settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial historiographies focus on success: Kyle B. Carpenter, ‘A Failed Venture in the Nueces Strip: Misconceptions and Mismanagement of the Beales Rio Grande Colony, 1832–1836’, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 123, 4, 2020, pp. 420-442

29Mar20

Excerpt: Historians of Mexican Texas rarely study the empresario grants that failed. Scholars generally relegate the unfulfilled contracts that Mexico awarded to land agents to populate its northern territories to footnotes or brief paragraphs, while the success stories continue to produce books and articles.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Black under settler colonialism: Caren Holmes, ‘Afrofuturist Responses to State Violence’, Brief Encounters, 4, 1, 2020, pp. 12-18

29Mar20

Excerpt: The African diasporic subject encounters the territories of occupied North America within a ‘post abduction existence’. Contemporary manifestations of state violence and dehumanization are reproductions of generational legacies of mass incarceration, apartheid and slavery imposed upon those racialized by categories developed to alienate the original class of abductees. In 1988, the American hip hop group Public Enemy proclaimed in a song, ‘Armageddon been-in-effect’ for the African diaspora: that is to say that ‘the conditions that continue to restrict black freedom and foreclose black futures mark the aftershocks of a man-made apocalypse’, also known as the transatlantic slave trade. In this essay, I explore two short stories written by Black authors in the United States. Each imagines Black resistance to the American settler colonial condition and to futurist mutations of state violence imposed upon Black and Brown communities. Both stories conceive of creative strategies through which their characters confront forms of structural and material violence which imprisons Black life in and outside of prisons and situates it closer to death. Several scholars have understood and represented the experience of Black people in settler colonial North America as that of the alien or post-human subject.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The dead and the living: Paul Turnbull, ‘International Repatriations of Indigenous Human Remains and Its Complexities: the Australian Experience’, Museum & Society, 18, 1, 2020, pp. 6-19

29Mar20

Abstract: Over the past forty or so years, many Indigenous peoples in former settler colonies have fought for, and in many instances won, recognition of their rights to have the bodily remains of their ancestors returned from Western museums and other scientific institutions for burial. It has been a remarkable achievement. However, as this article highlights, in the Australian context, the efforts of Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders to secure and bury the remains of their ancestors as their cultures require have, in many cases, been complicated by challenges arising from the need to revitalize or re-establish continuities with the ancestral past eroded by settler colonialism, while seeking restoration of their ownership rights in respect of land and cultural heritage in the contemporary Australian context.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The settlers have guns: Levi Gahman, Land, God and Guns: Settler Colonialism and Masculinity in the American Heartland, Zed Books, 2020

27Mar20

Description: This book is an antidote to the ideas of American white hetero-settler masculinity, prowess, and exceptionalism that are currently being flexed on the global stage. Through a fascinating combination of ethnographic research across six US states and an application of anti-colonial, feminist, andpoststructuralist theories, Land, God and Gunsreveals how time-honored rationalities and rites of passage associated with manhood in the American Heartland are constitutive of colonial worldviews, capitalist logics, essentialist gender binaries, ethnocentric religious conservatism, jingoistic nationalism, racial superiority, and embodied violence. A violence that both privileges and ultimately damages its main proliferators, white settler men. A detailed work that unravels how white constructions of and claims to land, history, and manhood are manufactured frontier myths that uphold a racist and heteropatriarchal ordering of life, and argues for a reconceiving of taken-for-granted notions such as respect, pride, property, and production.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Finance capital itself is a settler: Catherine Grace Cumming, ‘How Finance Colonised Aotearoa: A Concise Counter-History’, Counterfutures, 7, 2020, pp. 41-72

27Mar20

Abstract: This paper intervenes in orthodox understandings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history to elucidate another history that is not widely recognised. This is a financial history of colonisation which, while implicit in existing accounts, is peripheral and often incidental to the central narrative. Undertaking to reread Aotearoa New Zealand’s early colonial history from 1839 to 1850, this paper seeks to render finance, financial instruments, and financial institutions explicit in their capacity as central agents of colonisation. In doing so, it offers a response to the relative inattention paid to finance as compared with the state in material practices of colonisation. The counter-history that this paper begins to elicit contains important lessons for counterfutures. For, beyond its implications for knowledge, the persistent and violent role of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa has concrete implications for decolonial and anticapitalist politics today.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Are returned settlers settlers? ‘Repatriates, refugees, or exiles? Emanuele Ertola, ‘Decolonization and the Italian settlers’ return, 1941-1956’, in Giuliana Laschi, Valeria Deplano, Alessandro Pes (eds), Europe between Migrations, Decolonization and Integration (1945-1992), Routledge, 2020

27Mar20

Access the chapter here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Indigenous-washing is a project of replacement: Sara L. Crosby, Anna J. Willow, ‘Indigenous-Washing and the Petro-Hero in Genre Fictions of the North American Oil Boom’, Modern Fiction Studies, 66, 1, 2020, pp. 78-100

27Mar20

Abstract: This essay investigates how genre petrofictions of the North American oil boom engage with Indigenous perspectives and narratives. We find that most of these texts mirror the abuses that created our petroreality through a process of Indigenous-washing, which involves dismissing Indigenous peoples as complex individuals and sovereign entities and replacing them with strapping petro-heroes. Yet, at the same time, a growing corpus of texts legitimate Indigenous perspectives and highlight Indigenous narratives and so promise to reshape petrofiction into a tool for significant and sustained Indigenous empowerment and environmental justice.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On the structural limits of transitional justice (hint: it’s not a decolonial passage): Augustine S J Park, ‘Settler Colonialism, Decolonization and Radicalizing Transitional Justice’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2020

25Mar20

Abstract: Although transitional justice has been mobilized to address violence perpetrated under regimes of settler colonialism that are also established liberal democracies, this article theorizes the inability of paradigmatic transitional justice to confront settler colonialism. The liberal teleology of transitional justice risks working to realize the self-supersessionist goal of replacing the colony with a ‘post-colonial’, settler/settled polity. Drawing on Indigenous scholars, decolonization is explored through refusal, resurgence and prefiguration. The article advances a counterfactual proposition: If transitional justice is radicalized it has the potential to contribute to decolonization through decentring the state, inter-nationalizing the justice relation, challenging the legitimacy of the settler regime and abandoning liberal teleology. The article argues for a decolonizing acceptance of indeterminacy and uncertainty.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On the structural limits of recognition (hint: it’s not a decolonial passage): Deanne Aline Marie LeBlanc, The colonial denizen: a proposal to move beyond the politics of recognition toward a politics of responsibilities, PhD Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2020

25Mar20

Abstract: Since the twentieth century Canadian political scientists, government and society have become increasingly aware of the need to address the various effects and realities of colonialism. This has been a positive step forward for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike and has led to various steps toward ‘reconciliation’ if not decolonization. And yet, the predominant, mainstream approaches taken or proffered by (largely non-Indigenous) scholars and government officials, in response to Indigenous peoples’ calls for change, can only go so far in the move toward decolonization. This is because they are stuck within the logics of liberal democracy and recognition, based within the prevailing arguments that moving beyond contemporary colonial situations can only be achieved through either a more comprehensive extension of liberal democratic (settler) citizenship to Indigenous peoples, or through proper ‘recognition’ of Indigenous peoples from within a predominantly non-Indigenous (settler) perspective and societal structure. Not only are these arguments inappropriate responses to collective colonial realities, they also lead to the further entrenchment of colonial structures, relations and policies because they do not attempt the necessary self-reflexivity and openness to change that decolonization requires.

My proposal is that non-Indigenous peoples, in order that they can properly hear and respond to Indigenous peoples’ calls for decolonization, move beyond these aforementioned approaches and consider themselves ‘foreigners’ in need of invitation onto Indigenous lands – both past and present. I suggest that as colonial denizens non-Indigenous Canadians take up an ethos that encourages them to re-evaluate their lives and relations with Indigenous peoples, lands and the settler state. The following provides a thought experiment centered around the colonial denizen through which non-Indigenous peoples are encouraged to question the sovereignty of the state, the impacts of the Canadian citizenship regime, their daily lives, and their relations to land at the same time that it encourages them to place responsibilities to others above inwardly-focused rights. I contend that such a thought experiment can open a path toward the instantiation of this denizen ethos (both discursively and materially), an ethos which acts as a potential and active way through which non-Indigenous peoples could appropriately and seriously meet Indigenous peoples’ calls for change.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settlers settle the ‘good land’: Agnès Delahaye, Settling The Good Land: Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England (1630-1650), Brill, 2020

25Mar20

Description: Settling the Good Land: Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England (1630-1650) is the first institutional history of the Massachusetts Bay Company, cornerstone of early modern English colonisation in North America. Agnès Delahaye analyses settlement as a form of colonial innovation, to reveal the political significance of early New England sources, above and beyond religion. John Winthrop was not just a Puritan, but a settler governor who wrote the history of the expansion of his company as a record of successful and enduring policy. Delahaye argues that settlement, as the action and the experience of appropriating the land, is key to understanding the role played by Winthrop’s writings in American historiography, before independence and in our times.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute