settler colonial studies blog

No settler colonialism in outer space! Frank Tavares, ‘Ethical Exploration and the Role of Planetary Protection in Disrupting Colonial Practices’, ARXIV, 2020

25Oct20

Excerpt: All of humanity is a stakeholder in how we, the planetary science and astrobiology community, engage with other worlds. Violent colonial practices and structures–genocide, land appropriation, resource extraction, environmental devastation, and more–have governed exploration of Earth, and if not actively dismantled, will define the methodologies and mindset we carry forward into space exploration. With sample return missions from Mars underway, resource maps of the Moon being produced, and private industry progressing toward human exploration of Mars, the timeline is urgent to develop a modern, inclusive, robust, and enforceable policy framework to govern humanity’s engagement with other worlds. This paper does not recommend specific policies or implementation strategies, and instead focuses on “the identification of planetary protection considerations,” in accordance with the scope of this decadal survey. Ethical considerations must be prioritized in the formation of planetary protection policy. The choices we make in the next decade of space exploration will dictate the future of humanity’s presence on other worlds, with the potential to impact the environments we interact with on timescales longer than the human species has existed. We should make these choices consciously and carefully, as many will be irreversible, especially those pertaining to how we interact with potential extraterrestrial life.

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Megan Kuster, ‘Domestic Settler Colonialism in Katherine Mansfield’s “Old Tar” and “The Garden Party”, Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society, 4, 2020, pp. 48-59

25Oct20

Abstract: Focusing on the domestic ideals of settler colonialism, this essay provides an analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s representations of house and home in several of her New Zealand short stories. The first part of the essay considers Mansfield’s use of Gothic tropes to represent settler-Indigenous spatial relations in the story ‘Old Tar’ (1913), suggesting that the dread-tinged colonial house challenges settler colonial ideas about land-tenure and inheritance. The second part of the essay discusses the development of second-generation settler identities, analysing Mansfield’s representations of class in the context of settler spatial relations in ‘The Garden Party’ (1921). The essay’s broader claim is that ‘Old Tar’ and ‘The Garden Party’ challenge the domestic ideals of settler colonialism by showing the unpleasant realities of settler patriarchy and the racialised, gendered, and class-based underpinnings of second-generation settler sociability and culture.

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Nordic settler colonialism: Rauna Kuokkanen, ‘Reconciliation as a Threat or Structural Change? The Truth and Reconciliation Process and Settler Colonial Policy Making in Finland’, Human Rights Review, 21, 2020, pp. 293-312

21Oct20

Abstract: The Sámi have long desired a public process to examine and expose the Nordic states’ colonial, assimilationist practices and policies, past and present, toward the Sámi people. This article considers the truth and reconciliation process in Finland, assessing it in light of recent legislative and other measures. Employing settler colonial theory, it argues that reconciliation, although seemingly progressive, signifies a continuation of colonialism unless the state terminates its current approach of overlooking Sámi rights. The article concludes with a discussion of structural reconciliation and justice and considers some concrete measures for structural change in order for the reconciliation process to be valid and successful in Finland.

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Actually on settler resentment: Edana Beauvais, ‘The Political Consequences of Indigenous Resentment’, Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, 2020

21Oct20

Abstract: Understanding the legacy of settler colonialism requires understanding the nature and scope of anti-Indigenous attitudes. But what, exactly, are the political consequences of anti-Indigenous attitudes? Answering this question requires recognizing that attitudes toward Indigenous peoples are distinct from White racial attitudes toward other disempowered groups. In this paper, I introduce a novel measure of Indigenous resentment. I then show that Indigenous resentment is an important predictor of policy attitudes using data collected from an original survey of White settlers. I estimate the effect of both Indigenous resentment and negative affect on policy attitudes—opposition to welfare and support for pipeline developments—to make the case that Indigenous resentment is a better measure of anti-Indigenous attitudes than affective prejudice, and that Indigenous resentment is an important omitted variable in the study of public opinion in settler societies.

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SCT? Edward Watts, ‘Applied Settler Theory: Four Recent Histories’, Early American Literature, 55, 3, 2020, pp. 845-853

21Oct20

Excerpt: Since 2000, older American exceptionalist narratives have been challenged anew by what has come to be known as Settler Colonial Theory (SCT). Spearheaded in the late 1980s by Canadian and Australian literary theorists Alan Lawson, Helen Tiffin, Steven Slemon, and Bill Ashcroft, the field found its taxonomy and maturation in work by dominion-based historians and anthropologists Lorenzo Veracini, Peter Wolfe, Lisa Ford, and James Belich. Early Americanists such as Lawrence Buell and others began applying its ideas in the 1990s, but they also incorporated ideas about American imperialism running back through William Appelmans Williams and Amy Kaplan. Since 2010, SCT has contributed to the broader proliferation the dynamic field of early American studies in many and metamorphic ways.

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Nullification as decolonisation? Hannah Manshel, ‘William Apess and the Nullification of Settler Law’, Early American Literature, 55, 3, 2020, pp. 753-779

21Oct20

Abstract: This article argues that in Indian Nullification and A Son of the Forest, William Apess uses an antinomian practice of nullification to link together Indigenous and Black struggles for decolonization and abolition in the 1830s. The article reimagines the Puritan concept of antinomianism, the idea that because God gives grace freely one need not adhere to civil law, in order to describe a rejection of the very premises of the laws that have constitutively denied protection to Indigenous and Black Americans. The formal and textual politics of these writings challenge settler normalizations of private property in both land and in persons, which were used to dispossess and enslave Indigenous and Black persons. Apess’s strategic deployments of settler law and settler religion are radical decolonial practices, which both point out and undermine the injustices written into American law.

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Settler colonial storytelling: Ashley Barnwell, ‘Keeping the Nation’s Secrets: “Colonial Storytelling” within Australian Families’, Journal of Family History, 2020

21Oct20

Abstract: Recent studies of the genealogy craze focus on how family historians appeal to ancestors to fashion their own identities, but practicing family history can also be a form of national identity-work. In this paper I explore how Larissa Behrendt’s notion of “colonial storytelling” might apply to the hi/stories told within families, as they seek to reproduce or challenge inherited narratives of settler colonialism. To do this, I analyze a sample of self-published family histories of “settlement” held at the National Library of Australia. With close attention to family historians’ books, I consider how genealogical research can revise the collective memories that shape both familial and national imaginaries and offer a model for truth-telling.

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The usual threats to the settler state: Sergio Caggiano, Laura Mombello, ‘Immigrants and Indigenous Peoples in the Twists and Turns of Nationality and Citizenship: The Construction of Threats in Argentina (2015-2019)’, Historia y Sociedad, 39, 2020

18Oct20

Abstract: As part of research on social conflicts caused by the appropriation and use of lands and other spaces, this article addresses how the Argentine state constructed social threats between 2015 and 2019. The topics explored include who is construed as a threatening subject, the justification for using violence against these subjects and, more specifically, the notion of citizen versus foreigner used to legitimize the violence. By creating a threat, illegality is legally produced as part of the government’s concern for population security and circulation. Legislation, public debates, and national press coverage provide insight into these questions, as does the ethnographic fieldwork the authors have done with migrant organizations and rural and native communities since 1990. The state actions analysed herein should be understood as part of stricter control of migratory movements and borders in recent decades. But these global trends are linked to national and regional histories. In the policies implemented in Argentina between 2015 and 2019, two issues commonly viewed separately in the social sciences and public policies are connected: immigration/border crossing and the indigenous “problem.” Thus, the global rhetoric surrounding border control and illegality in Argentina refers to both non-nationals who move to the country and native groups who precede the nation-state. Although citizenship has been increasingly seen as separate from nationality, this article shows how the state continues to connect the two vis-à-vis the concept of foreignness. Additionally, it draws attention to how theoretical concerns about governmentality can be enriched by questions related to inequalities, disputes over goods and recognition, and, particularly, processes associated with accumulation by dispossession.

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Settler storytelling against settle ignorance: Carla Rice, Susan D. Dion, Hannah Fowlie, Andrea Breen, ‘Identifying and working through settler ignorance’, Critical Studies in Education, 2020

18Oct20

Abstract: As Canadian education systems implement the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, various expressions of white settler resistance become amplified. This article examines the potential for settler-educators’ stories to teach about processes for working through settler ignorance. Insight into the question of how to transform settler subjectivities and relationships with Indigenous peoples cuts across theoretical terrain in three fields: decolonizing education, epistemic ignorance, and affect/felt theory. We engage with these currents to analyze settler resistance through nIshnabek de’bwe wIn, a project aimed at transforming relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students and teachers through collaborative storytelling. We report on one project facet that brought Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, educators, and students together to create digital/multimedia stories about experiences of schooling that could inform settler-educator learning by offering critical insight into unlearning ignorance as one strategy (among many) for decolonizing colonial structures of schools. Attention to settler stories reveals a triadic relationship between power/knowledge/affect wherein these forces are inextricably entangled in ways that create and reinforce the epistemological knot of settler ignorance and resistance. The emotional work storytellers undertook as part of their embodied learning offers insight into the promise of creative pedagogies for untying that knot.

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Settler intimacy with land as a solution? Lorenz Gabriel Francesco Poeschl, De-Naturalising Affects: Toward Intimacy as a Means to Negotiate Settler Public Pedagogies in the Aotearoa/New Zealand Nature Site, PhD dissertation, University of Auckland, 2020

18Oct20

Abstract: This thesis investigates the role that conservation sites play in settler identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand and offers a theoretical framework, based on Peter Trawny’s reflections on intimacy, by means of which to interrogate and experience this role, which it considers a process of public pedagogy. The thesis situates the discourse of national identity through nature in the literature on settler colonial efforts to claim belonging through land. This effort in New Zealand was based on claims to unicity. These claims continue on into the discourses of present-day conservation. The thesis grounds the dispersal of this discourse in the literature on public pedagogy, meaning the teaching of ways of thinking and being through public spaces, figures, and practices. The particular discourse of national belonging the thesis takes as an affective discourse, one that changes the possibilities of bodies’ experience and capability. Places of identity give settler colonials the ability to experience themselves as belonging. Four New Zealand conservation sites are here investigated in their function as affective places of public pedagogy. As a means to negotiate such a public pedagogy of affect this thesis offers a theoretical framework based on the German philosopher Peter Trawny’s writings on intimacy. Intimacy is the condition of approach that makes no claim to finality. An intimate settler renounces the claim to native belonging and understands sites of public pedagogy as places that are to be performed without end. The case study sites are interrogated in terms of their ability to host intimate interaction. The attitude of intimacy also influences the form of this thesis. The writing should be considered in many places as seeking to express itself in the same attitude of which it speaks.

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