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The settlers of Africa: Duncan Money, Danelle van Zyl-Hermann (eds), Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, 1930s–1990s, Routledge, 2020

28Feb20

Description: This book showcases new research by emerging and established scholars on white workers and the white poor in Southern Africa.

Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa challenges the geographical and chronological limitations of existing scholarship by presenting case studies from Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe that track the fortunes of nonhegemonic whites during the era of white minority rule. Arguing against prevalent understandings of white society as uniformly wealthy or culturally homogeneous during this period, it demonstrates that social class remained a salient element throughout the twentieth century, how Southern Africa’s white societies were often divided and riven with tension and how the resulting social, political and economic complexities animated white minority regimes in the region. Addressing themes such as the class-based disruption of racial norms and practices, state surveillance and interventions – and their failures – towards nonhegemonic whites, and the opportunities and limitations of physical and social mobility, the book mounts a forceful argument for the regional consideration of white societies in this historical context. Centrally, it extends the path-breaking insights emanating from scholarship on racialized class identities from North America to the African context to argue that race and class cannot be considered independently in Southern Africa.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students of southern African studies, African history, and the history of race.


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The indigenous vs the settler commons: Susan Hegeman, ‘The Indigenous Commons’, Minnesota Review, 93, 2019, pp. 133-140

28Feb20

Abstract: The concept of the commons is central to an argument that connects indigenous people and their struggles both to global politics and to radical reconceptualizations of the relationships among knowledges, resources, and human communities. This article considers the use of the idea of a commons in water and atmosphere in the 2016 protest on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. It also contextualizes the concept of the commons in relation to the historical expropriation of land from native peoples in North America.


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The religious education of settlers: Stephen Jackson, Religious Education and the Anglo-World: The Impact of Empire, Britishness, and Decolonisation in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, Brill, 2020

26Feb20

Abstract: Focusing on Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, Religious Education and the Anglo-World historiographically examines the relationship between empire and religious education. The analysis centres on three formative eras in the development of religious education in each case: firstly, the foundational moments of publicly funded education in the mid- to late nineteenth centuries when policy makers created largely Protestant systems of religious education, and frequently denied Roman Catholics funding for private education. Secondly, the period from 1880-1960 during which campaigns to strengthen religious education emerged in each context. Finally, the era of decolonisation from the 1960s through the 1980s when publicly funded religious education was challenged by the loss of Britishness as a central ideal, and Roman Catholics found unprecedented success in achieving state aid in many cases. By bringing these disparate national literatures into conversation with one another, Stephen Jackson calls for a greater transnational approach to the study of religious education in the Anglo-World.


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The contemporary manifestation of settler exclusion: Hannah Gordon, ‘Cowboys and Indians: Settler Colonialism and the Dog Whistle in U.S. Immigration Policy’, University of Miami Law Review, 74, 2020, pp. 520-562

26Feb20

Abstract: The nineteenth-century Indian problem has become the twenty-first century border crisis. While the United States fancies itself a nation of immigrants, this rhetoric is impossible to square with the reality of the systematic exclusion of migrants of color. In particular, the Trump administration has taken the exclusion of migrants descended from the Indigenous inhabitants of Mexico and Central America to a reductio ad absurdum. This Note joins a body of scholarship that centers the history of genocide in the United States to examine what our settler colonial history means for today’s immigration law and policy. It concludes that the contemporary treatment of Mexican and Central American migrants echoes the ways in which the legal definition of citizenship was developed to exclude Indigenous people. Furthermore, it urges a reckoning with the past both to make sense of the present and to chart a different future.


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Feminism as settler colonialism: Judy Rohrer, ‘”What a Native Looks Like”: Academic Feminist Spaces, the Logic of Elimination, and Survivance’, Feminist Formations, 31, 3, 2019, pp. 143-170

23Feb20

Abstract: I write to share ways I have seen Native colleagues and their knowledges (Native, feminist, and otherwise) denied and rejected in feminist academic spaces. I also write to think through my responses to these incidents, in the moment and after the fact, as I grapple with my responsibilities as a non-Native feminist. The attempts I witnessed to eliminate/disappear/erase these colleagues fell into three broad categories: not being recognized as “real” Natives; not being seen as adequately feminist; and disappearing behind/into a near totalizing Black-white racial binary. These occurrences are homegrown demonstrations of the structural persistence of settler colonialism manifest in the logic of elimination. Overall, this paper argues that feminist academic spaces are often hostile territory for Native scholars who face attempts at elimination upon entering them. “Survivance” and “resurgence” assist these Native academics in their navigation of these territories, in their refusal of erasure, in their struggles for decolonization. Non-Natives wishing to facilitate that navigation and Native presence in the academy can learn to recognize these acts of resurgence and deepen our understanding of, and commitment to, decolonization.


