settler colonial studies blog

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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Settler colonising water access: Lina Abu Akleh, The Slow Creep of Settler Colonialism: Exploring Water Control in Palestine, MA dissertation, University of San Francisco, 2020

24May20

Abstract: This thesis analyzes the Israeli-Palestinian water issue using a settler colonial framework. It highlights the contributions made to this field under the often used framework of hydro-hegemony to understand water issues in Israel-Palestine. Using a settler colonial framework helps to better describe the issue and highlight the slow creep of settler colonialism over the years. It also helps to see beyond the power dynamics and its relationship to domination and consent to understand the realities that Palestinians face on the ground. In addition, this thesis will help build towards exploring resistance to water control under settler colonialism. Therefore, this thesis uses the village of Bardala, located in the northern part of the Jordan Valley, as a case study to examine Israel’s control over water resources, and the restrictions it has placed on accessing water for Palestinians. Through interviews and secondary sources, this thesis shows how settler colonial policies disrupt the entire fabric of Palestinian society. These policies consolidated Israel’s control over the water resources through various tools such as the permit regime which was established under the Oslo Interim Agreement of 1995, prevention of developing and constructing water infrastructures, attacks on water facilities and confiscation of agricultural equipment. In return, Palestinians have been engaging in various forms of everyday resistance methods to remain steadfast and continue to exist in the face of occupation. Therefore, using a settler colonial framework shows how the control over water resources is part of a greater settler colonial framework aimed at accessing territory and eliminating Palestinians from their lands through various processes and structures.

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Settler colonising academic freedom: David Landy, Ronit Lentin, Conor McCarthy (eds), Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel, Zed Books, 2020

24May20

Description: Academic freedom is under siege, as our universities become the sites of increasingly fraught battles over freedom of speech. While much of the public debate has focussed on ‘no platforming’ by students, this overlooks the far graver threat posed by concerted efforts to silence the critical voices of both academics and students, through the use of bureaucracy, legal threats and online harassment. Such tactics have conspicuously been used, with particularly virulent effect, in an attempt to silence academic criticism of Israel.

This collection uses the controversies surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a means of exploring the limits placed on academic freedom in a variety of different national contexts. It looks at how the increased neoliberalisation of higher education has shaped the current climate, and considers how academics and their universities should respond to these new threats. Bringing together new and established scholars from Palestine and the wider Middle East as well as the US and Europe, Enforcing Silence shows us how we can and must defend our universities as places for critical thinking and free expression.

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The settler-indigenous encounter needs appropriate self-constitution on behalf of the settler too: Emily Beausoleil, ‘”Gather Your People”: Learning to Listen Intergenerationally in Settler-Indigenous Politics’, Political Theory, 2020

20May20

Abstract: Decolonization requires critical attention to settler logics that reinforce settler-colonialism, yet settler communities, as a rule, operate without a collective sense of identity and history. This article, provoked by Māori protocols of encounter, explores the necessity of developing a sense of collective identity as precursor to meeting in settler-Indigenous politics. It argues that the ability, desire, and experience of being unmarked as a social group—apparent in paradigmatic approaches to engaging social difference in settler communities—is at the heart of the particularity of settler group identity and also stands at the heart of countless failures to meet in settler-Indigenous politics. This essay thus seeks to mark the particular ground of this unmarkedness of settler identity in Western philosophies that set being unmarked as both ontology and ideal; the dominance of settler communities in places of settlement; and the willful forgetting of the colonial histories brought about by such dominance.

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The settler sovereignty is over the art that marks the landscape (that’s where it can be challenged): Alicia Harris, Homescapes: Indigenous Land Art and Public Memory, PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2020

20May20

Abstract: Indigenous North Americans make visual forms that demonstrate and provide for the practice of kinship connections with land. In art history, discourse about “Land Art” has often omitted Indigenous connections with land and place. This dissertation aims to create a more holistic narrative of Land Art in North America through analysis of both ancestral and currently living artists and their work, as well as through a rigorous examination of histories of land possession and dispossession. Rooted in a kinship paradigm that intervenes in dominant public memories about place, I analyze art by Native American, First Nations, and Indigenous diaspora North Americans. In this context, I consider artworks of both living and ancestral communities who create in situ artworks, works that are representational of place, and works that consider place in abstraction. These artworks provide a counterpoint to dominant historical narratives and memories of land. Throughout my dissertation, I use the methodology, “Critical Place Inquiry,” established by Unangax scholar Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie in their 2015 book Place in Research: Theory Methodology, and Methods. This approach provides the tools through which I focus on Indigenous perspectives on land, and through which I reject the normalization of settler colonialism. Through this lens I understood place as shifting in meaning as it is experienced differently. This approach empowered me to recognize the artworks under consideration here as interjections of Indigenous kinship in the dominant narratives and memories that are constructed about land. These are claims to home on the land of North America. I first analyze in situ installations at sites of extreme historical tension and violence, battlefields and borderlands. The artists in this section include Colleen Cutschall (Lakota), Edward Poitras (Métis- Cree), Alan Michelson (Kahnawake), and the arts collective Postcommodity. Next I move to an analysis of Indigneous cartography through a series of maps painted by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish Kootenai, Métis, Shoshone). My analysis of Indigenous cartography gives way to a consideration of the connection between the Indigenous female body and the land through a series of photographs and sculptures by Cuban/ American artist Ana Mendieta and Faye Heavyshield (Kainai). All of the artists I analyze throughout this dissertation demonstrate through their art, their connections to land through a paradigm of kinship. This leaves me to conclude with a consideration of the concept of “home” for Indigenous peoples as connected to land. For this, I examine a photograph from Richard Ray Whitman’s Street Chiefs series, and I conclude my study with a consideration of an installation by Serpent River First Nation sculptor Bonnie Devine, Writing Home. I end my dissertation with a brief history and context of my own kinship with land as an Assiniboine woman. Being ancestrally at home on, and in kinship with the land of this continent underscores the conceptual framework of each of the artworks in this dissertation. Through my analyses I demonstrate some ways Native artists have given thoughtful artistic form to those connections with the land.

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The settler sovereignty is over the landscape: Meredith Alberta Palmer, ‘Rendering settler sovereign landscapes: Race and property in the Empire State’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2020

20May20

Abstract: This article examines the politics of race, indigeneity, and landscape in US American enactments of property. Its substance is the homelands of the Haudenosaunee, now territorialized as upstate New York. The 2005 US Supreme Court case City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation denied the Oneida of the Haudenosaunee the right to expand their sovereignty onto former reservation lands through the purchase of land title. In this article, I follow the genesis of the term “non-Indian character” of an area, first written in the Sherrill decision. In tracing the genealogy of this term, I examine the racial tenets embedded in US land survey tools and discourse of property-making after the Revolutionary War. I then discuss how efforts of the Holland Land Company, New York state agents, and yeoman settlers rendered settler sovereign landscapes through acts of Haudenosaunee dispossession and concepts of Indian inferiority. As Indigenous people continue to challenge US legal concepts of property today, the settler state has reauthorized this framing of Native American sovereignty that is bounded and may only recede territorially. I consider how racist understandings of Indian inferiority maintain land as property, to show how US sovereignty rests territorially on anti-indigenous concepts of race and place.

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