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Story painting against settler colonialism: Seán Kerins, Kirrily Jordan, ‘Mining Giants, Indigenous Peoples and Art: Challenging Settler Colonialism in Northern Australia Through Story Painting’, in Paul Cooney, William Sacher Freslon (eds), Environmental Impacts of Transnational Corporations in the Global South, Emerald Publishing, 2018, pp. 35-71

21Nov18

Abstract: The historian Patrick Wolfe reminds us that the settler colonial logic of eliminating native societies to gain unrestricted access to their territory is not a phenomenon confined to the distant past. As Wolfe writes, “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” In the Gulf of Carpentaria region in Australia’s Northern Territory this settler colonial “logic of elimination” continues through mining projects that extract capital for transnational corporations while contaminating Indigenous land, overriding Indigenous law and custom and undermining Indigenous livelihoods. However, some Garawa, Gudanji, Marra, and Yanyuwa peoples are using creative ways to fight back, exhibiting “story paintings” to show how their people experience the destructive impacts of mining. We cannot know yet the full impact of this creative activism. But their body of work suggests it has the potential to challenge colonial institutions from below, inspiring growing networks of resistance and a collective meaning-making through storytelling that is led by Indigenous peoples on behalf of the living world.


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Settler modernists: Dan Tout, ‘A gumtree is not a branch of an oak’: Indigenising settler nationalism in 1930s Australia, PhD dissertation, Swinburne University, 2018

21Nov18

Abstract: Questions over what, whether and when the Australian nation is or might be have been of consistent concern throughout most of Australia’s settler-colonial history and remain so today. In attempting to construct a national culture and identity, settler Australians, like settlers elsewhere, have invested in the establishment of a national literary tradition. This project of national cultural construction has emphasised a dual process of acclimation and maturation to claim the settler collective’s attainment of maturity and legitimacy within the metropolitan domain of world literature and belonging to the land that provides the underlying imperative for settler colonisation itself. In the standard story of inevitably unfurling national cultural development towards these two ends, Britain has played the part of ‘the mother country’ (or parent oak), while Australia is the child (or seedling) that eventually and inevitably reaches maturity in the new soil. In Manning Clark’s famous application of Henry Lawson’s phrase, Britain was ‘the Old Dead Tree’, Australia ‘the Young Tree Green’.

Yet these narratives of national maturation operate to conceal the nature and the complexity of the environment the national literary culture was supposed to be acclimatising to, and becoming expressive of. In constructing narratives of Australian national cultural development in terms of bilateral oppositions between colony and metropole, such narratives neglect the complexities of the settler-colonial, as distinct from the colonial, ‘situation’. On the contrary, this thesis is premised on the central proposition that the settler-colonial situation is fundamentally conditioned by a triangular system of relationships involving settler, metropolitan and Indigenous agencies. In this schema, the settler is compelled towards both indigenisation and neo-European replication, while both trajectories are similarly founded on the prior displacement — both literal and symbolic — of pre-existing Indigenous populations.

The 1930s was a crucial moment in the project of national identity construction, in which prevailing circumstances combined to make settler nationalism simultaneously more urgent and increasingly problematic. In particular, the demise of the ‘doomed race’ ideal, which had until then envisaged the inevitable and imminent resolution of the triadic relations of settler colonialism into the dyadic ones of ‘franchise’ or ‘dependent’ colonialism, meant that settlers, and especially settler nationalists, found themselves confronting the prospect of a persistent Indigenous presence within the boundaries of the settler nation. They were therefore compelled to negotiate the more complex — for the nationalist project, at least — trilateral relations characteristic of settler colonialism, rather than the relatively more straightforward bilateral ones of colonialism proper.

