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Political science as settler-colonial science II (‘Rethinking Political Science in Settler Colonial Australia’): Morgan Brigg, Mary Graham, Lyndon Murphy, ‘Toward the dialogical study of politics: hunting at the fringes of Australian political science’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 54, 3, 2019, 423-437

28Jul19

Abstract: Australian political science is broadly derivative of British-European liberal ideas and prescriptions. It supports Settler governance by following dominant political dynamics, and struggles to engage with Indigenous political ordering other than through British-European settler-colonial logics. In response, this article experiments with a dialogical approach to studying political science that is responsive to Indigenous frames of reference and attentive to the colonial political relationship that Indigenous and non-Indigenous people share. We first document and attempt to break with the structural politics of knowledge that conditions Australian political science. We then deploy an idiom for advancing macro-level and informal insights for knowing liberalism on the Australian continent. The final section outlines a selection of key challenging questions that Australian political science needs to address if it is to enter into more appropriate relations with Indigenous political ontology and peoples of the continent.


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Political science as settler-colonial science (‘Rethinking Political Science in Settler Colonial Australia’): Sana Nakata, Sarah Maddison, ‘New collaborations in old institutional spaces: setting a new research agenda to transform Indigenous-settler relations’, Journal Australian Journal of Political Science, 54, 3, 2019, 407-422

28Jul19

Abstract: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people navigate the social and political order of the Australian settler state in ways that seek to increase their personal freedoms and political autonomy. For some groups this means seeking a firmer place within the social, political and economic life of Australia, and for others it means navigating away, towards a more distant relationship based in the resurgence of Indigenous nationhood. This navigation is composed of multifaceted and multidirectional relations between Indigenous Australians, settler Australians, and the settler state. As a discipline, political science must move beyond the study of settler institutions and begin to engage more comprehensively in research that considers the dynamics and structures of Indigenous-settler relations as a matter of priority.


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They did colonialism and settler colonialism (and they disavow both): A special issue on Nordic Colonialisms

26Jul19

Scandinavian Studies, 91, 1-2, 2019: ‘Nordic Colonialisms’


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(Settler-colonial) night at the museum: Stephanie Anderson, ‘Museums, Decolonization, and Indigenous Artists as First Cultural Responders: A Case Study at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’, Museum & Society, 17, 2, 2019, pp. 173-192

24Jul19

Abstract: The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) is part of a global movement of human rights-driven museums that commemorate atrocity-related events through exhibitions aimed at communicating a national social consciousness. At the same time, museums in Canada are increasingly understood as contributing to the perpetuation of settler colonial memory regimes through dominant narratives of national identity. Through the analysis of a unique exhibit titled Aboriginal Women and the Right to Safety and Justice, which relies on shared authority and nuanced Indigenous art form, this article explores how museums in settler colonial societies might represent difficult knowledge and act as sites of decolonization. The article posits that by breaking with conventional curatorial and display approaches, the exhibit serves to reduce the institution’s traditionally authoritative, nationalistic perspective and offers a model for enacting decolonization in museums across regions.


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Philosophically speaking … : Paul Robert Patton, ‘Philosophical foundations for Indigenous economic and political rights’, International Journal of Social Economics, 2019

24Jul19

Abstract: The paper begins with a brief discussion of the emergence of specifically Indigenous rights, the significance of self-determination as a means of improving the economic and social conditions of communities, and the problem such rights pose for late 20th versions of egalitarian liberalism. It then examines the liberal culturalist argument for minority rights developed by Will Kymlicka, before turning to James Tully’s elaboration of the historical approach to the justification of Indigenous rights that draws on the tradition of treaty relations in North American colonialism. Finally, it outlines a third approach based on the political liberalism of John Rawls.


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Settler-colonial and racist? Jonathan Ofir, ‘Racism is at center of Israeli settler-colonialist venture’, Mondoweiss, 22/07/19

23Jul19

Excerpt: According to the internationally applied (yet irredeemably clumsy) definition of Anti-Semitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”, could amount to anti-Semitism. 

By this standard, Ronit Lentin, associate professor emeritus of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin, could be accused of Anti-Semitism for publishing her recent book Traces of Racial Exception – Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism (Bloomsbury, 2018).


