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‘Difficult’ passages (necessary as well?): Baligh Ben Taleb, ‘On the Difficulty of Reckoning with Settler Colonialisms: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 21, 1, 2020

13May20

Excerpt: In settler societies, coming to grips with historical wrongs continues to pose an enduring dilemma. Powerful scripts and events of redress, forgiveness and reconciliation are used to petition for and engage with narratives of the “post” settler nation state. The scope, substance, and politics of reckoning with settler colonial wrongs have garnered an intense controversy, and by turns, precipitated vibrant and creative scholarship. In Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and to a lesser extent, the United States, scholars have recognized the distinctive roles of reconciliatory efforts in settler societies, and attempted to untangle the repertoire of “moving on” and beyond the historical continuity of settler colonialism. They look at what it means to be “post” colonial and decolonized in nations that still lack a clear decolonizing moment. This essay engages with these competing perspectives as explored in the work of three recent volumes: Penelope Edmonds’ Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation, Eva Mackey’s Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization, and Sarah Maddison et al., The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation. Taking specific case studies across Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, these comprehensive and transnational comparative studies offer rigorous evaluation of the ideas and symbolic practices of reconciliation and their interlocking relationships with settler colonial histories. Without treating the processes of “decolonization” and “reconciliation” as self-contained, isolated, or discrete units of meaningful change, these scholars address the ways in which the practices of these concepts attempt to reanimate and mobilize the past for a “post” settler condition and emancipatory moral order. The prefix “post,” as Jean Francois Lyotard has articulated, conjures the conviction “that it is both possible and necessary to break with tradition and institute absolutely new ways of living and thinking.” But in settler societies, the “post” may not mean a clearly defined moment or a “rupture” with the colonial past; instead, it may well repeat it and reinforce its diurnal residues. In different ways, these volumes interrogate these “new” realities and their chameleon-like abilities, by offering multifaceted approaches to deter what seems to be an alarming reproduction of coloniality and normative authority of the settler state. They use different and understudied analytical lenses and frameworks such as performance, ethnography of conflicts about land rights, and structural and attitudinal engagement to explore the complex and difficult conundrums and aporias of decolonization in settler societies.


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The ‘Indigenous paradox’ is also a settler paradox: Jonas Bens, The Indigenous Paradox: Rights, Sovereignty, and Culture in the Americas, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020

13May20

Description: In the twenty-first century, it is politically and legally commonplace that indigenous communities go to court to assert their rights against the postcolonial nation-state in which they reside. But upon closer examination, this constellation is far from straightforward. Indigenous communities make their claims as independent entities, governed by their own laws. And yet, they bring a case before the court of another sovereign, subjecting themselves to its foreign rule of law.

According to Jonas Bens, when native communities enter into legal relationships with postcolonial nation-states, they “become indigenous.” Indigenous communities define themselves as separated from the settler nation-state and insist that their rights originate from within their own system of laws. At the same time, indigenous communities must argue that they are incorporated in the settler nation-state to be able to use its judiciary to enforce these rights. As such, they are simultaneously included into and excluded from the state.

Tracing how the indigenous paradox is inscribed into the law by investigating several indigenous rights cases in the Americas, from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, Bens illustrates how indigenous communities have managed—and continue to manage—to navigate this paradox by developing lines of legal reasoning that mobilize the concepts of sovereignty and culture. Bens argues that understanding indigeneity as a paradoxical formation sheds light on pressing questions concerning the role of legal pluralism and shared sovereignty in contemporary multicultural societies.


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Indigenous guardians unsettle settler control: Graeme Reed, Nicolas D. Brunet, Sheri Longboat, David C. Natcher, ‘Indigenous guardians as an emerging approach to indigenous environmental governance’, Conservation Biology, 2020

13May20

Abstract: Since 2010 the number of peer‐reviewed articles on indigenous guardians has risen substantially, signaling their vital role in conservation.


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Settler manhood: Jarett Henderson, ‘”The Most Infamous Degradation of the Honour of Civil Government”: The Turton Job and the sexual politics of colonial rule in 1830s Britain and British North America’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 21, 1, 2020

13May20

Abstract: This article interrogates the histories of political manhood and settler self-government in Britain and British North America in the 1830s. It zeroes in on the transimperial scandal that erupted over Thomas Turton—a “man of infamous immorality”—whose association with, and appointment to, Lord Durham’s 1838 administration was bound up in shifting notions of gender, sexuality and colonial rule. The debates over Turton’s transgressive heterosexuality in the press, the halls of Parliament and secret Colonial Office dispatches and private correspondence capture how questions about a man’s sexual comportment could trouble colonial rule. The sexual politics of the Turton Job, therefore, demonstrate that matters of intimacy were differently mobilized in metropolitan and colonial contexts as politicized tools to question the fitness of selves and governments, and the integrity of the empire itself.


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Undoing settler-colonial mythologies: Leyland Cecco, ‘Canada: DNA discovery lends weight to First Nations ancestral story’, The Guardian,10/05/20

11May20

Excerpt: The last of Newfoundland’s Beothuk was thought to have died in 1829 but new research indicates the bloodline did not die out – as Mi’kmaq tradition has always maintained.


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The settler frontier is in the settler’s (and the academic’s) mind: Brett Bowden, ‘Frontiers—Old, New, and Final’, The European Legacy, 2020

10May20

Abstract: The enduring idea of the frontier brings with it thoughts of adventure, discovery and romance, but also of hardship, solitude, and the struggle against the forces of nature. Similarly, the idea that there is a final frontier out there, just waiting to be explored and conquered, is as persistent as the idea of endless new frontiers, all waiting to be explored. The search for new frontiers arises out of humankind’s longing to discover, explore and conquer the great unknown, whether in deepest darkest space, ocean, or recesses of the mind. This article begins with a conceptual history of frontier and goes on to explain why it continues to resonate more than eight centuries after the term was first coined.


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Endogeneity and indigeneity: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Endogeneity and place-based identifications in the age of precarity and surveillance capitalism’, Postcolonial Studies 2020

08May20

Abstract: This paper develops two analogies in order to conceptualise endogeneity as a category of analysis. The first analogy compares Indigenous understandings of place and place-making and territorio as defined in Italian territorialist traditions. They are both locales endowed with a specific personality and agency: one is the home of Indigenous peoples facing settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination, the other is the home of endogenous collectives facing increasing modalities of exogenous control. The second analogy links the current appropriation of metadata under ‘surveillance capitalism’ with past appropriations and their justification: terra nullius. This paper’s first and third section deal each with one of these analogies, while its second section bridges between the two by focusing on an early expression of territorialist aspirations and on an early experience of electronic networks development: Adriano Olivetti’s activity as political theorist and early developer of electronic machines. Both analogies sustain the analysis of a global settler-colonial present.


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Representing indigenous peoples (and settlers): Frederick Luis Aldama, Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia, University Press of Mississippi, 2020

08May20

Description: Cultural works by and about Indigenous identities, histories, and experiences circulate far and wide. However, not all films, animation, television shows, and comic books lead to a nuanced understanding of Indigenous realities.

Acclaimed comics scholar Frederick Luis Aldama shines light on how mainstream comics have clumsily distilled and reconstructed Indigenous identities and experiences. He and contributors emphasize how Indigenous comic artists are themselves clearing new visual-verbal narrative spaces for articulating more complex histories, cultures, experiences, and narratives of self.

To that end, Aldama brings together scholarship that explores both the representation and misrepresentation of Indigenous subjects and experiences as well as research that analyzes and highlights the extraordinary work of Indigenous comic artists. Among others, the book examines Daniel Parada’s Zotz, Puerto Rican comics Turey el Taíno and La Borinqueña, and Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection.

This volume’s wide-armed embrace of comics by and about Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia is a first step to understanding how the histories of colonial and imperial domination connect the violent wounds that still haunt across continents. Aldama and contributors resound this message: Indigeneity in comics is an important, powerful force within our visual-verbal narrative arts writ large.


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Wildtending is also a settler thing: Bruno Seraphin, ‘Wildtending, Settler Colonialism, and Ecocultural Identities in Environmental Futures’, in Tema Milstein, José Castro-Sotomayor (eds), Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity, Routledge, 2020

08May20

Access the chapter here.


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Settler colonial narrative: Jordan Reznick, Settler Modernism: Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage and the Vicissitudes of Whiteness, 1890-1930, PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2020

06May20

Abstract: Settler Modernism traces how Stieglitz’s iconic photograph, Te Steerage (1907) came to be known as the frst modernist American photograph and how, at each stage of its trajectory into the modernist canon, it was interpreted through settler colonial narratives that served to naturalize whites’ ongoing presence on occupied territories in the twentieth century. Tough studies of settler visual cultures typically concentrate on events surrounding acts of colonization, I demonstrate that American modernist photography was continuous with the nineteenth-century history of photography for which settler colonialism was a structural and discursive force that framed photographic vision. I bring Te Steerage into conversation with Stieglitz’s photographs of working-class people, Manhattan, and clouds, as well as with artworks by Cézanne, Anne Brigman, Albert Bierstadt, Tomas Cole, and others. By interrogating how the camera’s capacity to distort perceptions of time and land clinched whites’ amnesia regarding the nation’s founding violence, I show how photographs encouraged settlers to imagine themselves as the ancient inhabitants of the continent. I also thread Indigenous histories, philosophies, and visual cultures throughout the text, undermining settler logic with perspectives that make apparent its impracticability. Trough concentrated examination of Te Steerage’s history, I shed light on how settler colonialism was not only central to the emergence of American modernism, but also to emergent conceptions of white racial identity that followed the closing of the frontier.


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