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Recognition through participatory equality: Dominic O’Sullivan, ‘Recognition and the politics of indigenous citizenship’, Politics, Groups and Identity, 2020

29Jul20

Abstract: Recognition theory responds to political exclusion. It provides ways of thinking about the tension between universal liberal citizenship and the distinctive claims that indigenous peoples make with reference to prior occupancy and the universal right to self-determination. However, the complex and contested political questions that recognition theory examines are not easily answered. In this article, I propose Nancy Fraser’s participatory parity as a transformative, and not simply distributive, approach to recognition, which offers scope for substantive indigenous voice in state policy making. I use participatory parity to contest arguments that the meaningful recognition of indigenous peoples is not possible in liberal democracies like Australia and New Zealand. I argue that, instead, participatory parity complements the extant authority that indigenous peoples claim over their own affairs. This kind of recognition, through differentiated citizenship, means that indigenous peoples are simultaneously inside and outside the state. Recognition through participatory parity provides a foundation for self-determination. However, its full potential and moral acceptability to indigenous peoples depend on it being the genuine recognition of equals and on its capacity to provide reasons to accept the moral legitimacy of the state which may, for many indigenous people, be an unrealistic and unreasonable expectation.


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Settler colonialism in international law (on the Separation Wall in the West Bank): Mia Lattanzi, ‘Settler Colonialism through the Court: Domestic Interpretations of International Law’, UCLA Journal of International Law, 2020

29Jul20

Access the article here.


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Accounting against the occupation: Dalia Abdulmuti A. Alazzeh, Three essays on Self-Government Accounting Practices under Settler Colonialism: A Case study from Palestine, PhD thesis, University of Essex, 2020

29Jul20

Abstract: This thesis consists of three self-contained essays that investigate self-government accounting practices in the salient context of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt). The first essay (Chapter 2) explores the enactment of New Public Financial Management (NPFM) as a component of the liberal peace-building discourse, disseminated by the World Bank. The study relies on the Fairclough dialectical relational approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (1992, 1999, 2010, 2012). The essay performs a semiotic analysis of the text of the World Bank’s (NPFM) strategies in the context of the peace-building efforts in the oPt. The analysis revealed the use of the genre of governance to mediate the relationship between the donor community, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority post-peace-agreement. This mediating genre specialises in ‘action at a distance’, such as initiating mechanisms for budget revenue transfers. The essay identifies value assumptions in the NPFM discourse, and exclusion of social agents (nominalisation) on several occasions, for instance, in the revenue-collection process or invoice validations. Further, extensional assumptions are ideologically vital as they reflect powerful representation. The second essay (Chapter 3) explores the budget of indigenous self-governing entities in the context of settler colonial studies. It adopts settler colonialism theory (SCT) as a theoretical framework and was initially introduced by Denoon (1979), subsequently developed by Wolfe (1994, 1999, 2001, 2006), and theoretically extended by Veracini (2010, 2012, 2018). The study highlights several strategies implemented by settler-colonisers to liquidate indigenous self-governing entities—and ultimately indigenous nations—using the budget as a weapon (e.g., the legitimisation of budgetary cuts and the suspension of the main source of indigenous self-government revenues, known as clearance revenues). It also presents an account of how settler corporate capitalism serves illegal settlements by channelling services and investing in the intelligence architecture of these settlements. This type of capitalism has also promoted settlers’ collective obsession with sovereignty, which has translated into a segregation regime that prevents indigenous self-governments from holding settler states financially accountable. The third essay (Chapter 4) examines the nature of accountability between settler state and indigenous self-government in an extreme power imbalance. The essay deploys Hopwood’s (1994, 1990) account of accountability and visibility. Three examples were presented in the essay regarding the nature of accountability between the settler state and indigenous-self government. The first example discusses the sharing revenue mechanism and the refusal of computerised system invoice. The second example presents the failure of revenue transfer from the settler state to indigenous self-government. The third example presents an untraceable deduction in health and electricity bills. All examples indicate that the settler state refuses to ‘provide an account’ to indigenous self-government, which enhances the invisibility. This has also weakened the internal accountability of indigenous self-government.


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Settling on Instagram: Carrie Karsgaard, Maggie MacDonald, ‘Picturing the pipeline: Mapping settler colonialism on Instagram’, New Media & Society, 22, 7, 2020, pp. 1206-1226

29Jul20

Abstract: Through mainstream discourses that infuse all components of society, settler superiority is naturalized in Canada. This process occurs at the expense of Indigenous peoples who continue to be displaced from the land, which is conceptualized as a ‘resource’. Despite the seemingly static nature of settler colonialism, its hegemony is both contested and reinforced through the participatory social space of Instagram. Though it is primarily known for its aesthetic and visual communication properties, Instagram’s visuality contributes substantially to public discourse, enabling resistant and political expressions around specific issues. Using data collected from Instagram, this article maps the social life of Canada’s controversial Trans Mountain pipeline issue, as it develops under medium-specific affordances. Around the Trans Mountain pipeline issue, hashtags and imagery mutually inform one another on Instagram, connecting highly located and temporal experiences with national policies, as users performatively challenge and reinforce social relations as they exist under settler colonialism.


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Triangular relations in settler colonial Cuba? Natalie Lewis, Envisioning Alternative Cuban Identities: How Black and Native Studies Inform Afro-Cuban Futures, graduate dissertation, Mount Holyoke College, 2020

26Jul20

Abstract: Considering the shared, lived experiences of Afro-Cubans and Taíno Indians under conquest reveals the violent, repressive conditions of nationalist ideologies and colonial domination that have continued to obscure these groups from dominant historical narratives in Cuba. This is evident through an investigation of Fidel Castro’s totalizing dictatorship that began in 1953 and was crystallized in 1959. Western​i​zed historical accounts of settler colonialism have a tradition of portraying the hegemonic perspective of the colonizer. This is to say that these dominant historical narratives not only uphold the power dynamic between the colonizer and the colonized, but limit the scope of critical historical inquiry about marginalized, historical actors. Castro’s work of redeveloping a new ​Cubanidad​, being a unique understanding of Cuban nationhood and national identity, in the wake of the nation’s long fight for independence is incomplete. It was produced under a totalizing agenda of homogenization and through a forgetting of Cuba’s history of racial discrimination. As a result, it has suppressed the contributions that Afro-Cubans and Taínos brought to the framework of ​Cubanidad​, further subjugated these marginal groups under the new Cuban Oneness, and has thwarted discussions of their possible futures. This independent research will use a critical race theory approach to critique Castro’s production of a post-Revolution ​Cubanidad t​hat was predicated on notions of homogenization, stability, and contained identities. This critique will reshape ​Cubanidad to envision an alternative ​Cubanidad ​that considers alternative Afro-Cuban and Taíno futures by privileging notions of hybridity, impurity, and instability. This research will consider the role of race and identity in Cuban constructions of nationhood and the extent to which these conditions have and have not been investigated comprehensively. To consider alternative futures, this project will complicate binaristic modes of identity formation to reveal underlying power dynamics resonant of colonial structures, cultivate a methodology of “reading silences” that are present in historical narratives, and investigate critical moments where Afro-Cubans and Natives embody and exemplify an early understanding of a central component of ​Cubanidad​: revolutionary subjectivity. Drawing on Tiffany Lethabo King’s metaphor of the ​shoal as a conceptual foundation, a term of scientific origin employed to theoretically conceptualize a “third space” of identity, where a subject is positioned as being “both, neither, and in between,” I challenge the rhetorics and ideologies that contain and homogenize Blacks and Natives, posit a multi-temporal and hybrid analysis of ​Cubanidad​, and reignite discussions of Black and Native futures through a reconceptualization of post-Revolution ​Cubanidad​. By offering an analysis of Black and Native intersubjectivity, I will situate an ethical relationality within the framework of Cubanidad​ as the basis to envision collective futures of mutual care.


