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Calling settler colonial genocide: Craig Nessan, ‘Calling a Thing What It Is Confronting the American Genocide of Indigenous Peoples’, Currents in Theology and Mission, 47, 1, 2020

03Jan20

Abstract: This article examines the history of indigenous people through the lens of genocide theory. Following autobiographical reflections on settler colonialism and the practice of holding seminars on the theme of American genocides, the author explores the meaning of right remembering and making reparations in the context of American exceptionalism and white supremacy as represented in civil religion. Calling a thing what it is, according to Luther’s theology of the cross, involves not only righting the historical narrative based on the past but appreciating the resistance and resilience of indigenous people into the present. Gordon J. Straw was a major figure whose legacy challenges us in calling a thing what it is.


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The socio-spatial positionalities of settler colonialism: Antoine Garrault, ‘The young activists of Ramallah against the Israeli occupation: Forms of commitment and socio-spatial positionalities’, Participations, 3, 2019, pp. 165-193

01Jan20

Abstract: Focusing on the young activists of Ramallah engaged in the Palestinian “popular resistance,” this article aims to analyze particular forms of anticolonial engagement in the West Bank. In the context of spatial divisions caused by the Israeli occupation, we demonstrate that the territorial regime in Ramallah, within the Oslo system, partly determines the interpretive framing of the conflict, the nature of the mobilizations, and the formation of activist networks. This study examines the existing relationships between spatial context, on the one hand, and the commitment of young activists, on the other, by defining specific socio-spatial positionalities. 


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Bodies as territory: Esme G. Murdock, ‘This Land Was Made for … : (Re)Appearing Black/Brown Female Corporeality, Life, and Death’, Hypatia, 2019

29Dec19

Abstract: Lands and bodies are often conceptualized as exhaustible objects and property within settler-colonial and neoliberal ideologies. These conceptualizations lead to underdevelopment of understandings of lands and bodies that fall outside of these ascriptions, and also attempt to actively obscure the pervasive ways in which settler colonialism violently reinscribes itself on the North American landscape through the murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women’s bodies. In this article, I will argue that the continual murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women in North America facilitate the successful functioning of ongoing settler-colonial systems and projects. This violence creates and reinforces the functionality of Black/Brown bodies as the territory upon which settler identity and futurity gains traction, indeed, requires.


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Settlers of colour: Arama Rata, Faisal Al Asaad, ‘Whakawhanaungatanga as a Māori Approach to Indigenous–Settler of Colour Relationship Building’, New Zealand Population Review, 45, 2019, pp. 211–233

29Dec19

Abstract: Communities of colour are racialised and oppressed differentially by settler colonial states , yet the discourse of diversity and inclusion that dominates state interactions with communities of colour tends to conflate marginalised groups as equivalent and interchangeable to the detriment of intergroup relations. An approach to community building that recognises racial difference in general and the irreducibility of indigeneity in particular is needed if racialised communities are to create solidarities for transformative change. We engage Indigenous and settler colonial theories to address these imperatives, while noting the distinct character of these frameworks. In particular, we seek to highlight the specificity of indigeneity in settler colonial contexts, such as Aotearoa New Zealand, and to generate a model for relationship building that is not founded on settler colonial ideologies, by drawing on Indigenous concepts. Through thematic analysis of interviews with Māori community leaders, we explore Māori-–tauiwi (settler) of colour (ToC) relations. The results of our qualitative analysis provide evidence for Māori–ToC relations that are consistent with whanaungatanga (good relationships characterised as family-like, based on similar experiences, and bound in conditional solidarity). Furthermore, we identify the following four aspects of whakawhanaungatanga (relationship building): positioning, power sharing, dialogue and cultural practice. Thus, we suggest whakawhanaungatanga as a Māori approach to relationship building with the potential to generate Indigenous–settler of colour solidarities towards transformative change.


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Settler geologies: Jeremy J. Schmidt, ‘Settler geology: Earth’s deep history and the governance of in situ oil spills in Alberta’, Political Geography, 78, 2020, #102132

29Dec19

Abstract: Alberta’s bitumen industry is frequently identified as a key site of environmental politics in the Anthropocene owing to the scale of its fossil fuel extraction operations. While popular images of surface mining activities often focus these discussions, approximately 80% of the bitumen reserves in the Canadian province lie too deep for surface mining and are extracted through in situ technologies, including processes that inject high-temperature, high-pressure steam to mobilize geologic formations of the tar-like fossil fuel. This article examines how in situ extraction was governed in response to four flow-to-surface (FTS) events in which bitumen unexpectedly migrated to Earth’s surface as the result of in situ operations. The governance response to these events is of particular interest because it counters the assertion that existing governance institutions operate on time scales that are incommensurate with those relevant to the Anthropocene. The Alberta case shows the opposite owing to how Earth’s deep history was used to provide temporal syntax for a geotechnical debate that ensued over what caused the FTS events. By detailing the controversy over what caused the FTS events, and the search for “enabling conditions” that would link causal explanations to the spatial distribution of the four bitumen seeps, Earth’s deep history was also made commensurate with the political geography of settler colonialism in Alberta. The article introduces and develops the notion of ‘settler geology’ in order to capture the naturalization of geologic forms of reasoning about Earth’s deep history, the geologic force of anthropogenic in situ operations, and the temporal framework of settler colonial governance in Alberta.


