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Settler colonialism and the Commune: Niklas Plaetzer, ‘Decolonizing the “Universal Republic”: The Paris Commune and French Empire’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 49, 3-4, pp. 585-603

12Feb21

Abstract: This article questions celebratory accounts of communard universalism by placing the 1871 Paris Commune within the space of French Empire. A first part analyzes the relation between the 1870 settler colonial revolt of the Algiers Commune (Commune d’Alger) and the 1871 Mokrani uprising against French rule in Algeria. While the Commune d’Algerpredated the Paris Commune and must be understood in the specific context of settler colonialism in North Africa, the case of Alexandre Lambert, Algiers delegate to the Paris Commune, sheds light on the colonial ambiguities of republican universalism more generally. The article suggests that universalist discourse foreclosed rather than enabled solidarity across struggles, as Lambert could understand the Commune’s emancipatory aspirations as entirely compatible with colonial domination. A second part traces the encounters between deported Parisian communards and colonized Kabyles and Kanak on the Île des Pins. These encounters show above all how communard universalism remained bounded by imperial domination and racialized epistemic frames. Yet attending to instances of political translation, they also point to a world-building solidarity across traditions of struggle.


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Settlers welcoming settlers: Yuval Tal, ‘The “Latin” Melting Pot: Ethnorepublican Thinking and Immigrant Assimilation in and through Colonial Algeria’, French Historical Studies, 44, 1, 2021, pp. 85-118

12Feb21

Abstract: This article explores how, through discussions about immigrant assimilation in fin de siècle Algeria, French republicans contemplated and wrote into law the ethnic traits of French national identity. Republicans assumed that the North Mediterranean immigrants who settled in Algeria shared ethnic origins with French settlers and consequently asserted that France should work to “fuse” the two groups. Assertions about immigrants’ ethnicity took different forms. In the colony they appeared either at the margins of colonial administrators’ attacks against immigrant communal organization or in literary representations of French-Mediterranean fusion. In the metropole republican legislators portrayed immigrants as innately prone to becoming French and thus supported the 1889 nationality law that naturalized them. The passing of the 1889 law prompted the creation of an explicitly ethnorepublican assimilatory model. The model’s proponents combined sociological and eugenicist principles to both socialize immigrants into the nation and promote the transfer of their Mediterranean “vigor” into French bodies.


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Settlers rejecting settlers: Andonis Piperoglou, ‘Envisioning Greek Refugees as ‘Farmers for Australia’: Christy Freeleagus, Land Settlement and Immigration Restriction in White Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, 52, 1, 2021, pp. 106-122

12Feb21

Abstract: In the early 1920s the Greek Consul General in Queensland, Christy Freeleagus, attempted to persuade Australian politicians, diplomats and immigration officials to grant assisted passage and allotments of land to Greek refugees. Making representations in the United Kingdom and Australia, Freeleagus claimed that Greek refugees, who were displaced due to an imposed transfer of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923, would make ideal agricultural settlers. While Freeleagus’ representations for a Greek land settlement scheme were ultimately unsuccessful, his advocacy reveals how Australia’s preference for British immigration overshadowed any likelihood that displaced Greeks could be humanitarianly assisted to immigrate and resettle in Australia as farmers. By focusing on Freeleagus’ advocacy and the refusal of Australian immigration officials to assist displaced Greeks, this article ties Australian history to studies on Greek-Turkish population exchange. It also reveals how the interwar dynamics of land settlement and immigration restriction in White Australia were interlinked.


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The settler curriculum: Matilda Keynes, Beth Marsden, ‘Ontology, sovereignty, legitimacy: two key moments when history curriculum was challenged in public discourse and the curricular effects, Australia 1950s and 2000s’, History of Education Review, 2021

12Feb21

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways that history curriculum has worked to legitimise dispossession through narratives that elide questions of Indigenous sovereignty, and which construct and consolidate white settler identity and possession.


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Food settler colonialism: Heather Elliott, ‘Unsettling Narratives: Settler Colonization in Food Movements on Turtle Island’, Sessions Sociologiques, 10, 1, 2020, pp. 51-62

09Feb21

Excerpt: Food Secure Canada (FSC) is the largest alliance of food movement actors in Canada and its biannual
Assembly is the largest food movement event in the country. Since its formation in 2001, FSC has
prioritized building relationships with Indigenous peoples by, for example, convening an Indigenous
Circle, facilitating significant participation of Indigenous communities in the 2012 People’s Food Policy
Project and ensuring strong Indigenous representation at its Assemblies. Nevertheless, at FSC’s most
recent Assembly (November, 2018), a number of Indigenous people and people of colour walked out
of the final day’s activities, asserting that FSC has not done enough to address their concerns and their
specific approaches. This situation reveals the tensions between settler-led2 food movements on the
one hand, and Indigenous efforts for food sovereignty on the other that co-exist with long-term
collaborations. This paper attempts to tease out some of the sometimes glaring, sometimes insidious
ways that food movements have struggled to meaningfully integrate Indigenous concerns, and offer
insight on possible ways forward.