This dissertation focuses on this historical and cultural context, and on three exemplary settler nationalists working within and responding to it: writer, editor and publisher, Percy Reginald ‘Inky’ Stephensen (1901–65); poet and editor, Reginald Charles (Rex) Ingamells (1913–55); and writer and polemicist, Alfred Francis Xavier Herbert (1901–84). At a historical moment marked by ambivalence in Australia’s relationship with metropolitan England, Stephensen, Ingamells and Herbert sought to establish settler Australia’s national cultural independence. In doing so, they each encountered, and responded to, the reality of a persistent and resistant Indigenous presence within the settler nation. While Stephensen posited himself and the Australian national culture he sought to construct as inheritors of both European and Indigenous traditions, and Ingamells engaged in a project of radical indigenist appropriation that separated and usurped a symbolic indigeneity from its bearers, Herbert celebrated instead the potentiality of ‘Euraustralian’ hybridity to overcome his own, and by extension his compatriots’, illegitimacy. While these approaches are ostensibly at odds, the central argument advanced in this thesis is that they share a drive towards settler indigenisation and independence as their common, overriding concerns.

 


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Augmented reality for decolonisation? Amanda Almond, Rob McMahon, Diane P. Janes, Greg Whistance-Smith, Diana Steinhauer, Stewart Steinhauer, ‘We are all related: Using augmented reality as a learning resource for Indigenous-settler relations’, Northern Public Affairs, October 2018, pp. 38-41

15Nov18

Excerpt: Efforts to improve Indigenous-settler relations include recognizing and learning the truths of past and ongoing settler-colonialism in Canada, as well as challenging them. Access to appropriate educational resources is one important approach, as are projects that support critical, reflective and reciprocal relationship-building through the co-development of resources by teams comprised of members from Indigenous and settler communities. In this context the We are all related: Using augmented reality as a learning resource for Indigenous-settler relations project invites participants to co-create and share digital stories to build and strengthen understandings of treaty and Indigenous-settler relations.


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A settler-colonial Garibaldi: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Postcolonial Garibaldi?’, Modern Italy, 2018

14Nov18

Abstract: This paper offers an original interpretation of Garibaldi’s political style and imaginary. The aim is to account for Garibaldi’s sustained engagement with the possibility of displacement as an alternative to revolution. It begins in an afternoon on a remote small island between two oceans. Garibaldi was considering his options. When he returned to Italy, he had seriously reflected on the possibility of colonising other places. Colonising had entered the picture. It was a postcolonial Garibaldi.

Questo saggio si propone di offirire una nuova interpretazione dell’origine dello stile politico e dell’immaginario di Garibaldi. L’obiettivo è quello di considerare la maniera in cui Garibaldi pensava la relazione tra emigrazione e rivoluzione. L’articolo inizia in un pomeriggio su un’isola remota tra due oceani. Garibaldi stava considerando diverse opzioni. Quando tornò, la possibilità di colonizzare altri luoghi ere stata ponderata attentamente. Si trattava di un Garibaldi postcoloniale.


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Settler courts uphold settler colonialism: Michael McCrossan, ‘Eviscerating Historic Treaties: Judicial Reasoning, Settler Colonialism, and ‘Legal’ Exercises of Exclusion’, Journal of Law and Society, 2018

14Nov18

Abstract: This article examines the reasoning of Canadian Supreme Court justices in the area of Aboriginal treaty rights, paying particular attention to the Grassy Narrows (2014) decision. By not only engaging with the internal logics contained within treaty rights decisions, but also by further contextualizing the decisions and comparing them to the transcripts of their respective hearings, it provides an additional perspective on the socio‐cultural relations of power inscribed within the legal field. Ultimately, the article demonstrates that members of the Supreme Court have displayed a consistent orientation towards logics predicated upon the absorption and elimination of Indigenous legal perspectives. In fact, what a reading of the hearing transcripts together with the Grassy Narrows decision reveals is a judicial privileging of established property interests and extractive impulses underpinning the settler‐colonial development of the Canadian state.


