settler colonial studies blog

Introducing a special issue on Black-Palestinian Transnational Solidarity: Noura Erakat, Marc Lamont Hill, ‘Black-Palestinian Transnational Solidarity: Renewals, Returns, and Practice’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 48, 4, 2019, pp. 7-16

29Sep19

Abstract: This introductory essay outlines the context for this special issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies on Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity (BPTS). Through the analytic of “renewal,” the authors point to the recent increase in individual and collective energies directed toward developing effective, reciprocal, and transformative political relationships within various African-descendant and Palestinian communities around the world. Drawing from the extant BPTS literature, this essay examines the prominent intellectual currents in the field and points to new methodologies and analytics that are required to move the field forward. With this essay, the authors aim not only to contextualize the field and to frame this special issue, but also to chart new directions for future intellectual and political work.

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‘Aware-settler’ heremeneutics: Matthew R. Anderson, ‘”Aware-Settler” Biblical Studies: Breaking Claims of Textual Ownership’, Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, 2019

29Sep19

Abstract: “Aware-Settler” is a term coined here to describe the various hermeneutics that arise as increasingly, non-Indigenous biblical scholars take seriously that their research is done on colonized Land. Paying special attention to the principle of possessiveness, the article suggests breaking stubborn Settler-scholar hidden-default assumptions of ownership, proposing instead that biblical texts might be understood as another form of “Treaty territory.” Indigenous scholars’ common emphases on Landedness, relationality, spirituality, and community good, can inform methodologies employed by Settler biblical scholars. These hermeneutical principles, learned in a contact zone characterized by attention to reciprocity and respect, are employed in a brief look at Matthew 28:25–28. The so-called Great Commission is a foundational text of colonialism; many Indigenous scholars have judged it as “unreadable.” For that reason it provides a particularly appropriate test-case for applying Aware-Settler hermeneutics focussed on breaking claims of identity and ownership.

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Now you recognise it, now you don’t: Shane Chalmers, ‘Terra Nullius? Temporal Legal Pluralism in an Australian Colony’, Social & Legal Studies, 2019

29Sep19

Abstract: There remains a puzzle as to the status of Indigenous land rights in Australian colonial law. The common view is that the laws of the British colonies, and subsequently of the federated state, did not recognise Indigenous land rights until late in the 20th century. Against this, a smaller body of scholarship argues that recognition had already occurred much earlier, the clearest instance being in the colony of South Australia in the 1830s and 1840s. The result is an apparent duplicity in the colonial law, whereby Indigenous land rights appear to have been both recognised and denied. The article shows a tendency in the scholarly literature to resolve this duplicity in absolute terms, based on positivist analysis of law. In contrast, by taking a critical legal pluralist approach, the article shows how different and even contradictory manifestations of the same law subsisted simultaneously through time. This both sheds new light on the question of the recognition of Indigenous land rights in Australian colonial law, and contributes theoretically to ‘critical legal pluralism’ by developing its temporal dimension.

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A guest is not a settler: Lauren Harding, ‘”This isn’t Canada, it’s Home”: Re-claiming Colonized Space through the Host-Guest Relationship’, Ethnoscripts, 21, 1, 2019, pp. 157-175

25Sep19

Abstract: The settler-colonial Canadian nation-state envisions national parks as places for citizens to recreate ideals of wilderness and the colonial frontier. In Canada, an idealized wild nature has become a central motif in settler-Canadian visions of home with outdoor recreation a hallowed pastime that has become a cornerstone to national identity. Yet as indigenous peoples increasingly assert their claims to territory, the state’s spatial designations and Canadian nationalist landscape narratives are challenged and complicated. In 1992, Peter and Monique Knighton made the decision to leave the main reserve where the Ditidaht people had been consolidated by the state in the 1960s, and return to Qua-ba-diwa, their ancestral home. However, Qua-ba-diwa, which the state calls Indian Reserve Number 6, lies within the boundaries of the West Coast Trail Unit in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. Since their move to Qua-ba-diwa, the Knighton family have built cabins, sold food, and provided shelter to tens of thousands of hikers, often to the consternation of parks officials. In a state where First Nations people have been continuously removed from their homes, taking on the role of territorial host through the provision of hospitality becomes a political act. I discuss the Knightons’ strategies of resistance to state efforts to confine their home to touristoriented visions of a wild Canadian nature, as well as the wider implications of their experiences for understanding the dissonance between indigenous and settler-Canadian conceptions of the same territory.

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Solidarity as post-settler subject formation: Harald Bauder, ‘Migrant solidarities and the politics of place’, Progress in Human Geography, 2019

25Sep19

Abstract: International migration and refugee scholars have made extensive use of the concept of solidarity in light of the recent arrival of migrants and refugees in Europe and elsewhere. They observe multi-dimensional solidarity practices and interpret solidarity from a variety of disciplinary and conceptual angles with different philosophical underpinnings. In this review article, I assume a geographical perspective to argue for a Marxian-Hegelian understanding of solidarity as a process of subject formation. I illustrate how solidarity relates to a politics of place that shapes migrant struggles in urban contexts and that promise to facilitate Indigenous reconciliation and decolonization in settler societies.

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Settler girls make more settlers: Elizabeth Dillenburg, ‘Girl Empire Builders: Girls’ Domestic and Cultural Labor and Constructions of Girlhood’, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 12, 3, 2019, pp. 393-412

25Sep19

Abstract: This article examines the ways in which girls contributed to the building of the British Empire by exploring two key questions: First, how did organizations like the Girls’ Friendly Society seek to educate girls about the empire and make them into good empire builders? Second, how did girls’ cultures inform the practices and principles of girl empire builders? To answer these questions, this article examines how specific notions of girlhood, specifically middle-class, white Victorian girlhood, were inscribed in cultural productions and how these constructions of girlhood intersected with and worked to support hierarchies of race, gender, age, and class in Britain, Australia, and South Africa.

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The poetics of allyship: Joan Garbutt, Walking Alongside: Poetic Inquiry into Allies of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, PhD Dissertation, University of Calgary, 2019

25Sep19

Abstract: This qualitative arts-based study made use of poetic inquiry to analyze and represent the stories of non-Indigenous people recognized as allies of Indigenous peoples in Canada. I adopted a theoretical foundation in critical realism, focusing on the role of agency in the emergent realities of the participants’ ally work (Archer, 2002). I grounded the study in literatures that drew from multiple Indigenous perspectives on teaching, learning and knowledge; social justice education and awareness; and postcolonial theory and decolonization. Thematically, the areas of ally experience that interested me most were their actions, emotions, and how they related to others in the spaces they occupied. Using the ally interview transcripts as raw data, I created found poems that reflected those themes. Constructing the poems while engaging in analysis led me to attempt to decolonize language and names. Hence, I made use of a disruptive strategy to bring attention to the extent to which language reflects colonization. In the final chapter of the dissertation, I outlined implications for adult education theory and practice as suggested by the study. In addition, I made suggestions for actions that allies-in-the-making may take up and directions for future study.

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The emotional regimes of settler colonialism: Ana Deumert, ‘Sensational signs, authority and the public sphere: Settler colonial rhetoric in times of change’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2019

25Sep19

Abstract: The article explores the emotional regimes of settler colonialism in post‐apartheid South Africa. The focus is on apocalyptic fears of the imagined eradication of whiteness. These fears are articulated in response to postcolonial/decolonial interpellations of abject whiteness, and are made visible in a range of sensational signs that circulate online and offline. The signs cluster around two themes that are central to the ideologies of settler colonialism: land (and its feared loss), and (white) bodies (and their feared disappearance). Following Sarah Ahmed (2004a,b), emotionally charged signs can be seen as actions (akin to words in speech act theory). In contrast to Jürgen Habermas’ conception of the public sphere as an idealized place of rational debate, the article argues that a combination of affect‐emotion‐feeling and the performance of ‘reason’—what Aristotelian rhetoric refers to as pathos and ethos—are integral for understanding public‐political discourses of whiteness at a time when white privilege has been called out globally (and locally), and white dominance has lost its stronghold.

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The disaster of settler colonialism: Andrew Kensinger, Unsettling Recovery: Natural Disaster Response and the Politics of Contemporary Settler Colonialism, PhD Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2019

25Sep19

Abstract: This dissertation is an ethnographic case study of the Christchurch Central City Rebuild. Following a series of severe earthquakes near Christchurch, New Zealand between September 2010 and February 2011, the central government declared a state of emergency and passed the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act 2011 (CER Act). This act mandated the creation of a new governing body, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, to oversee the development and implementation of a recovery strategy and plan for the Central City to be developed in cooperation with the Christchurch City Council and Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, the local Māori tribal authority. I analyze the structure of power established by the post-earthquake recovery legislation through the lens of Rebuild discourse, a discursive regime comprised of multiple political projects that each engaged in recovery in particular ways to enact their specific vision of what future Christchurch ought to be. I argue that the passage of the CER Act and the structure of power it created in post-earthquake Christchurch drew on the legacy of New Zealand’s settler-colonial history to enable the neoliberal settler state in its efforts to dispossess local Christchurch residents of access to their city while also maintaining the ongoing dispossession of the local indigenous group Ngāi Tahu in order to serve the interests of economic and political elites.

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Settler colonialism right now: Tatiana Dias, ‘Operation Amazon Redux’, The Intercept, 20/09/19

24Sep19

Excerpt: Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is planning to push industrialization and development in the interior of the country’s Amazon basin. It is far from a new project. For more than a century, a series of Brazilian governments have sought to move into the country’s interior, developing — or, to be more precise, colonizing — the Amazon. From the populist president-turned-dictator who made one of the early industrial pushes into the forest in the 1930s to the military dictatorship that ruled the country for two decades from 1964 until 1985, the justifications have largely been the same — economic gain and geopolitical paranoia — as were the often poor results.

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