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Multiple literacies as an unsettlement: Jennifer Darrah-Okike, ‘”The decision you make today will affect many generations to come”: Environmental assessment law and Indigenous resistance to urbanization’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2019

21Jul19

Abstract: In the early 2000s, the rural and predominantly Native Hawaiian Moloka‘i community faced another episode in a decades-long struggle against the commodification of sacred lands in the context of settler colonialism. In this paper I analyze a decisive moment in the land struggle: a public hearing over a legally mandated environmental impact assessment. Environmental assessments promise to improve environmental outcomes via public participation, but have often fallen short as a means to assert the values and interests of Indigenous communities. This paper adds insight into why this happens and shows how one community overcame the political limitations of the environmental assessments process. Through an analysis of public records and interview data, I show how corporate landowners engaged in extensive community consultation to pursue their commercial interests, in anticipation of the environmental assessments and in hopes of securing land-use approvals. However, in response, community members articulated Indigenous values and agency within (and beyond) a legal setting and environmental review process partially at odds with such values. I argue that defenders of a culturally sacred place, Lā‘au Point, both deployed and resisted Hawai‘i’s land-use and environmental laws. They leveraged the formal legal criteria of the environmental review process, yet they affirmed cultural meanings and relationships of moral responsibility to land by deploying multiple literacies—legal literacies as well as land and culture-based literacies—to protect a cherished place. Overall, this case study reveals the diversity, complexity, and resilience of Native Hawaiian resistance to urbanization and settler colonialism.


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Diverse economies as an unsettlement: Adam Bledsoe, Tyler McCreary, Willie Wright, ‘Theorizing diverse economies in the context of racial capitalism’, Geoforum, 2019

21Jul19

Abstract: This paper engages geographic literature on diverse economies by foregrounding an analysis of racial capitalism. Prevailing conversations on diverse economies aptly point out that there exist economic formations that do not adhere to capitalist modes of production. However, these same conversations lack an explicit engagement with the ways in which establishing non-capitalist economies entails attending explicitly to the question of race. Ignoring how racialization underlies capitalism runs the risk of inadequately understanding the role that race plays in configuring alternatives to capitalist formations. Thus, the authors argue that analysis of diverse economies must explicitly attend to the fact that both capitalism and its alternatives are shaped by racial difference. After discussing prominent geographical work on diverse economies, the authors explore racial capitalism as an analytic for interrogating present-day capitalism. They argue that racial capitalism shows how the marginalization of racialized populations is a central component of capitalist reproduction. The second half of the paper draws on empirical examples from Canada and the United States to demonstrate how Black and Indigenous communities both recognize the role that their oppression plays in capital accumulation and find ways to create economic alternatives to those forms of accumulation. Specifically, the authors discuss public housing initiatives among Indigenous communities in Winnipeg and Minneapolis and the creation of urban commons by Black communities in Detroit and Jackson. By emphasizing the racialized nature of capitalism and showing how racialized communities create economic alternatives to capitalism, this paper offers a nuanced approach to discussing the possibilities of diverse economies.


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Pidgin as an unsettlement: Kara Hisatake, Queer Pidgin: Unsettling U.S. Settler Colonialism in Hawai‘i’s Language Politics, PhD Dissertation, UC Santa Cruz, 2019

21Jul19

Abstract: My dissertation, “Queer Pidgin: Unsettling U.S. Settler Colonialism in Hawai‘i’s Language Politics,” assembles writings and performances in Pidgin, Hawai‘i’s creole language, and theorizes how this multiethnic body of cultural texts critically unsettles the representational and political norms of the United States as a settler colonial state. A language that developed from the multiethnic context of plantation labor, Pidgin emerged as the common language when the Native Hawaiian language was banned in 1896. Pidgin, I argue, not only bears the deterritorializing potential to challenge entrenched binaries between the settler and the native, but also admits a third term, the migrant laborer. Pidgin poses a counter to how identity and community have been formulated and sanctioned by the U.S. settler state. Indeed, in contrast to mainland multicultural ideology and uncritical celebrations of diversity, Pidgin, although associated with multiethnic speakers, has a “queer” relationship to “straight English” that calls for careful theorization. This is where my project intervenes. Albeit stigmatized as nonwhite and uncivilized, Pidgin’s imagined community, I argue, models a process of inclusion from below rather than assimilation enforced from above. Not a dialect, in this regard, but a creole, Pidgin is less a regionalized deviation from standard, mainland English than a synthesis of multiple languages whose “local” identity gestures toward the world and Native sovereignty in potentially critical ways. Even as Pidgin arose out of the plantation economy of Hawai‘i, it speaks, I contend, to international flows of labor, to the intermingling of tongues, and most critically to the political imagination of common ground between Native Hawaiians and Asian migrant laborers that cannot be reduced to assimilation through U.S. citizenship but rather suggests an alternative model of community.

