settler colonial studies blog

You and the horse you are riding on: Richard Barcham, ‘Feral horses symbol of settler conquest’, Green Left Weekly, 1232, 13/08/19

27Aug19

Abstract: Those who want to be able to show their children and grandchildren a little piece of Australia’s natural beauty need to rally, because that beauty is under threat from the ‘Kosciuszko Wild Horse Heritage Act 2018’ – a law that turns a feral animal into a heritage icon.

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Teaching both rather than each: Sonia A. P. Grant, ‘”Pervasive, yet Fractured”: A Roundtable on Centering Indigenous Critiques and Teaching Settler Colonialism’, Cultural Anthropology, 20/08/19

27Aug19

Excerpt: This Teaching Tools post features a roundtable discussion between Clint Carroll, Jessica Cattelino, Jean Dennison, and Anne Spice. We discussed imperatives for teaching about settler colonialism in university classrooms, and creative strategies for doing so. The authors underscore the importance of centering Indigenous perspectives and critiques in their pedagogy and reflect on their personal experiences teaching about the continuance of Indigenous life. Throughout their responses, each scholar provides examples of texts, activities, and approaches that they’ve found helpful in their teaching for creating conditions for students to, as Clint Carroll says below, “offer critical contributions on the pervasive, yet fractured, project of settler colonialism.”

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Reversing assimilation in Chile: Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, Martin Fonck, Paolo Perasso, ‘Can natives be settlers? Emptiness, settlement and indigeneity on the settler colonial frontier in Chile’, Anthropological Theory, 2019

27Aug19

Abstract: Under settler colonialism, dispossession is enabled by discursive strategies aimed at curtailing indigenous entitlement to land. One such strategy is the mutual determination of the native-settler categories whereby the native status is bound to a condition of ahistorical emplacement to specific tracts of land, while settlers can claim native status towards the nation state as a whole. The settler-native dichotomy fails to account for the possibility that settlement could be appropriated by indigenous collectivities as a process constitutive of land attachment and a sense of belonging. This analysis of memories and practices of indigenous settlement in the Mapuche frontier region in Chile indicates that, unlike dominant narratives of emptiness and environmental transformation reproduced under settler colonialism, indigenous settlement can unfold as an unstable ontological achievement aimed at both transforming and maintaining the land’s topological diversity and ability to partake in human social life. Indigenous settlement can work as a critical intervention against the reductionist determination of the category of native through which indigenous land entitlement is delegitimized under settler colonialism.

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The settler-colonial city is a racialised city: Heather Dorries, David Hugill, JulieTomiak, ‘Racial capitalism and the production of settler colonial cities’, Geoforum, 2019

27Aug19

Abstract: This article considers how racial capitalism can be productively mobilized to extend contemporary work on settler colonial urbanism. It argues that scholars interested in the latter have much to gain from the recent flourishing of geographical work on the former. Our contribution begins by surveying some of the core tensions and affinities between the theoretical commitments that animate the settler colonial and racial capitalism frameworks. It then examines the historical development of Winnipeg, Manitoba in an effort to ground our thinking in an empirical context. In doing so, it surveys the key dimensions of that city’s settler colonial urban history, focusing on the ways that property relations have functioned as a technique of racial domination. It concludes with a consideration of how an engagement with racial capitalism offers important opportunities to develop a more expansive understanding of racialized oppression in this and other contexts.

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Global settler America: Carroll P. Kakel III, A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History: American Wests, Global Wests, and Indian Wars, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

23Aug19

Description: Challenging the still widely held notion that American history is somehow exceptional or unique, this book argues that early America is best understood as a settler-colonial supplanting society. As Kakel shows, this society undertook the violent theft of Indigenous land and resources on a massive scale, and was driven by a logic of elimination and a genocidal imperative to rid the new white settler living space of its existing Indigenous inhabitants.

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Indigenous Comics (i.e., nonsettler comics): Camille Callison and Candida Rifkind, ‘Introduction: Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography’, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 11, 1, 2019, pp. 139-155

21Aug19

Excerpt: Working on this project, we have learned that Indigenous comics and graphic novels matter for the same reasons, that Indigenous characters can be just as brave, resilient, complex, messy, smart, and funny as any other comic book heroes. And we have also learned that a popular form like comics can make those “zombies, vampires, and ungentled ghosts” of settler colonialism come alive in the most literal of ways, along with the superheroes, guardians, and tricksters needed to fight and survive them.

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Settler economies are flexible: Laura Maravall Buckwater, ‘Factor endowments on the “frontier”: Algerian settler agriculture at the beginning of the 1900s’, The Economic History Review, 2019

21Aug19

Abstract: This article examines rural settlement in Constantine, a département in French Algeria, at the beginning of the 1900s. By taking into account the timing of colonial settlement for almost 100 municipalities, it shows how the changing geographical conditions and the relative quantities of land and labour shaped the colonial land policy and settler modes of production. As fertile land grew scarcer on the settlement ‘frontier’, the ability of settlers to participate in the export market was increasingly dependent on the capacity to make use of modern agricultural techniques that required larger fields and intensive labour. Thus, the outcome of rural settlement was determined by the relative abundance of indigenous labour and the adaptation of the land policy to Algeria’s agricultural needs. The results demonstrate that—even within a country itself and during the settlement process—the colonial land policy and settler modes of production change significantly, depending on the region being occupied.

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Reactive settler colonialism (the Ulsterisation of Crimea): Serhy Yekelchyk, ‘The Crimean Exception: Modern Politics as Hostage of the Imperial Past’, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 46, 3, 2019

18Aug19

Abstract: The author proposes a new perspective on the political mobilization of ethnic Russians in the Crimea as reactive settler nationalism. After the Russian imperial conquest of the peninsula and the gradual displacement of the Crimean Tatars, the 1917 Revolution galvanized the Tatar national movement, which entered into an alliance with the Ukrainian one. A similar situation developed in the late 1980s, when the peninsula’s Russian ethnic majority found itself threatened by the loss of status and land in what could become a Tatar autonomy within Ukraine. Based on the implicit approval of Stalin’s genocidal deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, the political mobilization of ethnic Russians in the 1990s made the Crimea an easy target for Russian annexation, which, however, took place twenty years later because of Russia’s internal reasons and the Euromaidan Revolution being perceived as a threat to the Putin regime.

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Two ways of resistance (defending water from settler-colonial encroachment): Andrew Curley, ‘”Our Winters’ Rights”: Challenging Colonial Water Laws’, Global Environmental Politics, 2019

18Aug19

Abstract: Much of the scholarship on Indigenous water rights in the United States focuses on legal and political rights awarded or denied in water settlements. This article highlights the voice of settlement opponents within Diné communities over the proposed Little Colorado River Settlement in 2012 between the Navajo Nation and Arizona. Using interviews with key actors, observations of water hearings, and a mini focus group with settlement opponents, my research finds that the proposed water settlement produced contradictory logics, practices, and frameworks that combined two “traditions of Indigenous resistance,” one rooted in the language of self-determination and sovereignty and the other in emerging notions of decolonization. This hybridity of seeking increased water recognition within colonial law, while advocating for decolonial waterscapes, speaks to the complicated and fundamentally entangled political landscapes of Indigenous peoples. Ultimately, in opposing the water settlement, Diné opponents and community members demonstrate that they seek to rectify the injustice of ongoing settler colonialism and realize their collective capabilities as nations, not “Indians,” “tribes,” or “minorities” within and against the authorities of the colonial state.

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The urban ecology of contemporary settler colonialism: Jessica Parish, ‘Re-wilding Parkdale? Environmental gentrification, settler colonialism, and the reconfiguration of nature in 21st century Toronto’, Environmant and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2019

18Aug19

Abstract: In 21st century Toronto, the labour of caring for urban trees is entangled with both gentrification processes and the social reproduction of settler colonial space. This paper contributes to the study of environmental gentrification through a study of the social reproduction of settler colonial relations to land in the Parkdale–High Park area of Toronto. Specifically, I take up the hyper-visibility of some forms of social reproduction, in order to shed light on how the mundane, quotidian ‘non-work’ of living in/with/for capitalism becomes a site of privilege and a luxury pursuit for more affluent residents. The paper highlights the processes and practices whereby settler colonial urban subjects seek out ‘nature’ as a temporary outside where they can escape from widely accepted downsides of capitalist urbanism, including a diverse array of social and physical ills, from stress, to obesity, to ecological degradation. The paper asks: whose social reproduction does the presence of urban trees serve? In the context of 21st century financialized gentrification, cities are increasingly normalized as spaces of wealth and luxury. It is therefore crucial to pay attention to the raced, gendered, and colonial micro-politics through which urban ecologies are transformed in the service of an anti-democratic vision of the city as a space of leisure and luxury.

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