settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism in South Africa today: Lorenzo Veracini, Rafael Verbuyst, ‘South Africa’s settler-colonial present: Khoisan revivalism and the question of indigeneity’, Social Dynamics, 2020

22Aug20

Abstract: South Africa’s settler-colonial past is widely acknowledged. And yet, commonplace understandings of the post-apartheid era and a focus on the end of segregation make an appraisal of settler colonialism in present-day South Africa difficult and controversial. Nonetheless, we argue that an understanding of South Africa’s “settler-colonial present” is urgent and needed. We suggest that settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination survives apartheid. In particular, we focus on the recent revival and political mobilisation of indigenous Khoisan identity and cultural heritage to show that settler colonialism and apartheid should be understood as distinct yet overlapping modes of domination. A settler colonial mode of governance aiming at “the elimination of the native” in two interrelated domains, dispossession and transfer, characterises past and present South Africa. An understanding of this continuity offers opportunities for an original interpretation of both Khoisan revivalism and contemporary South African society.

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On settler national culture: Dan Tout, ‘Rex Ingamells and Ted Strehlow: Correspondences and Contradictions in Australian Settler Nationalism’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2020

21Aug20

Abstract: The standard story of Australian national cultural development revolves around a fundamental conflict between the forces of empire loyalism or universalism on the one hand and Australian nationalism on the other. Yet this narrative structure neglects the complexities of the settler-colonial, as distinct from the colonial, situation. This article is premised on the proposition that the settler-colonial situation is conditioned by a triangular system of relationships involving settler, metropolitan and Indigenous agencies. In this schema, the settler is compelled towards both indigenisation and neo-European replication, while both trajectories are similarly founded on the prior displacement of pre-existing Indigenous populations. While at certain historical moments exclusive emphasis on the settler–metropole relation may be maintained, at others the disavowal of the settler–indigene relation common to both sides of the “two Australias” divide is rendered untenable by changing circumstances. It is into such a moment this article aims to situate its subjects—Rex Ingamells and the Jindyworobaks—and it does so with reference to the correspondences between Jindyworobak indigenism and the indigenising settler nationalism evident in the “salvage linguistics” of Ted Strehlow. In doing so, the article aims to reveal the complexities and persistence of what it terms the settler predicament.

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Even contracts settle: Geoff Mann, ‘Settler‐colonialism’s anti‐social contract: The Wiley Invited Lecture at the 2019 annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Geographers’, The Canadian Geographer, 2020

19Aug20

Abstract: Contemporary liberal governance requires constant access to a historical “reset” button, a simultaneous acknowledgement and disavowal of history. This is especially so in times of emergency or crisis; we are, supposedly, “all in this together.” The political economic institutions that facilitate this false solidarity—the anti‐social contract—range from the mundane to emergency measures, but they share an origin in, and gain their legitimacy from, a key mechanism of liberal social life: contract. If contracts “settle” the past, what can build solidarity in the shadow of a past that cannot be settled?

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Enviromentalism, settler colonial style: Chris Malcolm, ‘Ecocomplicity and the Logic of Settler-Colonial Environmentalism’, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 7, 2-3, 2020, pp. 106-131

19Aug20

Access the article here.

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Land-as-commodity vs. land-as-community: Kristen Brown, A Return to Turtle Island: Eco-cosmopolitics in American Indian Literature, 1880-1920, PhD dissertation, University of South Carolina, 2020

19Aug20

Abstract: During opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), the Lakota words mni wičoni, “water is life,” came to define the ongoing movement at Standing Rock and serve as a reminder of not only humans’ dependence on interconnected ecological communities, but also of the vitality and sentience in more-than-human beings. Looking to Indigenous author-activists producing texts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— when colonial ideologies of land exploitation and Indigenous dispossession were codified by federal policy—provides valuable insight into the tensions between these land-ascommodity and land-as-community worldviews. While scholars like literary and cultural theorist Joni Adamson and anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena explore the political implications of contemporary Indigenous cosmopolitics, this project looks to the turn of the twentieth century for self-narratives, tribal legends, erotic verse, boarding school newspapers, and magazine serials that reveal the emergence of an Indigenous ecocosmopolitics. Grounded in both tribe-specific and Pan-Indian philosophies, the ecocosmopolitics in these texts presents land-as-community worldviews that resist dispossessive frameworks of settler governance. I explore how Indigenous authoractivists producing texts on the brink of modernity—Sarah Winnemucca, Charles Eastman, Zitkala Ša, and E. Pauline Johnson—critique the violent logics of settler colonial ideologies with their narratives of transgenerational Indigenous ontologies undergirded by ongoing, reciprocal relationships with the more-than-human world.

