« Older posts
Newer posts »

Settler colonialism’s (and settler colonial studies’) ‘portability’ (like the frontier story): Samuel Truett, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Borderlands of Early America’, The William and Mary, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 435-442

07Aug19

Excerpt: THE notion of settler colonialism looms large in our tales of U.S. empire. Unlike other colonialisms, which pull peoples and resources into networks of labor, trade, and extraction, settler colonialism “destroys to replace,” Patrick Wolfe wrote. It eliminates others to establish new societies on stolen land. Though scholars often focus on “the elimination of the Native,” some take a broader view. Kelly Lytle Hernández, for instance, uses a settler colonial lens to link the conquest of Native California to efforts to exclude, corral, and incarcerate Mexicans, Chinese, and African Americans. Indeed, settler colonialism’s most salient feature as a category of analysis is its portability. It is, according to Wolfe, “a structure not an event.” That insight gave him a way to compare North America and Australia—but he also meant, in the context of postcolonial studies, that settler colonialism was far from post. Its “logic of elimination” is alive and well. As a link between past and present, it is especially useful in historicizing ongoing capitalist, settler, and state efforts to dispossess, remove, exclude, contain, coerce, and exploit.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The settler colonialisms of Others: Jennifer M. Spear, ‘Beyond the Native/Settler Divide in Early California’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 427-434

07Aug19

Excerpt: MUCH of the theorizing about settler colonialism has been rooted in analyses of the Anglophone world, but most of North America was initially colonized by the French or the Spanish. What can we learn about the settler colonial narrative by focusing on their colonies? As Nancy Shoemaker notes, there are, in addition to settler colonialism, “many varieties of colonialism,” determined by “colonial motivations and [the] consequences” of colonization. The cases of French and Spanish North America demonstrate that several colonialisms could exist simultaneously, sometimes in tandem, other times in tension. The complex social and racial orders that developed, especially in places such as colonial California, also make these colonies productive spaces for thinking about how racialized settlers fit into what settler colonial theorist Patrick Wolfe terms the “Native/settler divide.”


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

‘What do we do with the Black “settler”‘? Tiya Miles, ‘Beyond a Boundary: Black Lives and the Settler-Native Divide’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 417-426

07Aug19

Excerpt: WHAT do we do with the black “settler”? Or rather, what do we do with the more than one hundred thousand African Americans who moved north and west onto violated and usurped Indigenous lands in the nineteenth century? We have sidestepped this question in studies of the American Midwest and West even as settler colonial frameworks of analysis have reshaped Native American history. As a result, we still reach for the familiar and now especially charged term settler when describing black residents, with all of the conceptual baggage that word carries in our present historiographical moment as indicating agents or subagents of the settler colonial state beset with a “recurring need to disavow the presence of indigenous ‘others'” in the interest of controlling Native lands. Black “pioneer” (a label that “performs a similar disappearing act” by “discursively eras[ing] the indigenous peoples who were there ab origine“) likewise still appears in studies of the Black West. For example, a recent book that admirably reveals and enlivens black farmers’ experiences in the nineteenth-century Midwest asserts that African Americans were “pioneers in the purest sense, willing to risk their freedom and their lives for the chance to gain not just land but their rights.” Certainly the pollution of the category “pioneer,” rather than its purity, begs attention. But, as a cohort of scholars, we rely on this loose and yet electrified terminology—echoing an earlier historiography’s language for white settlers—of heroic black settlers, pioneers, and buffalo soldiers taming a wild frontier and organizing land use for civilized productivity, even though we recognize that black survivors of slavery were a distinctive group.

African Americans who came to dwell in the house of settler colonialism struggled to emerge whole from a proximal past of stolen lives and labor. They fought against stacked odds to set down new roots and grow strong families and communities. 


