settler colonial studies blog

Decolonial imaginaries from literature: Rebecca Lynne Fullan, Eating the Heart of Weetigo World: Decolonial Imaginaries in the Stories of Louise Erdrich and Tomson Highway, PhD dissertation, CUNY, 2020

30Sep20

Abstract: My dissertation asks what the decolonial possibilities of fiction are in the context of the settler colonial imaginaries particular to the United States and Canada. The ongoing process of settler colonialism demands various forms of conversion from Indigenous people: ecological/land based, religious, educational, legal, familial, but the construct of “conversion” obscures Indigenous worldviews, and indeed worlds, which function according to different principles. I interpret Erdrich and Highway’s work in the context of Anishinaabe and Cree narratives and story-structures. These offer examples of what can constitute broader decolonial imaginaries, through which perception and creation of other, more liveable worlds is possible. Fiction by Indigenous writers, I argue, acts as the expressions and creative tools of worlds that do exist, but, according to the truth-claims of settler colonial ontologies, are disavowed and suppressed.

The first chapter exposes weetigo institutions of Euroamerican settler colonialism through analysis of Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway and The Round House by Louise Erdrich. Wîhtikowipayi, the process of absorbing, accepting, and enacting cannibalistic appetites, with its gross misrecogition of others and insatiable violent greed, is a conversion demanded and created by settler institutions. The wîhtikowipayi of settler colonial institutions, then, facilitates not just individual persons becoming wîhtikow, but the production of settler colonial society itself as a process of weetigo worlding, which is how I name a the creation and maintenance of an ongoing network of political structures, nations, and epistemologies sustained precisely, if paradoxically, by these self-and-other-destructive greeds.

In the second chapter I look at the figure of Jesus and how people relate to him in Erdrich and Highway.In Highway, Jesus’ role as an instrument as well as a victim of violence, as well as the potential grotesquerie of the invitation to be “like” him, is more present than in Erdrich, while in Erdrich the potential variety of Jesus as enfleshed is slippery and startling, always in flux. Since orthodox Christianity assumes an all-encompassing worldview that contains, explains, and ordains all of space and time, literary interactions with Jesus according to radically different terms can make perceptible Indigenous worlds that are not contained by nor comprehensible within settler ontological assumptions.

The third chapter explores the how both Highway and Erdrich feature the Eucharist as a model of consumption that both diverges from and intersects with weetigo consumption. The relationship I am tracing centers around Eucharistic miracles: In scenes in Erdrich and Highway’s novels, the bread and wine change into edible meat. In both novels, though in very different ways, the person who experiences the miracle is on a gradual trajectory away from Catholic orthodoxy, and will eventually recognize and celebrate their immersion in Anishinaabe and Cree cosmology, respectively, as more significant than their Catholicism.

The fourth chapter looks at Erdrich’s latest novel, Future Home of the Living God, which describes a combined ecological, reproductive, governmental, and evolutionary dystopia. Future Home of the Living God is a narrative of and about inheritances–cyclical, punctuated, eruptive–nested within each other and operating on wildly different scales in terms of space, time, and impact. Future Home demonstrates how settler colonial nations depend upon a cycle of inheritance that is punctuated and eruptive. It halts along in repetitions that are both remarkably consistent in their ideologies and impacts, and remarkably flexible in how those ideologies and impacts are framed.

Through the stories of these Indigenous writers, I find a relationship of conversation that is counterposed to the transformative and destructive conversions demanded by Christian rules and by settler colonial institutions and imaginaries. The potential of conversation among incommensurable and disparate worlds that cannot be collapsed together at all without violence, nor fully even with genocidal violence across centuries, is itself small, partial, and particular. These attributes, I claim and hope, also make it potentially powerful, efficacious, and outside of the way coloniality continually frames and thinks about itself, and thus can make perceptible that which always exists outside of that world.

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Bible-mandated settlement: Mark G. Brett, ‘Settler Mandates and the Book of Joshua’, in C. L. Crouch (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible and Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 117–130

30Sep20

Abstract: The book of Joshua presents a multitude of ethical quandaries, both ancient and modern. After identifying some of the key questions about the text and its composition, our discussion will trace the distinctive kinds of influence that this book has exercised in a number of Jewish and Christian traditions. All of these elements will then figure in concluding reflections on how the book of Joshua may, and may not, help us to reflect on the legacies of imperialism and colonialism.

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Resentment and collaboration in Wisconsin: John Koban, ‘Walleye Wars and Pedagogical Management: Cooperative Rhetorics of Responsibility in Response to Settler Colonialism’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2020

30Sep20

Abstract: This essay details a history of environmental violence in Wisconsin, showing the ways that the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) responded during the walleye wars of the 1980s and early 1990s. I show that resentment-laden settler colonialism was engaged by an Ojibwe rhetoric of collaboration, a response that pedagogically emphasizes mutual respect and responsibility. In ongoing relationships with Wisconsin publics, they practice a rhetoric that works counter to the logics of settler colonialism. This essay ultimately shows how GLIFWC’s public outreach during the walleye wars unsettles a settler colonial violence grounded in ignorance and resentment. Such an approach to collaborative relationships enacts a pedagogy grounded in treaty rights between the US and Ojibwe tribes, all the while asserting sovereignty.

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Travellers who come to stay: Gerald Thomson, ‘Constructing a “Better Britain” in British Columbia: the travelogues, poetry and literature of Hilda Glynn-Ward, 1886–1966’, Studies in Travel Writing, 2020

27Sep20

Abstract: This article examines the writings of Hilda Glynn-Ward, a white British colonial woman who held a strong attachment for her adopted home of British Columbia, Canada in the early twentieth century. Her attachment to Canada’s Pacific province was so strong that she felt she had to defend it against the threat of non-Anglo immigrants, particularly Asians. Glynn-Ward’s travelogues, poetry, and literature were an overt racist political statement on how she wished to shape the future of British Columbia as a part of “Greater Britain.” Despite publishing success with her travel writing about British Columbia, her political agenda failed. After four decades of extreme racist political activism and marginal economic success she returned to the United Kingdom in 1958 and died in 1966. The article suggests that her desire to construct a “Better Britain” in British Columbia motivated her prolific but prejudiced writing career.

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The museum as settler: Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Imagining Palestine’s Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics’, Critical Inquiry, 47, 1, 2020

27Sep20

Abstract: This reflection on Palestine’s political impasses in relation to the experiences of other colonized places and peoples was inspired by the current ferment in critical indigenous and native studies, and now Palestinian studies, about settler colonialism. Tracing the promises and pitfalls of new imaginations of sovereignty and self-determination emerging through indigenous activism, the essay reflects on museums and contested rituals of liberal recognition in North America and Australia to highlight both the stark differences in the situations of Palestinians under Israeli rule and the radical significance of the recent efflorescence of Palestinian cultural projects. Focusing particularly on the history of the Palestinian Museum (that opened in Birzeit in 2016), the article argues that the productivity of the settler-colonial framework lies less in the way it maps directly onto the situation on the ground than in the new solidarities it engenders and its potential to burst open the Palestinian political imagination.

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The limits of settler colonialism: Javier Cikota, ‘Uncertain Flags: Immigrant Colonies and Frontier Anxieties in Northern Patagonia (1890-1930)’, The Latin Americanist, 64, 3, 2020, pp. 305-333

27Sep20

Abstract: This article looks at the shifting Argentine policy towards immigrants, the role of immigrant settlers in the Patagonian frontier, and challenges presented by large immigrant colonies of areas of contested sovereignty. Argentina encouraged tran-Atlantic immigration in the late nineteenth century to populate the country, including the newly incorporated region of Patagonia, which was formerly controlled by independent indigenous groups. Immigrants moved to the frontier as part of a staged migration, and quickly occupied key economic and social position in their growing towns. Their success on the frontier put Argentine authorities in a difficult position: they relied on immigrants to develop Patagonia, but they remained uncertain of the allegiance of those same immigrants. This difficult position was exacerbated with regards to Chilean immigrants, who were seen as “less preferred” than European immigrants and represented a heightened seditious threat, since Patagonia shared a long border with Chile. This article argues that the ambivalence by the state towards immigrants, the semi-colonial administration of the frontier by the Argentine state, and the immigrants own economic and social prominence created the conditions for the emergence of a civil society in northern Patagonia. This civil society grew in response to police abuses, and became adept to using institutional allies outside of Patagonia (like cabinet officials and diplomatic staff) to attempt to control local officials.

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Settler colonialism is an epidemic: J. Jolivette, ‘HIV, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism: Understanding PTIS, Crisis Resolution, and the Art of Ceremony’, in Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, Nishant Shahani (eds), AIDS and the Distribution of Crises, Duke University Press, 2020, pp. 236–256

27Sep20

Access this chapter here.

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Fantasies of ‘reverse colonisation’ are about settler colonialism: Stuart Ward, ‘”Regular White man”: Reveries of reverse colonization’, in Daniel Geary, Camilla Schofield, Jennifer Sutton (eds), Global white nationalism, Manchester University Press, 2020

24Sep20

Abstract: Stuart Ward discusses how conservatives have harnessed history to their cause, tapping into a vein of popular anxiety rooted in readings of the colonial past still prevalent in Australia, Britain, and other former British settler colonies. Invoking the memory of colonization, they stir memories of the very conditions of post-war decolonization that had originally burst the bubble of White Australia. The spectre of a “home” defiled by peoples once kept in their colonial place was remarkably reminiscent of the Powellite moment in 1960s England, and the wider dislocations of an unravelling empire. Moreover, it was consistent with the very earliest invocations of “decolonization” that invariably harboured fears of “the colonized becoming colonizers”. This chapter draws out the Australian perspective on white nationalism in the Anglosphere.

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A double negation: Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native, Harvard University Press, 2020

22Sep20

Description: Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities.

In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.

The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence.

Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors—victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries—based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.

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Refugees into settlers: Christina Juhász-Wood, Contesting Historical Enhancement: Militarized Settler Colonialism and Refugee Resettlement in New Mexico, PhD Dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2020

22Sep20

Abstract: This dissertation provides an interdisciplinary critical study of refugee resettlement to Albuquerque, New Mexico. I argue that refugee resettlement to the United States cannot be understood separately from the ongoing structure of settler colonialism. I analyze Albuquerque’s post-WWII militarized settlement as a settler colonial process of extraction and suburbanization that depended on Native labor and resources to fuel the growing nuclear weapons programs. Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base played a role not only in displacing and thus producing refugees during the Vietnam War but also in marking Albuquerque as a distinctly militarized
geography to which they were resettled. Thousands of refugees from regions of the Global South affected by U.S. militarism, imperialism, counterinsurgency, and warfare have subsequently been housed in the city’s International District, also referred to as the War Zone. Militarized settlement and suburban settler colonialism have contributed to racialized and gendered hierarchies of labor, housing, education and health and they foster uneven exposure to extractive industries, toxic contaminants, nuclear waste, and militarized police violence. Artists and activists contest these structures by working towards demilitarization and decolonization.

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