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Digital land is land: Meryem Kamil, Towards Decolonial Futures: New Media, Digital Infrastructures, and Imagined Geographies of Palestine, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2019

25Oct19

Abstract: Towards Decolonial Futures: New Media, Digital Infrastructures, and Imagined Geographies of Palestine explores the unexpected breaks and fault-lines within Israeli settler-colonialism that are exacerbated by new media objects and practices. The dissertation examines both content and form of media that represent Palestine, revealing the limitations and possibilities of new media objects to provide a platform for contesting settler-colonialism and imagining decolonial futures for subaltern subjects. The key questions of the dissertation are as follows: What work do digital representations of Palestine and Palestinian land do for identifying fissures in settler-colonial structures? How can an attention to the materiality of digital infrastructures illustrate the ways the digital shapes, affects, and (dis)allows alternative Palestinian futures and relationality? How can a “postcolonial digital studies” framework emerge that distances itself from techno-determinism to critically understand subaltern subjects’ engagements with technology? To address these framing questions, Towards Decolonial Futures focuses on objects that seek to reframe understandings of Palestine and Palestinian resistance: new site Al Jazeera English’s 360-degree video tour of al-Aqsa compound in East Jerusalem alongside Palestinian group Udna’s video of the razed village Mi’ar’s history and potential future; mobile video game Liyla and the Shadows of War that represents life in the Gaza Strip alongside ImpactGames desktop video game Peacemaker: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict that asks players to work towards a two-state solution; digital mapping practices on mobile application Waze and the open-source mapping community of OpenStreetMaps; and finally, incendiary kites and balloons released by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in 2018. The network, a non-space that traverses geography while also beholden to infrastructure, acts as a site of encounter where questions regarding Palestinian futurity can be explored. The dissertation models a method for future scholarship on postcolonial digital cultures by understanding technology as indeterminate objects embedded in structures of power. Through materialist postcolonial studies methods and digital culture analyses including close reading and discourse analysis, I examine both the content and form of media objects including circulation, infrastructure, and representation. The dissertation seeks to critically analyze the potential of media objects in re-framing users’ understandings of Palestinian identity, land, and resistance. In other words, I demonstrate the political work new media forms allow for in building alternative decolonial Palestinian futures. Towards Decolonial Futures delineates the ways particular new media objects and practices gesture to challenging Israeli settler-colonialism and building towards Palestinian futurity. Rather than celebrating new media in a techno-determinist fashion, this dissertation shows the affordances and limitations of using technology that disavow the importance of geography but allow for reimagining the relationship between Palestinians, Israeli settler-colonial structures, and land. 


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Margaret Atwood’s settler subject: Lee Frew, ‘”A Whole New Take on Indigenous”: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as Wild Animal Story’, Studies in Canadian Literature, 2019

25Oct19

Excerpt: ORYX AND CRAKE, the first novel of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam trilogy, presents the social order of the relatively near future as suffering from the effects of environmental degradation and dehumanization caused by a rapacious, globalized capitalism. In the novel, what Greg Garrard describes as the “corrosive power of modernity” (239) has not been productively resisted because democratic protections have been supplanted by neoliberal, transnational corporations. This system of domination is overthrown, however, once a brilliant geneticist nicknamed Crake engineers and unleashes a virus to exterminate humanity. In salvaging what remains of the earth’s biosphere from flagrant abuses, Crake’s “supreme act of bioterrorism” (Glover 56) aims to make way for the “Crakers” or “Children of Crake,” a transgenic, humanoid species that Crake has created as a replacement for humans. After “zero hour” has passed and most of the people on earth have been murdered, the novel’s central character, Jimmy/Snowman, leads the Crakers from their corporate compound to a “lethal transgenic-infested environment” (Garrard 238), in which numerous other genetically modified animal species reside. Although Oryx and Crake speculates in such a way on a post-national and postnatural future, the novel’s representation of human-animal interactions nevertheless resonates with a tradition of animal writing established first in Canada in the late nineteenth century. As I will elucidate in what follows, Oryx and Crake largely conforms to the conventions of the wild animal story, which Atwood was instrumental in identifying as a genre in her contentious 1972 study Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. As such, Atwood’s novel inevitably rehearses the expedient disavowal of Second World cultural nationalism: ongoing colonizing acts are obscured by the text’s privileging of a settler subject-position imagined as beset by the imperium of modernity.


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Settler belonging now: Emily Potter, Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the Field on Settler-Colonial Place, Intellect, 2019

24Oct19

Description: In Writing Belonging at the Millennium, Emily Potter critically considers the long-standing settler-colonial pursuit of belonging manifested through an obsession with firm and stable ground. This pursuit continues across the field of the postcolonial nation today; the recognition of colonization’s destructive impacts on humans and environments troublingly generates a renewed desire to secure non-indigenous belonging. Focusing on the crucial role that Australia’s contemporary literature plays in shaping ideas of place and its inhabitation, Potter tracks non-indigenous belonging claims through a range of fiction and non-fiction texts to examine how settler-colonial anxieties about belonging intersect with intensifying environmental challenges. Significantly, she proposes that new understandings of unsettled and uncertain non-indigenous belonging may actually be fruitful context for decolonizing relations with place – something that is imperative in a time of heightened global environmental crisis.


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There are two ingredients to white supremacy: Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, Duke University Press, 2019

24Oct19

Description: In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy. Among texts and topics, King examines eighteenth-century British mappings of humanness, Nativeness, and Blackness; Black feminist depictions of Black and Native erotics; Black fungibility as a critique of discourses of labor exploitation; and Black art that rewrites conceptions of the human. In outlining the convergences and disjunctions between Black and Native thought and aesthetics, King identifies the potential to create new epistemologies, lines of critical inquiry, and creative practices.


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Settler cities are indigenous too: Heather Dorries, Robert Henry, David Hugill, Tyler McCreary, Julie Tomiak (eds), Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West, University of Manitoba Press, 2019

24Oct19

Description: While cities like Winnipeg, Minneapolis, Saskatoon, Rapid City, Edmonton, Missoula, Regina, and Tulsa are places where Indigenous marginalization has been most acute, they have also long been sites of Indigenous placemaking and resistance to settler colonialism.

Although such cities have been denigrated as “ordinary” or banal in the broader urban literature, they are exceptional sites to study Indigenous resurgence. T​he urban centres of the continental plains have featured Indigenous housing and food co-operatives, social service agencies, and schools. The American Indian Movement initially developed in Minneapolis in 1968, and Idle No More emerged in Saskatoon in 2013.

The editors and authors of Settler City Limits, both Indigenous and settler, address urban struggles involving Anishinaabek, Cree, Creek, Dakota, Flathead, Lakota, and Métis peoples. Collectively, these studies showcase how Indigenous people in the city resist ongoing processes of colonial dispossession and create spaces for themselves and their families.

Working at intersections of Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, urban studies, geography, and sociology, this book examines how the historical and political conditions of settler colonialism have shaped urban development in the Canadian Prairies and American Plains. Settler City Limits frames cities as Indigenous spaces and places, both in terms of the historical geographies of the regions in which they are embedded, and with respect to ongoing struggles for land, life, and self-determination.


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Pointing at someone else’s genocide makes you forget your own: Jason Chalmers, ‘Settled Memories on Stolen Land: Settler Mythology at Canada’s National Holocaust Monument’, The American Indian Quarterly, 43, 4, 2019, pp. 379-407

24Oct19

Abstract: Local and national contexts shape the way people commemorate the Jewish Holocaust. In settler-colonial contexts, Holocaust memory has a tendency to marginalize Indigenous peoples and obscure histories of colonial violence. In 2017 Canada unveiled its first national site dedicated exclusively to the Holocaust—the National Holocaust Monument (NHM)—several blocks away from the federal Parliament buildings in downtown Ottawa. I contend that while the monument ostensibly commemorates the genocide of European Jewry, it also reflects Canada’s ongoing history as a settler state founded on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. Proponents of the NHM—monument designers, spokespersons, and political supporters—engage with themes that are central to Canada’s national myth. They frame civilizational progress as the overarching narrative of both human and national history and identify contemporary Canada as the culmination of this history. This narrative marginalizes Indigenous peoples in mutually reinforcing ways: it erases Indigenous peoples from the landscape while at the same time constructing settler society as newly “indigenized” inhabitants. In this way, the Canadian state uses the NHM to legitimize the theft of land while also suppressing Indigenous claims to land.


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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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