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Settler and colonial empires, articulated: Aziz Rana, ‘How We Study the Constitution: Rethinking the Insular Cases and Modern American Empire’, The Yale Law Journal, 130, 2020-21

08Nov20

Abstract: Few American law classes actually teach the Insular Cases. This Essay argues that this is due to a profound lacuna in mainstream constitutional study—the failure to adequately confront the extent to which the United States from its founding has been a project of empire. In part, for this reason, the field tends to have little to say about perhaps the key defining legal-political development of the American twentieth century: the country’s rise from regional player to the world’s dominant power. In exploring these omissions, the Essay highlights the place of the Insular Cases as a central ideological and institutional hinge between two modes of American imperial authority: settler conquest and global primacy. The Essay then reflects on what it would mean to take seriously the continuing role of colonialism in constitutional life as well as what lessons should be drawn for the study of constitutional law.


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Settlers amongst us! Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, ‘Historicizing the Transpacific Settler Colonial Condition: Asian–Indigenous Relations in Shawn Wong’s Homebase and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer’, Melus, 2020

07Nov20

Excerpt: Following the Fall of Saigon in 1975, the eponymous first-person narrator in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) is processed in a refugee camp on the US unincorporated territory of Guam before resettling in Southern California. There, he is invited by a famous Hollywood director, modeled after Francis Ford Coppola but identified only as “the Auteur” in the novel, to attest to the ethnic authenticity of The Hamlet. In this Vietnam War film—Nguyen’s stand-in for Apocalypse Now (1979)—a blonde Green Beret is tasked…


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Obviously settler colonialism: Adam HOgan, ‘Competing Administrations in Palestine: Imperial Power and Settler Regimes in the British Empire’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 19, 2, 2020, pp. 191-209

07Nov20

Abstract: This paper investigates the similarities between the British experiences with settlers in other instances of colonisation, and mandatory Palestine. It addresses the extent to which British officials were aware of, and understood the aims, intentions, and methods of the Zionist movement, as well as the consequences for the indigenous population. Utilising primarily British documents from the mandatory period, and the literature on settler-colonialism, this paper will address a gap in research on the imperial responsibility, and role in, the mandate’s development. This examines the knowledge and intent of the British in the settler-colonial context, and British imperial history.


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Settler colonial assemblages: Elise Klein, ‘The Indigenous development assemblage and contemporary forms of elimination in settler colonial Australia’, Postcolonial Studies, 2020

07Nov20

Abstract: This paper considers the processes of assemblage as an important aspect in studies of contemporary Australian settler colonialism. I explore how, what I am calling the Indigenous development assemblage, is made up of various government policies, actors, discourse, knowledge, legal frameworks and institutions, intersect and cohere with each other. I also explore how this assemblage affects not only material outcomes but also generates an atmosphere that affects aspirations, hope and possibility for change. Through examining various processes of the assemblage underway in the town of Kununurra, I argue that settler colonialism is different to the totalitarian form it often is described as. Through understanding the processes of assemblage, incoherence, disruption and emergence was also observed which opens up possibilities of the destabilisation of the assemblage itself.


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Settler colonial racism: Ronit Lentin, ‘Palestinian Lives Matter: Racialising Israeli Settler-Colonialism’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 19, 2, 2020, pp. 133-149

07Nov20

Abstract: Against the background of recent developments in Israel’s racial rule over the Palestinians, the Black Lives Matter protests, and in view of Israel’s declared intention to annex occupied Palestinian territories, this article theorises Israel’s permanent war against the Palestinians as first, state of exception, second, racial state, and third, settler-colony. The paper critiques the focus on ethnicity as an analytical frame by Israeli scholars and posits race as a key concept in analising Zionist settler-colonialism. It proposes that rather than being a solution to European antisemitism, Zionism adopted discourses of race approximating those expressed by antisemitic regimes. As the Black Lives Matter movement proliferates, the article concludes by proposing that Palestine and the question of Palestine are becoming a truly global issue.


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On Roman settler colonialism: Jeremia Pelgrom, Arthur Weststeijn (eds), The Renaissance of Roman Colonization: Carlo Sigonio and the Making of Legal Colonial Discourse, Oxford University Press, 2020

06Nov20

Description: The colonization policies of Ancient Rome followed a range of legal arrangements concerning property distribution and state formation, documented in fragmented textual and epigraphic sources. When antiquarian scholars rediscovered and scrutinized these sources in the Renaissance, their analysis of the Roman colonial model formed the intellectual background for modern visions of empire. What does it mean to exercise power at and over distance? This book foregrounds the pioneering contribution to this debate of the great Italian Renaissance scholar Carlo Sigonio (1522/3-84). His comprehensive legal interpretation of Roman society and Roman colonization, which for more than two centuries remained the leading account of Roman history, has been of immense (but long disregarded) significance for the modern understanding of Roman colonial practices and of the legal organization and implications of empire.  Bringing together experts on Roman history, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of international law, this book analyzes the context, making, and impact of Sigonio’s reconstruction of the Roman colonial model. It shows how his legal interpretation of Roman colonization originated and how it informed the development of legal colonial discourse, from imperial reform and colonial independence in the nascent United States of America to Enlightenment accounts of property distribution. Through a detailed analysis of scholarly and political visions of Roman colonization from the Renaissance to today, this book shows the enduring relevance of legal interpretations of the Roman colonial model for modern experiences of empire.


