settler colonial studies blog

Settlers have coffee: Jelmer Vos, ‘The Coffee Frontier in Proto-Colonial and Colonial Angola’, Commodity Frontiers, 2, 2021

20Apr21

Excerpt: Coffee plantations were unquestionably one of the defining features of Angola’s colonial landscape. From the 1870s to independence, coffee was the main export of this former Portuguese colony, barring a couple of intervals during which rubber and diamonds held first place. During this time, Angola ranked consistently among the world’s largest robusta producers, which it might still have been today had the country’s civil war (1975-2002) not made commercial farming all but impossible. In Angolan popular memory, coffee occupies an ambivalent position: for some people it brings up memories of colonial forced labor, while others recollect stories of successful family farms. My research project, “Coffee and Colonialism in Angola, 1820-1960,” aims to reconstruct the multiple, intertwined realities behind these contrasting memories. Focusing on northern Angola, where smallholding and estate farming always coexisted, it investigates how African farmers, colonial settlers, foreign traders, and global consumers shaped one of the oldest commercial coffee frontiers in subSaharan Africa. In doing so, it reflects on the question to what extent “colonialism” is the proper lens through which to study the history of coffee cultivation in Angola.

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Settler fantasises, emplaced: Jacklyn Weier, ‘Settler Rural Imaginaries of MichFest: Connecting Settler Legacies and Cis Fear’, ACME, 2021

17Apr21

Abstract: Thinking through scholarship at the intersections of anarcha-feminism, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy, this paper uses the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MichFest) as a case study to examine how settler rural imaginaries are mobilized to reify settler and cis hierarchies. The two imaginaries of interest – “safety in the woods” and “Nature is [cis] female” – rely on settler legacies: the first is derived from the emptiness created by settler state violence and Indigenous displacement, and the second is a reproduction of settler sexuality. To understand how these imaginaries surfaced at MichFest, I analyze online media created around the time of MichFest’s closing. Given the blame of MichFest’s closing was often placed on the issue of trans-exclusion, blog posts and opinion pieces around this time serve as a small sample of the trans-exclusionary rhetoric found at MichFest that reproduced these imaginaries. Most of the texts address concerns about trans-inclusion leading to sexual assault, creating an implicit connection between women’s fears and cis fears. The discourse around this time reproduced the wilderness of MichFest as a cis women’s landscape, constructing the land as a cis woman. In using these two imaginaries, women at MichFest are producing a cis women’s landscape that relies on the exclusion of both Indigenous and trans people, reproducing settler and cis dominance.

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Urban wilderness, urban indigeneity: Chance Finegan, ‘How Can Urban Parks Support Urban Indigenous Peoples? Exploratory Cases from Saskatoon and Portland’, Aboriginal Policy Studies, 9, 2, 2021

17Apr21

Abstract: In Anglo settler states, parks and Indigenous peoples interact in myriad ways, given the tight connection between Indigenous peoples and land and that parks are manifestations of settler control of land and heritage. Current park–Indigenous research is limited by a focus on rural locales, despite that more than half of Indigenous peoples live in urban areas. This exploratory paper draws connections between literature rooted in urban Indigenous studies and park management. I argue the literature’s current emphasis on rural locales neglects to consider how urban parks, might contribute to reconciliation if they affirmatively support urban Indigenous identities and cultural activities. I use two mini case studies—the Meewasin Valley Authority (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) and Fort Vancouver National Historic Site (Portland, Oregon)—to highlight some of the ways in which urban parks can support urban Indigenous peoples’ responses to persistent urban settler-colonialism.

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Settler women: Hannah A. Reynolds, ‘”I just had to do most everything”: Colonial Implications of Settler Women’s Roles in Nineteenth-Century Oregon’, Phi Alpha Theta Pacific Northwest Conference, 2021

17Apr21

Abstract: Molly Gloss’s 1987 novel, The Jump-Off Creek, is considered a classic work of literature on settler history in Oregon. Her depiction of the main character, Lydia Sanderson, is one of grit and generosity in the face of remarkable challenges. Having read accounts of women homesteaders in preparation for writing the book, Gloss addresses several of the themes that come out of historical studies of such women, such as the opportunity for them to own land and the resulting empowerment that they experienced. Perhaps inadvertently, she also recognizes that by doing so, they contributed to a larger system of structural violence against indigenous peoples. By examining the historiography of settler women, then adding to the narrative with case studies from the North Coast of Oregon, there lies an opportunity to break ground on a new version of remembering homesteading women in a way that honors their considerable labor in search of “boundless possibilities,” while recognizing their foundational role in an oppressive system.

