settler colonial studies blog

If you and I share ancient ancestors, then what is yours is my inheritance: Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania, Duke University Press, 2019.

03Nov19

Description: From their earliest encounters with Indigenous Pacific Islanders, white Europeans and Americans asserted an identification with the racial origins of Polynesians, declaring them to be racially almost white and speculating that they were of Mediterranean or Aryan descent. In Possessing Polynesians Maile Arvin analyzes this racializing history within the context of settler colonialism across Polynesia, especially in Hawai‘i. Arvin argues that a logic of possession through whiteness animates settler colonialism, by which both Polynesia (the place) and Polynesians (the people) become exotic, feminized belongings of whiteness. Seeing whiteness as indigenous to Polynesia provided white settlers with the justification needed to claim Polynesian lands and resources. Understood as possessions, Polynesians were and continue to be denied the privileges of whiteness. Yet Polynesians have long contested these classifications, claims, and cultural representations, and Arvin shows how their resistance to and refusal of white settler logic have regenerated Indigenous forms of recognition.

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Indigenous deaths in custody are settler killings: Jacqueline Briggs, ‘Exemplary Punishment: T. R. L. MacInnes, the Department of Indian Affairs, and Indigenous Executions, 1936–52’, The Canadian Historical Review, 100, 3, 2019, pp. 398-438

01Nov19

Abstract: This article focuses on a series of death penalty recommendations written by Department of Indian Affairs (dia) Secretary Thomas Robert Loftus (T.R.L.) MacInnes between 1936 and 1952, arguing that these recommendations contributed to the increase in Indigenous executions in the 1940s. Identifying MacInnes as a “born bureaucrat” and member of the governing elite in a brief biographical sketch, professional and personal connections are drawn between MacInnes and Duncan Campbell Scott, arguing that MacInnes inherited Scott’s legacy and extended his influence for another generation in the department. A discussion of the social and political context of the dia in the 1940s describes changes in the department at the culmination of a long period of policy stability stretching from the early nineteenth century. Attention is paid to networks of knowledge production and centralization of control at dia headquarters in Ottawa, and how the information collected from the field enabled MacInnes to claim expertise as an amateur criminologist. An analysis of themes in the recommendations reveals a reliance on tropes from the quasi science of criminal anthropology in classifying Indigenous peoples on a scale of criminal responsibility that mapped onto racial hierarchies and the dia’s “civilization policy.” The article discusses how MacInnes constructed and deployed racializing narratives in response to the “problem” of Indigenous peoples rejecting whiteness and explains how he positioned Indigenous executions as a being in the “interest of Indian administration.”

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Settling on top of settler colonialism: Akinyele O. Umoja, ‘Settler-Colonialism and the New Afrikan Liberation Struggle’, in I. Ness, Z. Cope (eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2019

01Nov19

Excerpt: Most elementary students in the United States are instructed that the United States is “one nation, under God with liberty and justice for all.” This notion has been historically challenged by Black revolutionaries, particularly the New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) The New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) is an ideological trend in the Black freedom struggle that has sought independent statehood for African descendants in the United States. The distinguishing event for the modern manifestation of the NAIM is when 100 Black nationalists declared their independence from the United States in 1968 and identified the states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina as their national territory. The New Afrikans demanded reparations, including their national territory, as reparations from the United States (Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa 1969).

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German Studies are invested in settler colonialism: Emina Mušanović, Ashwin Manthripragada, ‘Unsettling Futurity’, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 55, 4, 2019, pp. 398-414

01Nov19

Abstract: The project to find the role that German Studies can play in building transdisciplinary relationships with Indigenous Studies begins from the deleterious presumption that colonization in North America is a thing of the past and that the work of decolonization can therefore commence in an already-decolonized space. Imagining a different German Studies at this intersection is an inevitably future-oriented task that necessitates a problematization not just of the colonial past and still-ongoing settler colonial present but also of futurity itself. Informed in large part by Critical Indigenous Theory, this article intervenes on German Studies as a discipline that, in line with the settler colonial state, either relegates invasion, occupation, and settlement to the past or reconciles itself with continued invasion, occupation, and settlement through practices of inclusion. This article therefore calls for an expansion of the inquiry of German Studies’ investments in settler colonialism.

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Apologising to oneself does not count: Tom Bentley, ‘Settler state apologies and the elusiveness of forgiveness: The purification ritual that does not purify’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2019

27Oct19

Abstract: Focusing on Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations, this article asks: can colonial-settler states obtain forgiveness through political apologies? The article first defends Jacques Derrida’s observation that political apologies resemble the Christian practice of confession. In doing so, it subsequently draws on Michel Foucault’s (1979) detailed treatise on confession in order to assess the potential for absolution. For Foucault, the process of engaging in exhaustive truth-telling of sin before a demarcated authority provides a route to such atonement. By contrast, any potential unburdening of sin is lost when there is either no adequate authority to coax the confession or if the confession is less than full. The problem for the settler state is that it is predisposed to re-evoking the imaginary of the settler nation and Westphalian sovereignty in the very process of apologising. Consequently, there is no scope to submit before a higher sovereign body and any truth-telling is necessarily partial. As such, the central argument is that forgiveness for the settler state must remain elusive. The political opportunities arising from this for Indigenous peoples are discussed in the final section.

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The Nationality Law is not an ‘extreme right-wing document’, it is a settler colonial one: Ilan Pappe, ‘The Israeli Nationality Law: A Blueprint for a Twenty-first Century Settler-Colonial State’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 18, 2, 2019, pp. 179-191

27Oct19

Abstract: This article examines the recent Israeli Nationality Law within a historical context. It argues that the law in many ways manifests the settler-colonial identity of the State of Israel and as such the law embodies clearly both the achievements of the Zionist movement and Zionist future designs. The law is not an extreme right-wing document but rather an accurate reflection of the major characteristics of the Zionist settler-colonial movement in Palestine. Like all settler-colonial movements, the Zionist movement strove to include as few Palestinians as possible in it. The incomplete implementation of this goal during the 1948 Nakba has informed Israeli policies since 1948 and are the best explanation for the 2018 Nationality Law.

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Inclusion needs exclusion: Waleed Salem, ‘Who is Eligible to Exist? The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion of Settler Colonialism: The Case of Palestine, PhD dissertation, Near East University, 2019

27Oct19

Abstract: This PhD thesis aims to expand on the ‘logic of elimination’ of the settler colonial projects by analyzing in depth its dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, who is eligible to exist, and /or to be counted in these projects with a specific focus on Palestine as a case study; compared with three cases of The United States, South Africa and Ireland/ Northern Ireland.The thesis assumed that the Zionist project is characterized by ‘Demographic Elimination’ as the main feature of its inclusion and inclusion dynamics, combining the erasure of the land: place, space, territory, and the landscape; together with the displacement of the indigenous population internally and externally, and the replacement of them by settler colonialists brought from outside. These processes were practiced during the period of the Zionist Settler colonial project in Palestine in the 19th century leading to the establishment of the Israeli State in 1948,and continued after 1948 and 1967 by that State of Israel as being a “Settler Colonial State” in expansion. These methods are implemented in the frameworks of belligerent occupation, Apartheid, and Settler/ Internal Colonialism, combined with the structures of “Settler Democracy” and “Herrenvolk Democracy” that are both ethnically exclusive to the other politically, legally, economically (Through the settler colonial political economy), socially, and culturally. Since the 1940s the United States of America played the role as a ‘mother country’ to Israel and its settler colonial inclusion and exclusion ongoing project. Previously Britain played the mother country role. Before that the Evangelical Americans, German and the British created a Zionist Approach to conquer and settler Palestine in the early nineteenth century before Zionism emerged. The study is going over five chapters, and ends with a brief overview of the possibilities for decolonization, and for re-inclusion.

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Settler colonialism as the alternative to revolution: Tamara Lea Spira, ‘Postrevolutionary Affect and the Consolidation of Zionism: The Case of Mercedes Sosa’, boundary 2, 46, 4, 2019, pp. 119-156

25Oct19

Abstract: This essay traces the Zionist conversion of iconic revolutionary folk singer Mercedes Sosa to theorize the shifting forms of racial empire in the movement from the Dirty War to the War on Terror. I read Sosa’s story as emblematic of the thwarted revolutionary dreams of the late twentieth century and the subsequent forms of recolonization—and in this case Zionism as settler colonialism—that came to flourish in their stead. The arc of Sosa’s work spans the transitions of the epoch and their attendant affective economies: from the revolutionary hopes of the 1960s–1970s, to the deep sorrows of the early military regimes, to the infinite deferrals of justice that animated the neoliberal project. In closing, I examine solidarity responses to the 2014 attack on Gaza. Embodying the rejuvenation of joint decolonial struggle, they rupture the Zionist stronghold that has shaped dominant structures of feeling, overwhelmingly laying purchase on the popular imagination.

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Digital land is land: Meryem Kamil, Towards Decolonial Futures: New Media, Digital Infrastructures, and Imagined Geographies of Palestine, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2019

25Oct19

Abstract: Towards Decolonial Futures: New Media, Digital Infrastructures, and Imagined Geographies of Palestine explores the unexpected breaks and fault-lines within Israeli settler-colonialism that are exacerbated by new media objects and practices. The dissertation examines both content and form of media that represent Palestine, revealing the limitations and possibilities of new media objects to provide a platform for contesting settler-colonialism and imagining decolonial futures for subaltern subjects. The key questions of the dissertation are as follows: What work do digital representations of Palestine and Palestinian land do for identifying fissures in settler-colonial structures? How can an attention to the materiality of digital infrastructures illustrate the ways the digital shapes, affects, and (dis)allows alternative Palestinian futures and relationality? How can a “postcolonial digital studies” framework emerge that distances itself from techno-determinism to critically understand subaltern subjects’ engagements with technology? To address these framing questions, Towards Decolonial Futures focuses on objects that seek to reframe understandings of Palestine and Palestinian resistance: new site Al Jazeera English’s 360-degree video tour of al-Aqsa compound in East Jerusalem alongside Palestinian group Udna’s video of the razed village Mi’ar’s history and potential future; mobile video game Liyla and the Shadows of War that represents life in the Gaza Strip alongside ImpactGames desktop video game Peacemaker: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict that asks players to work towards a two-state solution; digital mapping practices on mobile application Waze and the open-source mapping community of OpenStreetMaps; and finally, incendiary kites and balloons released by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in 2018. The network, a non-space that traverses geography while also beholden to infrastructure, acts as a site of encounter where questions regarding Palestinian futurity can be explored. The dissertation models a method for future scholarship on postcolonial digital cultures by understanding technology as indeterminate objects embedded in structures of power. Through materialist postcolonial studies methods and digital culture analyses including close reading and discourse analysis, I examine both the content and form of media objects including circulation, infrastructure, and representation. The dissertation seeks to critically analyze the potential of media objects in re-framing users’ understandings of Palestinian identity, land, and resistance. In other words, I demonstrate the political work new media forms allow for in building alternative decolonial Palestinian futures. Towards Decolonial Futures delineates the ways particular new media objects and practices gesture to challenging Israeli settler-colonialism and building towards Palestinian futurity. Rather than celebrating new media in a techno-determinist fashion, this dissertation shows the affordances and limitations of using technology that disavow the importance of geography but allow for reimagining the relationship between Palestinians, Israeli settler-colonial structures, and land.

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Margaret Atwood’s settler subject: Lee Frew, ‘”A Whole New Take on Indigenous”: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as Wild Animal Story’, Studies in Canadian Literature, 2019

25Oct19

Excerpt: ORYX AND CRAKE, the first novel of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam trilogy, presents the social order of the relatively near future as suffering from the effects of environmental degradation and dehumanization caused by a rapacious, globalized capitalism. In the novel, what Greg Garrard describes as the “corrosive power of modernity” (239) has not been productively resisted because democratic protections have been supplanted by neoliberal, transnational corporations. This system of domination is overthrown, however, once a brilliant geneticist nicknamed Crake engineers and unleashes a virus to exterminate humanity. In salvaging what remains of the earth’s biosphere from flagrant abuses, Crake’s “supreme act of bioterrorism” (Glover 56) aims to make way for the “Crakers” or “Children of Crake,” a transgenic, humanoid species that Crake has created as a replacement for humans. After “zero hour” has passed and most of the people on earth have been murdered, the novel’s central character, Jimmy/Snowman, leads the Crakers from their corporate compound to a “lethal transgenic-infested environment” (Garrard 238), in which numerous other genetically modified animal species reside. Although Oryx and Crake speculates in such a way on a post-national and postnatural future, the novel’s representation of human-animal interactions nevertheless resonates with a tradition of animal writing established first in Canada in the late nineteenth century. As I will elucidate in what follows, Oryx and Crake largely conforms to the conventions of the wild animal story, which Atwood was instrumental in identifying as a genre in her contentious 1972 study Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. As such, Atwood’s novel inevitably rehearses the expedient disavowal of Second World cultural nationalism: ongoing colonizing acts are obscured by the text’s privileging of a settler subject-position imagined as beset by the imperium of modernity.

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