settler colonial studies blog

Against settler colonial patriarchy: Jennifer Nez Denetdale, ‘Refusing the Gift of Democracy and Embracing Diné Concepts of Kinship: The Navajo Nation, Citizenship, and Practices of Gender’, Theory & Event, 23, 4, 2020, pp. 1053-1065

27Oct20

Abstract: Critical Indigenous Studies scholars assert that our imperative is to support Native sovereignty and self-determination, especially as it is constituted under American settler occupation and to enact decolonization through theory and practice. However, as Indigenous feminist scholars demonstrate, Native nation-building must be understood historically as an American colonial project intended to remake Indigenous peoples into mirror images of citizens of western democracies that privilege heterosexual patriarchy. Patriarchy signifies how relations of dominance and subjection marks our lives, from our relationship to the land, to non-human beings and to each other. Indigenous adaptation to the structures of a settler government has meant presumed authority over all manners of Indigenous living under settler authority, including formations of intimate and domestic spaces where the categories of gender and sexuality have been naturalized as constructions of the binary—feminine/masculine. In order to build democratic Native nations, it was crucial to transform Indigenous ways of thinking and being to accept heteropatriarchy as the natural evolution of modern democracy. This essay addresses the construction of the modern Navajo nation’s intersection with gender, and how leadership, laws and policies shape citizenship and belonging in ways that exclude gender diversity. Beyond the constraints of living within nations that surveil how we belong as its citizens, I find that Diné and Indigenous forms of ceremony speak to my thinking on Navajo narratives of kinship and belonging and how these ways of belonging persist against formations of modern tribal nation-building that are rooted in settler colonialist formations. I marvel that the spaces of traditional ceremonies and Indigenous drag shows, seemingly different spaces, create similar feelings of freedom, love and compassion. What is it about these spaces that recreates and affirms a sense of belonging that belies the kinds of nationalist belonging to a nation that institutionalizes heteropatriarchy, to exact belonging and unbelonging by race and gender? Traditional Diné principles of K’é, of kinship and belonging, continue to be practices, whether it be in participation in the ceremonies of blessing and renewal, or in drag show performances. In these spaces we remember who we are: Diné who honor the teachings of our Holy People, through K’é. In those spaces of freedom, we imagine once again our capacity to be loving, generous and compassionate.

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Settler colonialism is a habit: Deanna, L. Aubert, The Habits of Settlement: A Critical Phenomenology of Settlerness, MA dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2020

25Oct20

Abstract: This thesis investigates the role of settlers in maintaining settlement in Canada. I problematize settler bodies to deliberate on their potential for performing decolonization. My discussion seeks to complicate theoretical approaches that position the ontoepistemological stance of the settler as their impediment to decolonizing action. Drawing from the fields of phenomenology and affect theory, I discuss habit formation in bodies. I use case studies that discuss settler-Indigenous land relations to ground these theories of habit. I look to Indigenous leaders, artists and scholars, who offer valuable insights into the habituations of settlement as an institutionalized arrangement and a mode of behavior. I argue that settlement is a structure that emerges through settler bodies by way of their
everyday being in the world. Performing settlement is therefore a habitual tendency for the settler who knows themselves in the world. A program for decolonization must address these habitual faculties beyond inducing an epistemological shift. I examine and confront settlers’ habitual tendencies to consider how they can shift their bodily habits and why they might want to take up the task of decolonization. I conclude with an initial framework for bringing settlers to the difficult work of confronting the legacy of colonialism and forging respectful treaty relations with Canada’s Indigenous sovereign partners.

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No settler colonialism in outer space! Frank Tavares, ‘Ethical Exploration and the Role of Planetary Protection in Disrupting Colonial Practices’, ARXIV, 2020

25Oct20

Excerpt: All of humanity is a stakeholder in how we, the planetary science and astrobiology community, engage with other worlds. Violent colonial practices and structures–genocide, land appropriation, resource extraction, environmental devastation, and more–have governed exploration of Earth, and if not actively dismantled, will define the methodologies and mindset we carry forward into space exploration. With sample return missions from Mars underway, resource maps of the Moon being produced, and private industry progressing toward human exploration of Mars, the timeline is urgent to develop a modern, inclusive, robust, and enforceable policy framework to govern humanity’s engagement with other worlds. This paper does not recommend specific policies or implementation strategies, and instead focuses on “the identification of planetary protection considerations,” in accordance with the scope of this decadal survey. Ethical considerations must be prioritized in the formation of planetary protection policy. The choices we make in the next decade of space exploration will dictate the future of humanity’s presence on other worlds, with the potential to impact the environments we interact with on timescales longer than the human species has existed. We should make these choices consciously and carefully, as many will be irreversible, especially those pertaining to how we interact with potential extraterrestrial life.

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Megan Kuster, ‘Domestic Settler Colonialism in Katherine Mansfield’s “Old Tar” and “The Garden Party”, Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society, 4, 2020, pp. 48-59

25Oct20

Abstract: Focusing on the domestic ideals of settler colonialism, this essay provides an analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s representations of house and home in several of her New Zealand short stories. The first part of the essay considers Mansfield’s use of Gothic tropes to represent settler-Indigenous spatial relations in the story ‘Old Tar’ (1913), suggesting that the dread-tinged colonial house challenges settler colonial ideas about land-tenure and inheritance. The second part of the essay discusses the development of second-generation settler identities, analysing Mansfield’s representations of class in the context of settler spatial relations in ‘The Garden Party’ (1921). The essay’s broader claim is that ‘Old Tar’ and ‘The Garden Party’ challenge the domestic ideals of settler colonialism by showing the unpleasant realities of settler patriarchy and the racialised, gendered, and class-based underpinnings of second-generation settler sociability and culture.

