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Settler indigenisation through inebriation: Daniel Monterescu, Ariel Handel, ‘Liquid indigeneity: Wine, science, and colonial politics in Israel/Palestine’, American Ethnologist, 2019

13Aug19

Abstract: Israel/Palestine is a site of bitter struggle over definitions of indigeneity and settlerness. In 2008 the first Palestinian “indigenous wine” was released, introducing a discourse of primordial place‐based authenticity into the wine field. Today, winemakers, scientists, autochthonous grapes, and native wines reconfigure the field of gastronationalism. Palestinian and Israeli wine industries can now claim exclusive historical entitlement in a global era in which terroir, that is, the idiosyncratic place, shapes economic and cultural value. Against the dominance of “international varieties,” this indigenous turn in the wine world mobilizes genetics, enology, and ancient texts to rewrite the longue durée of the Israeli/Palestinian landscape. The appropriation of the indigenous grape illustrates the power of science, craft, and taste to reconfigure the human and nonhuman politics of settler colonialism.


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The consciousness of decolonisation: Abraham Bradfield, ‘Decolonizing the Intercultural: A Call for Decolonizing Consciousness in Settler-Colonial Australia’, Religions, 2019

11Aug19

Abstract: Throughout this article I make a case for decolonizing consciousness as a reflexive orientation that reforms the ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous life-worlds are navigated and mutually apprehended in a settler colonial context. I consider how through decolonizing dominant habits of thought and action an intercultural dialogue responsive of diverse and mutually informing realities may be cultivated. This article aims to first introduce the key characteristics of ‘decolonizing consciousness’, this being reflexivity, deep listening, and border thinking. Using the Darling River in New South Wales, Australia, as a backdrop, I consider how place and environment are agents and facilitators of a contested intercultural dialogue where Indigenous and non-Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies often come to head. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with Aboriginal residents in far western New South Wales, as well as literature on decolonizing theory and Indigenous knowledge systems from different socio-cultural contexts, I argue that intercultural dialogue begins with reflexive contemplation of how one’s lived experiences is embedded in the realities of others.


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If settlers must reproduce they must grow adult too: Ken Gelder, Rachael Weaver, ‘The Australian Kangaroo Hunt Novel (1830–1858) as Bildungsroman’, Australian Literary Studies, 34, 1, 2019

09Aug19

Abstract: In Australia – and no doubt in other outposts of empire – hunting provided a rite of passage for ambitious young men to learn about local conditions and establish their colonial credentials. This article argues that the kangaroo hunt narrative therefore operated as a kind of colonial bildungsroman or novel of education. It examines three kangaroo hunt novels written by women who had in fact never travelled to Australia. The first is Sarah Porter’s Alfred Dudley; or, The Australian Settlers (1830). Porter’s novel shows that the kangaroo hunt is incompatible with the bourgeois sensibilities of an aspirant settler who revolts from ‘scenes of blood’. But other colonial bildungsromans invested in the adventure of hunting as a reward in itself. The second published kangaroo hunt novel is Sarah Bowdich Lee’s Adventures in Australia; or, the Wanderings of Captain Spencer in the Bush and the Wilds (1851); the third is Anne Bowman’s The Kangaroo Hunters; or, Adventures in the Bush (1858). Lee’s novel gives free play to the kangaroo hunt, exploring its possibilities for both Aboriginal and settler identities, while Bowman’s novel puts the kangaroo hunt into an ethical discussion of killing on the frontier. These British novelists imagine frontier experiences in colonial Australia by drawing on a range of Australian source material. Their novels present Australia as a testing ground for young male adventurers. The kangaroo hunt is their defining experience, something to survive and in some cases, finally, to disavow as they transition from emigrants to settlers.