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The American West is a global settler West: Janne Lahti, The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives, Routledge, 2018

14Nov18

Description: The American West and the World provides a synthetic introduction to the transnational history of the American West. Drawing from the insights of recent scholarship, Janne Lahti recenters the history of the U.S. West in the global contexts of empires and settler colonialism, discussing exploration, expansion, migration, violence, intimacies, and ideas. Lahti examines established subfields of Western scholarship, such as borderlands studies and transnational histories of empire, as well as relatively unexplored connections between the West and geographically nonadjacent spaces. Lucid and incisive, The American West and the World firmly situates the historical West in its proper global context.


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Concluding a book on settler archives: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Afterword: The global archive of liminal settlement’, in Yu-ting Huang, Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (eds), Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space and Race, Routledge, 2018

13Nov18

Abstract: Yu-ting Huang and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower have collected essays that reflect on the production, circulation, and signification of settler material texts. Settlers, by definition, move, and as they do, and as they retrospectively reflect on the implications of their displacement, they produce and reproduce specific texts and create archives of material and discursive production. This book is about what their cultural products do, singularly and collectively, and what they do in the contextual settings they operate in. This is an important direction of research; to my knowledge it had not been attempted before.


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Introducing a book on settler archives: Yu-ting Huang, Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, ‘Introduction: Settler colonialism and its cultural archives—ways of reading’, in Yu-ting Huang, Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (eds), Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space and Race, Routledge, 2018

13Nov18

Abstract: How might we conceptualize settler colonialism differently when we study contemporary Germans in Namibia as enduring settlers, despite the fact that their forefathers failed to maintain a settler sovereign state? What if settler-colonial research took seriously the possibility that a community center in New Zealand’s Far North could do the work of decolonization? And what consideration would result from finding ways to interpret settler narratives and folk culture—say, in the forms of romance novels and rural ballads—not just as subtle arms of hegemonic settler ideology but instead for thinly veiled anxiety and fear?


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The natural hazards of settler colonialism: Annick Thomassin, Timothy Neale, Jessica K. Weir, ‘The natural hazard sector’s engagement with Indigenous peoples: a critical review of CANZUS countries’, Geographical Research, 2018

13Nov18

Abstract: Natural hazard management agencies across the settler countries Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States (or CANZUS countries) are presently involved in an increasing range of collaborative and consultative engagements with Indigenous peoples. However, perhaps because these engagements are diverse and relatively recent, little has been written about how they emerged and, from these agencies’ perspectives, little is known about how these engagements find their motivation within government natural hazard management frameworks. In this article, we review existing academic and grey literature to categorise the origins of recent and present engagements and then identify and elaborate on the key rationales informing natural hazard management agencies’ interactions with Indigenous peoples. We argue both that the broad principles of sustainability and inclusion have transformed these interactions and that developmentalist approaches and an overemphasis on Indigenous peoples’ traditional knowledge can sometimes undermine this work. Incorporating critiques of settler colonialism relevant to the CANZUS context, this review aims to support established, emerging, and future collaborative engagements by investigating and analysing the literature to date.


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Black power against settler colonialism: Black Power Greg Burris, ‘Palestine in Black and White: White Settler- Colonialism and the Specter of Transnational Black Power’, in Paola Bacchetta, Sunaina Maira, Howard Winant (eds), Global Raciality: Empire, PostColoniality, DeColoniality, Routledge, 2018

13Nov18

Abstract: For the already besieged and malnourished population of Gaza, the summer of 2014 was a summer of hell. For 51 days and nights, Israel decimated the Strip, dropping some 20,000 tons of explosives-the rough equivalent of six nuclear bombs-on one of the world’s most densely populated territories: a piece of land smaller than Liechtenstein, about one-tenth the size of Rhode Island, and inhabited by a captive population of nearly two million people. Unable to escape the destruction, people took refuge wherever they could-in hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, and other United Nations-designated shelters. However, even these buildings were not always spared. By the end of the devastation, over 2,200 Palestinians were dead, over 10,000 wounded, and over a quarter of a million displaced. To use a metaphor frequently invoked by Israeli strategists, this was another instance of Israel “mowing the grass.”


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