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Situating Zionism: S. Nutt, Self-Determination, Sovereignty and History: Situating Zionism in the Settler-Colonial Archive, PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 2019

24Oct19

Abstract: Pre-existing models of Zionism as a Central European organic nationalist movement have sought to locate its rise to historic prominence primarily in the context of British imperial instrumentality which Zionist national histories themselves that have sought to emphasize. This thesis finds this specific connection unsatisfying, and therefore takes a broader historic and thematic view. Using the settler colonial research paradigm as a starting point, and its inherently comparative, trans-national and trans-historical perspective, it will attempt to trace several genealogies. The first, of the post-Enlightenment construction of the reasoning subject and the theory of self-determination, would be constituted against, and in front of, or prior to, the extended world, and the Others of a similarly constructed “mankind” that were seen to inhabit it. Through the philosophies of these self-determining subjects in common, in relation to private property and to the state that would secure it for them, it will come to an as yet unresolved problem of the sovereign subject and the universalization of that subject’s freedom in the sovereignty of the modern democratic state, a problem that many European thinkers would seek the resolution of in the potentiality of the settler colonial frontier. A second genealogy will trace the self-determining subjects of post-Enlightenment philosophy as they made their transits on the stage of history in and between what James Belich termed the “Settler Empire.” This imperium, encompassing the Second British Empire and the United States of America, contained and produced imagined communities, myths of racialized identity, technologies of racial government and settlement and attitudes to history and the future of the planet, that prefigured Zionism and practices of the state of Israel, which have proven to be one of its lasting legacies. A final genealogy will trace the sacred and secular messianic of Protestantism in Britain and America, which I argue after Gabriel Piterberg and Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin shows that Zionism is largely a continuance of Christian historicism and restorationist traditions rather than of the Jewish tradition and that the history of Protestantism in the settler colonial world had profound import on this development historically. This argument is reinforced by a close reading of key Christian and Jewish Zionist texts, analysed from the perspective of comparative settler colonial studies. This reveals that key ideological tropes of Zionism were pre-figured in the Christian Zionist tradition, that Jewish Zionism re-articulated Christian restorationist traditions, and importantly, that the legacies of settler colonial histories played an important role in shaping the development of Zionist ideology and the work of some of its key thinkers. The genealogy ultimately concludes that British elites and Zionist lobbyists in 1917 in many ways shared the same teleology of history and notion of history itself and their adoption of the Balfour Declaration was in large part consequence of this. The thesis closes by returning to the question of the unresolved problem of the universalization of self-determination in the modern democratic state and the question of sovereign violence in said state. This was a problem that European thought arguably has never fully resolved, but has found a heuristic outlet for the playing out of these issues in the open frontier of the settler colonies. We will show h0w profoundly dangerous a heuristic scheme this is by closely examining the play of sovereignties on the settler colonial frontier in America, Australia and then in contemporary Palestine, to indicate that such heuristic outlets are not to be seen as “practices of freedom” but rather mechanisms of structural invasion, elimination, and necropolitical violence.


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German settlerisms: Hollyamber Kennedy, Modernism’s Politics of Land: Settlement Colonialism and Migrant Mobility In the German Empire, from Prussian Poland to German Namibia, 1884-1918, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2019

24Oct19

Abstract: This dissertation charts a spatial, architectural, and landscape history of German settlement colonialism (Siedlungskolonialismus) in the Prussian Polish Provinces and German South West Africa, between 1884 and 1918. It situates this study from the framework of Germany’s late nineteenth century project of internal colonization (innere Kolonisation), which forms an almost exact temporal parallel with Germany’s external colonial interventions and can be seen as an indispensable part of its broader apparatus, which points to new connections within its entangled fields of operation. Following several generations of German architects, planners, social scientists, and settlement practitioners (Ansiedlungspraktiker) working at the borders of empire, this dissertation asks how the colonial question of land shaped modern planning discourse at the turn of the century. Broadly speaking, I look at how state control over the freedom of movement, colonial land reclamation, and the resistance these interventions encountered contoured modernism’s politics of land. This study illustrates how the languages of German architectural and planning modernism were marked by asymmetric and discordant processes of colonial spatialization—a multivalent transfiguration of the landscape in which the local, indigenous, and pre-colonial populations played a central, if often unacknowledged, role. This project seeks in turn to read that resistance, as interlocutor, back into the history of German colonial intervention in the two regions under discussion in this study. Finally, I argue that placing these episodes together within the same discursive framework, tracing the spatiality and aesthetics of German imperial expansion from the analytic of settlement, opens up a new set of questions regarding the role of enclosure and its epistemologies in architectural modernism. This brings the often-sidelined issue of agrarian modernity and the disciplining of the landscape (in the Foucauldian sense), to bear on modern architectural histories.