That Native Hawaiians “are not Americans,” as scholar-activist Haunani-Kay Trask maintains, is an implicitly comparative claim in Hawai‘i where local Japanese Americans have prominently figured as leaders within a national Democratic Party establishment. Some Asian American scholars like Candice Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura note that Asians in Hawai‘i have taken part in and benefited from a settler colonial structure. Additionally, literature written by Asian Americans in Hawai‘i has been criticized as participating in colonial hierarchies at the expense of Native Hawaiian literature and culture. Yet, even as these important insights into U.S. settler colonialism reveal minoritized complicity in systems of power, they adhere to a binaristic model of “settler” and “native” that falters when it comes to analysis of Pidgin.

Written by Native Hawaiians and Asian Americans alike, Pidgin cultural production complicates the binarism of U.S. settler colonial paradigms. While usually conceived as a non-literary and oral language, Pidgin features regularly in literary and cultural production both as a reflection of everyday life and, as I argue, as a critical intervention against the norms of U.S. imperialism. Pidgin literary works are not reducible to minority literature, which assumes assimilation and discounts U.S. settler colonialism and Hawaiian sovereignty. Unlike ethnic literatures, which fall under the national rubric of “American,” Pidgin exposes the imperialism of the United States. In its conception, Pidgin literature unsettles the American literary canon by refusing incorporation into it. Instead, Pidgin literature develops an imagined alternative community that re-works Hawai‘i’s settler colonial status along queer lines. As my research demonstrates, Pidgin literature refuses easy incorporation into the American literary canon. Whereas Pidgin literatures of Hawai‘i have often been disaggregated, in their critical reception, into multiple, largely non-intersecting tracks—namely, as an extension of U.S. literature, a regional subset of Asian American literature, a strand of Native Hawaiian literature, and a Hawai‘i-specific contribution to Pacific literature—my project harks back to Pidgin’s political function as a shared tongue. Inasmuch as Pidgin is a creole language, crossing ethnic and class boundaries in its polyglot origins, rather than a variety of English, Pidgin literary works also do not fall under the rubric of dialect and regional literature.

I assemble Pidgin cultural texts by Native Hawaiians writers like John Dominis Holt and Brandy Nālani McDougall; Asian Americans like R. Zamora Linmark; and mixed-race comedians like Rap Reiplinger. As my project demonstrates, these Pidgin cultural texts not only expose the interlocking nature of U.S. imperialism and settler colonialism, but also furnish a critical vision of multiethnic community that, with its decolonizing ethos, counters mainland state-driven ideologies around multiculturalism.


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‘Oriented in different ways’ (and yet dialectically related): Mark Rifkin, Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation, Duke University Press, 2019

19Jul19

Description: In Fictions of Land and Flesh Mark Rifkin explores the impasses that arise in seeking to connect Black and Indigenous movements, turning to speculative fiction to understand those difficulties and envision productive ways of addressing them. Against efforts to subsume varied forms of resistance into a single framework in the name of solidarity, Rifkin argues that Black and Indigenous political struggles are oriented in distinct ways, following their own lines of development and contestation. Rifkin suggests how movement between the two can be approached as something of a speculative leap in which the terms and dynamics of one are disoriented in the encounter with the other. Futurist fiction provides a compelling site for exploring such disjunctions. Through analyses of works by Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, Nalo Hopkinson, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, and others, the book illustrates how ideas about fungibility, fugitivity, carcerality, marronage, sovereignty, placemaking, and governance shape the ways Black and Indigenous intellectuals narrate the past, present, and future. In turning to speculative fiction, Rifkin illustrates how speculation as a process provides conceptual and ethical resources for recognizing difference while engaging across it.


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