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With two chapters on South African settler colonialism: Nina G. Jablonski (ed.), Persistence of Race, AFRICAN SUN MeDIA, 2020

01Mar20

Description: This is the third and final group of essays emerging from the discussions of the Effects of Race Project at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) that occurred in 2016 and 2017. The authors consider the biological and social understandings of race, and how new information from both the biological and social sciences is changing our perspective on the nature of the human condition, including the association of biological and social phenomena with “race”. They also look at global events or movements which influence these processes in South Africa and the costs of a racialised world order to humans and humanity. Phenomena are examined through the lenses of many disciplines: sociology, history, geography, anthropology and writing.


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Conservation policy dispossesses indigenous peoples: Lara Domínguez, Colin Luoma, ‘Decolonising Conservation Policy: How Colonial Land and Conservation Ideologies Persist and Perpetuate Indigenous Injustices at the Expense of the Environment’, Land, 9, 65, 2020

01Mar20

Abstract: The livelihoods of indigenous peoples, custodians of the world’s forests since time immemorial, were eroded as colonial powers claimed de jure control over their ancestral lands. The continuation of European land regimes in Africa and Asia meant that the withdrawal of colonial powers did not bring about a return to customary land tenure. Further, the growth in environmentalism has been interpreted by some as entailing conservation ahead of people. While this may be justifiable in view of devastating anthropocentric breaching of planetary boundaries, continued support for “fortress” style conservation inflicts real harm on indigenous communities and overlooks sustainable solutions to deepening climate crises. In reflecting on this issue from the perspective of colonial land tenure systems, this article highlights how ideas—the importance of individualised land ownership, cultivation, and fortress conservation—are intellectually flawed. Prevailing conservation policies, made possible by global non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and statutory donors, continue to harm indigenous peoples and their traditional territories. Drawing from the authors’ experience representing the Batwa (DRC), the Ogiek and Endorois (Kenya) and Adivasis (India) in international litigation, this paper examines the human and environmental costs associated with modern conservation approaches through this colonial lens. This article concludes by reflecting on approaches that respect environmental and human rights.


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Does indigenous financial sovereignty beat settler colonialism? Maria Bargh, ”, in J. K. Gibson-Graham, Kelly Dombroski (eds), The Handbook of Diverse Economies, Edward Elgar, 2020, pp. 362-369

01Mar20

Abstract: Internationally, Indigenous peoples have experienced colonization in different ways. In some countries Indigenous peoples have extensive control over the governance of land and resources often as a result of treaties or political recognition, while in other countries their very fight for recognition as ‘peoples’ remains a priority. These histories have shaped the financial positions that Indigenous peoples find themselves in. This chapter examines the experiences of an Indigenous Māori (Indigenous) community of Aotearoa New Zealand and analyses the way their financial practices are guided by Māori values.


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Settlers as a last resort: John Britton Seitz, Science and the steppe: Agronomists, nomads, and the settler colony on the Kazakh steppe, 1881-1917, PhD dissertation, Iowa State University, 2019

28Feb20

Abstract: In the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian officials and scientists undertook a project of exploiting the Kazakh Steppe to turn it into an agricultural breadbasket. However, this project ran into difficulties both among the indigenous nomadic Kazakh population and with the challenges of farming in a new environment. Therefore, officials and scientists turned to another group to attempt to transform the steppe: peasant settlers from European Russia. While they did not fully overcome the challenges and achieve their most extreme visions for the steppe, this process that included demographic, scientific, and economic changes would have far reaching affects on the story of Kazakhstan down to the present day.


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Indigenous settlers? Amy Reed Sandoval, ‘Settler-State Borders and the Question of Indigenous Immigrant Identity’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2020

28Feb20

Abstract: Indigenous migration from Latin America to the United States has been on the rise over the past decades. There has also been an increase in Indigenous self-identification amongst people in the United States who previously self-identified as Hispanic or Latina/o on census forms. Though Latin American Indigenous migration to the United States has been steadily on the rise since the 1990s, there remains a lack of resources—philosophical, political, and bureaucratic—to account for this migrant group. My goal in this article is to explore in greater depth why Latin American Indigenous migration is hermeneutically marginalised. First, I argue that we problematically fail to understand settler-state borders—particularly the Mexico-US border—as, in part, Indigenous spaces. Second, and relatedly, I argue that our failure to understand borders as Indigenous spaces is connected to the widespread, inaccurate presumption that Indigenous peoples ‘lose their authenticity’ (and, in turn, their very Indigenous identities) upon crossing settler-state borders. Contrary to what I describe as the dominant view of borders as de-Indigenised or non-Indigenous spaces, I argue in that many settler-state borders are spaces where Indigenous peoples, including Indigenous migrants, may experience their Indigenous identities intimately, and even publicly articulate and defend them. Importantly, this does not mean that settler-state borders do not also harm Indigenous peoples by threating Indigenous sovereignty. I end by arguing that addressing the hermeneutical marginalisation of Latin American Indigenous migration requires a rigorous reconceptualisation of borders themselves as Indigenous spaces.


