settler colonial studies blog

It’s not the citizenship, it’s the sovereignty: Lana Tatour, ‘Citizenship as Domination: Settler Colonialism and the Making of Israel’, Arab Studies Journal, XXVII, 2, 2019, pp. 8-39

15Feb20

Excerpt: During the 1948 war, over two thirds of the Palestinian population became refugees. A small, defeated minority remained in what became the state of Israel. It is no secret that the state did not want these Palestinians. As the Zionist adage goes, Israel wanted the dowry (the land) but not the bride (the Palestinian people).1 Te adage holds true to this day. Beginning with the establishment of Israel and continuing until 1966, the Israeli state subjected Palestinians in territories under Israeli control to a Military Government regime and an elaborate system of surveillance.2 At the same time, Israel extended sufrage and then citizenship to some, but not all, of those Palestinians. Despite the award of citizenship, the Israeli state did not regard Palestinians as indigenous to the space or as natural subjects of rights. Tis view of Palestinians has not changed. I

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The theatre of settler colonialism: Yi‐Hsin Hsu, ‘Performing Shakespeare in Colonial Taiwan: Early Japanese Settlers and the Bounds of Theatrical Imperialism, 1895‐1916’, Popular Entertainment Studies, 10, 1-2, pp. 72-92

15Feb20

Abstract: Built on archival research in Japan and Taiwan, this article constructs a comprehensive history of Shakespeare performancesin colonial Taiwan. Unearthing underexplored and previously unknown production records of Shakespeare performances by Japanese settlers as well as travelling troupes, this article provides contextual readings of surviving theatre reviews and investigates their cultural and theatrical significance. It adds to current literature by presenting three findings: first, the scope and quantity of Shakespeare performances extend beyond received knowledge. Previously unknown records of The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, New Hamlet, King Lear, and a proposed performance of Romeo and Juliet will be discussed alongside details of the known records of Hamlet and Othello. Second, Shakespeare performances were sites of artistic contacts and competition, where travelling troupes, local theatres, Japanese and Taiwanese audiences interacted together and contributed to a vibrant theatrical ecology. Third, this article foregrounds the bounds and limitations of theatrical imperialism. While theatre productions were utilised as tools of empire and supported by Japan’s administrative apparatus to instruct and assimilate the colonised, in their actual reception they were viewed as popular entertainments which, as objects of criticism, must entertain and delight censorious audiences.

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Sovereignty is food sovereignty too: Priscilla Settee, Shailesh Shukla (eds), Indigenous Food Systems Concepts, Cases, and Conversations, Canadian Scholars, 2020

15Feb20

Description: Unlike any other resource on the market, this textbook explores a diverse array of Indigenous food systems from across Canada, including Anishinaabeg, Asatiwisipe, Cree, Métis, Migmag, and Tsartlip. Seeking solutions to food insecurity and well-being for current and future generations, Indigenous and non-Indigenous food practitioners and scholars document the voices and experiences of community members encountered in their research, thus promoting an understanding of the barriers and challenges to Indigenous food systems and presenting ways used to reclaim cultural identity and food sovereignty. Offering in-depth case studies and critical conversations, Indigenous Food Systems reinforces the importance of the revitalization of Indigenous food knowledges for the health and well-being of Indigenous and Canadian populations.

This unique collection is a critical resource for students studying food security and food sovereignty in Indigenous studies, public health, anthropology, and social sciences as well as a useful reader for policy-makers, researchers, and community practitioners.

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Postsettlers: Josh Doble, White settlers to white Africans? Decolonization and white identity in Kenya and Zambia, PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 2019