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Nordic settler colonialism: Rauna Kuokkanen, ‘Reconciliation as a Threat or Structural Change? The Truth and Reconciliation Process and Settler Colonial Policy Making in Finland’, Human Rights Review, 21, 2020, pp. 293-312

21Oct20

Abstract: The Sámi have long desired a public process to examine and expose the Nordic states’ colonial, assimilationist practices and policies, past and present, toward the Sámi people. This article considers the truth and reconciliation process in Finland, assessing it in light of recent legislative and other measures. Employing settler colonial theory, it argues that reconciliation, although seemingly progressive, signifies a continuation of colonialism unless the state terminates its current approach of overlooking Sámi rights. The article concludes with a discussion of structural reconciliation and justice and considers some concrete measures for structural change in order for the reconciliation process to be valid and successful in Finland.

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Actually on settler resentment: Edana Beauvais, ‘The Political Consequences of Indigenous Resentment’, Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, 2020

21Oct20

Abstract: Understanding the legacy of settler colonialism requires understanding the nature and scope of anti-Indigenous attitudes. But what, exactly, are the political consequences of anti-Indigenous attitudes? Answering this question requires recognizing that attitudes toward Indigenous peoples are distinct from White racial attitudes toward other disempowered groups. In this paper, I introduce a novel measure of Indigenous resentment. I then show that Indigenous resentment is an important predictor of policy attitudes using data collected from an original survey of White settlers. I estimate the effect of both Indigenous resentment and negative affect on policy attitudes—opposition to welfare and support for pipeline developments—to make the case that Indigenous resentment is a better measure of anti-Indigenous attitudes than affective prejudice, and that Indigenous resentment is an important omitted variable in the study of public opinion in settler societies.

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SCT? Edward Watts, ‘Applied Settler Theory: Four Recent Histories’, Early American Literature, 55, 3, 2020, pp. 845-853

21Oct20

Excerpt: Since 2000, older American exceptionalist narratives have been challenged anew by what has come to be known as Settler Colonial Theory (SCT). Spearheaded in the late 1980s by Canadian and Australian literary theorists Alan Lawson, Helen Tiffin, Steven Slemon, and Bill Ashcroft, the field found its taxonomy and maturation in work by dominion-based historians and anthropologists Lorenzo Veracini, Peter Wolfe, Lisa Ford, and James Belich. Early Americanists such as Lawrence Buell and others began applying its ideas in the 1990s, but they also incorporated ideas about American imperialism running back through William Appelmans Williams and Amy Kaplan. Since 2010, SCT has contributed to the broader proliferation the dynamic field of early American studies in many and metamorphic ways.

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Nullification as decolonisation? Hannah Manshel, ‘William Apess and the Nullification of Settler Law’, Early American Literature, 55, 3, 2020, pp. 753-779

21Oct20

Abstract: This article argues that in Indian Nullification and A Son of the Forest, William Apess uses an antinomian practice of nullification to link together Indigenous and Black struggles for decolonization and abolition in the 1830s. The article reimagines the Puritan concept of antinomianism, the idea that because God gives grace freely one need not adhere to civil law, in order to describe a rejection of the very premises of the laws that have constitutively denied protection to Indigenous and Black Americans. The formal and textual politics of these writings challenge settler normalizations of private property in both land and in persons, which were used to dispossess and enslave Indigenous and Black persons. Apess’s strategic deployments of settler law and settler religion are radical decolonial practices, which both point out and undermine the injustices written into American law.

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Settler colonial storytelling: Ashley Barnwell, ‘Keeping the Nation’s Secrets: “Colonial Storytelling” within Australian Families’, Journal of Family History, 2020

21Oct20

Abstract: Recent studies of the genealogy craze focus on how family historians appeal to ancestors to fashion their own identities, but practicing family history can also be a form of national identity-work. In this paper I explore how Larissa Behrendt’s notion of “colonial storytelling” might apply to the hi/stories told within families, as they seek to reproduce or challenge inherited narratives of settler colonialism. To do this, I analyze a sample of self-published family histories of “settlement” held at the National Library of Australia. With close attention to family historians’ books, I consider how genealogical research can revise the collective memories that shape both familial and national imaginaries and offer a model for truth-telling.

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The usual threats to the settler state: Sergio Caggiano, Laura Mombello, ‘Immigrants and Indigenous Peoples in the Twists and Turns of Nationality and Citizenship: The Construction of Threats in Argentina (2015-2019)’, Historia y Sociedad, 39, 2020

18Oct20

Abstract: As part of research on social conflicts caused by the appropriation and use of lands and other spaces, this article addresses how the Argentine state constructed social threats between 2015 and 2019. The topics explored include who is construed as a threatening subject, the justification for using violence against these subjects and, more specifically, the notion of citizen versus foreigner used to legitimize the violence. By creating a threat, illegality is legally produced as part of the government’s concern for population security and circulation. Legislation, public debates, and national press coverage provide insight into these questions, as does the ethnographic fieldwork the authors have done with migrant organizations and rural and native communities since 1990. The state actions analysed herein should be understood as part of stricter control of migratory movements and borders in recent decades. But these global trends are linked to national and regional histories. In the policies implemented in Argentina between 2015 and 2019, two issues commonly viewed separately in the social sciences and public policies are connected: immigration/border crossing and the indigenous “problem.” Thus, the global rhetoric surrounding border control and illegality in Argentina refers to both non-nationals who move to the country and native groups who precede the nation-state. Although citizenship has been increasingly seen as separate from nationality, this article shows how the state continues to connect the two vis-à-vis the concept of foreignness. Additionally, it draws attention to how theoretical concerns about governmentality can be enriched by questions related to inequalities, disputes over goods and recognition, and, particularly, processes associated with accumulation by dispossession.

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