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Settler genocide in the form of a pageant: Andrea Lynn Smith, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Revolutionary War” New York’s 1929 “Pageant of Decision”‘, The Public Historian, 41, 4, 2019, pp. 7-35

11Dec19

Abstract: The centerpiece of New York State’s 150th anniversary of the Sullivan Expedition of 1779 was a pageant, the “Pageant of Decision.” Major General John Sullivan’s Revolutionary War expedition was designed to eliminate the threat posed by Iroquois allied with the British. It was a genocidal operation that involved the destruction of over forty Indian villages. This article explores the motivations and tactics of state officials as they endeavored to engage the public in this past in pageant form. The pageant was widely popular, and served the state in fixing the expedition as the end point in settler-Indian relations in New York, removing from view decades of expropriations of Indian land that occurred well after Sullivan’s troops left.


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Violence and identity: Alexander Rotard, ‘Settler Identity and Colonial Violence in French Algeria 1945-1962: An Exploration of the Relationship between Settler Identity Formation and the Justification of Violence in Settler Colonies’, Hitotsubashi Bulletin of Social Sciences, 11, 2019

11Dec19

Excerpt: Amalgamating a Fanonesque psychological approach to the broader question of colonial violence in Algeria with a modern examination of colonial and metropolitan responses to specific violent events, this paper investigates the role of settler identity formation in the legitimisation and unleashing of colonial violence in Algeria between 1945 and 1962. 


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Mormon settler colonialism: Elise Boxer, ‘The Book of Mormon as Mormon Settler Colonialism’, in P. Jane Hafen, Brenden W. Rensink (eds), Essays on American Indian and Mormon History, University of Utah Press, 2019, pp. 3-22

08Dec19

Excerpt: The Book of Mormon is not just a reflection of Mormon settler colonialism, but has been used to create a discourse that silences Indigenous voices and perspectives regarding their own history as a people on this continent. According to P. Jane Hafen, this is a“disruptive and colonizing act.” The Book of Mormon is utilized to construct a Lamanite identity and history in which Indigenous Peoples exist only to legitimize the presence of Mormon settlers on this continent and the religious narrative found in the Book of Mormon as accurate and true. By depicting Indigenous Peoples as Lamanites, or the first immigrants to this continent, the Book of Mormon provides the necessary justification for Indigenous removal and dispossession by Mormon settlers along the Mormon Corridor (Idaho, Utah, Arizona) in what is now the United States. The Book of Mormon reflects the nuanced ways in which Mormon settler colonialism is utilized to physically remove Indigenous people from their homelands while also demarcating Indigenous worldviews, identities, and histories as the racialized “other.” The Book of Mormon reflects the nuanced ways in which Mormon settler colonialism functions by creating very distinct notions of Indigeneity. Indigeneity, as defined by the Book of Mormon, is exhibited through the construction and application of “Lamanites” to American Indian Peoples. Lamanite identity is fluid, changing over time, but always in relation to Mormon Euro-​American notions of Indigeneity. The use of the Book of Mormon as a historical and religious text of Lamanite identity and history on this continent erases the way Indigenous Peoples view their own creation as a people, their connection to the land, and their identity as a people. Instead, Indigenous Peoples are made to fit into Mormon creation stories and religious belief system. The erasure of Indigenous Peoples and history by Mormon settlers is an extension of the larger American colonial project of removal and genocide of Indigenous Peoples.


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Camus as primarily a settler colonist: Gina Marie Breen, ‘Neither Algerian, nor French: Albert Camus’s Pied-Noir Identity’, Mediterranean Studies, 27, 2, 2019, pp. 210-233

08Dec19

Abstract: Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913 to white European settlers of French and Spanish origin. Hence, Camus and his parents belonged to the pied-noircommunity, a term commonly used to refer to Europeans who settled in Algeria during the French colonial occupation. While Camus chose Algeria as the setting for four of his literary texts, this article focuses on Camus’s first novel, L’Étranger, written during World War II and published in 1942, and his unfinished, posthumous, semiautobiographical novel Le Premier Homme, written during Algeria’s War of Independence and published in 1994, because they both discuss the French Algerian pied-noir community. I argue that this distinction allows them to best convey the evolution of Camus’s pied-noir identity. Through an analysis of these novels, I examine the ambivalence of Camus’s representations of French Algeria. Though his writing has left an ambivalent legacy, I contend that Camus mythologizes the past and present primarily through his piednoir origins. His poverty and loss are consolidated in his negative prognosis for Algeria’s future, a prognosis that is often mistrustful of Algerian independence. Often his pied-noir upbringing and experiences with poverty and marginality put in question the very possibility of an all-inclusive nation, rendering him incapable of imagining a hybrid community of French and Algerians living together. These works convey the complexity of Camus’s identities, and foreground his attempt and ultimate failure to navigate his past and access memories. In the end, these novels offer us a nuanced exploration of pied-noir marginality.


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Indigenising theology: Allen G. Jorgenson, ‘Decolonizing and Indigenizing Liberation Theology’, in Hussam S. Timani, Loye Sekihata Ashton (eds), Post-Christian Interreligious Liberation Theology, Palgave, 2019, pp. 159-183

07Dec19

Abstract: This chapter engages comparative theology in imaging how liberation theology might be informed by spiritualities and worldviews from the First Peoples of North America, referencing teachings, treaties, and ceremonies from the Six Nations of the Grand River Nation. The liberation hermeneutic of “see, judge, act” is informed, in turn, by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum, the Two Row Wampum, and the Condolence Ceremony. Liberation theology thus contextualized will involve seeing with “all my relations” in service of earth-justice, judging in a way that pairs thought and feeling/intuition attentive to the whole, and acting in a fashion whereby peace refuses to demonize oppressors, using power that is balanced with harmony for the sake of a righteousness that knows that there is no justice without language of justice and justice for language. This instance of comparative theology takes its cues from a land-based religion, and so its hermeneutic is shaped in situ such that it cannot be exported without further ado. As such, it invites other liberation projects to engage local land-based religions which will school those who desire to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk in a good way with the Creator in a way appropriate to their territory.


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Environmental protection and the logic of elimination: Erin Willahan, ‘Narratives of the North: Contested geographic imaginaries and the case of Izembek National Wildlife Refuge’, Arctic Yearbook, 2019

07Dec19

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Promoting settler ‘ready made’ farms: Shona Gourlay, ‘CPR’s Ready Made Farms’, Alberta History, 2019

07Dec19

Excerpt: As early as the late 1880s, CPR mounted various campaigns to entice settlers to the West. This included railway cars, such as Baggage Car 303 that visited communities in Canada and the United States with a special agricultural exhibition showing the prospects in western Canada. A similar program ran in England, with a Travelling Exhibition Van touring rural areas to spark interest in Canadian products, and to inspire emigration. In one year (1893?), the “van visited 513 communities, travelled more than 1,800 miles (2,896 kilometres), and was inspected by more than 1.7 million people. Similar campaigns were conducted throughout Europe.” […]

In addition to print advertisements, the CPR used motion pictures as part of its publicity campaign: “the development of motion pictures coincided with the development of active publicity campaigns by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company… In order to encourage immigration and settlement to western Canada, the company developed an extensive system of promotion which included the use of films. Railway filmmaking fell broadly into two categories, those which were designed with a specific intent to educate, inform, and persuade and those which were primarily intended as entertainment.”

The CPR undertook a special advertising campaign for ready made farms. Magazines such as Popular Mechanics contained ads telling people to ‘Get your Canadian home from the Canadian Pacific’ and the “Canadian Pacific offers you the finest land on earth for grain growing, cattle, hog, sheep and horse raising, dairying, poultry, vegetables, and general mixed farming…” The February 26, 1913 issue of Country Life contained an ad directed to British residents, stating that “Canadian Pacific ‘Ready Made’ farms offer to residents of Great Britain a means of settling in Western Canada with a minimum of discomfort, and insure the production of revenue from the investment in the shortest possible time.” The CPR also made presentations overseas.


