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Settlers out of time: David Kenrick, Decolonisation, Identity and Nation in Rhodesia, 1964-1979 A Race Against Time, Palgrave, 2019

08Nov19

Description: This book explores concepts of decolonisation, identity, and nation in the white settler society of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) between 1964 and 1979. It considers how white settlers used the past to make claims of authority in the present. It investigates the white Rhodesian state’s attempts to assert its independence from Britain and develop a Rhodesian national identity by changing Rhodesia’s old colonial symbols, and examines how the meaning of these national symbols changed over time. Finally, the book offers insights into the role of race in Rhodesian national identity, showing how portrayals of a ‘timeless’ black population were highly dependent upon circumstance and reflective of white settler anxieties. Using a comparative approach, the book shows parallels between Rhodesia and other settler societies, as well as other post-colonial nation-states and even metropoles, as themes and narratives of decolonisation travelled around the world.


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Settlers incarcerate indigenous girls: Sandrina de Finney, Patricia Krueger-Henney, Lena Palacios, ‘Reimagining Girlhood in White Settler-Carceral States’, Girlhood Studies, 12, 3, 2019, pp. vii-xv

08Nov19

Excerpt: We are deeply honored to have been given the opportunity to edit this special issue of Girlhood Studies, given that it is dedicated to rethinking girlhood in the context of the adaptive, always-evolving conditions of white settler regimes. The contributions to this issue address the need to theorize girlhood—and critiques of girlhood—across the shifting forces of subjecthood, community, land, nation, and borders in the Western settler states of North America. As white settler states, Canada and the United States are predicated on the ongoing spatial colonial occupation of Indigenous homelands. In settler states, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind us, “the settler never left” (2012: 20) and colonial domination is reasserted every day of active occupation. White settler colonialism functions through the continued control of land, resources, and racialized bodies, and is amalgamated through a historical commitment to slavery, genocide, and the extermination of Indigenous nationhood and worldviews. Under settler colonial regimes, criminal justice, education, immigration, and child welfare systems represent overlapping sites of transcarceral power that amplify intersecting racialized, gendered, sexualized, and what Tanja Aho and colleagues call “carceral ableist” violence.


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Settlers don’t return land: Matthew Wynyard, ‘”Not One More Bloody Acre”: Land Restitution and the Treaty of Waitangi Settlement Process in Aotearoa New Zealand’, Land, 8, 162, 2019

08Nov19

Abstract: Te Tiriti o Waitangi, signed between Maori rangatira (chiefs) and the British Crown in 1840 ¯ guaranteed to Maori the ‘full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of their lands’. In the decades ¯ that followed, Maori were systematically dispossessed of all but a fraction of their land through ¯ a variety of mechanisms, including raupatu (confiscation), the individualisation of title, excessive Crown purchasing and the compulsory acquisition of land for public works. Maori, who have deep ¯ cultural and whakapapa (genealogical) connections to the land, were left culturally, materially and spiritually impoverished. Land loss has long been a central grievance for many Maori and the return ¯ of land has been a guiding motivation for whanau (extended family), hap ¯ u (sub-tribe) and iwi (tribe) ¯ seeking redress from the Crown. Since the 1990s, many groups have entered into negotiations to settle their historical grievances with the Crown and while land loss and the deep yearning for its return are central to many Maori claims, precious little land is typically returned to M ¯ aori through ¯ the settlement process. This paper seeks to critically examine the Treaty settlement process in light of land restitution policies enacted elsewhere and argues that one of the many flaws in the process is the paucity of land returned to Maori. 


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Settler colonialism’s (commemorative) structures: Susan Slyomovics ‘Dismantling a world: France’s monumental military heritage in Sidi-Bel-Abbès, Algeria’, The Journal of North African Studies, 2019

05Nov19

Abstract: The history of France’s war memorials is a much-studied domain of scholarly inquiry. According to historian Antoine Prost, constructing monuments on a grand scale to commemorate wars was a response to the staggering number of 1,300,000 French dead in World War I. Among those who fought for France in 1914–18 were 343,000 conscripted and mobilised Algerians divided according to colonial categories between French citizens and indigènes, the latter drafted as French subjects. So widespread was the ‘cult of the monument’ that the term ‘statuomania’ was coined by historian Maurice Agulhon to account for 36,000 war memorials erected in the interwar period throughout France and its overseas territories, especially in Algeria, which was integrated as France’s southernmost province. The significance of French colonists implanting statues was well understood by the native Algerian population who linked a colonial Algeria known for a plethora of monuments to the visible and materialised expressions of colonial power and occupation. Analysing how the formerly colonised of Algeria address the enduring material presence of statues, steles, monuments, and other effigies of the colonial past, this essay draws on concepts such as ‘dark heritage’ and ‘difficult heritage’. My case study is the town of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, headquarters and cradle of the French Foreign Legion until 1962 and the different fates of its two war memorials after Algeria’s 1962 independence from France.


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A settler society reproduces architecturally: Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Designing ‘Post-Industrial Society’: Settler Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Palm Springs, California, 1876-1977, PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2019

04Nov19

Abstract: The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians Reservation was established in 1876, the same year as the transcontinental Southern Pacific Railroad completed a station in Palm Springs. These overlapping events would both enable and problematize the settler colonization of the Agua Caliente’s land, creating a checkerboard pattern of “fragmented jurisdiction” that was fundamental for its transformation into one of the wealthiest resorts in the United States. The territorial conflict between the Tribe and the U.S. would only begin to be legally resolved in 1977, when the Agua Caliente won the right to zone and plan their own lands. This dissertation examines how architecture, urbanism, and infrastructure mediated the technical, legal, and ideological struggles that took place in this period; sometimes enabling Imperial dispossession, other times structuring Tribal assimilation and decolonization. The dissertation historicizes and theorizes these processes by examining the modern architecture and urbanism of Palm Springs as a specific settler-colonial, “post-industrial” mode of development which was made possible by the particular territorial configuration that emerged out of nineteenth century Imperialism. It posits a correlation between settler colonialism and the settler imaginaries and material processes of technological progress, capitalist accumulation, natural resource extraction, and cultures of leisure that were uniquely developed in Palm Springs through modern architecture. Critically dismantling the connections between modern architecture, “post-industrial society,” and settler colonialism, this dissertation argues, is a necessary condition for the development of decolonial epistemologies and strategies of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist resistance.


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A settler society reproduces settler education: Margaret A. Nash, ‘Entangled Pasts: Land-Grant Colleges and American Indian Dispossession’, History of Education Quarterly, 2019

04Nov19

Abstract: Land-grant colleges were created in the mid-nineteenth century when the federal government sold off public lands and allowed states to use that money to create colleges. The land that was sold to support colleges was available because of a deliberate project to dispossess American Indians of land they inhabited. By encouraging westward migration, touting the “civilizing” influence of education, emphasizing agricultural and scientific education to establish international strength, and erasing Native rights and history, the land-grant colleges can be seen as an element of settler colonialism. Native American dispossession was not merely an unfortunate by-product of the establishment of land-grant colleges; rather, the colleges exist only because of a state-sponsored system of Native dispossession.


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A settler society reproduces queerly: Ryan Tan Wander, Queer Times Out West: Genres of the Settler Colonial US West, 1868-1912, PhD Dissertation, University of California, Davis, 2019

04Nov19

Abstract: “Queer Times Out West: Genres of the Settler Colonial US West, 1868-1912” examines how frontier literatures of the US West narrate the co-constitution of sexuality and US settler colonialism. In portraying relations between and among white, Indigenous, and racialized bodies in the spatiotemporal zone of the frontier, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century frontier literatures imaginatively re-presented US settler colonialism’s reliance on white settlers who adopt the sexual backwardness associated with Natives, Mormons, and subordinated racial groups. Despite the “closing” of the frontier in 1890, US settlement remained active and contested over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. White settlers’ claims to Native “primitivity” were at the heart of the settler imperative to inhabit an indigenizing primitivity while remaining oriented toward the future. Authors and literary genres intimately tied to frontier representation, I argue, portrayed white “primitivity” on the frontier as a form of sexual backwardness that simultaneously authorizes and threatens the US national future that it is supposed to found. National modernization, evolutionary thinking, and sexology differentiated populations and individuals based on universal timelines of “progress,” imposing teleological narrative order on variegated forms of sexual, social, and economic life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Such ordering relegated Indigenous and racialized others to the past at the same time that it sutured white settlers’ appropriation of an indigenizing sexual backwardness to the settler future. Frontier literatures serve as a privileged medium for repeating or reconfiguring this narrative ordering of sexuality, offering chronotopes that incline toward multiple potential futures at a time when US sovereignty out West was not a foregone conclusion. Bringing scholarship on the imbrication of sexuality and US settler colonialism into dialogue with work on temporality in nineteenth-century US literature and culture, my project demonstrates that these frontier literatures’ narrative forms work through the threat and asset that the contradictory temporality of white settler sexuality represented in a crucial moment of settler colonial consolidation.


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Settlers take land from indigenous and ‘half breed’ peoples equally: David Ress, The Half Breed Tracts in Early National America: Changing Concepts of Land and Place, Palgrave, 2019

03Nov19

Description: In 1824 and 1830, over one hundred thousand acres across Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska were set aside as a home for descendants of Native American women and white traders and trappers. The treaties that established these so-called Half Breed Tracts left undefined exactly who held claim to the land, and by the end of the 1850s, settlers and speculators had appropriated virtually every acre for themselves. But in an era of ravenous westward expansion, why did the process of dispossession require three decades of debate and legal maneuvering? As David Ress argues, the fate of the Half Breed Tracts challenges longstanding ideas about land tenure and community in early national America.


