settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism today: Aweke Amare Kenaw, ‘One country – two citizenships: the status of settlers in Benishangul-Gumuz Regional Sates (BGRS) of Ethiopia’, African Identities, 2020

02Sep20

Abstract: Migration of people from a certain area to a new destination is as old as human history. It is often made as a result of factors necessitating the movement either in the form of pull and push factors. In Ethiopia too, there has been various peoples’ movements since whenever in history from their home areas to new destinations across the country. Some have resulted for permanent settlements and full-fledged citizenship in the areas they settled but it has also produced very complicated relations in some. Besides individual oriented movements in search of better opportunities, there were also state operated movements based on the severity of circumstances. This paper, therefore, is dedicated to comment on the political and citizenship status of state operated settlers in Ethiopia in light of the experiences of Settlers in Asossa woreda, Benishangul-Gumuz Regional State (BGRS) of Ethiopia.

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Can the settler listen? Ryan Ben Shuvera, Sounding Unsettlement: Rethinking Settler States of Mind and Re(-)cognition through Scenes of Cross-Cultural Listening, PhD dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2020

02Sep20

Abstract: In this dissertation I consider how listening to music produced by Indigenous peoples might convince settler listeners to surrender settler states of mind. I focus on the elements of settler colonialism that are exemplified in and challenged by the experiences of listening to music produced by Indigenous peoples. I focus on these aesthetic encounters as a way of exposing the everyday presence and power of settler states of mind and, more importantly, exploring how settlers might go about rebuilding states of mind through these moments of aesthetic surrender that are spurred by embodied experiences of sound. My project builds on the work of writers, theorists, and musicians such as African American writer James Baldwin, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Simpson, and Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson. I think about what it means to listen cross-culturally in the context of ongoing settler colonialism in North America (Turtle Island) and increased rhetoric around “reconciliation” in response to the conclusion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) in 2015. I speak to the intimate level of listening to music from across cultures in this dissertation so that settlers might begin to engage in a critical self-reflection necessary for the rebuilding of settler states of mind—a reflection that involves a sense of surrender that requires settlers to learn how to participate in new worlds opened and led by various Indigenous peoples and nations.

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On indigenous futures: Yin Paradies, ‘Unsettling truths: modernity, (de-)coloniality and Indigenous futures’, Postcolonial Studies, 2020

30Aug20

Abstract: In our world of fractured truths, unparalleled disparities and technological wizardry, it is vital that we interrogate the largely unquestioned political axioms that have brought us to the brink of extinction. In this article, I explore the broader landscape in which settler-coloniality is ensconced through an examination of global modernity. I briefly outline some well-known, but largely subsumed, and mostly unremarked, realities of the contemporary world. I then argue that debt, property, institutions and nation states are the constituent devastations of modernity that we must simultaneously aver and avert. I suggest that the path towards decoloniality entails radical land-based re-localisation, revitalised communalism and embodied kinship with all life. This will necessitate an Indigenisation in which we, collectively across difference and distance, embrace fundamentally transformed relationships of mutuality so as to bring about flourishing egalitarian societies.

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Genocide applies: Claudia Laurel Bell, A Postcolonial Analysis of the Genocide Convention With Reference to the Lived Experiences of the Palestinian People Under Settler Colonial Rule, MA dissertation, Columbia, 2020

