settler colonial studies blog

Eating settlements (I): Edith Snook, ‘The Recipes of Jonathan Odell and 18th-Century Settler Colonialism in the Maritimes’ Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region, 49, 2, 2020, pp. 119-132

08Dec20

Excerpt: Recipes provide one lens through which to examine the history of settler colonialism.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settlers in the archives: Ian Mckay, ‘Race, White Settler Liberalism, and the Nova Scotia Archives, 1931-1976’, Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region, 49, 2, 2020, pp. 5-33

08Dec20

Abstract: This article explores the ways in which the Nova Scotia Archives confronted questions of race from 1934 to 1976. White settler colonialism provides a key to much of the archival work and historical reflection of such archivist-historians as D.C. Harvey and J.S. Martell. That outlook was preserved after 1945 by a new cohort of archivists, represented by C.B. Fergusson and Phyllis Blakeley. By the late 1960s, partly because of New Left ideas, apologies for empire ceded place to critical examinations of race and colonialism, as suggested by the pioneering works of Robin Winks and James St. G. Walker.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

We are settlers on Indigenous sovereignty: Charles W. A. Prior, Settlers in Indian Country: Sovereignty and Indigenous Power in Early America, Cambridge University Press, 2021

08Dec20

Description: The aim of this Element is to foreground Native American conceptions of sovereignty and power in order to refine the place of settler colonialism in American colonial and early republican history. It argues that Indigenous concepts of sovereignty were rooted in complex metaphorical language, in historical understandings of alliance, and in mobility in a landscape of layered interconnections of power. Where some versions of the interpretive paradigm of settler colonialism emphasise the violent ‘elimination of the native’, this work reveals that diplomatic transactions between the Iroquois Confederacy and British colonial and imperial agents reveal a hybrid language of alliance, sovereignty and territory. These languages and concepts of inter-cultural diplomacy provide contexts that suggest a more nuanced and dynamic relationship between colonialism and Indigenous power.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler utterances: Miguel A. Montalva Barba, ‘(Re)enacting Settler Colonialism via White Resident Utterances’, Critical Sociology, 2020

08Dec20

Abstract: This is a qualitative study outlining the links between white resident utterances and settler colonialism. Specifically, this article provides evidence of how settler colonialism continues to operate in a progressive community, despite the narratives of community and diversity shared by research respondents. This is primarily done by the cultural master narratives that respondents uttered to make sense of “community” and “diversity” in a borough that is undergoing gentrification. Because master narratives are created and reinforced by the socialization process where whiteness is the norm, white utterances continue the settler colonial project that invests in separate white communities to maintain racial privilege. While prior studies have detailed the tensions between community and diversity, this study contributes to this debate by adding a settler colonial frame that validates the idea that in a progressive neighborhood, diversity becomes a violation of settler emplacement. These findings are particularly significant given the vast literature on communities and diversity, but few have taken a settler colonial analytical approach to the debate.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Learning (early) about settler colonialism: Mark Robert Sinke, Learning to Settle: Young Students Learning Canadian and Indigenous Histories in the Figured Worlds of Social Studies Classrooms, PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2020

08Dec20

Abstract: This research study is an investigation into how children in public elementary schools are educated through social studies curricula into ways of understanding themselves and their relationships to the nation-state, the land, and people with whom they share the land. The questions that have driven this research are these: 1) How do young students construct and negotiate the figured worlds of a social studies classroom where they engage in inquiry-based learning about settler colonialism? 2) What do students connect with, and what are they doing with the stories they hear about Indigenous and Canadian history in public school classrooms? 3) How do students in public school classrooms take up or reject settler colonialism in their
learning about history? Examining these questions through the theoretical frame of figured worlds and employing a post-structural ethnographic methodology, the author relies on the fields of curriculum studies and settler colonial studies to ground this study into the experiences of young students in public schools. The frame of figured worlds allows the author to examine the ways that students talk about and enact identities-in-practice as they learn stories about Canadian and Indigenous histories. This thesis sheds light on the specific ways students configure, negotiate, and enact their own subjectivities as they learn about the settlement and growth of Canada on the Indigenous territory it now occupies. Data for this study were gathered through research groups, interviews, and classroom observations at two elementary schools in Hamilton, Ontario. Analysis and discussion of these data reveal the complex ways students both take up and\or reject discourses and narratives about settler colonialism, Indigenous resurgence, and reconciliation. The stories and experiences of students in this research reveal ways that education works to maintain settler structures of inequality and elimination through the teaching of social studies. This work also points to ways this can be challenged, and how counter-narratives and discourses are being taken up by students as they navigate their identities-in-practice in response to what they learn, who they learn it with, and the multiple voices that they listen to for guidance.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Liberal settler colonialism: Éléna Choquette, ‘Appropriating Indigenous lands: the liberal founding of Manitoba’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

05Dec20

Abstract: This article examines the language and strategies of Canadian land expansion through the founding of Manitoba in 1870. It analyses the discourse of key colonial authorities, which reveal that Canada mobilises the ideals of liberalism to promote the colonial policy of appropriating Indigenous lands. Because liberalism endures as the dominant paradigm that both structure contemporary politics and contemporary thinking about politics in the West, it is critical to clarify the connection between liberalism and the wrongs of land appropriation. Examining the role of liberal ideas in the founding of Manitoba also helps defuse the capacity of liberalism to produce dispossession, especially of Indigenous Peoples. In addition to exposing the ideas that supported the production of Canadian sovereignty, this article also analyses the various tactics Canada deployed to secure that sovereignty amidst Indigenous resistance. If Canadian officials first opted to absorb Indigenous lands through the ‘gentle’ means of administration, declaration and negotiation, they resorted to military forces when Indigenous Peoples frustrated Canadian claims to sovereignty. By bringing into focus the shifting tactics that Canadian state officials employed to annex Indigenous lands, the founding of Manitoba enriches our understanding of settler colonial statecraft and of the distinctive means of settler state expansion.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

A settler history: Stephen Warren, ‘The Wrong History for Our Time: An Analysis of David McCullough’s The Pioneers’, Middle Werst Review, 7, 1, 2020, pp. 143-147

05Dec20

Excerpt: David McCullough’s new book, The Pioneers, provides a sweeping narrative history of the Ohio Company and the men who settled what became Marietta, Ohio, at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers. Manasseh Cutler, his son, Ephraim, and other colleagues from Massachusetts, including Rufus Putnam and Joseph Barker, formed a company to speculate in land that had not yet been ceded to the United States by the Native nations who called the region home.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Even the settler ghosts settle: Agnieszka Kliś-Brodowska, ‘Ghosting history/historicizing the ghost: Time passage in T. C. Haliburton’s The Old Judge’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2020

05Dec20

Abstract: This article investigates the representation of time in T. C. Haliburton’s The Old Judge as shaped by the writer’s British North American context as well as his political background and agenda. It pays attention to the manner in which the text prepares the ground for native identity formation by providing a version of Nova Scotia’s recent history that is nonetheless presented as bygone and ancient. In The Old Judge, temporal distance of the past, apart from its richness — both confirmed by the presence of the properly historicized settler ghost — is the condition for cultural distinctiveness, maturity and heritage. Approaching The Old Judge from the perspective of Cynthia Sugars’ Canadian Gothic and Lorenzo Veracini’s settler colonialism, I argue that the text represents the past of the province as curiously extended in time in the Old World fashion, so that it may encompass the stages of cultural development required to gain the Empire’s recognition. Simultaneously, the text’s intricate play with heterochronies suggests that Haliburton’s Nova Scotia contains heterotopic spaces in Foucauldian terms, where the ordinary time passage is necessarily breached for the colony to attain proper legacy and distinct cultural status.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Seeing wounded children: Joanne Faulkner, ‘Settler-Colonial Violence and the “Wounded Aboriginal Child”: Reading Alexis Wright with Irene Watson (and Giorgio Agamben)’, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 9, 4, 2020, pp. 45-60

05Dec20

Abstract: Drawing on Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book and Irene Watson’s expansive critique of Australian law, this article locates within the settler–Australian imaginary the figure of the ‘wounded Aboriginal child’ as a site of contest between two rival sovereign logics: First Nations sovereignty (grounded in a spiritual connection to the land over tens of millennia) and settler sovereignty (imposed on Indigenous peoples by physical, legal and existential violence for 230 years). Through the conceptual landscape afforded by these writers, the article explores how the arenas of juvenile justice and child protection stage an occlusion of First Nations sovereignty, as a disappearing of the ‘Aboriginality’ of Aboriginal children under Australian settler law. Giorgio Agamben’s concept of potentiality is also drawn on to analyse this sovereign difference
through the figures of Terra Nullius and ‘the child’.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Celebrity settlers: Andrea Taylor, Joanna McIntyre (eds), Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture, Routledge, 2021

03Dec20

With a section on ‘Celebrity masculinities and settler colonialism‘.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute