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Biculturalism vs. superdiversity as decoy: Angel Chan, Jenny Ritchie, ‘Responding to Superdiversity Whilst Upholding Te Tiriti O Waitangi: Challenges for Early Childhood Teacher Education in Aotearoa New Zealand’ in Jillian Fox, Colette Alexander, Tania Aspland (eds), Teacher Education in Globalised Times, Springer, 2020, pp. 219-237

17May20

Abstract: Countries with a superdiverse population due to increases in migration have been slow in recognising and addressing social inequalities driven by this situation (Vertovec, 2007). In Aotearoa (New Zealand), there are now more than 200 different ethnic groups and 27.4% of its population was born overseas (Statistics New Zealand, 2019), and there is also an increasing number of students with diverse cultural, linguistic and migration backgrounds enrolled in the country’s early childhood teacher education programmes. The manifestation of superdiversity in Aotearoa is particularly complex and challenging since it occurs within a legislated ‘bicultural’ context (Royal Society of New Zealand, 2013). In light of these concerns, this paper reports findings from a study which utilised a methodology of critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2011; Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002) to examine several key institutional policy documents in order to interrogate the responsibilities of early childhood teacher education in supporting both the country’s commitment to ‘biculturalism’ and its current superdiverse demographics. The theoretical analysis draws on Vertovec’s (2007) superdiversity approach, critical multiculturalism (May, 1999) and critical and Indigenous pedagogies of place (Penetito, 2009; Perumal, 2015). While all the documents make explicit references to ‘bicultural’ commitments, minimal attention is given to migration-related inequality issues. Our analysis highlighted complex inter-relationships and tensions between honouring ‘biculturalism’ and catering for superdiversity. Recognising and addressing this complexity is important in future policy development, and teacher education providers need to ensure that their graduates have the knowledge and skills to work equitably with children, families and communities in order to address inequalities emanating from the history of colonisation in Aotearoa as well as the current superdiversity situation.


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‘Savagism’ as decoy: Andrea Lynn Smith, ‘Savagism, silencing, and American settlerism: commemorating the Wyoming battle of the American Revolutionary War’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

17May20

Abstract:This article explores the role played by savagism in American historical consciousness, focusing on its appearance in settler accounts of the Battle of Wyoming (1778) of the Revolutionary War. The story of Wyoming is told each year in the small town of Wyoming, Pennsylvania in one of the longest-running historical commemorations in the United States. Rather than emphasizing a British foe, however, these celebrations revel in gruesome descriptions of alleged Indian forms of warfare. This article explores the political uses of savagism in these accounts. The savage trope has long served settlers in deflecting attention away from their own actions and in justifying conquest. In Wyoming narratives, savagism instead serves to deflect attention away from a deeper intra-colonist conflict that pitted two factions of colonists against each other in a bitter war that lasted decades. I conclude by considering the unifying functions of savagism in the advance of early American settlerism.


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The settler ‘home’ is where the settler maps (and unmaps): Lee-Anne Broadhead, ‘Scales of justice: putting remembrance back on the map in Palestine and Mi’kma’ki’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

17May20

Abstract: This paper considers two remarkable efforts to counter the repressive effects of ‘colonial cartography’: the Nakba map project in Israel, and the Ta’n Weji-sqalia’tiek Mi’kmaw Place Names Digital Atlas and Website Project in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia, Canada). Undertaken by the Israeli NGO Zochrot (‘remembering’ in Hebrew), the Nakba ‘counter-mapping’ project seeks to challenge settler foundation myths utilized to perpetuate ongoing oppression. The Ta’n Weji-sqalia’tiek Mi’kmaw Place Names project deploys cartographic revelation – the recovery of erased place names – as a mode of cultural reclamation, confronting settlers with the natural and human realities of the ‘world’ they ‘discovered.’ In addition, by delineating the legends and lore encoded and embedded in those place names, the project helps place the Mi’kmaw language and worldview back ‘on the map’ of remembrance and dialogue. Linkages between the two examples of settler occupation are highlighted through a consideration of the ways the Canadian government assists with the ongoing oppression of Palestine, as well as the ways Palestinian-Indigenous solidarity efforts seek to resist entrenched settler-centric narratives (mental maps). The case studies are presented as part of a necessarily larger, on-going effort to give voice to those long silenced by the hegemonic ‘truth’ of settler societies.


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The settler ‘home’ is where the settler displaces: Donald E. Pease, ‘The Uncanny Return of Settler-Colonial Capitalism in Toni Morrison’s Home’, boundary 2, 47, 2, 2020, pp. 49-70

17May20

Abstract: Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home is concerned primarily with the efforts undertaken by its protagonist, the black Korean War veteran Frank Money, to accommodate himself to civilian life. However, Home differs from other Korean War novels in that after Frank returns to the United States, he neither aligns his wartime experiences with the superpower rivalry nor conducts a critical meta-engagement with Cold War ideology. When Frank comes back to the United States in 1955 from a tour of duty as a combat infantryman in Chosin, Korea, he instead undergoes the unheimlich experience of becoming a fugitive within a carceral state. Morrison confronts readers with a comparably uncanny experience when she deletes from the narrative any trace of the Cold War ideology whose structures of feeling, epistemologies, and military architecture the Korean War was putatively fought to establish and that the so-called war on terror had eerily revived. When she disallowed Cold War ideology control over representations of Home’s characters, actions, and events, Morrison recast the Korean War as the Cold War’s uncanny Other that exposed readers to an ongoing settler-colonial war being waged within 1950s US domestic society.


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Justice deferred is justice denied (this is so for settler colonial injustice too): David Lloyd, ‘Justice Deferred: Palestine, Settler Colonialism and International Law’, b20, 06/05/20

17May20

Excerpt: For some decades now, Israeli propaganda (or hasbara) has managed to keep in play two quite contradictory self-descriptions that serve at once to obscure and to legitimate its ongoing subjugation of Palestinians through occupation, strangulating siege, dispossession and settlement, discrimination and collective punishment, not to mention its regular use of lethal force. Though each and every one of these routine practices has been found to be in violation of a panoply of international laws and human rights conventions, Israel and its supporters continue to repeat, with increasing vociferousness the more the facts challenge them, their shopworn incantation of these bipolar narratives: Israel is a normal (if admittedly “flawed”) democracy, indeed, the “only democracy in the Middle East”; Israel is an exception, claiming the right to exceptional allowances because of its precarious location in what President Obama liked to call, with the folksy affectation with which he was wont to disavow the racist formations of his post-racial epoch, “a very tough neighborhood”. At other times, Israel also claims to be an exception because of its miraculous dispensation, as an improbable achievement that must be treasured as no other state on account if its fulfillment of a centuries-old desire for return enshrined in biblical prophecy. Less often openly acknowledged is that Israel maintains a perpetual state of exception, in its exercise of brutal sovereign power over its Palestinian subjects, deploying a variety of special or emergency powers some of which date back to the British Mandate and the origins of the Zionist settlement, while others are its own inventions.


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Settler womanhood: Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, ‘”Mind above matter”: Work, gender, and social class in Susanna Moodie’s immigration memoirs’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2020

13May20

Abstract: This article examines Susanna Moodie’s memoirs in the context of changing narratives around immigration and social class in the 1830s. She overtly engaged with the age’s boosterist literature, warning genteel Britons about unrealistic portrayals of emigration, and positioning herself as an authentic interpreter of colonial realities. Moodie’s texts dramatize the settler-colonial dilemma of early Canada, caught between American influences and imperial loyalties. In Canada, class was inflected and performed differently from in Britain due to local realities and to the different attitudes that working-class immigrants and genteel immigrants had towards women, waged labour, upward mobility, and social hierarchies. Given imperial fears of American republican influences, Moodie uses class markers as national identifiers to redefine gentility in this new setting. While sympathetic to upward mobility, her settlerist discourse remains inflected in class terms, presenting social hierarchies as an ideological bulwark protecting the colonies from the lure of American political models.


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A different landscape: Nathan Braccio, Parallel Landscapes: Algonquian and English Spatial Understandings of New England, 1500-1700, PhD dissertation, University of Connecticut, 2020

13May20

Abstract: Between 1500 and 1700 English and Algonquians in New England possessed different spatial epistemologies that caused them to experience and describe the landscape in distinct ways. For example, where colonists saw a dangerous swamp, Algonquians saw a productive landscape with spiritual significance that served as a haven in times of war. This dissertation argues that English settlers and Algonquians’ distinct spatial understandings and experiences amounted to parallel landscapes. While those landscapes existed simultaneously and separately, the encounter between cultures caused them to shift. Specifically, Algonquians impacted how the English interacted with the landscape in New England. Algonquians taught colonists how to navigate forests and swamps and helped them survive its harsh winters. New England had been marked and made through Algonquian action, and bewildered the English, who were denied familiar features on the landscape.

This dissertation asserts that Algonquian knowledge of the landscape represented a powerful and persistent alternative to English surveying and mapmaking in New England. When English colonists and explorers recognized the unsuitability of their techniques for understanding New England’s unfamiliar landscape, they tried to appropriate Indigenous knowledge and maps. Algonquian sachems (community leaders), used this as an opportunity to manipulate and benefit from their new English neighbors. However, the English constantly felt insecure in their dependence of Indigenous people and, beginning in the late 1630s, they began to remake and mark the landscape in a way they understood. Algonquians adapted, remaining important knowledge providers even in a place no longer entirely of their making.


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Again on the question of Indigenous labour and settler colonialism: Alexandra Giancarlo, ‘Indigenous student labour and settler colonialism at Brandon Residential School’, The Canadian Geographer, 2020

13May20

Abstract: This paper contends that unfree Indigenous student labour at residential schools was a key—and underappreciated—component of settler colonialism in Canada. Colonial administration and the churches attempted to “civilize” and assimilate Indigenous people—and prepare the frontier for white settlers—through residential schooling. Labour, in accordance with Euro‐Canadian gender norms, was expected to usher Brandon Industrial Institute (later Brandon Residential School) students from the “backwardness” of traditional lifeways to the industriousness and assimilation necessary for their roles in the serving classes of modern society. I use archival sources—newspapers, unpublished reports, Department of Indian Affairs documents, and United Church correspondence and photographs—and employ a version of Norman et al.’s “settler‐colonial grid of recognizability” to examine student labour. This paper argues that the Department of Indian Affairs and church officials at Brandon Residential School sought to make Indigenous youth “legible” under the settler‐colonial grid of recognizability through agricultural and manual work for boys and domestic labour for girls, both of which ensured the school’s financial viability. I propose that this under‐explored aspect of settler colonialism could be understood through three main themes—imperial settler‐humanitarianism, the logic of containment, and productive bodies—that are traced across the lifetime of the school.


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Again on the relationship between genocide and settler colonialism: Michael Bryant, ‘Canaries in the Mineshaft of American Democracy: North American Settler Genocide in the Thought of Raphaël Lemkin’, Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, 14, 1, pp. 21-39

13May20

Excerpt: We all want to think well of ourselves. This truism applies to societies as well as to their individual citizens. In the United States, belief in American exceptionalism has sometimes produced outlandish assertions, as when the US solicitor general, in blithe disregard of centuries of slavery and the annihilation of Indian tribes, proclaimed in 1952 that “genocide has never existed in this country. Under our form of government, it can never exist.” For rosy optimism, this verdict far transcends even Whiggish history, which for all its faith in the march of progress nonetheless concedes the existence of evil, if only as a minor pothole along an improving road. The Panglossian cheerfulness of the solicitor general is not unusual in US history. Similar attitudes abound in every era of the American past, nourished by a “bardic tradition” of historical writing that glorifies European expansion across the North American continent while ignoring or minimizing its human cost. Thus, two of the leading historians of the USA, George Bancroft and Arthur Schlesinger, each writing at moments separated by 158 years, could extol the country’s settlement as a victory over “feeble barbarians” (Bancroft in 1834) and “primitive tribes” (Schlesinger in 1992). In 2008, former US officials in the Clinton administration, including ex-Secretary of State Madelaine Albright, wrote with eyes firmly clenched shut on American history that genocide “threatens not only our values, but our national interests.”


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‘Difficult’ passages (necessary as well?): Baligh Ben Taleb, ‘On the Difficulty of Reckoning with Settler Colonialisms: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 21, 1, 2020

13May20

Excerpt: In settler societies, coming to grips with historical wrongs continues to pose an enduring dilemma. Powerful scripts and events of redress, forgiveness and reconciliation are used to petition for and engage with narratives of the “post” settler nation state. The scope, substance, and politics of reckoning with settler colonial wrongs have garnered an intense controversy, and by turns, precipitated vibrant and creative scholarship. In Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and to a lesser extent, the United States, scholars have recognized the distinctive roles of reconciliatory efforts in settler societies, and attempted to untangle the repertoire of “moving on” and beyond the historical continuity of settler colonialism. They look at what it means to be “post” colonial and decolonized in nations that still lack a clear decolonizing moment. This essay engages with these competing perspectives as explored in the work of three recent volumes: Penelope Edmonds’ Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation, Eva Mackey’s Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization, and Sarah Maddison et al., The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation. Taking specific case studies across Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, these comprehensive and transnational comparative studies offer rigorous evaluation of the ideas and symbolic practices of reconciliation and their interlocking relationships with settler colonial histories. Without treating the processes of “decolonization” and “reconciliation” as self-contained, isolated, or discrete units of meaningful change, these scholars address the ways in which the practices of these concepts attempt to reanimate and mobilize the past for a “post” settler condition and emancipatory moral order. The prefix “post,” as Jean Francois Lyotard has articulated, conjures the conviction “that it is both possible and necessary to break with tradition and institute absolutely new ways of living and thinking.” But in settler societies, the “post” may not mean a clearly defined moment or a “rupture” with the colonial past; instead, it may well repeat it and reinforce its diurnal residues. In different ways, these volumes interrogate these “new” realities and their chameleon-like abilities, by offering multifaceted approaches to deter what seems to be an alarming reproduction of coloniality and normative authority of the settler state. They use different and understudied analytical lenses and frameworks such as performance, ethnography of conflicts about land rights, and structural and attitudinal engagement to explore the complex and difficult conundrums and aporias of decolonization in settler societies.


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