30Aug20

Abstract: Native people under colonial rule have suffered a multitude of human rights abuses throughout history. The human rights community has attempted to address this by granting colonised peoples self-determination, in addition to creating international laws that seek to prevent and punish the mistreatment of vulnerable people more broadly. However, a growing number of scholars have argued that international human rights law not only fails to sufficiently account for abuses that continue to be perpetrated against native peoples, but also, by doing so, actively contributes to their marginalisation. I will follow this academic trajectory, and will argue that the Genocide Convention specifically, was constructed in accordance with the vested interests of colonial powers. The resulting definition of genocide omitted acts occurring to native people, such as ethnic cleansing and forced assimilation, as it suited the political agendas of colonial countries. I will challenge this position and assert that if genocide is to be understood as the destruction of the group, rather than its individual constituent parts, then any action designed to intentionally decimate the group, (as a metaphysical entity existing beyond its human participants), should be considered genocidal. More specifically, non-lethal methods, often referred to as cultural genocide, should be included in the Genocide Convention. I will contextualise this argument within Palestine and apply a settler-colonial lens to the engagement between the Israeli State and the Palestinian people. I will argue that settler-colonisation has an intrinsically genocidal dimension; it follows therefore that the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israeli State can be plausibly considered. It will be concluded that if international human rights law is to effectively protect vulnerable communities from human rights abuses, such as genocide, it needs to be consistently evaluated and reconsidered from a multitude of perspectives.

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Assimilation’s many exits: Catherine S. Ramírez, Assimilation An Alternative History, University of California Pres, 2020

28Aug20

Description: For over a hundred years, the story of assimilation has animated the nation-building project of the United States. And still today, the dream or demand of a cultural “melting pot” circulates through academia, policy institutions, and mainstream media outlets. Noting society’s many exclusions and erasures, scholars in the second half of the twentieth century persuasively argued that only some social groups assimilate. Others, they pointed out, are subject to racialization.

In this bold, discipline-traversing cultural history, Catherine Ramírez develops an entirely different account of assimilation. Weaving together the legacies of US settler colonialism, slavery, and border control, Ramírez challenges the assumption that racialization and assimilation are separate and incompatible processes. In fascinating chapters with subjects that range from nineteenth century boarding schools to the contemporary artwork of undocumented immigrants, this book decouples immigration and assimilation and probes the gap between assimilation and citizenship. It shows that assimilation is not just a process of absorption and becoming more alike. Rather, assimilation is a process of racialization and subordination and of power and inequality.

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If the settler only focuses on land, only focusing on land after settler colonialism is a dead end: Langton Makuwerere Dube, ‘Race, Entitlement, and Belonging: A Discursive Analysis of the Political Economy of Land in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Black Studies, 2020

26Aug20

Abstract: The access, control, and ownership of land and the means of production is an enduring frontier of conflict in post colonial settler states. Whilst racially tinged, colonialism created “structures of feeling” that sanctioned epistemic violence and created an economy of entitlement and belonging that sustained imperial designs. Zimbabwe’s independence meant the redistribution and proprietorship of land became a central leitmotif of cadastral politics. The article explores the interplay of the contested tropes of race, entitlement, and indigeneity as they informed the highly polarized land redistribution discourse. The discussion takes stock of the dominant narratives of post-colonial state predations, patronage, populism, and megalomania in contradistinction to the various ways in which whiteness and its prejudices and stereotypes nurtured some hubris of entitlement and belonging that retrogressively not only perpetuated colonial settler values and identities but also entrenched racial distance and indifference. The polarized contestations on land redistribution discourse coalesce around concepts such as restitution, indigeneity, nativity, patriotism, race, and class. Therefore while critiquing state excesses that have masked the honorable intentions of land redistribution, the article underscores the complex ways in which white Zimbabweans contributed to the enduring crisis by obdurately fixating their energies on colonial settler entitlements, values, and identities.

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Logically, once you are a regenerated settler, you begin decaying: Ryan Wander, ‘The end(s) of regeneration: naturalist frontier chronotopes and the time of US settler colonial biopolitics’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

26Aug20

Abstract: This article reads naturalist portrayals of “post-frontier” frontiers by Frank Norris and Jack London, two key turn-of-the-twentieth-century US literary naturalists, for their chronotopic engagement with the temporal logics and phenomenological orientations that underwrite US settler colonialism. Despite its 1890 “closure,” the concept of the frontier remained central to the ongoing enactment of US settler colonialism around the turn of the twentieth century, and it remains so to this day. This article argues that Norris and London’s naturalist aesthetics support the US settler state’s biopolitics of white ascendance, racialized death, and Native elimination through narratives of white settler death. By considering texts whose narratives appear to contradict the white masculine triumphalism that literary critics often stress in readings of naturalist frontier fiction, I trace how texts including McTeague (1899), The Call of the Wild(1903), and “To Build a Fire” (1908) mobilize US literary naturalism’s evolutionary and typological representational idiom to stage critiques of the racial and genocidal logics of US settler colonialism. Ultimately, these critiques uniquely help to consolidate the phenomenological orientations that underwrite US settler biopolitics: Norris and London’s narratives of white settler death turn the representation of white settler death into a source of (white) settler futurity.

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Who can the unsettler be? Erich Steinman, ‘Unsettling as agency: unsettling settler colonialism where you are’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

26Aug20

Abstract: A great deal of recent sociological scholarship in Canada has examined the ‘unsettling’ process motivating non-Natives or ‘settlers’ to act in solidarity with Indigenous movements and their experiences of becoming unsettled through such engagements. Informed by settler colonialism and Indigenous studies concerns, such conceptualizations of unsettling have focused primarily on individual trajectories’, in conjunction with an overriding normative emphasis on settlers’ active support for, and accountability to, Indigenous leadership.While invaluable, these predominating conerns leave open questions about the scope of appropriate agency for non-Native people in challenging settler colonialism. Scholarship to date lacks an explicit affirmative model for settlers to interrupt the routine institutional reproduction of settler colonial understandings, discourses and practices, which also limits its applicability to the United States context. Drawing upon sociological concerns with the institutional and organizational reproduction of power, the article discusses and disentangles differing notions of unsettling and suggests that, under larger covering norms of following Indigenous leadership and relationality, settlers can actively destabilize the reproduction of settler colonial reality through a disruptive form of quotidian agency wherever they are.

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To make a settler society: Natasha Varner, La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico, University of Arizona Press, 2020

26Aug20

Description: In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, nation builders, artists, and intellectuals manufactured ideologies that continue to give shape to popular understandings of indigeneity and mestizaje today. Postrevolutionary identity tropes emerged as part of broader efforts to reunify the nation and solve pressing social concerns, including what was posited in the racist rhetoric of the time as the “Indian problem.” Through a complex alchemy of appropriation and erasure, indigeneity was idealized as a relic of the past while mestizaje was positioned as the race of the future. This period of identity formation coincided with a boom in technology that introduced a sudden proliferation of images on the streets and in homes: there were more photographs in newspapers, movie houses cropped up across the country, and printing houses mass-produced calendar art and postcards. La Raza Cosmética traces postrevolutionary identity ideals and debates as they were dispersed to the greater public through emerging visual culture.

Critically examining beauty pageants, cinema, tourism propaganda, photography, murals, and more, Natasha Varner shows how postrevolutionary understandings of mexicanidad were fundamentally structured by legacies of colonialism, as well as shifting ideas about race, place, and gender. This interdisciplinary study smartly weaves together cultural history, Indigenous and settler colonial studies, film and popular culture analysis, and environmental and urban history. It also traces a range of Indigenous interventions in order to disrupt top-down understandings of national identity construction and to “people” this history with voices that have all too often been entirely ignored.

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Settler colonialism and racial capitalism, then and now: Robert Warrior, ‘”The Finest Men We Have Ever Seen”: Jefferson, the Osages, and the Mirror of Nativism’, Comparative Literature, 72, 3, 2020, pp. 276–282

22Aug20

Abstract: Noting the entwined histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, Robert Warrior investigates the place of Native Americans in colonial hierarchies manifest across US history, from an 1804 encounter in Washington, DC, between the Osage people and Thomas Jefferson—in which Jefferson claims that the Osage were among “the finest men we have ever seen”—to the January 2019 media event surrounding Nathan Phillips and Nicholas Sandmann on the National Mall. Drawing from the work of Arica Coleman, he notes that Jefferson’s seeming high regard for the Osage people masks his ideological commitment to racial purity, and he casts these reflections alongside movements such as Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter.

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