settler colonial studies blog

The disjoined temporalities of settler colonialism: Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem, ‘Settler colonial temporalities, ruinations and neoliberal urban renewal: the case of Suknet Al-Huresh in Jaffa’, GeoJournal, 2020

19Aug20

Abstract: In a bid to Judaize the Palestinian space, Israel has imposed through its planning policies and practices different temporal structures and narratives of ruinations on Palestinian cities inside its 1948 borders. These different forms of ruins have created temporal segregation in adjacent spaces. This paper provides a temporal analysis of planning policies and practices imposed on Jaffa, a Palestinian city emptied of the bulk of its residents and turned after the 1948 war into a city of ruins. It provides an outline of Jaffa’s temporal map, which illustrates the varying temporalities that had been imposed by the municipality and governmental bodies on the city’s various quarters. Special attention is given to one section of Al-‘Ajami district—Suknet Al-Huresh/the Maronite Quarter which has taken a particular trajectory. To track these changes a micro and macro geography methods have been employed: a study of a specific house as well as an analysis of local urban plans and journalistic archives has been undertaken. The main findings show that neoliberal governmentality has enabled individual settlers’ control over time and space. While such a control maybe blatant in expanding settler colonialism’s frontiers, this article illustrates how it is assumed in a ‘normative setting’. Moreover, it shows how colonizers, as agents, create through neoliberal tools a linear temporality of terra sine tempore and contribute to the reproduction of the settler colonial structure. Yet, it is found that Palestinian inhabitants continued to perceive the space beyond such temporal presentations.

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Catholic indigeneities? Conor J. Donnan, ‘Kindred Spirits and Sacred Bonds: Irish Catholics, Native Americans, and the Battle Against Anglo-Protestant Imperialism, 1840–1930’, U.S. Catholic Historian, 38, 3, 2020, pp. 1-23

19Aug20

Abstract: Between 1840 and 1930, the United States engaged in Westward expansion, displacing Native Americans in the name of imperialism, capitalism, and Anglo-Saxonism. Simultaneously, Anglo colonization in Ireland helped prompt millions of Irish to immigrate to the United States. They became the unwitting foot soldiers for expansion, engaging in bloody assaults on Indigenous North Americans. Despite this, some Irish Catholics and Indigenous peoples found common ground in shared colonial experiences. They expressed political solidarity, used anti-Anglo language, and cooperated to undermine Anglo-Saxonism and promote their own values. Because the British and Anglo-Americans viewed Catholicism as backward and savage, religion was central in linking Indigenous and Irish struggles. The Irish living in the U.S. hoped to create a spiritual empire that weakened Anglo-Protestantism, an effort that gained support from Native Americans. These Irish-Indigenous interactions provide valuable insights into alternatives to Anglo-Protestant hegemony, imperial expansion, and capitalism.

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Settler Rhodesia: Nicola Ginsburgh, Class, work and whiteness: Race and settler colonialism in Southern Rhodesia, 1919–79, Manchester University Press, 2020

16Aug20

Description: This book offers the first comprehensive history of white workers from the end of the First World War to Zimbabwean independence in 1980. It reveals how white worker identity was constituted, examines the white labouring class as an ethnically and nationally heterogeneous formation comprised of both men and women, and emphasises the active participation of white workers in the ongoing and contested production of race. White wage labourers’ experiences, both as exploited workers and as part of the privileged white minority, offer insight into how race and class co-produced one another and how boundaries fundamental to settler colonialism were regulated and policed. Based on original research conducted in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK, this book offers a unique theoretical synthesis of work on gender, whiteness studies, labour histories, settler colonialism, Marxism, emotions and the New African Economic History.\

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Voting rights as containment: V. Jo Hsu, ‘Voting rights, anti-intersectionality, and citizenship as containment’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 106, 3, 2020, pp. 269-276

12Aug20

Abstract: This piece argues that dominant histories of U.S. suffrage have misremembered the history of voting rights legislation as one of steady social progress and multicultural inclusion. By contrast, I consider landmark legislation affecting voting rights such as the 19th Amendment and the Dawes and Magnuson Acts as strategies of containment that that expand but also continue to police the racialized gender norms of U.S. citizenship. These legal reforms, while providing potential channels for redistributions of power and resources, also perpetuate anti-intersectional (Brandzel) vocabularies that impose single-axis frameworks (Crenshaw) onto understandings of citizenship and civic inclusion. While acknowledging the partial and contingent gains made by suffrage movements, I offer a counternarrative of U.S. voting rights as means of managing and maintaining colonial dominance. I argue that the settler-colonial nation state continues to restrict the decision-making capacities of those marginalized by race, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and/or disability through a vast network of administrative practices that must be analyzed in concert with voting rights.

