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Indigenous migrants: Hélène Pellerin, ‘Indigenous Peoples in Canadian Migration Narratives: A Story of Marginalization’, Aboriginal Policy Studies, 8, 1, 2019, pp. 3-24

03Nov19

Abstract: An increasing number of migration scholars have been critical of the narrative of Canada’s successful immigration history, because of its neglect of colonial and discriminatory practices against Indigenous peoples and racialized minorities. This paper seeks to engage critically with this scholarship by insisting on the distinct places Indigenous peoples have in Canada’s immigration history and migration narratives. By comparing various administrative programs and policies on immigration, the paper identifies the continuous marginalization and invisibility of Indigenous peoples over time. A closer look at the contemporary employment conditions of both groups highlights the administrative process of making Indigenous peoples invisible and disconnected from the wage economy, unlike migrants who are explicitly constructed as connected to it. The paper concludes with a call for further critical migration scholarship, with the examination of the history of Indigenous-settler-immigrant entanglements over time. 


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Settlers facing demise: Derek Saunders, The Unsettled Settler: Settler Identity in PostApartheid South African and Post-Soviet Estonian Literature, MA Dissertation, Tallinn University, 2019

03Nov19

Abstract: In 2007, riots erupted in Tallinn, Estonia, the largest single instance of civil unrest since the fall of the Soviet Union. The stated cause of this was the removal of the Soviet-era monument to the unknown Soviet soldier, which after Estonian reindependence took on various meanings, being seen by ethnic Estonians as a reminder of the Soviet occupation, and by Soviet-era immigrants, the so-called Baltic Russians, as a sign of their belonging in Estonia. However, in spite of the Tallinn monument, relations between Estonian- and Russian-speakers were believed to be improving. However, the riots sparked by the monument’s removal brought these divisions to the fore. This separation has remained in the public consciousness, with many Estonian Russians believing themselves to be discriminated against due to the country’s language and citizenship laws, the perceived secondary status of Russian in Estonian life, and, more recently, the implementation of new language requirements in Russian-medium secondary schools, where at least sixty per cent of all school subjects must be taught in Estonian. In addition, the continued presence of approximately 85 000 stateless individuals in Estonia has raised concern about the state’s seeming unwillingness to integrate its large Russian-speaking population.

In a similar process, White South Africans’ perception that they are discriminated against and are unwelcome in the country of their birth has also developed and grown apace since the election South Africa’s first Black president, Nelson Mandela, in 1994. The end of apartheid was supposed to bring reconciliation, unity, and prosperity for all, yet racial divisions and a lack of real change for the majority of poor, mostly nonWhite South Africans, have remained realities of everyday life. The victimhood that White South Africans have adopted has manifested itself in the form of a lack of cross-cultural communication, a tendency to remember the benefits of apartheid for Whites while ignoring the draconian state, and a hankering after an idealised status quo that can never return. An increase in inflammatory demagoguery in the political sphere, a persistently high violent crime rate, and a loss of the exclusive attentions of the state have all contributed to a feeling of dispossession amongst White South Africans. Complaints about the current state of the nation may be met with responses along the lines of: “If you don’t like it, go back to Europe.” But how can White South Africans “go back” to Europe? And how can Russian-speakers resident in Estonia “return” to Russia? In South Africa, many of these people are the descendants of settlers that came to the respective countries three centuries ago; in Estonia, the first wave of Soviet-era immigration began in the early 1950s, not long after the beginning of the Soviet occupation. Children, parents, and grandparents have settled in Estonia, calling it home. Where should they go?

And yet, divisions remain within the changed society. With linguistic and social divisions persisting after the birth of the new order, the newly free countries found that there could be no quick and simple solution to the problems inherent in decades, or even centuries, of oppression and marginalisation of the Native Other. However, the settlers themselves remain. Cavanagh and Veracini argue that there is no such thing as a post-settler colony, as the settler, by definition, takes root and becomes resident within the colony. 1 Settlership and settler colonialism are resilient and persistent structures. Thus the question must be asked: what is to be done?

This thesis is based on the premise that, despite past injustices and the violence and inequity of the settler colony’s original formation, the settler is here to stay, be it in South Africa, Estonia, or elsewhere. Since these (often sizeable) populations remain in the country that they once occupied, living in close proximity with the people whose oppression they aided in, the issue of progression beyond violent clashes or restricted communication must be dealt with. The issue of the settler’s relationship with his home and the formation of settler identity in terms of the colony are the main focuses this thesis. In particular, the manner in which the settler is unsettled through his relation to both the colonising Empire and the colonised Native will be analysed. The prevailing model of the colonial system is dualist, envisaging a distant metropolitan Empire superior to the peripheral Colony. The settler is understood as a representative of the Empire, and not as a separate party at all. However, through his own distancing from the metropolis, and through the hybridisation of culture, the settler takes on an identity that has aspects of both Coloniser and Colonised, and yet is part of neither. When the prevailing hegemonic structure of settler superiority is disrupted, this disjuncture results in a necessary reworking of national narratives. During this process, however, the settler remains unsettled, leaving him unsure of his position within the new order. It is this that must be dealt with.