Leveraging the often painfully gained agency associated with English language literacy, these authors articulate a sophisticated ecological engagement that challenges raced and gendered concepts like “adapted to agriculture” and “the habits of civilized life” in contemporaneous federal policies. Incorporating theories from both Indigenous and non- Indigenous scholars, this dissertation especially draws from settler colonial and ecocritical theories while looking to innovative applications of sound studies and queer ecologies. Each chapter analyzes an author’s strategic recasting of a pillar in the colonial project—literacy, health, education, and sexuality—while underscoring their advocacy for Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world. Their rhetorical strategies for speaking back to oppressive regimes in their own historical moment, as well as the stillresonant environmental insights they provide, I argue, can inform our current understanding of relations among ecological health, Indigeneity, and settler colonialism. Rather than reducing their works through an assimilation-resistance binary, reading for ecological underpinnings in these works reveals their potential as works of environmental justice, both then and now. Together, they provide Indigenous perspectives on dispossession while offering Indigenous philosophies and practices for developing communities whose sense of shared, eco-conscious connection predates and transcends that of the bounded nation-state.

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Inducting allies into ‘Indigenous-led’ critiques of settler colonialism: Dana E. Powell, Ricki Draper, ‘Making It Home: Solidarity and Belonging in the #NoDAPL/Standing Rock Encampments’, Collaborative Anthropologies, 13, 1, 2020, pp. 1-45

19Aug20

Abstract: The movement to defend tribal sovereignty and resist construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) in Standing Rock, North Dakota, was a fleeting yet deeply significant site of experimentation in collaboration and solidarity. We argue, through the paired concepts of kinship and home, that central to #NoDAPL’s lasting significance is the way that allies in the resistance camps worked across various registers of difference to align interests in such a manner that Indigenous territorial sovereignty emerged as the shared matter of concern, and thus achieving a powerful relationality and sense of collaborative possibility. We offer an ethnographic lens on the #NoDAPL encampments to show how solidarity was achieved and places where it wavered. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, activist research, and digital ethnography, we show how the linchpin of moral alignment across difference (the element that made solidarity hold) was the induction of allies into an Indigenous-led critique of settler colonialism, exposing tensions in the difficult process of collaboration, and generating a strong vein of reflexivity on the part of non-Native activists.

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They can be remembered if they fight alongside settlers, but not if they fight against them: Federica Caso, ‘Representing indigenous soldiers at the Australian War Memorial: a political analysis of the art exhibition For Country, For Nation’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 2020

19Aug20

Abstract: The article examines the latest exhibition commemorating Indigenous soldiers produced by the Australian War Memorial titled For Country, For Nation. It suggests that the exhibited material maps and visualises a neglected aspect of Indigenous history and as such expresses Indigenous resurgence and sovereignty. And yet, these artworks are not outside of colonial structures of power. While the article views the artworks of For Country, For Nation as an expression of Indigenous visual sovereignty, it also examines how they operate within setter colonial mentalities that disavow Indigenous sovereignty to legitimise settler authority. The Australian War Memorial operates in this order by refusing to commemorate the Frontier Wars. The article argues that despite the inclusion of Indigenous soldiers in official war commemorations is a sign of Indigenous recognition, as long as the Memorial refuses to include the Frontier Wars, this recognition legitimises colonial authority and contributes to ongoing settler colonialism.

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Currency as a tool of settler colonialism: Serena Merrino, ‘Currency and settler colonialism: the Palestinian case’, Review of International Political Economy, 2020

19Aug20

Abstract: This paper aims to shed new light on the international dimension of monetary power by exploring currency policy as a systematic tool of settler colonialism. The latter is defined as a mode of domination whereby an exogenous hegemonic power aims to displace and dispossess the native society in order to establish a new permanent homeland. These arguments are developed by exploring the case of Israeli currency circulation in the occupied Palestinian territories. To this purpose, the heterodox critique of the classical theory of money is employed to provide a fresh geopolitical reading of the origins, evolution, implications, and continued viability of a so-called ‘settler currency.’ It is found that Israel’s settler colonial project has been expedited by the enforced shekelization of the oPt, in that the latter not only acts as a barrier to industrialization and economic liberation in line with other hegemonic institutions, but also offers a sophisticated tool for coercion that directly assists the hegemon’s political ends. It follows that a settler colonial currency represents a multifaceted vehicle that facilitates the settler state’s reproduction.

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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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