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Decolonising and colonising: Gracelynn Chung-yan Lau, ‘Decolonizing my Hong Kong Identity as a Settler in Canada: An Expressive Arts-based Inquiry’, Creative Arts in Education and Therapy, 6, 2, 2020. pp. 153-170

09Feb21

Abstract: This paper documents an intermodel arts-based inquiry through engaging in expressive arts therapy. The author responded to reflexive questions: Who am I as a Hong Kong Chinese Canadian
in the indigenous-colonial context of the 21st century? How can I carry my own decolonization
through the arts? Carried out in Hong Kong and Ontario, Canada, this inquiry explored indigeneity, settler colonialism, personal and collective history, and family memories.


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Terra nullius? Bain Attwood, ‘The Limits of the Law in Claiming Rights to Land in a Settler Colony: South Australia in the Early-to-Mid Nineteenth Century’, Law and History Review, 38, 4, 2020

09Feb21

Access the article here.


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The settler garden: A. L. Constantine-Rogers, Space to Grow: ‘the Garden’ as a Place of Colonial and Capitalist Displacement, Control, and Social Transformation, MA dissertation, Utrecht University, 2021

09Feb21

Abstract: ‘The garden’ as both a conceptual framework and a material locality acts as a lush site of cultural analysis that helps investigate multiple phenomena, including climate change, colonialism, capitalism, and social transformation. This thesis analyzes these multiple interlocking systems of oppression through using ‘the garden’ as both a lens to help reveal these power structures, as well as an avenue to view how power operates within them. By analyzing the Anthropocene, including its universalizing language that does not consider the unequal causes and effects of climate change, ‘the garden’ is located within a temporal spatiality. Moreover, implicating colonialism and capitalism in the deleterious effects of climate change through Heather Davis and Zoe Todd’s critique of the Anthropocene, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s critique of capitalist systems, Sara Ahmed’s discourse on ‘anxiety,’ and José Esteban Muñoz’s ‘queerness as horizon,’ the universalizing narratives of ‘the end’ due to climate disaster are challenged. As new diverse and subversive ways of countering capitalism, colonialism, and environmental degradation are emerging, they frequently do not critically examine how those systems of oppression are intricately related to each other. Given this gap in research, this thesis discusses how the garden operates in settler colonial, capitalist societies as well as how it operates outside or in opposition to these frameworks. Grounding the analysis in settler colonial studies, gender studies, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial, and anti-racist frameworks, this thesis investigates power structures that hinder the necessary deconstruction of oppressive systems. Only through active subversion of hierarchies of oppression can ‘the garden’ become a means of challenging hegemony. When these systems are challenged, the ways in which it created splintered versions of ‘futurity’ emerges, allowing us to imagine how the garden can be utopic, dystopic, and transformative, and thus a location of social transformation.


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The power of settler naming: Carrie Karsgaard, Maggie MacDonald, Michael Hockenhull, ‘Rename and resist settler colonialism: Land acknowledgments and Twitter’s toponymic politics’, First Monday, 2021

08Feb21

Abstract: Connected with various resurgent and decolonizing projects, Canada has seen a surge of renaming and Indigenous land acknowledgement, which draw attention to Indigenous territories that have been overwritten through colonial naming practices. While renaming practices and land acknowledgments are contested for having merely representational effects, they may also be linked with decolonizing efforts. Our paper explores subversive (re)naming practices afforded by the free-form location identifying function on Twitter’s user profiles. It then draws a connection to issue-alignment in relation to the contested Trans Mountain pipeline as a means of considering to what extent toponymic selection is linked with actual issue alignment within the colonial context of resource extraction in Canada. We apply a mixed methods approach, based in digital methods that work with Twitter’s user profile location category. We extend our analysis through a qualitative reading of key subsets of the Twitter data, using a grounded theory approach to identify prevalent themes. In keeping with the anti-colonial nature of the tweets, we resist colonial categorization of the data and instead share an “un-typology” of Twitter toponyms, which we then connect to various expressions of anti-pipeline positioning. These mixed methods help us explore the entanglement of representational toponymic significance, infrastructural, in relation to the platform and the colonial nature of geolocational regimes online, and grounded, in relation to issue expression regarding the Trans Mountain pipeline.


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New dealing, not a new deal: Benjamin Balthaser, ‘New Deal Settler Colonialism, Indigeneity, and the 1930s Literary Left’, PMLA, 2021

08Feb21

Excerpt: At the conclusion of his 1932 cross-country travelogue, American Jitters, the critic Edmund Wilson reaches the end of the continental United States to gaze upon the sugar magnate John Speckles’s iconic Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. Wilson describes the hotel as “white as a wedding cake” and, in a nod to the imperial “Great White Fleet” of San Diego, notes also that it is “polished and trim as a ship” and that its presence is a monument intended to “dominate” the coast before the “shoreline gives way to Mexico” (254). This image of whiteness and imperial domination stretching off into the infinity of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean is then coupled with a dialectical image of Wilson reaching back in time, to the history that brought the hotel into existence: “it was the same year the first vestibule train was put on the tracks by George Pullman and the revolt of the Apaches under Geronimo . . . to assert their independence . . . had been put down by the government and the Apaches penned up in a reservation.” Wilson’s construction, in which he simultaneously looks forward, over the ocean to the “sugar plantations of Honolulu,” and backward, into the connection between settler colonialism and capitalist industry, topped by an absurdly white hotel, marks a troubling convergence of settler-colonial time and capitalist space in left-wing thought in the United States.


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