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

‘Settler colonial theory’s problem space’: Stephanie E. Smallwood, ‘Reflections on Settler Colonialism, the Hemispheric Americas, and Chattel Slavery’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 407-416

07Aug19

Excerpt: ATTENTION to “settler-driven” colonies as a distinct form first emerged in the context of the long nineteenth century of modern British imperial expansion. […] 

The difference between settler and franchise colonialisms manifests itself most clearly in the outcome of nationalist mobilizations for independence. In the franchise setting, postcolonial independence results in white colonists being “throw[n] . . . out,” according to Wolfe. Having only ever been a demographic minority, “the Whites turn out not to have been established in the same way that settler colonizers have been established.” But the opposite is the case in the settler context. Regarding Australia, for instance, Wolfe explains that white colonists “went to Australia to replace Aborigines and themselves become Australians, so their children would be Australians and Australia would then go on forever.” Given that, what settler colonial critique problematizes most directly is the enduring continuity of colonial relations of power […]. As the claim most readily associated with settler colonial critique asserts, “settler colonizers come to stay,” with the result that the invasion at the heart of settler colonialism “is a structure not an event.” Settler colonial theory’s problem space, then, is the as-yet-unfinished project of decolonization, and the principal work the settler colonialism concept does is to account for the process of supersession whereby the settler colony is replaced by the “settler-colonial state”—the independent polity born of (white) colonizing settlers turned sovereigns …


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The standpoint of settler colonialism (and that of settler colonial studies): Ashley Glassburn, ‘Settler Standpoints’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, 3, 2019, 399-406

07Aug19

Excerpt: THE framework of settler colonialism invites scholars to use an Indigenous standpoint to better understand history and society. The hashtag #VastEarlyAmerica and the conversations it has sparked urge scholars to account for the complex and varied relations that shaped the settling of the North American continent. In practice #VastEarlyAmerica encourages decentering the standard British colonial, Euro-American, westward-moving narrative of the United States by diversifying the regions, peoples, and forces on which we focus our historical gaze. Under this umbrella, settler colonial studies and Indigenous history are often understood as contributing to a more vibrant and complicated understanding of early America, but settler colonialism can offer even more as an analytic tool for shaping methodology when conceptualized as a standpoint.

Standpoint theory was popularized by feminist epistemologists in the 1980s as a way of talking about knowing across differences, whether sexual, racial, cultural, or, in this case, historical. In juxtaposition to claims that all knowledge is grounded in personal experience, Sandra Harding argues that people can learn and think through the perspectives of others in order to take up their standpoint. Furthermore, according to Harding, social justice demands that those with the most social capital, such as scholars, have a responsibility to give voice to the least powerful by cultivating a standpoint that centers marginalized experiences and interests. For Harding, standpoint theory is a political commitment to address unrecognized bias shaping research projects by intentionally seeking to understand and represent the most vulnerable. For her part, Patricia Hill Collins describes the theory’s resonating logic of prioritizing “subjugated knowledge” as a means to decenter hegemonic paradigms that normalize structures of oppression, a program that clearly overlaps with the goals of #VastEarlyAmerica.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The map of settler aspirations: Michael Witgen, ‘A Nation of Settlers: The Early American Republic and the Colonization of the Northwest Territory’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 391-398

07Aug19

Excerpt: THE Jefferson-Hartley map, drawn to reflect the Land Ordinance of 1784, represented the settler colonial aspirations of the United States (Figure I). The map was produced by Thomas Jefferson as part of his work on a series of congressional committees tasked with creating a system of government for lands from the Appalachian Mountains west to the Mississippi River valley. The ordinance of 1784 was revised into the Northwest Ordinance, the legal mechanism designed by the federal government to transform Native homelands in the newly organized Northwest Territory into the public domain of the United States. The map, in effect, performs the ideological work imagined by the ordinances. It erases the presence of Native peoples and inscribes indigenous land with new meaning, as nascent states poised to enter the union on an equal footing with the original thirteen.