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If you and I share ancient ancestors, then what is yours is my inheritance: Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania, Duke University Press, 2019.

03Nov19

Description: From their earliest encounters with Indigenous Pacific Islanders, white Europeans and Americans asserted an identification with the racial origins of Polynesians, declaring them to be racially almost white and speculating that they were of Mediterranean or Aryan descent. In Possessing Polynesians Maile Arvin analyzes this racializing history within the context of settler colonialism across Polynesia, especially in Hawai‘i. Arvin argues that a logic of possession through whiteness animates settler colonialism, by which both Polynesia (the place) and Polynesians (the people) become exotic, feminized belongings of whiteness. Seeing whiteness as indigenous to Polynesia provided white settlers with the justification needed to claim Polynesian lands and resources. Understood as possessions, Polynesians were and continue to be denied the privileges of whiteness. Yet Polynesians have long contested these classifications, claims, and cultural representations, and Arvin shows how their resistance to and refusal of white settler logic have regenerated Indigenous forms of recognition.


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Indigenous deaths in custody are settler killings: Jacqueline Briggs, ‘Exemplary Punishment: T. R. L. MacInnes, the Department of Indian Affairs, and Indigenous Executions, 1936–52’, The Canadian Historical Review, 100, 3, 2019, pp. 398-438

01Nov19

Abstract: This article focuses on a series of death penalty recommendations written by Department of Indian Affairs (dia) Secretary Thomas Robert Loftus (T.R.L.) MacInnes between 1936 and 1952, arguing that these recommendations contributed to the increase in Indigenous executions in the 1940s. Identifying MacInnes as a “born bureaucrat” and member of the governing elite in a brief biographical sketch, professional and personal connections are drawn between MacInnes and Duncan Campbell Scott, arguing that MacInnes inherited Scott’s legacy and extended his influence for another generation in the department. A discussion of the social and political context of the dia in the 1940s describes changes in the department at the culmination of a long period of policy stability stretching from the early nineteenth century. Attention is paid to networks of knowledge production and centralization of control at dia headquarters in Ottawa, and how the information collected from the field enabled MacInnes to claim expertise as an amateur criminologist. An analysis of themes in the recommendations reveals a reliance on tropes from the quasi science of criminal anthropology in classifying Indigenous peoples on a scale of criminal responsibility that mapped onto racial hierarchies and the dia’s “civilization policy.” The article discusses how MacInnes constructed and deployed racializing narratives in response to the “problem” of Indigenous peoples rejecting whiteness and explains how he positioned Indigenous executions as a being in the “interest of Indian administration.”


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Settling on top of settler colonialism: Akinyele O. Umoja, ‘Settler-Colonialism and the New Afrikan Liberation Struggle’, in I. Ness, Z. Cope (eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2019

01Nov19

Excerpt: Most elementary students in the United States are instructed that the United States is “one nation, under God with liberty and justice for all.” This notion has been historically challenged by Black revolutionaries, particularly the New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) The New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) is an ideological trend in the Black freedom struggle that has sought independent statehood for African descendants in the United States. The distinguishing event for the modern manifestation of the NAIM is when 100 Black nationalists declared their independence from the United States in 1968 and identified the states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina as their national territory. The New Afrikans demanded reparations, including their national territory, as reparations from the United States (Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa 1969). 


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German Studies are invested in settler colonialism: Emina Mušanović, Ashwin Manthripragada, ‘Unsettling Futurity’, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 55, 4, 2019, pp. 398-414

01Nov19

Abstract: The project to find the role that German Studies can play in building transdisciplinary relationships with Indigenous Studies begins from the deleterious presumption that colonization in North America is a thing of the past and that the work of decolonization can therefore commence in an already-decolonized space. Imagining a different German Studies at this intersection is an inevitably future-oriented task that necessitates a problematization not just of the colonial past and still-ongoing settler colonial present but also of futurity itself. Informed in large part by Critical Indigenous Theory, this article intervenes on German Studies as a discipline that, in line with the settler colonial state, either relegates invasion, occupation, and settlement to the past or reconciles itself with continued invasion, occupation, and settlement through practices of inclusion. This article therefore calls for an expansion of the inquiry of German Studies’ investments in settler colonialism.


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Apologising to oneself does not count: Tom Bentley, ‘Settler state apologies and the elusiveness of forgiveness: The purification ritual that does not purify’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2019

27Oct19

Abstract: Focusing on Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations, this article asks: can colonial-settler states obtain forgiveness through political apologies? The article first defends Jacques Derrida’s observation that political apologies resemble the Christian practice of confession. In doing so, it subsequently draws on Michel Foucault’s (1979) detailed treatise on confession in order to assess the potential for absolution. For Foucault, the process of engaging in exhaustive truth-telling of sin before a demarcated authority provides a route to such atonement. By contrast, any potential unburdening of sin is lost when there is either no adequate authority to coax the confession or if the confession is less than full. The problem for the settler state is that it is predisposed to re-evoking the imaginary of the settler nation and Westphalian sovereignty in the very process of apologising. Consequently, there is no scope to submit before a higher sovereign body and any truth-telling is necessarily partial. As such, the central argument is that forgiveness for the settler state must remain elusive. The political opportunities arising from this for Indigenous peoples are discussed in the final section.


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The Nationality Law is not an ‘extreme right-wing document’, it is a settler colonial one: Ilan Pappe, ‘The Israeli Nationality Law: A Blueprint for a Twenty-first Century Settler-Colonial State’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 18, 2, 2019, pp. 179-191

27Oct19

Abstract: This article examines the recent Israeli Nationality Law within a historical context. It argues that the law in many ways manifests the settler-colonial identity of the State of Israel and as such the law embodies clearly both the achievements of the Zionist movement and Zionist future designs. The law is not an extreme right-wing document but rather an accurate reflection of the major characteristics of the Zionist settler-colonial movement in Palestine. Like all settler-colonial movements, the Zionist movement strove to include as few Palestinians as possible in it. The incomplete implementation of this goal during the 1948 Nakba has informed Israeli policies since 1948 and are the best explanation for the 2018 Nationality Law.


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Inclusion needs exclusion: Waleed Salem, ‘Who is Eligible to Exist? The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion of Settler Colonialism: The Case of Palestine, PhD dissertation, Near East University, 2019

27Oct19

Abstract: This PhD thesis aims to expand on the ‘logic of elimination’ of the settler colonial projects by analyzing in depth its dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, who is eligible to exist, and /or to be counted in these projects with a specific focus on Palestine as a case study; compared with three cases of The United States, South Africa and Ireland/ Northern Ireland.The thesis assumed that the Zionist project is characterized by ‘Demographic Elimination’ as the main feature of its inclusion and inclusion dynamics, combining the erasure of the land: place, space, territory, and the landscape; together with the displacement of the indigenous population internally and externally, and the replacement of them by settler colonialists brought from outside. These processes were practiced during the period of the Zionist Settler colonial project in Palestine in the 19th century leading to the establishment of the Israeli State in 1948,and continued after 1948 and 1967 by that State of Israel as being a “Settler Colonial State” in expansion. These methods are implemented in the frameworks of belligerent occupation, Apartheid, and Settler/ Internal Colonialism, combined with the structures of “Settler Democracy” and “Herrenvolk Democracy” that are both ethnically exclusive to the other politically, legally, economically (Through the settler colonial political economy), socially, and culturally. Since the 1940s the United States of America played the role as a ‘mother country’ to Israel and its settler colonial inclusion and exclusion ongoing project. Previously Britain played the mother country role. Before that the Evangelical Americans, German and the British created a Zionist Approach to conquer and settler Palestine in the early nineteenth century before Zionism emerged. The study is going over five chapters, and ends with a brief overview of the possibilities for decolonization, and for re-inclusion. 


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Settler colonialism as the alternative to revolution: Tamara Lea Spira, ‘Postrevolutionary Affect and the Consolidation of Zionism: The Case of Mercedes Sosa’, boundary 2, 46, 4, 2019, pp. 119-156

25Oct19

Abstract: This essay traces the Zionist conversion of iconic revolutionary folk singer Mercedes Sosa to theorize the shifting forms of racial empire in the movement from the Dirty War to the War on Terror. I read Sosa’s story as emblematic of the thwarted revolutionary dreams of the late twentieth century and the subsequent forms of recolonization—and in this case Zionism as settler colonialism—that came to flourish in their stead. The arc of Sosa’s work spans the transitions of the epoch and their attendant affective economies: from the revolutionary hopes of the 1960s–1970s, to the deep sorrows of the early military regimes, to the infinite deferrals of justice that animated the neoliberal project. In closing, I examine solidarity responses to the 2014 attack on Gaza. Embodying the rejuvenation of joint decolonial struggle, they rupture the Zionist stronghold that has shaped dominant structures of feeling, overwhelmingly laying purchase on the popular imagination.


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