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A settler’s dream (i.e., deporting indigenous people): Helen Davidson, ‘Citizenship test: court to decide whether Indigenous people can be deported from Australia’, Guardian, 04/12/19

05Dec19

Excerpt: The high court of Australia will this week examine a complicated question: can Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders be deported as aliens if they don’t hold Australian citizenship?

The federal government says yes.

 


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Minecraft is a settler-colonial game: Bennett Brazelton, ‘On the 10-year anniversary of minecraft: two interventions in extractive colonialism’, Cultural Geographies, 2019

04Dec19

Abstract: In light of the 10-year anniversary of the release of Minecraft, the wildly popular survival/building game, this retrospective considers the game as a vastly impactful digital text of settler colonialism. The ways in which the game’s ‘survival mode’ approaches the extraction of resources from land is fundamentally entangled in colonial fictions of indigeneity, gendered systems of property, and a Euro-humanist sense of entitlement and ownership. Considering Minecraft as a colonial text allows for two theoretical and aesthetic interventions: first, the visual art of Peruvian-American Eamon Ore-Giron, who challenges colonial extractivism in the two-channel piece, Morococha, and second, the 2006 flash game released by XGen Studies, Motherload, which approaches mining-based gameplay with key differences. These two interventions highlight the importance of digital realms as a terrain of colonial space-making and thus a site of analysis for cultural geographers. Moreover, they may help to chart useful paths to the production and realization of anti-colonial digital textuality.


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The ‘settler-not’: Tryon P. Woods, ‘Marronage, Here and There: Liberia, Enslavement’s Conversion, and the Settler-Not’, International Labor and Working Class History, 96, 2019, pp. 38-59

04Dec19

Abstract: This proposed contribution to the special issue of ILWCH offers a theoretical re-consideration of the Liberian project. If, as is commonly supposed in its historiography and across contemporary discourse regarding its fortunes into the twenty-first century, Liberia is a notable, albeit contested, instance of the modern era’s correctable violence in that it stands as an imperfect realization of the emancipated slave, the liberated colony, and the freedom to labor unalienated, then such representation continues to hide more than it reveals. This essay, instead, reads Liberia as an instructive leitmotif for the conversion of racial slavery’s synecdochical plantation system in the Americas into the plantation of the world writ large: the global scene of antiblackness and the immutable qualification for enslavement accorded black positionality alone. Transitions between political economic systems—from slave trade to “re-colonization,” from Firestone occupation to dictatorial-democratic regimes—reemerge from this re-examination as crucial but inessential to understanding Liberia’s position, and thus that of black laboring subjects, in the modern world. I argue that slavery is the simultaneous primitive accumulation of black land and bodies, but that this reality largely escapes current conceptualization of not only the history of labor but also that of enslavement. In other words, the African slave trade (driven first by Arabs in the Indian Ocean region, then Europeans in the Mediterranean, and, subsequently, Euro-Americans in the Atlantic) did not simply leave as its corollary effect, or byproduct, the underdevelopment of African societies. The trade in African flesh was at once the co-production of a geography of desire in which blackness is perpetually fungible at every scale, from the body to the nation-state to its soil—all treasures not simply for violation and exploitation, but more importantly, for accumulation and all manner of usage. The Liberian project elucidates this ongoing reality in distinctive ways—especially when we regard it through the lens of the millennium-plus paradigm of African enslavement. Conceptualizing slavery’s “afterlife” entails exploring the ways that emancipation extended, not ameliorated, the chattel condition, and as such, impugns the efficacy of key analytic categories like “settler,” “native,” “labor,” and “freedom” when applied to black existence. Marronage, rather than colonization or emancipation, situates Liberia within the intergenerational struggle of, and over, black work against social death. Read as enslavement’s conversion, this essay neither impugns nor heralds black action and leadership on the Liberian project at a particular historical moment, but rather agitates for centering black thought on the ongoing issue of black fungibility and social captivity that Liberia exemplifies. I argue that such a reading of Liberia presents a critique of both settler colonialism and of a certain conceptualization of the black radical tradition and its futures in heavily optimist, positivist, and political economic terms that are enjoying considerable favor in leading discourse on black struggle today.


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