settler colonial studies blog

Humour as resistance (against settler colonialism): Jeremy A. Siegman, ‘Playing with Antagonists: The Politics of Humor in Israeli‐Palestinian Market Encounters’, PoLAR, 2020

30May20

Abstract: This article identifies playful antagonism as a defining mode of rare Israeli‐Palestinian encounters in Israeli settlement businesses. It is based on ethnographic work primarily in an Israeli settlement supermarket where the lowest‐paid workers are mostly occupied Palestinians. This playful antagonism characterizes heated Israeli‐Palestinian political exchanges as well as Palestinian workers’ mockery of their settler bosses and customers, through gestures and jokes alike. These practices navigate an incongruity between the high‐stakes antagonisms of Israeli settler‐colonization and the banality of the workplace. Rather than preventing more “serious” antagonism, this playful antagonism is itself serious, enacting and contesting existential struggles over settler‐colonization, in a context saturated with suspicion and risk to Palestinian livelihoods. Thus, rather than framing humor as standing outside of or transcending political domination and antagonism, this article frames humor as a way of enacting these forms of settler‐native politics. It thus stages a fresh conversation between the recent literature on settler colonialism in Palestine, which has understandably focused on Israeli domination but ignored Israeli‐Palestinian contact and humor, and the literature on humor, which has often ignored scaled‐up forms of power and domination. The article thus contributes to a political anthropology of humor as intertwined with power and domination.

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Settler colonial repressive authenticity, one cranium at a time: Michael Roellinghoff, ‘Osteo-hermeneutics: Ainu racialization, de-indigenization, and bone theft in Japanese Hokkaido’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2020

30May20

Abstract: This article analyzes the late nineteenth century Euro-Japanese desecration of Ainu graves across the island of Hokkaido. Stolen Ainu crania were utilized by Japanese physical anthropologists such as Koganei Yoshikiyo and Kodama Sakuzaemon to define a ‘pure’ Ainu race. Amidst the ongoing dispossession of Ainu land and resources, these scholars deemed the increasingly racially mixed Ainu population ‘impure’, and thereby non-Ainu. Some, using ‘specimens’ of Ainu crania as evidence, displaced the Ainu racial origins of outside of the space of their colonized homeland. Such scholarly research collectively ‘de-indigenized’ the Ainu and, by consequence, worked to reaffirm Japanese claims of Hokkaido as terra nullius (ownerless land). Accordingly, exogenous claims of ownership of both Ainu land and Ainu bodies were inextricably linked in the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido.

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Indigenising education (against settler colonialism): Alison Sammel, Susan Whatman, Levon Blue (eds), Indigenizing Education: Discussions and Case Studies from Australia and Canada, Springer, 2020

30May20

Description: This book provides invaluable guidance for community, school and university-based educators who are evaluating their educational philosophies and practices to support Indigenizing education. The examples from Australia and Canada shared in this book illustrate how Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators have worked together to Indigenize their educational practices, showcasing community empowerment and reconciliation agendas. It also enables beginning educators to gain a meaningful and critical understanding of what Indigenizing education can mean in their own future practice.

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Fanon in Palestine, Fanon facing settler colonialism: Stephen Sheehi, Lara Sheehi, ‘The settlers’ town is a strongly built town: Fanon in Palestine’, Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 2020

30May20

Abstract: This article emerges from one collaboration with Palestinian clinicians while presenting the work of Frantz Fanon to a group of training clinicians in the Maana Center of EMMS Nazareth Hospital in Nazareth (al‐Nasirah). Reading and discussing Fanon in Palestine with Palestinian clinicians and trainees elicited deepseated feelings of affirmation and validation, while also disclosing anxieties arising from colonial alienation, as Fanon would say. At the same time, Fanon conjures in Palestine an affirming and empowering spirit that, inevitably, results in a consideration of how Palestinian indigeneity, no matter how mediated by regimes of domination and control, recenters itself as a repost to the extractive psychological and material violence that constitutes settler colonialism; in this case, Zionism. Adopting a decolonial methodology, we came to understand how psychological theory and practice provides Palestinian clinicians a means to work for selfawareness within a regime of oppression. Centering indigenous lives, their relationships to their own collectives and communities, and their relationship the psychopathy of settler colonial structures, produced critical psychological and social knowledge.

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Settling on oral traditions: Sarah Hernandez, ‘Translating and Retranslating “Fallen Star”: An Ohų’kaką Tale’, English Language Notes, 58, 1, 2020, pp. 178-185

27May20

Abstract: This article provides a comparative close reading of Ella Deloria’s and Stephen Riggs’s translations of the ancient and sacred Dakota creation story “Fallen Star.” Although Deloria, a fluent Dakota/Lakota speaker, published several books on the Dakota oral storytelling tradition, Riggs is often viewed as the expert on Dakota culture, language, and literature. The impulse to privilege Riggs is problematic, because it is a new iteration of settler colonialism and patriarchy that further oppresses the Dakota nation and delegitimizes its rich and complex literary traditions. As an ethnologist and linguist, Riggs transformed the rich and complex Dakota oral storytelling tradition into a static cultural artifact. This article examines how Deloria corrected Riggs’s work to incorporate tribally specific beliefs, values, and worldviews into a new interpretation of “Fallen Star.”

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Opposing settler colonial conquest locally: Tariq Dana, ‘Localising the Economy as a Resistance Response: A Contribution to the “Resistance Economy” Debate in the Occupied Palestinian Territories’, Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, 2020

27May20

Abstract: Recent years have seen a growing, yet unstructured, debate among Palestinian scholars and activists about the imperative of localising the economic approaches to development. This debate has revolved around the notion of “resistance economy (RE)” that places resistance at the core of the anti-colonial economic consciousness and practice. RE is envisaged as a localised response to the multifaceted crisis—generated by the dynamic interaction among Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and international donors—afflicting the Palestinian political economy. Influenced by the rich legacy of the anti-colonial experience in Palestine, the RE seeks to invigorate organised popular mobilisation and collective struggle against the settler colonial reality. However, the term is still ambiguous and underdeveloped; further, it lacks the theoretical and methodological underpinnings to allow it to be contextualised, strategised, and implemented as part of everyday economic activity. This article seeks to contribute to this debate and foster an understanding that takes into consideration the interrelationship between the economy, politics, and society in a context characterised by the repressive interplay of colonialism and neoliberalism. Finally, the article engages critically with the debate concerning the centrality of agricultural activity to the RE.

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Settler colonial conquest in perspective: Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, Metropolitan Books, 2020

27May20

Description: In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

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Undoing settler colonialism in relation: Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, Andrea Smith (eds), Otherwise Worlds Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, Duke University Press, 2020

24May20

Description: The contributors to Otherwise Worlds investigate the complex relationships between settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to explore the political possibilities that emerge from such inquiries. Pointing out that presumptions of solidarity, antagonism, or incommensurability between Black and Native communities are insufficient to understand the relationships between the groups, the volume’s scholars, artists, and activists look to articulate new modes of living and organizing in the service of creating new futures. Among other topics, they examine the ontological status of Blackness and Indigeneity, possible forms of relationality between Black and Native communities, perspectives on Black and Indigenous sociality, and freeing the flesh from the constraints of violence and settler colonialism. Throughout the volume’s essays, art, and interviews, the contributors carefully attend to alternative kinds of relationships between Black and Native communities that can lead toward liberation. In so doing, they critically point to the importance of Black and Indigenous conversations for formulating otherwise worlds.

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Settler colonising by way of fantastic reconstruction: Jordan P. Brasher, ‘Creating “Confederate pioneers”: a spatial narrative analysis of race, settler colonialism, and heritage tourism at the Museu da Imigração, Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, São Paulo’, Journal of Heritage Tourism, 2020

24May20

Abstract: Local history museums are important to heritage tourism, often presenting interconnected local, regional, national, and transnational histories. This article explores the settler colonial narrative presented at the Museu da Imigração (Museum of the Immigration), in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, São Paulo, Brazil. Though much scholarship explores the relationship between the Confederacy and slavery in public memory and heritage tourism studies, the scale of discussion is typically limited to the US South. Less well known is the fact that several thousand Confederate soldiers and their families, rather than face Reconstruction, preferred to restart their lives in Brazil. Applying innovations in discourse analysis and studies of commemorative atmosphere, I analyze a local museum’s spatial narrative. I show how it weaves together a settler interpretation of the past through texts, photographs, and historical objects and artifacts – bringing together discourses like the Lost Cause and Brazil’s ‘racial democracy.’ Ultimately the museum constructs a settler colonial narrative that frames the Confederate migrants as brave ‘pioneers’ striking out to re-create their lives after the US Civil War. I conclude by placing the significance of the museum’s narrative into broader context, highlighting how some scholars have perpetuated this narrative in academic and public discourse.

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Settler colonising by polluting chemicals: Reena Shadaan, Michelle Murphy, ‘EDC’s [sic] as Industrial Chemicals and Settler Colonial Structures: Towards a Decolonial Feminist Approach’, Catalyst, 6, 1, 2020

24May20

Abstract: Oil refineries and settler colonialism are not typically how feminist and environmental frameworks scope the problem of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Instead, it is much more common to find EDCs described as a problem of packaging, plastics, and consumer goods, and to characterize their effects as a problem of bodily damage, and particularly as injuries or alterations to the reproductive and sexual development of individuals. This paper seeks to disrupt these individualized, molecularized, damage-centered and body-centered frames, and to strengthen decolonial feminist frameworks for understanding EDCs. We contend that our understanding of EDCs must expand to the structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that accompany oil extraction and refining, as well as to the distribution of emissions to airs, waters and lands. Building on the argument that pollution is colonialism, we hold that EDCs are materially a form of colonial environmental violence, disrupting land/body relations, and at the same time, are made possible by a permission-to-pollute regulatory regime.

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