15Feb20

Abstract: This thesis addresses the identities of ‘white settlers’ who chose to stay in Kenya and Zambia after independence from British rule. By focusing on these racially and materially privileged minority groups this thesis unearths the ways in which racial identities have been formed and contested, in contexts in which whiteness has been inescapably historically charged. By analysing both Kenya and Zambia the thesis breaks new ground in comparing the postcolonial history of a settler colony and an African protectorate. In doing so it raises questions about the categorisations of ‘settler’ and the notion of being ‘settled’, as well as taking on the difficult label of ‘white African’ and its contested use in postcolonial Africa. This research draws upon settler colonial history in Africa and contemporary whiteness studies. As such the thesis represents a social history of decolonisation and a history of a contemporary phenomenon, whites with a colonial heritage searching for belonging and legitimacy in postcolonial contexts which invalidate their history. The thesis traces the legacies of settler colonial rule through the spatial, sensorial, linguistic and temporal dimensions of whites’ postcolonial lives. Research participants all drew upon a personal colonial lineage which connected their families to the longer colonial history of Kenya and Zambia. They represented a group of people whose life experiences mapped onto the historical ‘period’ of decolonisation. The timeframe of the thesis – from the mid-1950s to 2017 – utilises a periodisation which transcends the bounds of colonialism and postcolonialism, and as a result is able to assess continuity and change in how racial identity and privilege was constructed and reconfigured. The thesis’ originality lies not only in its comparative study of under-researched postcolonial whites, but in its synthesis of whiteness studies, settler colonial history, postcolonial history, the history of emotions and senses, and oral history.

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Settler transnational understandings: Scott Burchill, ‘Israel-Palestine: Part Two—Australian Foreign Policy and the Israel-Palestine Conflict—Avoiding the Colonialist Narrative’, in Scott Burchill, Misunderstanding International Relations, Palgrave, 2020, pp. 63-83

12Feb20

Abstract: Settler colonial societies such as Australia, the United States and South Africa have unique attributes which affect not only the way they interact with each other, but also how they regard their indigenous populations. The settler-colonial nature of Zionism not only determined the oppressive nature of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, it also explains why other settler-colonial states such as Australia, Canada and the United States have consistently been Israel’s greatest defenders in international diplomacy. It is the similar colonial history of these political communities that has constructed a distinct, supportive and mutually reinforcing series of political relationships.

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Settler colonialism persists: Natsu Taylor Saito, Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law Why Structural Racism Persists: Citizenship and Migration in the Americas, NYU Press, 2020

10Feb20

Description: How taking Indigenous sovereignty seriously can help dismantle the structural racism encountered by other people of color in the United States

Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law provides a timely analysis of structural racism at the intersection of law and colonialism. Noting the grim racial realities still confronting communities of color, and how they have not been alleviated by constitutional guarantees of equal protection, this book suggests that settler colonial theory provides a more coherent understanding of what causes and what can help remediate racial disparities.

Saito attributes the origins and persistence of racialized inequities in the United States to the prerogatives asserted by its predominantly Angloamerican colonizers to appropriate Indigenous lands and resources, to profit from the labor of voluntary and involuntary migrants, and to ensure that all people of color remain “in their place.”

By providing a functional analysis that links disparate forms of oppression, this book makes the case for the oft-cited proposition that racial justice is indivisible, focusing particularly on the importance of acknowledging and contesting the continued colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands. Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law concludes that rather than relying on promises of formal equality, we will more effectively dismantle structural racism in America by envisioning what the right of all peoples to self-determination means in a settler colonial state.

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Cashlessness for indigeneity: Elise Klein, ‘Settler colonialism in Australia and the cashless debit card’, Social Policy & Administration, 2020

10Feb20

Abstract: Settler colonialism continues in Australia today. One way this occurs is through processes of assimilation such as targeting First Nations subjectivities with behavioural conditions on their social security payments. In this paper, I draw on a 13‐month study examining one such programme; the Cashless Debit Card trial in the East Kimberley region in North West Australia. Through restricting cash and purchases to curb alcohol consumption, illegal drug use, and gambling, card aims to instil “responsible behaviour” such as getting a job in the capitalist economy, accumulating private property, and succeeding in English education. Through drawing on critical discourse analysis, I ask, what does the Cashless Debit Card tell us about the settler state’s attempts of continued assimilation? The paper explores specific ways the state legitimising assimilation through provoking narratives of First Nations dysfunction, depoliticising poverty and colonisation, constructing evidence around success of policy, and constructing ideas of “community” in order to regulate who speaks and who is overlooked. Although assimilation attempts are made, there is resistance and pushback in the trial site. Attempts of assimilation, not actual assimilation, can only be observed.

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On the population economy of settler colonialism: RebeccaHall, ‘Indigenous/state relations and the “Making” of surplus populations in the mixed economy of Northern Canada’, Geoforum, 2020

10Feb20

Abstract: Grounded in an analysis of the mixed economy of the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, this article examines the contemporary relationship between surplus populations and colonial capitalist accumulation of new spaces. The functioning of the reserve surplus population requires that the unwaged, or under-waged, want, or need, wage labour. Thus, like all capitalist relations, a reserve surplus population is predicated on the separation of workers from their means of subsistence: what Marx calls “primitive” accumulation. Traditionally the home of the Dene and Inuit, and now home to approximately equal parts Indigenous (primarily Dene, Inuit and Métis) and non-Indigenous residents, the NWT mixed economy is a set of social relations that combine subsistence and social reproduction, wherein labour is oriented toward the daily and intergenerational wellbeing of the collective rather than the profit of the individual, with capitalist production. With a focus on the diamond industry, this article traces the shifting Canadian State approach to Indigenous labour in this space across time and the state policies and extractive projects that have both “made” Indigenous labour surplus and rhetorically justified their existence through evocations of regional unemployment and imagined dependency. In so doing, the paper identifies a move from the welfare-state era, wherein the state structured northern Indigenous “dependency”, to the neoliberal era, wherein dependency became a problem to be solved through increased Indigenous incorporation into capitalist wage labour. The northern diamond mining industry, responding to both Indigenous demands for land recognition and neoliberal imperatives for lean operations, exemplifies this latter approach.

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Settler colonialism as tribute: Dylan Ruediger, ‘”Neither Utterly to Reject Them, Nor Yet to Drawe Them to Come In”: Tributary Subordination and Settler Colonialism in Virginia’, Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 18, 1, 2020, pp. 1-31

10Feb20

Abstract: This essay explores tributary relationships between colonists and Algonquian peoples in seventeenth-century Virginia, placing the process of political subordination into familiar narratives of indigenous dispossession. Virginia’s tributary system—a political and legal institution founded in 1646 at the conclusion of the third Anglo-Powhatan war—created a colonial order in which Indian communities became subordinated but largely autonomous polities within a composite imperial state. This idea of tribute, a form of what Hugo Grotius called an “unequal alliance,” had roots in Algonquian political traditions and the emerging European literature on international law. Drawing on these lineages, this essay provides a framework for thinking about how the tributary system developed in the decades between 1646 and 1676. The legal and political distance separating tributaries from colonists proved to be an important tool for indigenous communities struggling to maintain communal identity, but provided colonists with a flexible means of effecting dispossession. Though colonists’ resentment of the slender protections Governor William Berkeley afforded tributaries erupted into civil war in 1676, Bacon’s Rebellion failed to destroy the tributary system. It was reestablished at the Treaty of the Middle Plantation in 1677, which still provides the legal framework for Indian relations in the state of Virginia.

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Settler structures: Timothy J Stanley, ‘Commemorating John A. Macdonald: Collective Remembering and the Structure of Settler Colonialism in British Columbia’, BC Studies, 2020

10Feb20

Abstract: The 2018 controversy surrounding the decision of the mayor and council of the City of Victoria, BC, to remove a statue of John A. Macdonald from the entrance to city hall raises questions about how lived histories of colonialism and racisms are marked in landscape of collective remembering within the city and more broadly within Canada. Building of the work of James Wertsch on collective remembering, Eileen Moreton Robinson on private property and Patrick Wolfe on settler colonialism, this paper explores how the cultural markings of the City of Victoria have been produced by processes of colonization and racist exclusion. In particular, it discusses how such things as the dominance of English, the nature of place names, the marginalization Indigenous and Chinese people within the territory have come to be and how this making is erased from technologies of remembering. The paper contrasts the historical John A. Macdonald and his colonizing and racist practices his celebration by nationalists today. In so doing it show how the positions of the Macdonald apologists enact the same exclusions as those of the colonizing landscape. It conclude sby considering the implications of this structure of colonized remembering for transformative projects of decolonization and antiracism.

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