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The settlers did it: Mohamed Adhikari (ed.), Civilian-Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies, Routledge, 2019

15Apr21

Description: Existing studies of settler colonial genocides explicitly consider the roles of metropolitan and colonial states, and their military forces in the perpetration of exterminatory violence in settler colonial situations, yet rarely pay specific attention to the dynamics around civilian-driven mass violence against indigenous peoples. In many cases, however, civilians were major, if not the main, perpetrators of such violence. The focus of this book is thus on the role of civilians as perpetrators of exterminatory violence and on those elements within settler colonial situations that promoted mass violence on their part.

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With interventions on settler colonialism and the Canadian welfare system (by Laura C. L. Landertinger), and on settler sexualities (by Gregory D. Smithers): Chelsea Schields, Dagmar Herzog (eds), The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism, Routledge 2021

15Apr21

Access the chapters here.

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Settler new races: Charlotte Ann Legg, The New White Race: Settler Colonialism and the Press in French Algeria, 1860-1914, University of Nebraska Press, 2021

15Apr21

Description: The New White Race traces the development of the press in Algeria between 1860 and 1914, examining the particular role of journalists in shaping the power dynamics of settler colonialism. Constrained in different ways by the limitations imposed on free expression in a colonial context, diverse groups of European settlers, Algerian Muslims, and Algerian Jews nevertheless turned to the press to articulate their hopes and fears for the future of the land they inhabited and to imagine forms of community which would continue to influence political debates until the Algerian War. The frontiers of these imagined communities did not necessarily correlate with those of the nation—either French or Algerian—but framed processes of identification that were at once local, national, and transnational. The New White Race explores these processes of cultural and political identification, highlighting the production practices, professional networks, and strategic-linguistic choices mobilized by journalists as they sought to influence the sentiments of their readers and the decisions of the French state. Announcing the creation of a “new white race” among the mixed European population of Algeria, settler journalists hoped to increase the autonomy of the settler colony without forgoing the protections afforded by their French rulers. Their ambivalent expressions of “French” belonging, however, reflected tensions among the colonizers; these tensions were ably exploited by those who sought to transform or contest French imperial rule.

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It does not get any more settler colonial than this! Golf course erases Indigenous pasts …

14Apr21

Sarah Bahr, ‘A Push to Move the Golf Course Atop a Native American ‘Stonehenge’: Historians hoping to preserve the ancient Octagon Earthworks in Newark, Ohio, as a UNESCO World Heritage site faces a problem: the golf club that leases the property’, New York Times, 12/04/21

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Several appropriations: Siddhant Issar, ‘Theorising ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’: settler colonialism, slavery and racial capitalism’, Race & Class, 2021

13Apr21

Abstract: This article reconceptualises the Marxist notion of ‘primitive accumulation’, examining how settler colonialism and anti-Black racial domination structure American capitalism. The analysis intervenes in theorisations of primitive accumulation in both critiques of neoliberalism and the growing literature on racial capitalism. It shows how particular appropriations of primitive accumulation in the context of neoliberalism not only treat the concept as, ultimately, external to the core logic of capitalism, but also ignore the ways racial domination and colonisation configure capital’s violence. Simultaneously, within racial capitalism scholarship, primitive accumulation is prone to conceptual stretching, often flattening disparate forms of land and labour expropriation. In contrast, through the analytic of ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’, the author elucidates how normative wage-labour exploitation is predicated on settler colonialism and racial slavery and its afterlives. This thus adds precision to received understandings of capitalist expropriation, while also pushing the literature on racial capitalism beyond a white/Black binary.

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Indigeneity as disability: Siobhan Senier, ‘Disability, Blackness, and Indigeneity: An Invitation to a Conversation’, College Language Association Journal, 64, 1, 2021, pp. 166-173

13Apr21

Excerpt: Arguably, Indigenous Disability Studies performs similar work. One landmark book does the same kind of heavy duty as Christopher Bell’s Blackness and Disability, and it was published just shortly after his groundbreaking volume: in Native American Communities on Health and Disability Lavonna Lovern and Carol Locust (Eastern Band Cherokees) argue that “for centuries tribes have emphasized the normality of people with difference.”¹ Scholars following their lead have sought to describe longstanding, tribally specific approaches to (dis)ability; of Cherokee descent, Sean Teuton suggests that “in many oral traditions, disability is a paradoxical source of power.”² Other scholars have shown how specific kinds of bodymind impairment have been produced by settler colonialism: For example, residential schools produced post-traumatic stress and intergenerational trauma; massive out-adoption of Indigenous children has led to psychic conditions like “split feather syndrome”; the destruction of traditional food sources has created diabetes and other illnesses.

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