[…]

Conceptualizing North America as the New World, European empires regarded the continent as unsettled land, which allowed them to claim these lands by right of discovery. The Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution granted the Northwest Territory to the United States. Imagining this space not as Native North America but rather as an unsettled wilderness, the United States set out to transform Native homelands into American homesteads. Under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance, with the immigration of five thousand free white men, a settlement could be organized as a federal territory, with an appointed governor and judiciary and an elected legislative council. With sixty thousand white inhabitants, a territory could draft a state constitution and petition the republic for admission to the union. The explicit goal of the Northwest Ordinance was to establish the civil society of the American Republic in the region. The land law represented a social contract between the federal government and white settlers willing to move west to claim what was assumed to be wilderness for the republic. They would not be colonial subjects; rather, they would be citizens of the United States.

Jefferson’s map reflected this ideology and its assumption that North America and the Northwest Territory existed in a “state of nature.” In colonial regimes an exogenous power establishes its authority over a subordinated population to extract wealth and resources from the colonized territory. Accordingly, colonialism requires an ongoing political relationship rooted in the structural inequality between the colonizer and the colonized. Settler colonialism, in contrast, seeks an end or completion of the colonial project via the elimination of the indigenous population and its replacement by a settler population. This was the outcome projected by the Jefferson-Hartley map. 


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Empire and settler empire: Allan Greer, ‘Settler Colonialism and Empire in Early America’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 383-390

07Aug19

Excerpt: IN January 1788 the First Fleet dropped anchor in Botany Bay and began disgorging its cargo of convicts, marines, and officials to inaugurate the colonial history of Australia. It arrived in the middle of global revolutionary changes that were ushering in the modern world. Britain was industrializing, capitalism was beginning to conquer the world, and political upheavals flying the banner of popular sovereignty were bringing down established regimes across the Americas and Europe. Fundamental reconfigurations of space and power were central to these transformations. More than ever before, territorial states were taking shape with clear, hard outer boundaries and uniform internal sovereignty. And within these states, land was being reconfigured as private property. From Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia to Napoléon Bonaparte’s expanded France, the absolute rights of owners were proclaimed. Political and property boundaries were now construed as precise and measurable, with fuzzy and overlapping claims relegated to the past. When it came to Indigenous lands and the processes of colonization in the wake of the American Revolution, there was little room for ambiguity: once territory entered the settler sphere, it was supposed to be fully subject to American sovereignty and a settler property regime. Indigenous peoples were utterly excluded.

Unlike the Americas, Australia was settled entirely under the auspices of the modern, absolutist conception of political and economic space. Its history of colonizing was also marked by some further peculiarities: sponsorship by a global superpower, an absence of interimperial competition, and an indigenous population that was, under these circumstances, militarily weak and lacking in commodities that colonists might be willing to trade for. The expansion of settler control, by no means unopposed, advanced rapidly through massacres, forced migrations, and assimilation. Given this power imbalance, the invaders saw no need to negotiate treaties of land cession. Instead they treated the country as legally empty—terra nullius—a striking contrast with North and South America, where the centuries-long and highly competitive European invasion had spawned powerful coalescent societies such as the Mapuche, the Comanches, and the Lakotas, capable of keeping colonization at bay for a long time. Australia therefore appears as a kind of “ideal type” of modern settler colonialism, a place where Indigenous resistance was weak, where the complexities of pre-Enlightenment territoriality were absent, and where the brutal logic of appropriation could operate on what looked like (but was not) a clean slate. It was with this Australian history in mind that Patrick Wolfe first developed his theory of settler colonialism, largely as a response to a postcolonial scholarship focused on colonies of exploitation. An omnivorous reader with a probing mind, Wolfe also engaged deeply with the histories of India, the United States, and Israel, among other sites of colonization. But his thinking was strongly shaped by the Australian case as the prototypical instance of settler colonialism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The prehistory of settler colonialism: Susanah Shaw Romney, ‘Settler Colonial Prehistories in Seventeenth-Century North America’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 375-382