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Systematic colonisation is a powerful force: Philip Steer, ‘Edward Gibbon Wakefield on Systematic Victorian Colonization and Its Discontents’, Brewminate, 01/04/19

09Aug19

Abstract: In 1829, Edward Gibbon Wakefield published his first statement of a “systematic” theory of settler colonization, A Letter from Sydney: The Principal Town of Australasia. Wakefield offered a novel economic theory of the relationship between population density and successful colonization, hinging on the establishment of a minimum or “sufficient” price on colonial land, and he spent the next few decades at the forefront of efforts to promulgate and profit from it. The theory of systematic colonization was first put into practice in 1836 in the new colony of South Australia, and then more extensively in New Zealand in 1839; in both cases, speculative mania in Britain precipitated the invasion of thousands of settlers, even though the settlements were as yet unmapped. Wakefield’s theories were also at the center of a new imperial imaginary that emerged in Britain by the 1850s, which established Australia and New Zealand as pastoral locations capable of restoring damaged British subjects. In spurring the vast expansion of migration to Australia and New Zealand, contributing to the genocide and dispossession of indigenous populations, and accelerating the destruction of local ecosystems, systematic colonization constitutes one of the most powerful and destructive examples of the ability of Victorian representations to permanently reshape the globe.


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An old argument in a new dress (that settler societies are peaceful while postcolonial ones are prone to civil war): Manuel Vogt, Mobilization and Conflict in Multiethnic States, Oxford University Press, 2019

09Aug19

Description: Why are some multiethnic countries more prone to civil violence than others? This book examines the occurrence and forms of conflict in multiethnic states. It presents a theory that explains not only why ethnic groups rebel but also how they rebel. It shows that in extremely unequal societies, conflict typically occurs in non-violent forms because marginalized groups lack both the resources and the opportunities for violent revolt. In contrast, in more equal, but segmented multiethnic societies, violent conflict is more likely.

The book traces the origins of these different types of multiethnic states to distinct experiences of colonial rule. Settler colonialism produced persistent stratification and far-reaching cultural and economic integration of the conquered groups, as, for example, in Guatemala, the United States, or Bolivia. By contrast, in decolonized states, such as Iraq, Pakistan, or Sri Lanka, in which independence led to indigenous self-rule, the colonizersâ âdivide and ruleâ policies resulted in deeply segmented post-colonial societies.

Combining statistical analyses with case studies based on original field research in four different countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, Vogt analyzes why and how colonial legacies have led to peaceful or violent ethnic movements.


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The future of settler colonial studies: Jeffrey Ostler, ‘Locating Settler Colonialism in Early American History’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 443-450

07Aug19

Excerpt: IS settler colonialism simply a trendy buzzword, or will it become an enduring and useful concept in North American history in general and early American history in particular? Recent criticisms (some seen in print, some heard in conference sessions and hallways) object to theorizations and applications of settler colonialism that appear reductionist and teleological, arguably leave little room for contingency, and risk reversing advances in the field that highlight Native agency and resist declensionist narratives of Native disappearance. Other critical commentary seems to imply that settler colonialism may be a useful framework (at least for some times and places) if modified and more carefully applied, while still other commentary suggests that the concept is more or less useless, if not dangerous, and should be encouraged to expire. Whether or not criticisms of settler colonialism will lead to the concept’s elimination is anyone’s guess. In my view, however, the concept is useful not simply as a theoretical construct but because it identifies an actual historical phenomenon. For that reason, it should be interrogated and refined, but it should also be retained. In other words, in the same way that scholars who object to particular theories of capitalism seldom deny capitalism’s reality, problems in theorizing settler colonialism do not mean that it does not exist. If settler colonialism is a name for an actual historical phenomenon, where and when can it be found in early American history?


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Settler colonialism’s (and settler colonial studies’) ‘portability’ (like the frontier story): Samuel Truett, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Borderlands of Early America’, The William and Mary, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 435-442

07Aug19

Excerpt: THE notion of settler colonialism looms large in our tales of U.S. empire. Unlike other colonialisms, which pull peoples and resources into networks of labor, trade, and extraction, settler colonialism “destroys to replace,” Patrick Wolfe wrote. It eliminates others to establish new societies on stolen land. Though scholars often focus on “the elimination of the Native,” some take a broader view. Kelly Lytle Hernández, for instance, uses a settler colonial lens to link the conquest of Native California to efforts to exclude, corral, and incarcerate Mexicans, Chinese, and African Americans. Indeed, settler colonialism’s most salient feature as a category of analysis is its portability. It is, according to Wolfe, “a structure not an event.” That insight gave him a way to compare North America and Australia—but he also meant, in the context of postcolonial studies, that settler colonialism was far from post. Its “logic of elimination” is alive and well. As a link between past and present, it is especially useful in historicizing ongoing capitalist, settler, and state efforts to dispossess, remove, exclude, contain, coerce, and exploit.


