settler colonial studies blog

Settler violence is also sexual violence: Mythili Rajiva, ‘A comparative analysis of White and Indigenous girls’ perspectives on sexual violence, toxic masculinity and rape culture’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: North American feminist scholarship on violence against women (VAW) focuses primarily on gendered-based violence and does not substantively incorporate intersectionality. In this paper, I offer a comparative analysis of Canadian Indigenous and White middle-class adolescent girls’ narratives of toxic masculinity, rape culture and sexual violence. I use VAW research, Indigenous feminist theory and girlhood studies to focus on the following: (1) the ‘boys will be boys’ discourse, (2) the feminist critique of the stranger danger discourse and (3) the surveillance of girls. I analyze focus group data with girls (aged 13–19 years). I am interested in how girls both accept and resist the status quo in their day-to-day negotiations with family, peers, schools and public spaces.

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Settler ideal communities: Emily R.M. Lind, The White Settler Colonial Landscape of Toronto’s Wychwood Park, PhD dissertation, Carleton University 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: Mythologized as a former artist’s colony, Wychwood Park is a gated community in midtown Toronto that encompasses fifty-eight homes built at the turn of the twentieth century. Wychwood Park’s landscape plan is one of Canada’s earliest examples of a garden suburb – a suburban design model derived from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century English Garden City movement. The Park boasts the highest concentration of Arts and Crafts domestic architecture in Toronto. Famous early residents included artists and art patrons who were instrumental in establishing what became the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Ontario College of Art and Design, and the Ontario Society of Artists. In this dissertation, I argue that Wychwood Park is a white settler colonial landscape. This argument is informed by the idea of landscape as an actor in social and political processes, rather than a reflection of them. The physical landscape of Wychwood Park, and the extent to which it reflects the ideas and values that sustain settler colonial rule, are seriously interrogated in this project. I am interested in the ways that a neighbourhood like Wychwood Park can teach Torontonians something about how patriarchy and racism work and what it means to live in an environment shaped by gendered/racialized thinking and social organization. I am informed by Richard Schein’s contentions that “discourses of racialized social relations work through landscapes”
and that landscapes are the sites in which racialized discourses become “materialized.” In this dissertation, I situate the patriarchal and racialized social relations of settler colonialism within the material landscape of Wychwood Park. This approach highlights Wychwood Park’s engagement with the settler colonial project, addressing a gap in existing literature on the Park specifically and on Toronto history as a whole.

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Secular settlers: Stacey Gutkowski, ‘Secular feelings, settler feelings: the case of Palestine/Israel’, Religion, State and Society, 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: Scholars have not yet discussed how secular and settler-colonial emotions intersect in contexts such as Palestine/Israel. This article addresses the gap. It explores one case of settler, secular emotion, using data from a larger study on secular Jewish-Israeli millennials after the 2014 Gaza War. It analyses how the Jewish-Israeli settler experience problematises ‘Jewish secular’ feelings and vice versa. Stressing the need to study secular sentiments intersectionally, it offers Bourdieu’s field and habitus as a new conceptual framework. This article argues that the dominant power dynamics within a given context will also predominantly shape people’s emotions – though, critically, not always.

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Settler colonialism and its environments: Roberta Biasillo, ‘Socio-ecological colonial transfers: trajectories of the Fascist agricultural enterprise in Libya (1922-43)’, Modern Italy, 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: This paper intertwines the two historiographical concerns of migration and colonialism by exploring the case of Italian rule in North Africa from 1922 to 1943 and by adopting the analytic ground of the environment. The role played by the environment in targeting and shaping specific social groups, forming and grounding specific policies, creating and preventing social and natural transfers, has been overshadowed until now, particularly in relation to Italian colonialism. This study articulates the Fascist agricultural enterprise in Libya around the watershed event of the colony’s 1932 pacification. To illustrate its development, it looks at the environment-making processes and transfers entailed in the transformation of the Italian colonial project. This reconstruction contributes to the environmental history subfields of migration and colonialism and invites historians to further explore the first decade of Italian rule in Libya and not to limit historical explorations to the lens of settler colonialism.

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Again, on distinguishing colonies and settler colonies: Krishan Kumar, ‘Colony and Empire, Colonialism and Imperialism: A Meaningful Distinction?’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: Colony and empire, colonialism and imperialism, are often treated as synonyms. This can be acceptable for many purposes. But there may be also good reasons to distinguish between them. This article considers in detail one important attempt in that direction by the classicist Moses Finley. It argues that there is considerable strength in that approach, putting the stress as it does on the distinctiveness of the settler community. It is also valuable in suggesting that early-modern Western colonialism marked a new departure in an older history of imperialism, thus once again suggesting the need for a conceptual separation of the two. But the article concludes that ultimately more may be lost than gained by insisting on the distinction. In particular, it inhibits wide-ranging comparisons between ancient and modern, and Western and non-Western, empires, which can often suggest illuminating connections and parallels. The field of empire studies gains by drawing on the rich store of examples provided by the whole history of empire, from the earliest times to now. Western colonialism is part of that story; to separate it out is to impoverish the field.