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The settlers of Africa: Duncan Money, Danelle van Zyl-Hermann (eds), Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, 1930s–1990s, Routledge, 2020

28Feb20

Description: This book showcases new research by emerging and established scholars on white workers and the white poor in Southern Africa.

Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa challenges the geographical and chronological limitations of existing scholarship by presenting case studies from Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe that track the fortunes of nonhegemonic whites during the era of white minority rule. Arguing against prevalent understandings of white society as uniformly wealthy or culturally homogeneous during this period, it demonstrates that social class remained a salient element throughout the twentieth century, how Southern Africa’s white societies were often divided and riven with tension and how the resulting social, political and economic complexities animated white minority regimes in the region. Addressing themes such as the class-based disruption of racial norms and practices, state surveillance and interventions – and their failures – towards nonhegemonic whites, and the opportunities and limitations of physical and social mobility, the book mounts a forceful argument for the regional consideration of white societies in this historical context. Centrally, it extends the path-breaking insights emanating from scholarship on racialized class identities from North America to the African context to argue that race and class cannot be considered independently in Southern Africa.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students of southern African studies, African history, and the history of race.


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The indigenous vs the settler commons: Susan Hegeman, ‘The Indigenous Commons’, Minnesota Review, 93, 2019, pp. 133-140

28Feb20

Abstract: The concept of the commons is central to an argument that connects indigenous people and their struggles both to global politics and to radical reconceptualizations of the relationships among knowledges, resources, and human communities. This article considers the use of the idea of a commons in water and atmosphere in the 2016 protest on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. It also contextualizes the concept of the commons in relation to the historical expropriation of land from native peoples in North America.


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The religious education of settlers: Stephen Jackson, Religious Education and the Anglo-World: The Impact of Empire, Britishness, and Decolonisation in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, Brill, 2020

26Feb20

Abstract: Focusing on Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, Religious Education and the Anglo-World historiographically examines the relationship between empire and religious education. The analysis centres on three formative eras in the development of religious education in each case: firstly, the foundational moments of publicly funded education in the mid- to late nineteenth centuries when policy makers created largely Protestant systems of religious education, and frequently denied Roman Catholics funding for private education. Secondly, the period from 1880-1960 during which campaigns to strengthen religious education emerged in each context. Finally, the era of decolonisation from the 1960s through the 1980s when publicly funded religious education was challenged by the loss of Britishness as a central ideal, and Roman Catholics found unprecedented success in achieving state aid in many cases. By bringing these disparate national literatures into conversation with one another, Stephen Jackson calls for a greater transnational approach to the study of religious education in the Anglo-World.


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The contemporary manifestation of settler exclusion: Hannah Gordon, ‘Cowboys and Indians: Settler Colonialism and the Dog Whistle in U.S. Immigration Policy’, University of Miami Law Review, 74, 2020, pp. 520-562

26Feb20

Abstract: The nineteenth-century Indian problem has become the twenty-first century border crisis. While the United States fancies itself a nation of immigrants, this rhetoric is impossible to square with the reality of the systematic exclusion of migrants of color. In particular, the Trump administration has taken the exclusion of migrants descended from the Indigenous inhabitants of Mexico and Central America to a reductio ad absurdum. This Note joins a body of scholarship that centers the history of genocide in the United States to examine what our settler colonial history means for today’s immigration law and policy. It concludes that the contemporary treatment of Mexican and Central American migrants echoes the ways in which the legal definition of citizenship was developed to exclude Indigenous people. Furthermore, it urges a reckoning with the past both to make sense of the present and to chart a different future.


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Feminism as settler colonialism: Judy Rohrer, ‘”What a Native Looks Like”: Academic Feminist Spaces, the Logic of Elimination, and Survivance’, Feminist Formations, 31, 3, 2019, pp. 143-170

23Feb20

Abstract: I write to share ways I have seen Native colleagues and their knowledges (Native, feminist, and otherwise) denied and rejected in feminist academic spaces. I also write to think through my responses to these incidents, in the moment and after the fact, as I grapple with my responsibilities as a non-Native feminist. The attempts I witnessed to eliminate/disappear/erase these colleagues fell into three broad categories: not being recognized as “real” Natives; not being seen as adequately feminist; and disappearing behind/into a near totalizing Black-white racial binary. These occurrences are homegrown demonstrations of the structural persistence of settler colonialism manifest in the logic of elimination. Overall, this paper argues that feminist academic spaces are often hostile territory for Native scholars who face attempts at elimination upon entering them. “Survivance” and “resurgence” assist these Native academics in their navigation of these territories, in their refusal of erasure, in their struggles for decolonization. Non-Natives wishing to facilitate that navigation and Native presence in the academy can learn to recognize these acts of resurgence and deepen our understanding of, and commitment to, decolonization.


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