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Compassion as a settler colonial device: Carmela Murdocca, ‘”Let’s help our own”: Humanitarian compassion as racial governance in settler colonialism’, Oñati Socio-legal Series, 2019

13Sep20

Abstract: This article explores narratives of humanitarian compassion as rendered intelligible through the relational intersecting concerns about Syrian refugees and the suicide crisis in the Indigenous community of Attawapiskat, Ontario. Fuelled by a combination of anti-refugee rhetoric, racism and ongoing colonialism experienced by Indigenous people and communities, public and media discourse reveals how humanitarian governance is constitutive of the genealogy of settler colonialism. I suggest that examining the political genealogy of humanitarian governance in white settler colonialism assists in revealing the centrality of racial colonial violence in producing public and media discourse that is contingent upon the relational currencies of anti-refugee rhetoric, racism and humanitarian compassion. As expressions of a grammar of racial difference in liberal settler colonialism, these discourses ultimately reveal how racial colonial violence is constituted through the genealogy of humanitarianism.


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Red tape as a settler-colonial device: Jennifer Matsunaga, ‘The red tape of reparations: settler governmentalities of truth telling and compensation for Indian residential schools’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

13Sep20

Abstract: This paper brings into conversation truth telling and compensation as forms of reparation for historical injustices in the Canadian settler colonial context. I examine how settler bureaucracy engages with stories of Indian residential schools and former students through analysis of the Common Experience Payment program’s application form and final evaluation. This program, which provided former students with compensation for their collective experience in residential schools, erases survivor-centred forms of truth telling within the records and practices of the public service. I argue that the Common Experience Payment process both produces a new Indigenous population to be governed and perpetuates longstanding settler colonial rationalities that attempt to manage and marginalize the emotion and voices of Indigenous peoples and racialize them as inferior by way of being a ‘challenge to overcome’ for the bureaucracy. I emphasize that assimilation is not located simply in the spectacular or brute acts embedded in settler colonial policy, but in the everyday procedural instruments and mechanisms of the public service such as application forms and final evaluations which are largely taken for granted as benign.


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Settler ‘normalization’: Mai Albzour, ‘The Deconstruction of the Concept of Normalization within the Context of the Settler-Colonialism in Palestine: The Duality of Acceptance and Rejection’, Language, Discourse & Society, 2020

13Sep20

Abstract: The concept of normalization was associated with the peace process with Israelis, in both, Arab and Palestinian context. The term has different interpretations depending on context, and it becomes more complex when referring to a direct relationship between the colonized and their colonizers in the context of the settler colonialism in Palestine, therefore, it is a highly controversial concept. The political debates over the concept, mostly describe it as a term that refers to recognizing the state of Israel and conducting normal relations with Israelis. The term ‘normalization’ has been used by Michel Foucault in describing the processes of psychological dominance imposed by an authority’s penal role in modern societies and its influence on human groups. One of the most prominent purposes of “Post-modern” theories is to resist the colonial dominant narratives by discovering the Scattered Historical Contingencies. Given this premise, this paper has the following objectives: To offer a critical, deconstructivist analysis for the concept of normalization in the context of the settler-colonial regime, and to study the genealogies of this concept (Généalogie) by investigating the relevant historical hypotheses: 1) there are historical differences regarding the appearance of the expression phonologically and its practice (political, official, and public practice); and 2) there are historical epistemological transformations that took place with regards to Arabs’ perceptions, and the political reflection, which shaped the image and the relationship with the colonizer, due to the practice of the concept normalization in politics. I will analyse these historical hypotheses by using a synthesis of settler colonial theoretical frameworks and those of socio-political psychology such as Frantz Fanon’s theoretical contributions, to investigate political discourse, including discourse in peace treaties, politics related to the Palestinian and Arab national identities, and the relevant political discourses used by politicians who reject normalization.


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Data sovereignty under settler colonialism is sovereignty: Maggie Walter, Tahu Kukutai, Stephanie Russo Carroll, Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear (eds), Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Policy, Routledge, 2021

11Sep20

Description: This book examines how Indigenous Peoples around the world are demanding greater data sovereignty, and challenging the ways in which governments have historically used Indigenous data to develop policies and programs. In the digital age, governments are increasingly dependent on data and data analytics to inform their policies and decision-making. However, Indigenous Peoples have often been the unwilling targets of policy interventions and have had little say over the collection, use and application of data about them, their lands and cultures. At the heart of Indigenous Peoples’ demands for change are the enduring aspirations of self-determination over their institutions, resources, knowledge and information systems. With contributors from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, North and South America and Europe, this book offers a rich account of the potential for Indigenous data sovereignty to support human flourishing and to protect against the ever-growing threats of data-related risks and harms.


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Decolonial metaphors: Warwick Anderson, ‘Finding Decolonial Metaphors in Postcolonial Histories’, History and Theory, 59, 3, 2020, pp. 430-438

09Sep20

Abstract: This is a reflection on the close relations of the writing of postcolonial histories and recent decolonial critiques, and on the tensions between them. Postcolonial historical analysis often has been preoccupied with hybridity and mixture, conjugation and adaptation, exchange and interaction—with subversions of sovereignty in contact zones, borderlands, and on the beach. As a structuralist formulation, decolonial historical binarism in contrast echoes Indigenous politics of self‐determination, even suggesting at times an ontological decoupling of settler and Indigenous histories and practices. Stringent decolonization of historical inquiry—implying the sabotage and superseding of settler colonial linguistic, narrative, and temporal conventions and the disturbing of standardized assumptions about evidence, agency, and authorship—would give us an epistemic assemblage perhaps not recognizable as “history.” Even if desirable, is that imaginable now except as metaphor or ideal?


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Indigenous-led, place-based decolonial practice: Michelle Murphy, ‘Some Keywords Toward Decolonial Methods: Studying Settler Colonial Histories and Environmental Violence from Tkaronto’, History and Theory, 2020

09Sep20

Abstract: This article provides keywords and reflections for decolonial methods, drawing on insights from the Indigenous‐led Land and the Refinery project, which concerns the history of Canada’s Chemical Valley. This project is crucially organized as Indigenous people co‐researching the Imperial Oil Refinery, not as academics studying Aamjiwnaang, and asks how Indigenous and decolonial methods might reorient the use of archives toward other futures. Together, the keywords begin to outline a particular place‐based theory of change within decolonial historical practice.


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Settler gendering: Susanah Shaw Romney, Returning to the Gender Frontier’, Journal of Women’s History, 32, 3, 2020, pp. 146-153

09Sep20

Excerpt: Over the last two decades, scholars have rethought the history of empire and colonization in North America. Epitomized by Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire, historians have used the term “empire” to turn the tables on traditional assumptions about European power. They instead posit that Native empires maintained or increased control over the heart of the continent into and beyond the eighteenth century.1 At the same time, theorists of Native and Indigenous studies have used the framework of “settler colonialism” to identify the continuous drive for the erasure of multiple Native groups from North American landscapes from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.


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Settler bordering, comparatively speaking: Fae Chubin, Manuel A. Ramirez, ‘Securing Racial Borders: A Comparative Study of Settler‐Racial Ideology and State Border Violence’, Sociological Inquiry, 2020

09Sep20

Abstract: The Palestinian “Great March of Return” in 2018, marked by the Israeli government’s brutal attacks on Palestinians who were demonstrating at the Gaza border, nearly coincided with the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy in which the unauthorized border crossing of Latinx immigrants came under an ever severe attack. This article offers a comparative content analysis of the “border security” discourses of the two settler‐colonial states of the United States and Israel by examining American and Israeli government officials’ public comments on state violence at borders. We place our study within a settler‐colonial framework to provide a historically grounded analysis of the U.S. and Israel’s racial ideologies and the colorblind rhetoric of “border security.” Through a content analysis of the speeches, interviews, social media posts, and press releases of American and Israeli government officials, we identified a settler‐racial ideology shared by the two states comprised of three distinct and overlapping frames: (1) obscuring settler colonialism, (2) vilification of those constructed as non‐native, and (3) glorification of the state. By bridging theories of settler colonialism and structural racism, we demonstrate that a settler‐racial ideology is central to maintaining the ongoing systems of border violence within settler‐colonial states.


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Sovereign outcomes within sovereignty? Wayne Edwards, Sovereignty and Land Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the United States, Palgrave 2020

09Sep20

Description: This book presents a comparative study of the land settlements and sovereign arrangements between the US government and the three major aggregated groups of indigenous peoples—American Indians, Native Alaskans, and Native Hawaiians—whose land rights claims have resulted in very different outcomes. It shows that the outcomes of their sovereign claims were different, though their bases were similar. While the US government insists that it is committed to the government-to-government relationship it has with the tribes, federal authority severely limits the ability of tribal governments to participate as an equal partner.


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Settler colonial diaries: Kelly Struthers Montford, ‘Milk and Law in the Anthropocene: Colonialism’s Dietary Interventions’, Journal of Food Law & Policy, 16, 1, 2020

09Sep20

Abstract: It is widely accepted that we are living in the Anthropocene: the age in which human activity has fundamentally altered earth systems and processes. Decolonial scholars have argued that colonialism’s shaping of the earth’s ecologies and severing of Indigenous relations to animals have provided the conditions of possibility for the Anthropocene. With this, colonialism has irreversibly altered diets on a global scale. I argue that dairy in the settler contexts of Canada and the United States remains possible because of colonialism’s severing of Indigenous relations of interrelatedness with the more-than-human world. I discuss how colonialism—which has included the institution of dairy—requires and authorizes relations that at their core seek to domesticate those imagined as wild, including humans, animals, and land. With this in mind, I then analyze recent and current dairy lawsuits as well as proposed legislation seeking to maintain legislated definitions of milk as exclusively animal-based. I argue that instances of mobilizing law to secure dairy as exclusively animal-based are attempts to re-secure settler colonial ontologies of life along a “real food” versus “fake food” dichotomy in which plant-based foods are positioned as substitutes for animal products. However, these pro-dairy lawsuits are often unsuccessful. Thus, dairy law is one arena in which settler colonialism’s orderings of life and relations are being challenged and re-made. In the context of the Anthropocene, the role of legal ontologies in shaping our consumption habits and relationships with animals remain all the more urgent.


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