall of stereotypes. Black women were represented through various stereotypes that included the licentious jezebel and the docile servant. Yet Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have never been the submissive prey of settler colonialism. Resistance has been manifest in diplomacy, litigation, refusal, the withholding of labour, activism and writing. It is within the latter tradition that this special issue of the Australian Feminist Law Journal falls.

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On settler-indigenous coordination: Nadia Naser-Najjab, Shir Hever, ‘Elite and popular contradictions in security coordination: overcoming the binary distinction of the Israeli coloniser and the colonised Palestinian’, Critical Studies on Security, 2021

31Jan21

Abstract: Settler colonial theory has made a hugely significant contribution to the theorisation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but there is a danger that its application to the specific practice of security coordination could simply render the practice as an instrument of settler colonial rule. In this article, we would like to propose the important qualification that Coordination is, in practice, deeply conflicted and subject to multiple internal pressures, which extend from elites to public opinion. In accepting that Coordination can be appropriately viewed through a settler colonial lens, we would like to argue that it can also be viewed from ‘below’, and as an object of domestic political struggle that is implicated in legitimisation processes. Coordination is therefore simultaneously renounced and retained as part of the survival strategy of assorted elite groups. In order to demonstrate this, we reference Elite theory, interviews and online materials. Moreover, internal Palestinian divides suggest that opposition is more incomplete, partial and reactive within the neoliberal and settler colonial context.

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Settlers need help (how to stage an intervention): Daniel Platts, The Settler Colonial Catastrophe of White Supremacist Fantasy: Diagnosis, and Treatment Options for Settlers, MA dissertation, York University, 2021

26Jan21

Abstract: This paper utilizes marxist psychoanalysis to provide a diagnosis for the pathology of settler colonialism such that treatment options can be derived for settlers who wish to engage in the process of decolonization. The diagnosis identifies two mechanisms through which settler colonialism produces itself: the catastrophic violence of conquest, and the fantasy of white supremacy. It discusses their operation in settlers and the states they create to demonstrate the ways in which the fantasy causes violence that serves to maintain it. A special focus is given to the relation of capitalism to dispossession as I contend that attending to this injustice will give treatment the greatest chance of success. Building from this I argue that the only way to stop being a settler is to let go of the land, and that this will require nothing less than a mass movement against global capital. From this the discussion of treatment holds that settlers must learn how to engage in radical action without reproducing the violences of the system they seek to oppose and that this depends on their ability to confront the operation of fantasy within themselves. It is hoped this can be accomplished through the development of settler grounded normativity, a process which above all requires taking heed from indigenous nations already engaged in the struggle. The paper closes with a discussion of the parade and the blockade as two distinct methods for articulating grounded norms in the face of catastrophe.

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Settler colonial auxiliaries: James Pangilinan, Christine Peralta, Wesley Attwell, ‘Between Caregiving and Soldiering: Filipina Non-Citizens and Settler Militarisms in Israel’, Amerasia Journal, 2021

26Jan21

Abstract: While Filipinas often appear in studies of gendered reproductive care, Filipinos appear commonly as militarized labor extending American hegemony. Both sets of Filipinx labor aspire to attaining citizenship and rights to permanent settlement. This article focuses on Filipinas in the Israeli Defense Forces. Filipina IDF recruits have recently appeared in Israeli media in order to reframe Israeli settler militarism as benevolent. Yet these instrumental portrayals build on longer histories of Philippine-Israeli entanglement. By situating two Filipinas’ stories within transnational contexts of humanitarian and reproductive care, we highlight how legacies of U.S. and Israeli settler militarism tether the Philippines to Israel.

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Superhuman settlers now? Caleb Hylkema, Kelly Smith, ‘(Poster) Who’s Afraid of Little Green Men? Genetic Enhancement for Off-World Settlements’, Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology (SSoCIA) Conference, 12, 2020.

26Jan21

Description: There many threats facing the Earth that could put humanity (and indeed the entire terrestrial ecosystem) at existential risk. This is a brute fact we must face head on. And we should also be clear that this risk imposes a clear prima facie moral duty to establish successful settlements on other worlds sooner rather than later in order to ensure our survival. That will be no easy task, but one promising approach that could make it considerably easier is the use of genetic enhancement to give off-world settlers much the biological adaptations they need to thrive in the harsh conditions they will encounter. Of course, there are many ethical concerns here that also should not be taken lightly, though it’s our view that, in general, they can be handled if we approach them with care. We thus begin this chapter by responding to several of the more common objections to genetic enhancement. Some of these are well taken in general but don’t pose an insurmountable obstacle to using this technology for settlements, while others are based on unexamined terrestrial assumptions that do not apply in off-world contexts. Next, we discuss how this debate, as with so many debates about the future, tracks an unacknowledged fault line between idealists and pragmatists. Idealists tend to see an off-world settlement as an opportunity to start afresh and create a better world than we have ever experienced on Earth while pragmatists tend to argue that tough choices will inevitably have to be made and, in the final analysis, it’s better to have an acceptable settlement now than hope for a perfect one in the distant future. To illustrate our approach, we critique Schwartz’s (2020) recent argument for the creation of an off-world settlement accessible to all who wish to go. While this is certainly a laudable vision, for practical reasons it is simply not a feasible demand, at least initially. Finally, we offer a vision for a realistic use of genetic enhancement that might make settlements easier to establish and then discuss what sorts of unique problems these could create. In the final analysis, we believe it’s possible to create a morally acceptable off-world settlement in the near future, though doing so may well involve controversial technologies like genetic enhancement. But given the stakes we face, we have a moral duty to forge ahead, though this does not absolve us of the responsibility to listen carefully to critics who seek to restrain some of our less thoughtful impulses. What we decide to do has to strike a complex balance, but it is ultimately not morally defensible to substitute our dreams of an ideal settlement for the possibility of a real one.

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Settler colonial Israel, then and now: Jeff Halper, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State, Pluto Press, 2021

25Jan21

Description: For decades we have spoken of the ‘Israel-Palestine conflict’, but what if our understanding of the issue has been wrong all along? This book explores how the concept of settler colonialism provides a clearer understanding of the Zionist movement’s project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, displacing the Palestinian Arab population and marginalizing its cultural presence. Jeff Halper argues that the only way out of a colonial situation is decolonization: the dismantling of Zionist structures of domination and control and their replacement by a single democratic state, in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews forge a new civil society and a shared political community. To show how this can be done, Halper uses the 10-point program of the One Democratic State Campaign as a guide for thinking through the process of decolonization to its post-colonial conclusion. Halper’s unflinching reframing will empower activists fighting for the rights of the Palestinians and democracy for all.

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Settler colonial Taiwan: Katsuya Hirano, Lorenzo Veracini, Toulouse-Antonin Roy, ‘Vanishing Natives and Taiwan’s Settler-Colonial Unconscious’, in Shu-mei Shih, Lin-chin Tsai (eds), Indigenous Knowledge in Taiwan and Beyond, Springer, 2021, pp. 225-248

25Jan21

Abstract: What are the implications of recovering settler colonialism as a mode of domination that fundamentally shaped Taiwan’s history? The article argues that this uncovering is crucial to understanding the formation of successive polities on the island of Taiwan, but this is not to say that a settler-colonial studies lens should replace a colonial one.

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