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The settler colonialisms of Others: Jennifer M. Spear, ‘Beyond the Native/Settler Divide in Early California’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 427-434

07Aug19

Excerpt: MUCH of the theorizing about settler colonialism has been rooted in analyses of the Anglophone world, but most of North America was initially colonized by the French or the Spanish. What can we learn about the settler colonial narrative by focusing on their colonies? As Nancy Shoemaker notes, there are, in addition to settler colonialism, “many varieties of colonialism,” determined by “colonial motivations and [the] consequences” of colonization. The cases of French and Spanish North America demonstrate that several colonialisms could exist simultaneously, sometimes in tandem, other times in tension. The complex social and racial orders that developed, especially in places such as colonial California, also make these colonies productive spaces for thinking about how racialized settlers fit into what settler colonial theorist Patrick Wolfe terms the “Native/settler divide.”


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‘What do we do with the Black “settler”‘? Tiya Miles, ‘Beyond a Boundary: Black Lives and the Settler-Native Divide’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 417-426

07Aug19

Excerpt: WHAT do we do with the black “settler”? Or rather, what do we do with the more than one hundred thousand African Americans who moved north and west onto violated and usurped Indigenous lands in the nineteenth century? We have sidestepped this question in studies of the American Midwest and West even as settler colonial frameworks of analysis have reshaped Native American history. As a result, we still reach for the familiar and now especially charged term settler when describing black residents, with all of the conceptual baggage that word carries in our present historiographical moment as indicating agents or subagents of the settler colonial state beset with a “recurring need to disavow the presence of indigenous ‘others'” in the interest of controlling Native lands. Black “pioneer” (a label that “performs a similar disappearing act” by “discursively eras[ing] the indigenous peoples who were there ab origine“) likewise still appears in studies of the Black West. For example, a recent book that admirably reveals and enlivens black farmers’ experiences in the nineteenth-century Midwest asserts that African Americans were “pioneers in the purest sense, willing to risk their freedom and their lives for the chance to gain not just land but their rights.” Certainly the pollution of the category “pioneer,” rather than its purity, begs attention. But, as a cohort of scholars, we rely on this loose and yet electrified terminology—echoing an earlier historiography’s language for white settlers—of heroic black settlers, pioneers, and buffalo soldiers taming a wild frontier and organizing land use for civilized productivity, even though we recognize that black survivors of slavery were a distinctive group.

African Americans who came to dwell in the house of settler colonialism struggled to emerge whole from a proximal past of stolen lives and labor. They fought against stacked odds to set down new roots and grow strong families and communities. 


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‘Settler colonial theory’s problem space’: Stephanie E. Smallwood, ‘Reflections on Settler Colonialism, the Hemispheric Americas, and Chattel Slavery’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 407-416

07Aug19

Excerpt: ATTENTION to “settler-driven” colonies as a distinct form first emerged in the context of the long nineteenth century of modern British imperial expansion. […] 

The difference between settler and franchise colonialisms manifests itself most clearly in the outcome of nationalist mobilizations for independence. In the franchise setting, postcolonial independence results in white colonists being “throw[n] . . . out,” according to Wolfe. Having only ever been a demographic minority, “the Whites turn out not to have been established in the same way that settler colonizers have been established.” But the opposite is the case in the settler context. Regarding Australia, for instance, Wolfe explains that white colonists “went to Australia to replace Aborigines and themselves become Australians, so their children would be Australians and Australia would then go on forever.” Given that, what settler colonial critique problematizes most directly is the enduring continuity of colonial relations of power […]. As the claim most readily associated with settler colonial critique asserts, “settler colonizers come to stay,” with the result that the invasion at the heart of settler colonialism “is a structure not an event.” Settler colonial theory’s problem space, then, is the as-yet-unfinished project of decolonization, and the principal work the settler colonialism concept does is to account for the process of supersession whereby the settler colony is replaced by the “settler-colonial state”—the independent polity born of (white) colonizing settlers turned sovereigns …


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