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The settlers look to the stars: R. A. Rosenfeld, ‘Exploring the History of Colonialism and Astronomy in Canada’, Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, 117, 2, 2021, pp. 89-95

30Mar21

Abstract: Many societies have recently experienced increasing calls for racial and social justice, spurred by lethal abuses of authority and power originating in systemic imbalances. Land acknowledgements of varying degrees of sincerity have been confected, statues of slave traders have been toppled, and buildings, streets, and communities have been renamed. Research and educational institutions have not been untouched by this; the statements and records of benefactors have come under increased scrutiny. Many bodies, including astronomical ones, have started processes of self examination, and established committees to address issues of reform. The problems are generally considered to arise from colonialism continuing to shape post-colonial societies—an unwelcome haunting of the present by the past. The better we know that past, the better equipped we are to change what has to be changed. This paper looks at the history of colonialism and astronomy in Canada.

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Settlers steal children now: Theresa Rocha Beardall, Frank Edwards, ‘Abolition, Settler Colonialism, and the Persistent Threat of Indian Child Welfare, SOCArXiv, 2021

30Mar21

Abstract: Family separation is a defining feature of the relationship between the U.S.government and American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) families and tribal nations. The historical record catalogues this relationship in several ways including the mass displacement of Native children into boarding schools throughout the 19th century and the widespread adoption of Native children into non-Indian homes in the 20th century. Child removal was commonplace, and explicitly directed at the elimination of Native cultures and nations through aggressive assimilation. This violent legacy eventually prompted the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978. TheICWA introduced federal protections for Native children, families, and tribes against unnecessary removal and affirmed the role of the tribe as an important partner in child welfare proceedings. To what extent has this landmark legislation changed the prevalence and frequency of Native family separation since 1978? What can be done to reduce the threat of the child welfare system on the well-being of Native families today? In this Article, we use administrative and historical data to statistically evaluate the magnitude of change in AIAN family separation since the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act and locate the institutional pathways by which AIAN families are funneled into the child welfare system.Our findings reveal that despite long-standing treaty responsibilities to support the health and well-being of tribal nations, high rates of separation among AIAN children persist. In particular, we find that the frequency ofAIAN children’s placement into foster care has remained relatively stable since the passage of the ICWA, that AIAN children remain at incredibly high risk of family separation through the child welfare system, and that the post-investigation removal decision by child welfare agencies is a key mechanism of inequality in family separation. We situate these findings within theories about settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession to illustrate that the continuous removal of Native children from their families and tribal communities is not an anomaly. Instead, we argue that the very intent of aWhite supremacist settler-state is to dismantle Native families and tribal nations. Based upon these findings, we shift our focus away from the particularities of Indian child welfare and argue that the child welfare system more broadly must be abolished in order to stop the routine separation of Native children from their families by the state. Left intact, child protection systems prioritize surveillance and separation over welfare and support, affecting non-White children and families in immeasurable ways. We suggest that the ICWA has provided, and will continue to provide, a necessary intervention to protect Native families so long as this intrusive system remains. We conclude by exploring how an abolitionist approach to child welfare might positively impact Native families by immediately redirecting social and financial resources into the hands of Native families and working cooperatively with tribal communities to promote Indigenous communities of care.

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Settler colonialism as infrastructural mediation: Rafico Ruiz, Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier, Duke University Press, 2021

30Mar21

Description: From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheries off Labrador’s coast. In Slow Disturbance Rafico Ruiz engages with the Grenfell Mission to theorize how settler colonialism establishes itself through what he calls infrastructural mediation—the ways in which colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the creation and maintenance of infrastructures. Drawing on archival documents, maps, interviews with municipal officials, teachers, and residents, as well as his field photography, Ruiz shows how the mission’s infrastructural mediation—from its attempts to restructure the local economy to the aerial surveying and mapping of the coastline—responded to the colony’s environmental conditions in ways that expanded the bounds of the settler frontier. By tracing the mission’s history and the mechanisms that enabled its functioning, Ruiz complicates understandings of mediation and infrastructure while expanding current debates surrounding settler colonialism and extractive capitalism.

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Refusing reconciliation and teaching how and why: Kevin Lowe, Nikki Moodie, Sara Weuffen, ‘Refusing Reconciliation in Indigenous Curriculum’, in Bill Green, Philip Roberts, Marie Brennan (eds), Curriculum Challenges and Opportunities in a Changing World: Transnational Perspectives in Curriculum Inquiry, Springer, 2021, pp. 71-86

25Mar21

Access the chapter here.

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The Western outside the West: Alex Trimble Young, ‘Settler Colonial Studies and/as the Transnational Western: Resistance and Representation in Academic Discourse and Cultural Production ‘, History of the Present 11, 1, 2021, pp 80–105

24Mar21

Abstract: The article explores contemporary debates regarding the representation of Indigenous resistance in the field of settler colonial studies by putting the work of Australian theorist Patrick Wolfe into conversation with the political allegories articulated in two contemporary Western films. Its first section, tracing what Wolfe called his “pharmacological indebtedness” to Gayatri Spivak, considers the methodological problems for settler colonial studies that have emerged from Wolfe’s critique of the settler intellectual’s representation of Indigenous resistance. The second section suggests an alternative direction for transnational settler colonial studies by undertaking a comparative reading of two films—Hell or High Water (2016) written by US settler filmmaker Taylor Sheridan, and Goldstone (2016) written and directed by Indigenous Australian (Gamilaroi) director Ivan Sen. Both films collapse the detective genre with settler colonialism’s most recognizable representational genre: the Western. In so doing, they articulate narratives about the ongoing crimes of settler colonialism that offer novel perspectives on the question of what is knowable—and by whom—under settler colonialism’s structure of violence.

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