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Settlers, deputised: Dallas Jokic, ‘Cultivating the Soil of White Nationalism: Settler Violence and Whiteness as Territory’, Journal of Critical Race Enquiry, 7, 2, 2020, pp. 1-21

03Nov20

Abstract: This paper considers the emergence of white nationalist movements in Canada and their relationship to settler colonialism. How do ideas of Canada as a white nation, and fear mongering about white Canadians being “replaced” come to be so effective in a context in which white people have typically been the replacers themselves? While the Canadian state frames itself as multicultural, many of its laws and practices cultivate white nationalist beliefs, affects, and feelings. The state informally deputizes white settlers as owners and protectors of private property and uses them to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their land in order to appropriate it. This deputization protects both the material territory of the state and the affective and ideological justification for the continuation of settler colonialism. Private ownership of land cannot be understood merely as a legal capitalist relation, but is felt by many settlers as a deep, primordial connection to the land. Acts of settler violence both express and shape the racialized core of Canada. I propose thinking about settler private
property as what I call “settler whitespace,” which is not only protective and expansive, but also involves the fabrication of an idea of white nativity to Canadian territory. This racialization of space serves to naturalize racist violence, cultivate hypermasculine expressions of whiteness, and ground white claims of exclusive belonging to Canada, all characteristic of the resurgent far-right. The property regime of Canada is not just part of its territorializing project; it lays the groundwork for white nationalist movements.


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Settler rhetoric, settler denial: Laura Mudde, ‘Framing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Process in Canada: A Media Analysis of Settler Colonial Rhetoric and Colonial Denial, 2003-2016’, Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, 7, 2, 2020, pp. 46-73

03Nov20

Abstract: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada helped to expose the trauma experienced by Indigenous peoples in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (IRS), which were governed and run by government and church officials. In 2008, the Canadian government formally apologized for these residential schools. This apology was undermined, however, by a denial of colonial history by Canada at the G20 in 2009, revealing a rhetorical contradiction that is part of a public narrative of colonial denial. This paper examines the public discourse during and after the TRC process to understand the impact of negative discourses regarding the TRC and colonialism. This case study examines written content from five Canadian media platforms that covered the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and
TRC process between 2003 and 2016. Drawing on concepts such as the white possessive, white rage, and white fragility, the aim of this paper is to unpack the cognitive dissonance of apology concurrent with the rhetoric of settler colonial denial. Findings from the discourse analysis substantiate the hypothesis that continued dominant narratives of settler colonialism
align with representations of the TRC process. This limits the authentic potential for a formal apology to address the IRS legacy which perpetuates continued settler colonial realities in Canada.


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Settler expectations: Patrizia Gentile, Queen of the Maple Leaf: Beauty Contests and Settler Femininity, UBC Press, 2020

31Oct20

Description: As modern versions of the settler nation took root in twentieth-century Canada, beauty became a business. But beauty pageants were more than just frivolous spectacles. Queen of the Maple Leaf deftly uncovers how colonial power operated within the pageant circuit. In this astute critical investigation, Patrizia Gentile examines the interplay between local or community-based pageants and more prestigious provincial or national ones. Contests such as Miss War Worker, Miss Black Ontario, and Miss Civil Service often functioned as stepping stones to competitions such as Miss Canada. At all levels, pageants exemplified codes of femininity, class, sexuality, and race that shaped the narratives of the settler nation. A union-organized pageant such as Queen of the Dressmakers, for example, might uplift working-class women but immigrant women need not apply. Not unlike sports leagues linked from minor to major, pageants from local to national formed a network that entrenched white settler nationalism in the context of the beauty industrial complex. Queen of the Maple Leaf demonstrates that these contests are designed to connect female bodies to white, middle-class, respectable femininity and wholesomeness, and that their longevity lies squarely in their capacity to reassert the white heteropatriarchy at the heart of settler societies. Students, scholars, and researchers will want to add this significant contribution to gender and sexuality studies to their bookshelves, particularly for its insights into settler femininity.


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On settler Canada: Cole Harris, A Bounded Land: Reflections on Settler Colonialism in Canada, UBC Press, 2020

31Oct20

Description: Canada is a country of bounded spaces – a nation situated between rock and cold to the north and a political border to the south. In A Bounded Land, Cole Harris seeks answers to a sweeping question: How was society reorganized – for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike – when Europeans resettled this distinctive land? Through a series of vignettes that focus on people’s experiences on the ground, Harris exposes the underlying architecture of settler colonialism as it grew and evolved, from the first glimpses of new lands and peoples, to the immigrant experience in early Canada, to the dispossession and resettlement of First Nations in British Columbia. In the process, he explores how Canada’s settler societies differed from their European progenitors and, more theoretically, how colonialism managed to dispossess. At a time when Canada is seeking to overcome the legacies of colonialism, A Bounded Land is essential reading. By considering the whole territory that became Canada over 500 years and focusing on sites of colonial domination rather than on settler texts, Harris unearths fresh insights on the continuing and growing influence of Indigenous peoples in Canada and argues that country’s boundedness is ultimately drawing it toward its Indigenous roots. This book will appeal to readers from all walks of life – general readers interested in the history or geography of Canada, students and scholars of settler societies and Indigenous-settler relations, and politicians and senior civil servants engaged with Indigenous peoples and reconciliation.


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