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Indigenous migrants: Hélène Pellerin, ‘Indigenous Peoples in Canadian Migration Narratives: A Story of Marginalization’, Aboriginal Policy Studies, 8, 1, 2019, pp. 3-24

03Nov19

Abstract: An increasing number of migration scholars have been critical of the narrative of Canada’s successful immigration history, because of its neglect of colonial and discriminatory practices against Indigenous peoples and racialized minorities. This paper seeks to engage critically with this scholarship by insisting on the distinct places Indigenous peoples have in Canada’s immigration history and migration narratives. By comparing various administrative programs and policies on immigration, the paper identifies the continuous marginalization and invisibility of Indigenous peoples over time. A closer look at the contemporary employment conditions of both groups highlights the administrative process of making Indigenous peoples invisible and disconnected from the wage economy, unlike migrants who are explicitly constructed as connected to it. The paper concludes with a call for further critical migration scholarship, with the examination of the history of Indigenous-settler-immigrant entanglements over time. 


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Settlers facing demise: Derek Saunders, The Unsettled Settler: Settler Identity in PostApartheid South African and Post-Soviet Estonian Literature, MA Dissertation, Tallinn University, 2019

03Nov19

Abstract: In 2007, riots erupted in Tallinn, Estonia, the largest single instance of civil unrest since the fall of the Soviet Union. The stated cause of this was the removal of the Soviet-era monument to the unknown Soviet soldier, which after Estonian reindependence took on various meanings, being seen by ethnic Estonians as a reminder of the Soviet occupation, and by Soviet-era immigrants, the so-called Baltic Russians, as a sign of their belonging in Estonia. However, in spite of the Tallinn monument, relations between Estonian- and Russian-speakers were believed to be improving. However, the riots sparked by the monument’s removal brought these divisions to the fore. This separation has remained in the public consciousness, with many Estonian Russians believing themselves to be discriminated against due to the country’s language and citizenship laws, the perceived secondary status of Russian in Estonian life, and, more recently, the implementation of new language requirements in Russian-medium secondary schools, where at least sixty per cent of all school subjects must be taught in Estonian. In addition, the continued presence of approximately 85 000 stateless individuals in Estonia has raised concern about the state’s seeming unwillingness to integrate its large Russian-speaking population.

In a similar process, White South Africans’ perception that they are discriminated against and are unwelcome in the country of their birth has also developed and grown apace since the election South Africa’s first Black president, Nelson Mandela, in 1994. The end of apartheid was supposed to bring reconciliation, unity, and prosperity for all, yet racial divisions and a lack of real change for the majority of poor, mostly nonWhite South Africans, have remained realities of everyday life. The victimhood that White South Africans have adopted has manifested itself in the form of a lack of cross-cultural communication, a tendency to remember the benefits of apartheid for Whites while ignoring the draconian state, and a hankering after an idealised status quo that can never return. An increase in inflammatory demagoguery in the political sphere, a persistently high violent crime rate, and a loss of the exclusive attentions of the state have all contributed to a feeling of dispossession amongst White South Africans. Complaints about the current state of the nation may be met with responses along the lines of: “If you don’t like it, go back to Europe.” But how can White South Africans “go back” to Europe? And how can Russian-speakers resident in Estonia “return” to Russia? In South Africa, many of these people are the descendants of settlers that came to the respective countries three centuries ago; in Estonia, the first wave of Soviet-era immigration began in the early 1950s, not long after the beginning of the Soviet occupation. Children, parents, and grandparents have settled in Estonia, calling it home. Where should they go?

And yet, divisions remain within the changed society. With linguistic and social divisions persisting after the birth of the new order, the newly free countries found that there could be no quick and simple solution to the problems inherent in decades, or even centuries, of oppression and marginalisation of the Native Other. However, the settlers themselves remain. Cavanagh and Veracini argue that there is no such thing as a post-settler colony, as the settler, by definition, takes root and becomes resident within the colony. 1 Settlership and settler colonialism are resilient and persistent structures. Thus the question must be asked: what is to be done?

This thesis is based on the premise that, despite past injustices and the violence and inequity of the settler colony’s original formation, the settler is here to stay, be it in South Africa, Estonia, or elsewhere. Since these (often sizeable) populations remain in the country that they once occupied, living in close proximity with the people whose oppression they aided in, the issue of progression beyond violent clashes or restricted communication must be dealt with. The issue of the settler’s relationship with his home and the formation of settler identity in terms of the colony are the main focuses this thesis. In particular, the manner in which the settler is unsettled through his relation to both the colonising Empire and the colonised Native will be analysed. The prevailing model of the colonial system is dualist, envisaging a distant metropolitan Empire superior to the peripheral Colony. The settler is understood as a representative of the Empire, and not as a separate party at all. However, through his own distancing from the metropolis, and through the hybridisation of culture, the settler takes on an identity that has aspects of both Coloniser and Colonised, and yet is part of neither. When the prevailing hegemonic structure of settler superiority is disrupted, this disjuncture results in a necessary reworking of national narratives. During this process, however, the settler remains unsettled, leaving him unsure of his position within the new order. It is this that must be dealt with.


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