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Settler colonising academic freedom: David Landy, Ronit Lentin, Conor McCarthy (eds), Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel, Zed Books, 2020

24May20

Description: Academic freedom is under siege, as our universities become the sites of increasingly fraught battles over freedom of speech. While much of the public debate has focussed on ‘no platforming’ by students, this overlooks the far graver threat posed by concerted efforts to silence the critical voices of both academics and students, through the use of bureaucracy, legal threats and online harassment. Such tactics have conspicuously been used, with particularly virulent effect, in an attempt to silence academic criticism of Israel.

This collection uses the controversies surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a means of exploring the limits placed on academic freedom in a variety of different national contexts. It looks at how the increased neoliberalisation of higher education has shaped the current climate, and considers how academics and their universities should respond to these new threats. Bringing together new and established scholars from Palestine and the wider Middle East as well as the US and Europe, Enforcing Silence shows us how we can and must defend our universities as places for critical thinking and free expression.


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The settler-indigenous encounter needs appropriate self-constitution on behalf of the settler too: Emily Beausoleil, ‘”Gather Your People”: Learning to Listen Intergenerationally in Settler-Indigenous Politics’, Political Theory, 2020

20May20

Abstract: Decolonization requires critical attention to settler logics that reinforce settler-colonialism, yet settler communities, as a rule, operate without a collective sense of identity and history. This article, provoked by Māori protocols of encounter, explores the necessity of developing a sense of collective identity as precursor to meeting in settler-Indigenous politics. It argues that the ability, desire, and experience of being unmarked as a social group—apparent in paradigmatic approaches to engaging social difference in settler communities—is at the heart of the particularity of settler group identity and also stands at the heart of countless failures to meet in settler-Indigenous politics. This essay thus seeks to mark the particular ground of this unmarkedness of settler identity in Western philosophies that set being unmarked as both ontology and ideal; the dominance of settler communities in places of settlement; and the willful forgetting of the colonial histories brought about by such dominance.


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The settler sovereignty is over the art that marks the landscape (that’s where it can be challenged): Alicia Harris, Homescapes: Indigenous Land Art and Public Memory, PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2020

20May20

Abstract: Indigenous North Americans make visual forms that demonstrate and provide for the practice of kinship connections with land. In art history, discourse about “Land Art” has often omitted Indigenous connections with land and place. This dissertation aims to create a more holistic narrative of Land Art in North America through analysis of both ancestral and currently living artists and their work, as well as through a rigorous examination of histories of land possession and dispossession. Rooted in a kinship paradigm that intervenes in dominant public memories about place, I analyze art by Native American, First Nations, and Indigenous diaspora North Americans. In this context, I consider artworks of both living and ancestral communities who create in situ artworks, works that are representational of place, and works that consider place in abstraction. These artworks provide a counterpoint to dominant historical narratives and memories of land. Throughout my dissertation, I use the methodology, “Critical Place Inquiry,” established by Unangax scholar Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie in their 2015 book Place in Research: Theory Methodology, and Methods. This approach provides the tools through which I focus on Indigenous perspectives on land, and through which I reject the normalization of settler colonialism. Through this lens I understood place as shifting in meaning as it is experienced differently. This approach empowered me to recognize the artworks under consideration here as interjections of Indigenous kinship in the dominant narratives and memories that are constructed about land. These are claims to home on the land of North America. I first analyze in situ installations at sites of extreme historical tension and violence, battlefields and borderlands. The artists in this section include Colleen Cutschall (Lakota), Edward Poitras (Métis- Cree), Alan Michelson (Kahnawake), and the arts collective Postcommodity. Next I move to an analysis of Indigneous cartography through a series of maps painted by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish Kootenai, Métis, Shoshone). My analysis of Indigenous cartography gives way to a consideration of the connection between the Indigenous female body and the land through a series of photographs and sculptures by Cuban/ American artist Ana Mendieta and Faye Heavyshield (Kainai). All of the artists I analyze throughout this dissertation demonstrate through their art, their connections to land through a paradigm of kinship. This leaves me to conclude with a consideration of the concept of “home” for Indigenous peoples as connected to land. For this, I examine a photograph from Richard Ray Whitman’s Street Chiefs series, and I conclude my study with a consideration of an installation by Serpent River First Nation sculptor Bonnie Devine, Writing Home. I end my dissertation with a brief history and context of my own kinship with land as an Assiniboine woman. Being ancestrally at home on, and in kinship with the land of this continent underscores the conceptual framework of each of the artworks in this dissertation. Through my analyses I demonstrate some ways Native artists have given thoughtful artistic form to those connections with the land.


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The settler sovereignty is over the landscape: Meredith Alberta Palmer, ‘Rendering settler sovereign landscapes: Race and property in the Empire State’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2020

20May20

Abstract: This article examines the politics of race, indigeneity, and landscape in US American enactments of property. Its substance is the homelands of the Haudenosaunee, now territorialized as upstate New York. The 2005 US Supreme Court case City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation denied the Oneida of the Haudenosaunee the right to expand their sovereignty onto former reservation lands through the purchase of land title. In this article, I follow the genesis of the term “non-Indian character” of an area, first written in the Sherrill decision. In tracing the genealogy of this term, I examine the racial tenets embedded in US land survey tools and discourse of property-making after the Revolutionary War. I then discuss how efforts of the Holland Land Company, New York state agents, and yeoman settlers rendered settler sovereign landscapes through acts of Haudenosaunee dispossession and concepts of Indian inferiority. As Indigenous people continue to challenge US legal concepts of property today, the settler state has reauthorized this framing of Native American sovereignty that is bounded and may only recede territorially. I consider how racist understandings of Indian inferiority maintain land as property, to show how US sovereignty rests territorially on anti-indigenous concepts of race and place.


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Settler innovators: Tariq Dana, ‘A Cruel Innovation: Israeli Experiments on Gaza’s Great March of Return’, Sociology of Islam, 8, 2, 2020, 175-198

20May20

Abstract: This article sheds light on the relationship between Israeli high-tech innovation and military/security production in the framework of settler-colonialism and the prolonged occupation of the Palestinian territories. It analyzes the global rise of Israel in military and security innovation as a result of decades-long colonial ventures and regional wars, which have been a key variable for dynamic and extensive innovation and productivity. Moreover, the article argues that Israeli military and security would not have been attainable without the extraordinary official assistance and private investment from the United States, especially since the aftermath of the 1967 war. Besides the structural dependency on the US, this article highlights other characteristics that define Israel’s military and security production, such as the vicious nature of these innovations, complicity in global atrocities, and profitability of innovation to Israel’s war economy. Finally, the article presents Gaza’s Great March of Return (gmr) as a case study to present evidence on the ways in which Israeli military forces and security companies are jointly involved in experimentation, using new weapons and unmanned devices on the Palestinian civilians.


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A matter of historical interpretation: Megan Ryley Suster, ‘We Don’t Mention the United States’: The Cultural Politics of Historical Interpretation Within the Settler State of Hawai’i at Puʻukoholā Heiau and ‘Iolani Palace, PhD dissertation, University of California Riverside, 2020

20May20

Abstract: Through analyses of two foundational sites of the Hawaiian Kingdom—Puʻukoholā Heiau and ‘Iolani Palace—this dissertation offers an alternative interpretation of how Hawaiian history has been deployed as both a settler colonial tourist strategy and a means to foster Hawaiian independence and indigeneity. This project investigates how, through specific acts of historical commemoration at each site, the colonial histories of Hawai’i have been (re)presented and revised through the collaboration (and sometimes, conflict) of community organizations and those acting as stewards of the site. These efforts have led to narratives more critically engaged with telling histories of Hawai’i that include the structural impact of settler colonialism and militourism.

Puʻukoholā Heiau is an eighteenth-century heiau (temple or shrine) built by Kamehameha the Great on the Kohala Coast of Hawai’i Island in a successful quest to unify all the islands under his rule in the 1810s. Though condemned by Christian missionaries arriving immediately after his death, generations of Native Hawaiians quietly preserved and protected the site. The National Park Service has been its steward since the 1960s. Built for similar reasons by a later sovereign, ‘Iolani Palace serves as the second case study. Constructed in the 1870s by King Kalākaua, the Palace stands in downtown Honolulu, Oahu, as a symbol of Hawaiian sovereignty. After being occupied for several decades by those who overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom, the Palace was eventually vacated to become a museum and taken over by the Friends of ‘Iolani Palace, a non-profit organization working in tandem with the State of Hawai’i to preserve the structure and interpret its history.

Ultimately, this dissertation explores how the historical interpretations at these sites developed and how Native Hawaiian activists, community groups, and other indigenous advocates pushed contemporary stewards towards culturally decolonial micro-interventions that help complicate the settler imaginary that perceives and represents Hawai’i as both American and an American commodity. This dissertation seeks to resituate these sites as spaces of contestation and indigeneity operating within, and sometimes beyond, the limitations of their administering state agencies.


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Settler colonial utopias need catastrophes: Brittany Henry, ‘Survivalism, the Jeremiad and the Settler Colonial Utopian Imaginary in James Wesley Rawles’s Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse’, Western American Literature, 55, 1, 2020, pp. 65-96

20May20

Excerpt: While dystopian fiction has enjoyed popularity across the twentieth and into the twenty- first century, in recent decades public enthusiasm for the genre has skyrocketed as writers and filmmakers have increasingly turned to dystopian and apocalyptic representation to diagnose and warn against a range of social, political, economic, and environmental crises. Western American literature and fi lm have not been immune to the dystopian turn in popular culture, as evidenced by the prevalence of frontier mythology in dystopian and apocalyptic tales (as William Katerburg and Barbara Gurr have both noted) and the frequency with which dystopian and apocalyptic texts choose the US West as their setting or engage tropes of the Western genre in their storytelling. Examples abound but include novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s Th e Road, Octavia Butler’s Parable series, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias Triptych, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s Th e Water Knife, as well as television series and films such as Joss Whedon’s Firefly and Serenity, George Miller’s Mad Max films, The Walking Dead franchise, and HBO’s Westworld. Despite this, western studies has seen a relative dearth of scholarship taking up the dystopia in a serious way as a relevant and important genre to the field (Katerburg’s 2008 Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction is a notable exception). This essay seeks to initiate and participate in a more sustained engagement between western American studies and dystopian and apocalyptic scholarship and cultural production. I am particularly interested in the opportunity western studies offers to bring dystopian scholarship into conversation with settler colonial theory in order to understand how the history and mythology of the US West informs the speculative futurities envisaged in American popular culture, in particular the religious and gendered ideologies that structure these narratives. Such a project, I contend, enables us to put more critical pressure on the political investments of a genre consumed by a wide swath of the American public.


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The life of capital over indigenous life: Anna Stanley, ‘Risk management and the logic of elimination’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 2020

20May20

Abstract: This intervention is premised on the observation that differentiated and relational exposure and protection are fundamental to the political economy of settler colonialism in Canada. These orderings map directly onto a value logic that privileges the life of capital above all else, and orchestrates the voluntary and involuntary sacrifice of value to the national economy. Herein, the value of Indigenous life is continually metered out (and in various ways) in relation to the valued life of capital. I argue that ‘risk management’ – by which I mean the variety of techniques and practices that order and organize exposure to (and protection from) harm – is vital to the political economy of settler colonialism in Canada because of how it normalizes colonial violence. To support my argument I make three observations about ‘risk management’ anchored in three ‘exposure scenarios’ drawn from my research in the mining sector: (1) risk management is an intervention analogous to securitization; (2) risk management is powerful because it makes social relations fungible; and (3) risk management is a value logic consistent with settler governmentality and the logic of elimination.


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VIRAL: Lorenzo Veracini, Desmond Manderson, ‘A Virus is Colonising Our Pubilc Life’, Arena Online, 19/05/20

19May20

Excerpt: To cut a long story short, the virus SARS-CoV-2 has rapidly ushered in a new political regime. It has colonised our public life.

It has done so in several interrelated ways, but three aspects can be emphasised.


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The settler sovereign’s multiple personalities: Mark G. Brett, Naomi Wolfe, ‘Sovereignty: Indigenous Counter-Examples’, International Journal of Public Theology, 14, 1, 2020, pp. 24-40

17May20

Abstract: Through assertions of ‘sovereignty’, modern nation states lay claim to an undivided authority. It is commonly suggested that this kind of political assertion superseded the overlapping authorities of medieval theological imagination. But in settler colonial states, Indigenous sovereignties endure to the present, not washed away by the ‘tide of history’, and in many cases Indigenous peoples embrace Christian identities along with traditional law and custom. The peculiar complexities of Australian history reveal many counter-examples to the conventional modernist tale, and in particular, the article seeks to show how Indigenous Christians snatched the King James Bible from Protestant doctrines of discovery. This discussion comes at an historically significant time as Australian state governments contemplate treaty making with the First Nations, each of whom exercise their own alternative model of sovereignty within local jurisdictions. This article argues that biblical theologies can support the making of modern treaties.


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