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A diaspora in charge is a settler colony (more on Chinese settler colonialism): Els van Dongen, ‘Writing Modern Chinese History Inside Out: New Relational Approaches to (Un)thinking the Nation-State, Diaspora, and Transnationalism’, Twentieth-Century China, 44, 3, 2019, pp. 362-371

18Oct19

Abstract: Engaging with earlier scholarship that probes the linearity of the nation-state, recent works employ new relational approaches and foreground “Chinese” perceptions of “China.” They approach modern Chinese history through the lens of the emigrant-homeland dynamic, advocating a localized transnationalism and exploring the implications of the transnational turn on temporality. Also, situating the nation-state within history, they argue for a “shifting” China based on questions of ethnicity and cultural exchange.


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A Chinese settler-colonial project: Ying-kit Chan, ‘Ethnicity and Frontier Studies in Southwest China: Pan-Thai Nationalism and the Wartime Debate on National Identity, 1932–1945’, Twentieth-Century China, 44, 3, 2019, pp. 324-344

18Oct19

Abstract: In the 1930s and early 1940s, China was at war with Japan and China’s Nationalist government moved to Sichuan Province in the Southwest. An ideal location in many ways, Southwest China was also an ethnically diverse place, a crucible for the idea of a modern, unified Chinese nation held together by its constituents. The region became a seedbed for frontier studies and the rethinking of ethnic relations, a region that academics and administrators hoped to transform into a bastion of military resistance and national recovery. This article argues that Pan-Thai nationalism, promoted by the Thai state to spread Thai consciousness among Tai minorities in Southwest China, provided an impetus for these trends. Unity became the national purpose, and the cultural and economic development of Southwest China was conceptualized.


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Art appreciation (from afar) as settler ‘effective occupation’: Margaret Boyce, One Hundred Words for Conquest: Curating Arctic Sovereignty at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, PhD dissertation, McMaster University, 2019

16Oct19

Abstract: This dissertation examines a series of catalogues for Inuit art exhibitions held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG), spanning from 1967 to 2017. I argue that the discursive conventions of settler-Canadian art appreciation, especially those geared towards Inuit creative production, have resonances with the political strategies that Canada uses to prove effective occupation—a term from international law—of the Arctic. My work intervenes in this context by showing how art appreciation encourages modes of effective occupation that are not obviously political, insofar as these modes operate in the realm of affect. I first develop a critical framework inspired by Glen Coulthard’s concept of colonial recognition politics, to demonstrate that there is an affirmative recognition politics at work in the WAG catalogues. I then theorize that catalogues’ tendency to oscillate between an ethnographic (contextualist) analysis and an aesthetic (non-contextualist) analysis produces a tension that orients patrons towards the North accordance with Canada’s position on Arctic geopolitics. Building on the work of Eva Mackey, I argue that a mixed ethnographic-aesthetic view of Inuit art activates a particularly expedient form of belonging from afar in settler patron-readers, whereby they are encouraged to feel as if they are of the North, while never having to be there. My third chapter attends to how the WAG narrates the dramatic social transformations that Inuit experienced in the mid-20th century. The catalogues implicitly invalidate many Inuit’s experience of settler-colonial intervention by suggesting that the move to sedentary communities, often at the hands of the settler state, was inevitable and even desirable. This work provides strategies for critiquing instances of settler benevolence that are unique to the art world, and offers a template for how to approach exhibition catalogues as a genre—both of which are areas of scholarship that have been hitherto neglected.


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Settler colonialism and tri-racial borderlands: Christine Antoinette Rizzi, ‘My Feet Are Chained’: Settler Colonialism and Mobility in the Florida Borderlands, 1812-1866, PhD dissertation, University of Mississippi, 2019

16Oct19

Abstract: This project uses the framework of mobility to understand how settler colonialism functioned in a tri-racial southern borderland in the nineteenth-century. Nineteenth-century Florida constituted a borderland characterized by competition for land and resources among Seminole Indians, African Americans, and white Americans. White Americans regulated mobility, i.e. the physical movement of peoples, in order to privilege their own settlement in Florida, divest native peoples of their land, and enslave people of African descent. Beginning in 1812 and lasting through the first half of the 1860s, white Americans used legislation, the settlement of white families, the solidification of a slave system, and warfare against the Seminole Indians to Americanize the Florida peninsula by creating a white supremacist settler colony. Native and black peoples, however, used their own idiosyncratic forms of movement to resist americanization and the settler colonial system. The Civil War, itself a settler colonial war in Florida, witnessed the last gasp of the settler colonial system in Florida as slavery ended in 1865 and the Seminole Indians secured their authority in the state. White supremacy, however, would continue to reign in Florida through violence, white political control, and the rise of the tourism industry alongside Jim Crow segregation. The following project demonstrates the overriding importance of physical mobility to the process of national expansion and settlement, the persistence of borderland conflicts in the South after the colonial period, and the existence of a tri-racial South wherein native peoples wielded significant power and influence beyond the Removal Era.


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Considering settler colonialism in the making of ‘crimmigration’: Louise Boon-Kuo, ‘”Race”, Crimmigration and the Deportation of Aboriginal Non-citizens’, in Peter Billings (ed.), Crimmigration in Australia: Law, Politics, and Society, Springer, 2019, pp. 39-62

16Oct19

Abstract: Immigration detention and criminal deportation have both formed central concerns in a growing body of scholarship on the interrelationship between criminal and immigration law regimes: a field known as “crimmigration”. Given the integral role that “race” has played in social stratification, it is no surprise that as this field of research has developed, scholars have started to identify racialised dimensions of crimmigration. Yet even when race is centred, the role of settler colonialism as constitutive of racial formation remains marginal, which risks distorting how we see race and racism. By exploring the contemporary application of Australian criminal deportation provisions to exclude Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people who are not Australian citizens, this chapter reveals the foundational and continuing role of “race” and “whiteness” in the formation of Australian sovereignty and citizenship. It builds on existing explanations for punitive approaches in immigration law enforcement by contending that such approaches can be understood as part of the expressive performance of patriarchal white sovereignty responding to the crisis of legitimacy of its illegal foundation. Although the focus is on Australian practices, its discussion of Indigenous sovereignty and crimmigration is also relevant for other settler colonial states such as the United States, Canada and New Zealand.


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Responsibility is about crafting a response: Rebekah Garrison, ‘Settler Responsibility: Respatialising Dissent in “America” Beyond Continental Borders’, Shima Journal, 13, 2, 2019, pp. 56-75

15Oct19

Abstract: Settler responsibility is a worldview grounded in profound relationships, exchanges, and solidarities between Indigenous and non-native communities. When put into practice, settler responsibility requires constant collaboration, articulation, and radical care to support a rich re-envisioning of peace and justice. Through a critique of white settler colonial discourse, I demonstrate that shared histories of US imperialism link Caribbean and Pacific Islands. Building upon kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui’s notion of kuleana consciousness, I argue that decolonial awareness in local spaces is a necessary step towards creating better worlds. Applying the Hawaiian concept of kuleana, my qualitative and archival findings from Bieke (Vieques), Guåhan (Guam), and Hawaiʻi calls settlers to deepen our approaches and ethical responsibilities to the Indigenous peoples whose lands we occupy. Bringing to the fore that Indigenous movements for demilitarisation respatialise dissent in “America” beyond continental borders, I seek to raise white settler consciousness about our own ignorance of these islands, histories, and peoples.


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If settler colonialism is about reproducing a social body in the place of another, the settler polity is an empire of homes: Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘Reconsidering Domesticity through the Lens of Empire and Settler Society in North America’, The American Historical Review, 124, 4, 2019, pp. 1249–1266

13Oct19

Abstract: Our reconsideration of domesticity comes at a time when empire and colonial and postcolonial categories of analysis are informing many fields of historical study. This essay traces the historiographic origins of the intersection of domesticity and empire, focusing on domesticity’s usefulness as a window on cross-cultural intimacy and conflict. It also offers an example of how previous treatments of domesticity might be revised by taking empire and settler society into account.


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The other captivity narrative (indigenous women in the house) as a settler story: Victoria Haskins, ‘Domesticating Colonizers: Domesticity, Indigenous Domestic Labor, and the Modern Settler Colonial Nation’, The American Historical Review, 124, 4, 2019, pp. 1290–1301

13Oct19

Abstract: The placement of Indigenous girls and young women in white homes to work as servants was a key strategy of official policy and practice in both the United States and Australia. Between the 1880s and the Second World War, under the outing programs in the U.S. and various apprenticeship and indenturing schemes in Australia, the state regulated and constructed relations between Indigenous and white women in the home. Such state intervention not only helped to define domesticity in a modern world, but was integral to the formation of the modern settler colonial nation in its claims to civilizing authority in the United States and Australia. In the context of settler colonialism, domesticity was not hegemonic in this period, but rather was precarious and uncertain. By prescribing and demanding from employers demonstrations of domesticity, the state was engaged in perfecting white women as well as Indigenous women, the latter as the colonized, to be domesticated, and the former as the colonizer, to domesticate.


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The captivity narrative (i.e., the settler woman out of the house) as settler crisis: Treva Elaine Hodges, The captivity narratives of Cynthia Ann Parker: settler colonialism, collective memory, and cultural trauma, PhD dissertation, University of Louisville, 2019

13Oct19

Abstract: This dissertation explores representations of the captivity narrative of Cynthia Ann Parker, an Anglo woman captured as a child by Comanche, with whom she lived in a kinship relationship until her forced return to Anglo society twenty-four years later. The project draws upon trauma theory to explain the persistent appeal of Parker’s narrative. Interpretations analyzed include the original historical account of Parker’s narrative, and appearances in the genres of opera, film, graphic novel, and historical fiction. The dissertation reveals how appearances of Parker’s narrative correspond to periods in US history in which social change threated the dominant position of Anglo American men. The primary argument is that captivity narratives serve to reinforce hegemonic Anglo masculinity promoted by the American settler colonial system. The dissertation is divided into six chapters organized chronologically to demonstrate the significance of Parker’s narrative in various historical moments. Chapter One provides a historical overview of Parker’s story and briefly reviews the impact of captivity narratives. Chapter Two explores the first formal historical account of Parker’s narrative and discusses the significance of myth to conceptions of Americanism during the Progressive Era. Chapter Three examines Julia Smith’s interpretation of Parker’s narrative via her opera, Cynthia Parker, to show how expansion of rights for white women between World Wars I and II failed to translate to equal rights for all due to the persistence of the racial hierarchy established by the settler colonial system. In Chapter Four, John Ford’s film The Searchersdemonstrates how Parker’s narrative helped reinforce the social position of Anglo men returning from World War II. Chapter Five looks to alternative forms of Parker’s narrative in the graphic novel, White Comanche, and historical fiction, Ride the Wind, to demonstrate how Anglo writers, even when attempting to center Native people as agents in Parker’s story, continue to reinforce negative stereotypes that perpetuate the supremacy of Anglo masculinity. The final chapter briefly looks at the current political and social climate of the US to demonstrate how the long-term insidious trauma inherent in the settler colonial system continues to impact racial and gender hierarchical performance.


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Sponge Bob is a settler! Holly M. Barker, ‘Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom’, The Contemporary Pacific, 31, 2, 2019 pp. 345-379

12Oct19

Abstract: Billions of people around the globe are well-acquainted with SpongeBob Squarepants and the antics of the title character and his friends on Bikini Bottom. By the same token, there is an absence of public discourse about the whitewashing of violent American military activities through SpongeBob’s occupation and reclaiming of the bottom of Bikini Atoll’s lagoon. SpongeBob Squarepants and his friends play a role in normalizing the settler colonial takings of Indigenous lands while erasing the ancestral Bikinian people from their nonfictional homeland. This article exposes the complicity of popular culture in maintaining American military hegemonies in Oceania while amplifying the enduring indigeneity (Kauanui 2016) of the Marshallese people, who maintain deeply spiritual and historical connections to land—even land they cannot occupy due to residual radiation contamination from US nuclear weapons testing—through a range of cultural practices, including language, song, and weaving. This article also considers the gendered violence of nuclear colonialism and the resilience of Marshallese women.


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