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Virtual residential schools: Andrew Woolford, Adam Muller, Struan Sinclair, ‘Risky Times and Spaces: Settler Colonialism and Multiplying Genocide Prevention through a Virtual Indian Residential School’, Genocide Studies and Prevention, 13, 3, 2019, pp. 79-96

29Dec19

Excerpt: Accordingly, the logic of prevention can also be seen to operate as a “logic of elimination.” Just as the logic of elimination, as identified by Patrick Wolfe, works to erase Indigenous presence upon the land while naturalizing non-Indigenous settlement, the logic of prevention turns our gaze away from the many means of elimination (e.g., forced assimilation, removal, linguistic and political destruction), thereby allowing us to imagine North America as a space not needing prevention. Indigenous groups, and the centrality of culture to the ongoingness of these groups, are defined out of the scope of genocide and so out of the scope of prevention, facilitating the perpetuation of a settler colonial logic of elimination by legal and other means.


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On the vitality of an interpretative approach: Kevin Bruyneel, ‘Review Essay: On Settler Colonialism’, The Review of Politics, 82, 1, 2020 , pp. 145-157

27Dec19

Reviewing Brenna Bhandar’s Colonial Lives of property, Adam Dahl’s Empire of the People, Sarah Deer’s The Beginning and End of Rape, and Onur Ulas Ince’s Colnial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism.

 


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‘Wakefield’s laboratory’ then and NOW: Simon Barber, ‘In Wakefield’s Laboratory: Tangata Whenua into Property/Labour in Te Waipounamu’, Journal of Sociology, 2019

27Dec19

Abstract: This article follows the alchemical political economy of Edward Gibbon Wakefield for whom Kāi Tahu whenua served as a laboratory. Wakefield’s clever formula for the transubstantiation of an incendiary social situation in Britain into new terrain for capital was designed to secure the transplantation of English economic and social relations to the colonies to ensure the persistence of a landless class compelled to sell their labour for wages. Ingeniously, the transport of that labour to the colonies was to be paid for by the market in land in the new colony: Kāi Tahu would be made to fund their own colonisation. I track the fate of capital’s settler dream for ready land and labour as it was brought into being by the New Zealand Company, subsequently taken over by the Crown, and as it continues into our present. The argument is divided into two parts. The first is the classical moment of primitive accumulation, clearing people from the land to provide a market in land and labour, ‘legal’ dispossession, and commodification. The second is the more recent continuation of the initial processes of dispossession and commodification as these assert themselves in processes of redress and as they are expressed in the corporatisation of Ngāi Tahu.


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Critiquing one colonialism by embracing another: David Myer Temin,‘“Nothing much had happened”: Settler colonialism in Hannah Arendt’, European Journal of Political Theory, 2019

27Dec19

Abstract: Hannah Arendt’s account of imperialism has become an unlikely source of inspiration for scholars invested in anti-colonial and postcolonial critique. However, the role of settler colonialism in her thought has come under far less scrutiny. This essay reconstructs Arendt’s account of settler-colonization. It argues that Arendt’s republican analysis of imperialism hinges on her notion of the boomerang effect, which is absent in settler-colonial contexts. Arendt recognized some of the distinctive features of settler expansionism but reproduced many of the ideologies that sustain practices of settler-colonial conquest. This interpretation sheds light on the promises and limits of contemporary retrievals of Arendt’s analysis and critique of imperialism by foregrounding the specificity of settler colonialism as an axis of ongoing colonial violence.


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Asian American settlers: Bao Lo, ‘Epistemic Decolonization: Centering Settler Colonialism in Asian American Studies’, Ethnic Studies Review, 42, 2, 2019, pp. 210-224

22Dec19

Abstract: This article extends critical discussions on decolonization and settler colonialism specifically as it relates to Asian American Studies. The author argues for a centering of settler colonialism in Asian Americans Studies as epistemic decolonization of the imperial practices of the university. Focusing on the curriculum and pedagogy in courses she teaches in Asian American Studies, the author offers meaningful suggestions for engaging settler colonialism in the implementation of Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies in higher education.


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