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Aboriginal mobility against settler colonialism: Sianan Healy, ‘Aboriginal Mobility and the Search for a Home and a Job in Postwar Victoria’, Australian Historical Studies, 51, 1, 2020, pp. 38-53

23Feb20

Abstract: Following World War II, the Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board sought to house and employ Aboriginal Victorians as part of its assimilation policy. Crucial to these efforts was controlling Aboriginal mobility, which the Board saw as problematic, being unsettling in its disregard of state borders and its refusal to conform to settler-capitalist ideologies of private property, wealth accumulation and individualism. This is an attitude that permeates descriptions of Aboriginal people’s movement in the settler-colonial archive. This article investigates discussions of housing and employment in the Board’s papers, drawing together the disparate references that pepper the manuscripts to suggest an alternative interpretation of archival descriptions of Aboriginal mobility. That interpretation centres Aboriginal decision-making and comprehends the unbroken nature of Aboriginal movement to, within and across ancestral lands – a continuation of pre-invasion Indigenous mobility that involved adapting to and incorporating the pressures of the settler-capitalist economy.


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Free settlers of ‘free’ land: Julius Wilm, Settlers as Conquerors: Free Land Policy in Antebellum America, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2018

23Feb20

Description: In early America, the notion that settlers ought to receive undeveloped land for free was enormously popular among the rural poor and social reformers. Well into the Jacksonian era, however, Congress considered the demand fiscally and economically irresponsible. Increasingly, this led proponents to cast the idea as a military matter: Land grantees would supplant troops in the efforts to take the continent over from Indian nations and rival colonial powers. Julius Wilm’s book examines the free land debates of the 1790s to 1850s and reconstructs the settlement experiences under the donation laws for Florida (1842) and the Oregon Territory (1850). Both laws promised to bring the interests of poorer whites and their government into a more harmonious relation – to the exclusion of African Americans and for the explicit purpose of displacing Native peoples. Drawing on new records, Wilm details the trajectory of settlements and shows how the settler-imperialist experiments fell apart and undermined the rationale of the donation laws. After home seekers fled Florida due to malaria and militias in Oregon triggered uncontrollable violence, settlers came to be seen as unreliable agents of government aims.


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How the Phantom became a … settler: Robert Aman, The Phantom Comics and the New Left A Socialist Superhero, Palgrave, 2020

21Feb20

Description: This book is about the Phantom in Sweden, or, more correctly, about Sweden in the Phantom. Robert Aman uncovers how a peripheral American superhero – created in 1936 by Lee Falk – that has been accused of both racism and sexism has become a national concern in a country that several researchers have labelled the most antiracist and gender equal in the world. When a group of Swedish creators began their official production of licensed scripts based on The Phantom comic in 1972, the character was redefined through the prism of New Left ideology. The plots of these comics, besides aiming to entertain, also sought to affirm for readers the righteousness and validity of an ideological doctrine that, at the time, was dominant among the Swedish public and influential in the country’s foreign policy. Ultimately, Aman demonstrates how the Swedish Phantom embodies values and a political point of view that reflect how Sweden sees itself and its role in the world.


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More (settler) frontier making assemblages: Rachel Busbridge, ‘Messianic time, settler colonial technology and the elision of Palestinian presence in Jerusalem’s historic basin’, Political Geography, 79, 2020, 102158

19Feb20

Abstract: Advancing the settler colonial paradigm through a temporal perspective on territoriality, this article argues that the Jewish messianic idea is a distinctive feature of Israeli settler colonialism and an important element of Zionist territorial production. Specifically, the article contends that messianic time constitutes a specific settler colonial technology of domination which finds place-based expression in the ‘historic basin’ of occupied East Jerusalem. This is illustrated through two sites: the City of David archaeological park in the Palestinian village of Silwan and the Temple Mount/Haram al-Shariff, current home of the Dome of the Rock and prophesised location of the Third Jewish Temple. Both are at the frontier of settlement in the historic basin and the messianic conception of a mythical past and redemptive future aids claims to territorial exclusivity by ‘disappearing’ Palestinians in the present. The article concludes by reflecting on the value of an analytical focus on time for settler colonial scholarship on Israel-Palestine and in political geography more broadly.


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(Settler) frontier making assemblages: Wassim Ghantous, Settler-Colonial Assemblages and the Making of the Israeli Frontier: Palestinian experiences of (in)security, surveillance and carceral geographies, PhD Dissertation, Göteborgs universitet, 2020

19Feb20

Abstract: This dissertation examines the operations of contemporary Israeli security machinery as it unfolds in the course of expanding the Israeli colonial frontier over Palestinian rural areas of the occupied West Bank. Since the early 1990s and up to the present, Israeli security measures and monitoring technologies multiplied and have come to operate across various public, hybrid and civilian actors and institutions that orchestrate control over Palestinian bodies as a mean to dispossess them and expand the Israeli frontier over their lands through the erection of settlements. In order to study how the Israeli frontier is made today, this dissertation follows Palestinian villagers’ everyday experiences of (in)security and control as they play out through a multitude of formal and informal colonial actors, institutions and technologies — in other words, through a settler-colonial assemblage. Informed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ontology of ‘assemblage thinking’, and drawing on their theorizations regarding power, politics and contemporary war-making, this dissertation pays attention to various domains in which the Israeli assemblage operates today in relation to Palestinian bodies and landscapes. More specifically, the dissertation identifies dominant features of Israeli power as they play out across imaginative and spatiotemporal domains of the Israeli assemblage, highlighting relations between political and security discourses, securitization practices, and the movement and intensity of control and violence. By investigating the operations of Israeli power in rural areas of the West Bank, this dissertation offers novel conceptual insights regarding political processes and logics that inform contemporary Israeli regimes of control and colonization in the occupied Palestinian territory more broadly.


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