« Older posts
Newer posts »

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

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.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Student settler colonialism: Chen Chen, ‘(Un)Making the international student a settler of colour: a decolonising autoethnography’, Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 2021

25Jan21

Abstract: This paper reflects on my experience as a non-white international student at a top-ranked sport/kinesiology faculty in Canada, particularly the (un)learning of my complicity within settler colonialism. Following a decolonising autoethnographic approach, I juxtapose my own desired pathway of pursuing international study with shapeshifting forms of settler colonialism. The stories reveal that Canada’s marketing of higher education, settler geography, the whiteness of university, and the spectacle of ‘reconciliation’ can operate in concert to prevent international students from developing critical understandings of the violent conditions of their stay on occupied Indigenous land. While elusive opportunities of (un)learning and resisting do exist, I argue that the seemingly natural trajectory of (re)producing settlers of colour warrants critical intervention.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

More queer settler colonialism: Shannon Brown, ‘Molly Wood’s Bush: Settler Colonialism, Queer Activism, and Commemoration in Toronto’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 54, 2-3, 2020, pp. 290-319

25Jan21

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between queer activism and settler colonialism in Toronto from the 1970s to the 2000s through the commemoration of Alexander Wood, a nineteenth-century magistrate. Over the course of these three decades, Wood was reclaimed as a historical gay man by a variety of queer activists who sought to incorporate lessons from the past into their work. After briefly introducing the early liberationist interpretations of Wood, this article investigates the process through which Toronto’s gay village, Church-Wellesley Village, became legible as “Molly Wood’s Bush,” a piece of land Wood purchased in the 1820s with roughly the same geographic boundaries. Emerging homonationalist forms of queer activism that placed queer life within the bounds of national belonging provoked a reinterpretation of Wood, making him into a gay pioneer and culminating in the creation of a statue to mark the Village as queer territory. By examining a series of rewritings of Wood’s history as well as their reception in Toronto, this article argues that the role of commemoration in creating maps of belonging that facilitate integration into the settler colonial order must be included in understandings of queer activism in Canada.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Queer settler colonialism: Laura Hall, ‘Revisiting ’69 Celebrations and Challenging Settler Homonationalism in the (Un)Just Society’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 54, 2-3, 2020, pp. 228-244

25Jan21

Abstract: Narratives about queer Canada, or queering Canada, continue to normalize the nation-state and its settler-colonial roots. During the summer of 2019, the release of the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls made it impossible to ignore settler colonialism in the Canadian context, and yet celebrations of 1969’s Criminal Codechanges attempted to frame the country as a safe haven for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer + (LGBTQ+) rights. This article will explore rhetoric surrounding Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s era including the Just Society, the criminal reforms of 1969, as well as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s moment as celebrations of the 1969 reforms unfurl. In particular, this article will look at the contrast in rhetoric between the Just Society and protests by Indigenous peoples for whom 1969 nearly ended with the passing of the white paper and subsequent extinguishment of Indigenous rights. Assimilation, and, therefore, disappearance, frames Indigenous experiences of the Just Society, while settler-colonial aspirations frame mainstream understandings of 1969’s LGBTQ+ Criminal Code reforms. At the same time, as Indigenous peoples reframe this moment, and as Canadians prepare to celebrate its meanings, a surging Far Right has announced itself across the country. In response to this problem and to the liberal problem of doublespeak and Just Society rhetoric, this article will centre the aspirations and voices of Indigenous women and Two-Spirit folks as temporal and spatial alter-Natives to the rise of homonationalism rooted in ongoing settler colonialism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Competing colonialism in twentieth century Hawai’i: Jessica Wang, ‘Agricultural expertise, race, and economic development: small producer ideology and settler colonialism in the Territory of Hawaii, 1900-1917’, History and Technology, 2021

16Jan21

Abstract: This essay explores the technical practices of economic development in early twentieth-century Hawaiʻi, where agrarianism, race, and competing colonialisms shaped agricultural experts’ perceptions of the islands’ future. Technical activities in the form of horticultural experiments aimed at introducing new crops, research on soil and fertilizers, work on plant diseases and insect pests, shipping experiments and marketing efforts, analytical testing services, and outreach to farming communities constituted the key means by which the United States Department of Agriculture’s Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station pushed for fundamental economic and social transformations in the Territory of Hawaii. A populist anti-imperialist ideology drove the experiment station’s agenda, in an explicitly stated project of Americanization that sought to break Hawaiian dependence on sugar and plantation agriculture, expand small farming, and remake the islands’ racial order through white settlement from the mainland. Ultimately, the USDA’s brand of settler colonialism failed to supplant the existing plantation economy.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Competing settler colonialism in nineteenth century Hawai’i: Christen T. Sasaki, ‘Emerging Nations, Emerging Empires: Inter-Imperial Intimacies and Competing Settler Colonialisms in Hawai’i’, Pacific Historical Review, 90, 1, 2021, pp. 28-56

16Jan21

Abstract: This article covers the controversy that followed the March 16, 1893 escape of prisoner Yosaku Imada to the Japanese warship, the Naniwa, which was docked in Honolulu. Imada’s act of seeking refuge onboard the ship occurred at a time when the provisional government of Hawai‘i had no extradition treaty with Japan. This created a diplomatic event that entangled leaders from Japan, the provisional government, and the United States. To further complicate matters, Issei and Meiji government officials were also pressing for franchise in the Islands, a right that a majority of the community did not have access to at home. By placing Imada’s escape and the Issei fight for voting rights in the context of the uncertainty that followed the January 17, 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, this article emphasizes Hawai‘i’s relevance as a site where inter-imperial dynamics aligned with competing settler colonialisms.Keywords:


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »