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Settler colonialism and urban space: Jessica Ty Miller, ‘Temporal analysis of displacement: Racial capitalism and settler colonial urban space’, Geoforum, 2020

16Sep20

Abstract: Researchers have often called for micro-scale analyses of residential displacement, and more recently, for work that acknowledges the importance of temporal and spatial relationships that influence current iterations of residential displacement. Relying on grounding in urban political ecology, and work in gentrification, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism, this paper highlights the historic relationships between development interests and resident groups in Gowanus, Brooklyn to examine how historic context shapes the development of displacement patterns. Relying on historic texts and images found in New York City archives, this work documents the developmental history of Gowanus, which has held a prominent place in New York City history since before the 1600s, when European settler colonists began to create farms and mills based on existing local knowledge of the landscape held by the Canarsee, a Munsee speaking Indigenous group of Lenape people who lived in the area now known as Gowanus. Over time, several groups of developers and industrialists dominated this space by morphing the tidal wetland into an industrial waterway, capitalizing on the waterfront as a commodity. Most recently, residents who can afford luxury rentals with views of waterfront have moved into the area. At the same time, city plans and the United States Environmental Protection Agency are addressing the legacy of contamination in the area. The varying access and attitude toward the canal over time continues to impact the development in the area, with some people being forced out, while others are moving in. This work builds on the growing literature on residential displacement to argue that even with embedded silence in archival materials, investigating the long-range historic patterns of development can be a useful method for understanding current iterations of development and displacement, including the most recent shift towards high-end waterfront living.


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Capitalism and colonization: Edwyna Harris, Sumner La Croix, ‘Understanding the Gains to Capitalists from Colonization: Lessons from Robert E. Lucas, Jr., Karl Marx and Edward Gibbon Wakefield’, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa Department of Economics Working Paper Series, 20-23, 2020

16Sep20

Abstract: Britain after the Napoleonic wars saw the rise of colonial reformers, such as Edward Wakefield, who had extensive influence on British colonial policy. A version of Wakefield’s “System of Colonization” became the basis for legislation establishing the South Australia colony in 1834 and the New Zealand colony in 1840. We use extended versions of Robert Lucas’s 1990 model of coordinated colonial investment to show how Wakefield’s institutions were designed to work. We also find that the critique of Wakefield’s system by Karl Marx in Das Kapital closely follows Lucas’s analysis of colonial institutions.


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Misbehaving settlers: Emanuele Ertola, ‘”White slaves”: labor, whiteness, and settler colonialism in Italian East Africa (1935-1941), Labor History, 2020

16Sep20

Abstract: In the context of settler colonialism the immigration of white workers has generated a complex network of dynamics between race, labor, and whiteness. The intertwining of these three concepts can be better understood by analyzing them together, as interconnected tesserae of the same mosaic. Italian East Africa is the perfect case study. In a few years this settler colony was the site of a peculiar migratory wave by Italian workers: the phenomenon, rarely seen elsewhere in these proportions, was first encouraged by the authorities as an outlet for national unemployment, but it soon became clear that economic contraindications far outweighed the advantages. Furthermore, the presence of unskilled white workers constituted a threat to the settler social order, characterized by a strictly hierarchical racial distinction. While anxiety over their presence grew among the settler bourgeoisie, the authorities then moved from State-sponsored immigration to the compulsory repatriation of unskilled workers, to police raids for internment and expulsion of those who were unemployed. This case therefore demonstrates how unskilled white labor’s uncertain whiteness jeopardized the workers’ possibility of being part of a settler society in which race and class were closely connected.


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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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