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The rurality of settlerism: Lisa Waller, Emma Mesikämmen, Brian Burkett, ‘Rural radio and the everyday politics of settlement on Indigenous land’, Media, Culture & Society, 2019

20Oct19

Abstract: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Country Hour radio programmes are produced regionally and promote specific understandings of rurality. This article presents an analysis that shows Indigenous people and issues are rarely sources or topics in Country Hour, and that stories about Indigenous land use are generally broadcast only if the land is used in a way that is seen as ‘productive’ through settler colonial eyes. It also argues the programme should include Indigenous voices and understandings of the land in imagining this space. It makes a theoretical contribution to media studies by extending on concepts of the ‘rural imaginary’ and ‘settler common sense’ to argue that the programme perpetuates a discourse that legitimates and valorises the use of ‘rural’ space for non-Indigenous people, concepts and activities. Indigenous people are noticeably absent and silent. Country Hour is therefore conceptualised as a media space that continues to transmit settler colonialism and its attendant myths.


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The nature of indigeneity: Shianna McAllister, ‘From Sacred to Public: A Hidden Place into the Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Park’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 118, 4, 2019, pp. 911-920

20Oct19

Abstract: This narrative essay discusses the transformative nature of colonialism in the creation of the Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Park by highlighting how the creation of the park simultaneously tokenizes and erases Indigenous presence on the land and in the waters. Taking up themes of alienation and everyday violence, this essay considers the use of stereotypical notions of Indigeneity in the campaign to save the Stein and how this impacted the way that Nlaka’pamux communities relate to the park today. In doing so, this paper also brings into question the complexities of settler allyship and their potential cooptation of Indigenous assertions of jurisdiction when settlers recenter themselves in the struggle.


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Indigeneities (note the plural): Andrew Shaler, Mariposa and the Invasion of Ahwahnee: Indigenous Histories of Resistance, Resilience, and Migration in Gold Rush California, PhD Dissertation, UC Riverside, 2019

20Oct19

Abstract: The Sierra Nevada mountain range has been home to a diverse array of indigenous nations since time immemorial. Academic histories have often delegated the stories and experiences of these Miwok, Yokuts, Mono, and Paiute peoples to a peripheral place. This dissertation examines the rich and diverse indigenous histories of the southern Sierra Nevada, focusing especially on the ways tribal communities actively resisted, negotiated, adapted and endured in the face of colonial violence and encroachment. Throughout the nineteenth century, tribal nations of the southern Sierra regions took up armed resistance against violent settlers, actively negotiated with settler and government forces, and adapted their societies to better cope with the traumatic threats they faced. Many tribal peoples in this period, for example, engaged in gold mining while simultaneously maintaining their traditional economies of hunting, gathering, and fishing. In response to the increasingly violent actions of Gold Rush settlers, an intertribal movement of resistance gradually crystalized in and around the Yosemite region. This movement was ultimately met with the “Mariposa War,” a disproportionately violent settler response which, with state sanction, aimed to crush all indigenous resistance to white settlement through forced removal.


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Food as reconciliation: Charles Z. Levkoe, Lana Ray, Jessica Mclaughlin, ‘The Indigenous Food Circle: Reconciliation and Resurgence through Food in Northwestern Ontario’, Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 2019

20Oct19

Abstract: Food policy councils provide a forum to address food systems issues and a platform for coordinated action among multisectoral stakeholders. While diverse in structure, most councils aim to develop democratic and inclusive processes to evaluate, influence, and establish integrated policy and programs for healthy, equitable, and sustainable food systems. The Thunder Bay and Area Food Strategy (TBAFS) is one such example that pro­motes regional food self-reliance, healthy environ­ments, and thriving economies through the implementa­tion of research, planning, policy, and program development. Despite its success, the TBAFS had no formal engagement from the Indigenous com­munities that make up almost 13% of Thunder Bay’s population (the highest urban Indigenous population in Canada). Recognizing this gap, in 2016, members of the TBAFS began to develop partnerships with regional Indigenous leaders and organizations to better understand the barriers and opportunities to engagement. The result was the establishment of the Indigenous Food Circle, which aimed to reduce Indigenous food insecurity, increase food self-determination, and establish meaningful relationships with the settler population through food. In this paper, we trace the history of the Indigenous Food Circle. Drawing on theories of decolonization and Indige­nous food sover­eignty, we argue that the Indige­nous Food Circle requires more than simply good­will from TBAFS members and other allied organizations. It demands confronting our histories and engaging in action that transforms current pat­terns of relations. It means embracing the discom­fort that comes with recognizing the prevalence of settler colonial­ism and developing respectful and just relation­ships followed by action. We conclude with some suggestions for continuing this work and the opportunity to experiment with food as a tool for reconciliation and resurgence.


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A diaspora in charge is a settler colony (more on Chinese settler colonialism): Els van Dongen, ‘Writing Modern Chinese History Inside Out: New Relational Approaches to (Un)thinking the Nation-State, Diaspora, and Transnationalism’, Twentieth-Century China, 44, 3, 2019, pp. 362-371

18Oct19

Abstract: Engaging with earlier scholarship that probes the linearity of the nation-state, recent works employ new relational approaches and foreground “Chinese” perceptions of “China.” They approach modern Chinese history through the lens of the emigrant-homeland dynamic, advocating a localized transnationalism and exploring the implications of the transnational turn on temporality. Also, situating the nation-state within history, they argue for a “shifting” China based on questions of ethnicity and cultural exchange.


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A Chinese settler-colonial project: Ying-kit Chan, ‘Ethnicity and Frontier Studies in Southwest China: Pan-Thai Nationalism and the Wartime Debate on National Identity, 1932–1945’, Twentieth-Century China, 44, 3, 2019, pp. 324-344

18Oct19

Abstract: In the 1930s and early 1940s, China was at war with Japan and China’s Nationalist government moved to Sichuan Province in the Southwest. An ideal location in many ways, Southwest China was also an ethnically diverse place, a crucible for the idea of a modern, unified Chinese nation held together by its constituents. The region became a seedbed for frontier studies and the rethinking of ethnic relations, a region that academics and administrators hoped to transform into a bastion of military resistance and national recovery. This article argues that Pan-Thai nationalism, promoted by the Thai state to spread Thai consciousness among Tai minorities in Southwest China, provided an impetus for these trends. Unity became the national purpose, and the cultural and economic development of Southwest China was conceptualized.


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Art appreciation (from afar) as settler ‘effective occupation’: Margaret Boyce, One Hundred Words for Conquest: Curating Arctic Sovereignty at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, PhD dissertation, McMaster University, 2019

16Oct19

Abstract: This dissertation examines a series of catalogues for Inuit art exhibitions held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG), spanning from 1967 to 2017. I argue that the discursive conventions of settler-Canadian art appreciation, especially those geared towards Inuit creative production, have resonances with the political strategies that Canada uses to prove effective occupation—a term from international law—of the Arctic. My work intervenes in this context by showing how art appreciation encourages modes of effective occupation that are not obviously political, insofar as these modes operate in the realm of affect. I first develop a critical framework inspired by Glen Coulthard’s concept of colonial recognition politics, to demonstrate that there is an affirmative recognition politics at work in the WAG catalogues. I then theorize that catalogues’ tendency to oscillate between an ethnographic (contextualist) analysis and an aesthetic (non-contextualist) analysis produces a tension that orients patrons towards the North accordance with Canada’s position on Arctic geopolitics. Building on the work of Eva Mackey, I argue that a mixed ethnographic-aesthetic view of Inuit art activates a particularly expedient form of belonging from afar in settler patron-readers, whereby they are encouraged to feel as if they are of the North, while never having to be there. My third chapter attends to how the WAG narrates the dramatic social transformations that Inuit experienced in the mid-20th century. The catalogues implicitly invalidate many Inuit’s experience of settler-colonial intervention by suggesting that the move to sedentary communities, often at the hands of the settler state, was inevitable and even desirable. This work provides strategies for critiquing instances of settler benevolence that are unique to the art world, and offers a template for how to approach exhibition catalogues as a genre—both of which are areas of scholarship that have been hitherto neglected.


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Settler colonialism and tri-racial borderlands: Christine Antoinette Rizzi, ‘My Feet Are Chained’: Settler Colonialism and Mobility in the Florida Borderlands, 1812-1866, PhD dissertation, University of Mississippi, 2019

16Oct19

Abstract: This project uses the framework of mobility to understand how settler colonialism functioned in a tri-racial southern borderland in the nineteenth-century. Nineteenth-century Florida constituted a borderland characterized by competition for land and resources among Seminole Indians, African Americans, and white Americans. White Americans regulated mobility, i.e. the physical movement of peoples, in order to privilege their own settlement in Florida, divest native peoples of their land, and enslave people of African descent. Beginning in 1812 and lasting through the first half of the 1860s, white Americans used legislation, the settlement of white families, the solidification of a slave system, and warfare against the Seminole Indians to Americanize the Florida peninsula by creating a white supremacist settler colony. Native and black peoples, however, used their own idiosyncratic forms of movement to resist americanization and the settler colonial system. The Civil War, itself a settler colonial war in Florida, witnessed the last gasp of the settler colonial system in Florida as slavery ended in 1865 and the Seminole Indians secured their authority in the state. White supremacy, however, would continue to reign in Florida through violence, white political control, and the rise of the tourism industry alongside Jim Crow segregation. The following project demonstrates the overriding importance of physical mobility to the process of national expansion and settlement, the persistence of borderland conflicts in the South after the colonial period, and the existence of a tri-racial South wherein native peoples wielded significant power and influence beyond the Removal Era.


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