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Statistics, erasure, citizenship: Desi Small-Rodriguez, Remaking Collective Identities: Statistical Statecraft, Indigenous Erasure, and Tribal Citizenship, PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, 2020

12Aug20

Abstract: In the social sciences, the identification of a population of interest is central to any research, policy, or program. Defining, counting, and classifying populations, however, are not objective. Rather, they are catalyzed by boundary making processes that are deeply embedded in social and political structures. In the United States (US), population classification and enumeration have long served the aims of American statecraft while disenfranchising certain populations. Racial and ethnic minorities, for example, share historical legacies of statecraft determining whose bodies are counted, whose views are official, and which knowledge corpora are privileged. As US demographics shift toward a majority minority population, there is growing need to understand the nature of boundary change, particularly with regard to intraracial heterogeneity and the intersection of citizenship and race. I use the case of American Indians and Alaska Natives (AIANs) to examine how the race-making and nation-making instruments of statecraft control the boundaries of indigeneity and threaten the sustainability of tribal populations. The AIAN case provides broad insight into how the American settler colonial ideology of erasure is reproduced in population statistics and how it can be challenged by marginalized populations who are rapidly becoming the majority in the US. I situate this inquiry within several bodies of literature, including the sociology of race and ethnicity, social stratification, state formation, and critical demography. While prior research on these topics has rarely examined the AIAN population, AIANs are an unusually rich case for analysis due to their concurrent straddling of race, ethnicity, and nationality boundaries. By centering tribal sovereignty, I demonstrate how the ongoing colonial realities of Native nations reflect the dialectical relationship between statecraft and AIAN population statistics. Drawing on an original database of tribal citizenship criteria, US Census data, and a tribal case study, I explore two central research questions. First, how have the data practices of colonial statecraft been utilized to construct and control Indigenous Peoples in the US? Second, how are Native nations reclaiming some measure of control over these data practices to reconstruct their group boundaries? I answer these research questions in three empirical studies that explore the nuances of tribal enumeration and classification. In the first study, I delve into the US Census as the official statistics context to explore how the federal government’s data collection efforts both challenge and support the sovereignty of Native nations. I find the intersection of census self-identification and tribal sovereignty problematic with implications for the utility of official US data on tribal populations. In the second study, I examine the racialization of tribal identity in a cross-national context by analyzing variation in tribal citizenship criteria. Using original data from more than 80 percent of Native nations in the contiguous US, I find that tribal blood quantum persists as a durable boundary of colonial control. In the third study, I focus on the nation state context by partnering with a Native nation to evaluate the extent to which blood quantum policy and demographic realities threaten the sustainability of tribal populations. This final study advances the case for more research in tribal demography to support Indigenous futures. As a whole, this dissertation reveals that the data practices of settler statecraft retain a strong hold on the collective boundaries of AIAN identity and that Native nations have various degrees of control over these boundaries depending on the context. I posit that the colonial imperative of Indigenous erasure is antithetical to the sustainability of tribal peoples and tribal sovereignty. Ultimately, to prevent erasure, Native nations must reclaim their boundaries of belonging.

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The First Intifada as a struggle against settler colonialism (not colonialism): Nadia Naser-Najjab, ‘Palestinian leadership and the contemporary significance of the First Intifada’, Race & Class, 2020

12Aug20

Abstract: On the eve of the highly controversial 2020 plan for Israel to annex parts of the West Bank, the author examines the nature of the Palestinian condition and the many challenges Palestinians confront, including the absence of an effective leadership. In registering this, the article proposes a reassessment of the First Intifada that places it in a contemporary perspective and seeks to ‘excavate’ modes of resistance. It engages with the problematic of leadership and highlights how existing challenges might be addressed. Taking into account the Oslo Accords and subsequent attempts towards neoliberal state-building, it draws on theories of settler colonialism and stresses the neo-colonial continuum in Palestine. Finally, the author interviews key activists from the First Intifada to (respectively) provide insight into the nature of the contemporary situation and suggest an alternative model of leadership and struggle.

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On allyship as decolonial practice: Andrea Sullivan-Clarke, ‘Empowering Relations: An Indigenous Understanding of Allyship in North America’, Journal of World Philosophies, 5, 1, 2020, pp. 30-42

12Aug20

Abstract: Colonization is still present in the lives of Indigenous people in North America, and the threats it underwrites—the possibility of losing federal recognition, the failure to investigate the cases of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, and the constant challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act —comprise the day-to-day demands in Indian Country. While allies in the fight against modern-day colonialism would be welcome, the previous failings and insincerities of putative allies and the existence of an ally industrial complex make it difficult to be a contemporary ally to Indigneous people. In this paper, I address the difficulties associated with allyship and discuss why being an active bystander is not sufficient for the needs of Indigenous people in North America. Taking the lessons learned from the actions of Veterans Stand for Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter during #NODAPL, I present some features of a decolonial ally. A decolonial ally is willing to stand in a relationship with Indigenous people, will seek out this relation while recognizing their privilege and affirming the sovereignty of those they seek to serve, and above all, will learn about the people independently, without imposing a burden on marginalized communities. Given that Indigenous people worldwide face similar colonial threats, I conclude by offering some points for future research regarding global Indigenous allyship.

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Where settler colonialism does not apply: Breny Mendoza, ‘Decolonial Theories in Comparison’, Journal of World Philosophies, 5, 1, 2020, pp. 43-60

12Aug20

Abstract: The article examines the theories of decolonization that have originated in the north of the Americas and Oceania and Latin America. It compares settler colonial theories developed by Australian historians Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini with the theory of the coloniality of power of the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. The author argues that Wolfe’s and Veracini’s theory of settler colonialism creates a conceptual distancing from what they call exploitation colonialism (which supposedly characterizes Latin America colonialism) that is not only theoretically unsound, but also historically inaccurate. The land/labor binary that they build in their theory of settler colonialism holds up only if it excludes Latin America from the analysis. This becomes evident in their analyses of the state, race, and miscegenation. Both theories, however, largely ignore gender in the description of colonization, a gap that Latin American decolonial theorists and feminist indigenous theorists of the north must fill. The differences between the theories determines also the ways they imagine decolonization.

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If you worry about ‘authenticity’ there is probably a reason: Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem, ‘Privatizing the production of settler colonial landscapes: “Authenticity: and imaginative geography in Wadi Al-Salib, Haifa’, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2020

12Aug20

Abstract: This article explores how urban settler-colonial landscapes are produced in the neoliberal era. Adopting an anti-colonial approach, the article addresses practices of landscape production through the history of Wadi Al-Salib in Haifa after the driving out of its inhabitants in 1948. A micro geographical study of three Palestinian refugees’ houses, sold by the state to private real estate companies during the last two decades, constitutes the empirical mainstay of the article. Located in Wadi Al-Salib where rapid neoliberal urban renewal schemes hope to raise property values and enact demographic change, these houses are often marketed to upper-class Israeli Jews as “authentic”. Such branding indicates that the privatization of the Palestinian refugees’ houses may also signify privatization of the colonial imagination, and a broader shift of the landscape into a collage of marketable images, echoing an ‘aesthetic violence’ that evokes past colonial landscapes. Such references create several hyper-realities in the same place, thus canonizing colonial landscapes’ imaginaries.

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Indigenous education sovereignty is sovereignty: Michelle Bishop, ‘A rationale for the urgency of Indigenous education sovereignty: enough’s enough’, Australian Educational Researcher, 2020

12Aug20

Abstract: For tens of thousands of years, Indigenous Peoples in the country now known as Australia have had a very successful education system in place, from place. Currently, many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students experience systemic harm in Australia’s public and private schooling systems at unacceptable levels and are consistently positioned as deficient in both the practices and outcomes of formal schooling in Australia. Under the pretense of ‘getting a good education’, many Indigenous students feel coerced into compliance, with schools used as vehicles of institutionalisation, indoctrination and assimilation. As a Gamilaroi woman, I find issue with this and am concerned about the intergenerational consequences if Indigenous students remain in this system. Yet, there are few education options available outside the dominant Western, compulsory schooling model. This paper proposes an envisioning of Indigenous education sovereignty, grounded in Aboriginal axiologies, ontologies and epistemologies as an education option for all students.

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