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Settlers want labour too: Sai Englert, ‘Settlers, Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession’, Antipode, 2020

26Jul20

Abstract: This article offers a critique of the Wolfe-an model, which has become so dominant within contemporary Settler Colonial Studies (SCS). It focuses particularly on the central claim made by Patrick Wolfe, and others after him, that settler colonialism is categorically differentiated from other forms of colonialism by its drive to “eliminate the native”, instead of exploiting them. This paper builds on the literature that shows how settler colonies have used elimination as well as exploitation in their relations with indigenous peoples—even transitioning from one to the other. Instead, the paper argues that focusing on accumulation by dispossession allows for an analysis of the specificity of settler social relations to emerge. It highlights the specific ways in which settlers collectively expropriate indigenous peoples and struggle amongst different settler classes over the distribution of the colonial loot.


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Cities are indigenous places: Libby Porter, ‘Indigenous Cities’, in Dallas Rogers, Adrienne Keane, Tooran Alizadeh, Jacqueline Nelson (eds), Understanding Urbanism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 15-26

26Jul20

Abstract: The historical origins of thousands of cities around the world, many of them cities from where mainstream theory and urban scholarship emanates, lie in dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples. Yet this foundational dimension of urbanisation is often simply missing from urban scholarship. Thinking about the city as an Indigenous place is to call for a more truthful and accurate account of what cities are, how they have come to be, and what work they do in securing colonial expansion and erasing Indigenous belonging. Focusing specifically on settler-colonial contexts, this chapter reveals key dimensions for thinking about how cities are Indigenous places, the ways cities are knitted into the structures of settler-colonial domination, and their vital importance for all our futures.


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Indigenous data sovereignty against settler colonialism: Maggie Walter, Tahu Kukutai, Stephanie Russo Carroll, Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear (eds), Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Policy, Routledge, 2020

24Jul20

Description: This book examines how Indigenous People around the world are demanding greater data sovereignty, and challenging the ways in which governments have historically used Indigenous data to develop policies and programmes.

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 for 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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Settler landscape and Indigenous Country: Martina Horáková, ‘From Landscape to Country: Writing Settler Belonging in Post-Mabo Australia’, Life Writing, 2020

22Jul20

Abstract: One of the debates which Australia continues to witness with various degrees of intensity involves the complex ways of articulating settler (un)belonging in the postcolonising settler nation. While one of the most significant moments which re-defined settler-Indigenous relationship took place around the turn of the twenty-first century, the critical scholarship examining settler anxieties regarding the sense of (un)belonging is flourishing in the post-Mabo period, as is the production of cultural and literary narratives engaging with this topic. This article explores two recent memoirs of settler belonging in Australia and contextualises them in a broader tradition of settler memoirs in the first decade of this century. By comparing and contrasting Tim Winton’s Island Home (2015. London: Picador) and Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtful (2016. Melbourne: Scribe), the article demonstrates a visible shift from earlier forms of writing settler (un)belonging, which often thematised settler anxiety and desire to belong through various acts of appropriating Indigenous ways of belonging. Winton’s and Mahood’s memoirs, however, offer a different vision of settler belonging: one that is deeply embedded in local, bioregional and environmental histories, recognition of Indigenous knowledges as significant agents shaping post-Mabo aesthetics and politics, and a commitment to transformation of settler relationship with the land from territory to Country.


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Gentrifying settlers (in unexpected places): Anwar Ouassini, Nabil Ouassini, ‘Between a Rock and the Kasbah: Tourism Gentrification, Cultural Repackaging, and Identity in Tangier’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2020

22Jul20

Abstract: This article explores the impact of tourism gentrification on the residents of the Kasbah in the city of Tangier, Morocco. It utilizes qualitative methods to reveal how the Kasbah has become a site of contention between the Moroccan neoliberal state, the foreign investors and settlers, and the residents of Tangier as they negotiate place and identity. The paper will examine how the process of tourism gentrification is not only reinforcing a demographic shift in the Kasbah by displacing the locals but also how the foreign urban settlers are increasingly becoming the filter through which traditional Moroccan culture is conspicuously produced and legitimized. The article will end with a discussion on the mixed contentions surrounding the gentrifying presence of the foreign urban settlers on the residents of the Kasbah and the city of Tangier.


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