07Aug19

Excerpt: IN 1655, the Dutch residents of Manhattan discussed how they could best attack their Lenape-Munsee neighbors. What they really wanted, according to an initial draft of a petition they wrote to the West India Company directors in the Netherlands, was “the assistance of 3 to 400 good soldiers, who would be willing to settle down in this country after matters have been concluded,” with whose help they could “subdue the aforesaid barbarian nation.” They evidently knew the company would hesitate to finance this request, and so they did not even bother including it in their final draft. As they debated among themselves whether they could or should engage in war without that help, the desire for blood among settler leaders is clear. Why even trouble dissecting whose fault the current conflict was, wondered Johannes La Montagne, “seeing that they have given a just and sufficient, indeed more than sufficient cause, before the conflict”? Cornelis van Tienhoven thought it “just and necessary . . . to punish and subject the [savages], by the grace of God, through force of arms,” following the example of nearby English colonies, which had proven that “they would never be able to live securely before and until the Indian nation had been subjugated and forced into submission.” Violence and war, soldiers and settlers, framed these burghers’ arguments over the path forward for New Netherland. Are these colonists’ words and actions in the 1650s best understood as an expression of “settler colonialism”? What do we gain, analytically, by interpreting the debate through this rubric?

The term settler colonialism is suddenly everywhere. Despite the articulation of complex theories about it, the phrase also has an appeal on a commonsense level. After all, the men discussing whether or not to undertake Lenape-Munsee annihilation were settlers by any definition of the term. And by every measure, what the Dutch were undertaking at Manhattan was colonization. Yet the meaning of words lies not just in their dictionary definitions but also in their use. Before applying the term, early Americanists would be wise to take heed of how scholars in fields distant from our own are using settler colonialism. Doing so suggests both that using it without caution might import unintended anachronistic implications and that studying the seventeenth-century Dutch might be better conceived of as a process of searching out the genealogy and prehistory of settler colonialism. Finding the roots of the settler colonial process, in turn, may suggest the need for theorists to think more historically themselves and to ponder more broadly the when, who, and where of settler colonialism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Why the English? Nancy Shoemaker, ‘Settler Colonialism: Universal Theory or English Heritage?’ The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 369-374

07Aug19

Excerpt: THOSE who see explanatory power in settler colonialism as a concept cast it as a theory, as a “global and genuinely transnational phenomenon” pitting settlers against indigenes. Yet the vast majority of studies employing settler colonialism as their vantage point concentrate on the former British colonies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and South Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If settler colonialism is a theory, then presumably people of any racial, ethnic, or national heritage could appear in the role of settler. Why, then, have the English outpaced all others as the archetypical settlers, and why has the historiography on settler colonialism dealt almost entirely with the modern period when migration and conquest are age-old phenomena in human history? The scholarly emphasis on the recent past makes settler colonial narratives appear to be a retrospective cover-up of a Native dispossession that began mainly in the nineteenth century and continues up to the present day. But we can envision an alternate approach: scholars could conceptualize settler colonialism as a forward-looking ideology devised to motivate English imperial expansion in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

If settler colonial ideology did indeed crystalize in early modern England, the early American period is more important than advocates of settler colonial theory realize. By shifting attention away from settler colonialism’s consequences to query its origins, scholars could test the theory’s applicability in a wider variety of settings and refine it. And by contextualizing settler colonialism in a longer durée, theorists could nuance the presentist mindset that privileges the latest wave of settler invasion as the only settler colonialism worth remembering.

So why the English? A curious aspect of English history from an outsider’s perspective is how fundamental invasion is to that history’s telling.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Introducing a special William and Mary Quarterly issue on Settler Colonialism in Early American History: Jeffrey Ostler, Nancy Shoemaker, ‘Introduction’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 361-368

07Aug19

Abstract: This Forum on settler colonialism in early American history features contributions from Ashley Glassburn, Allan Greer, Tiya Miles, Jeffrey Ostler, Susanah Shaw Romney, Nancy Shoemaker, Stephanie E. Smallwood, Jennifer M. Spear, Samuel Truett, and Michael Witgen.\


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »