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The settler’s search for psycurity: Rachel Jane Liebert, Psycurity: Colonialism, Paranoia, and the War on Imagination, Routledge, 2018

03Nov18

Description: Across the world, the rhetoric and violence of white supremacy is rising up. Yet, explanations for white supremacist attacks typically direct attention toward an unreasonable, paranoid state of mind, and away from the neocolonial security state that made them.

Offering a response to US expressions of white supremacy, Liebert reads paranoia as a dis-ease of coloniality by following its circulation within the ultimate place of reason, indeed a key arbitrator of it: Psychology. Through reflexivity, interviews, participant observation, scientific artefacts, and public art, this unique work seeks to argue for and experiment with unsettling the entwined coloniality of Psychology and the current political moment, joining with struggles for a world where it is not only white lives that matter. Tracing the spinning cogs and affective coils of the prodromal movement – a program of research that, capturing potential psychosis, illustrates the serpentine workings of a control society – Liebert argues that, within a context of psycurity, paranoia hides as reasonable suspicion, predicts the future, brands threatening bodies, and grows through fear, thereby seeping into the cracks of white supremacy, stabilizing it. Catching this argument as itself enacting psycurity, she then engages the more-than-human to search for paranoia’s decolonizing, otherworldly potential; one that may revive the psykhe – breath – of psychologies too.

Calling for psychologies to leave Psychology’s comfort zone and make space for imagination, this performative, interdisciplinary work will engage students, researchers, and activists from an array of disciplines who wish to examine a critical and creative response to present-day racism and fascism.


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Peace-seeking settlers? Rob Harper, Unsettling the West Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

03Nov18

Description: The revolutionary Ohio Valley is often depicted as a chaotic Hobbesian dystopia, in which Indians and colonists slaughtered each other at every turn. In Unsettling the West, Rob Harper overturns this familiar story. Rather than flailing in a morass, the peoples of the revolutionary Ohio Valley actively and persistently sought to establish a new political order that would affirm their land claims, protect them against attack, and promote trade. According to Harper, their efforts repeatedly failed less because of racial antipathy or inexorable competition for land than because of specific state policies that demanded Indian dispossession, encouraged rapid colonization, and mobilized men for war.

Unsettling the West demonstrates that government policies profoundly unsettled the Ohio Valley, even as effective authority remained elusive. Far from indifferent to states, both Indians and colonists sought government allies to aid them in both intra- and intercultural conflicts. Rather than spreading uncontrollably across the landscape, colonists occupied new areas when changing policies, often unintentionally, gave them added incentives to do so. Sporadic killings escalated into massacre and war only when militants gained access to government resources. Amid the resulting upheaval, Indians and colonists sought to preserve local autonomy by forging relationships with eastern governments. Ironically, these local pursuits of order ultimately bolstered state power.

Following scholars of European and Latin American history, Harper extends the study of mass violence beyond immediate motives to the structural and institutional factors that make large-scale killing possible. The Ohio Valley’s transformation, he shows, echoed the experience of early modern and colonial state formation around the world. His attention to the relationships between violence, colonization, and state building connects the study of revolutionary America to a vibrant literature on settler colonialism.


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Indigenous infopolitics is settler colonialism in action: Matthew MacLellan, ‘Indigenous Infopolitics: Biopolitics as Resistance to White Paper Liberalism in Canada’, Theory & Event, 21, 4, 2018 pp. 914-936

03Nov18

Abstract: This article argues for a reading of biopolitics as a mechanism of political empowerment under conditions in which the state perpetuates exclusion by paradoxically affirming the political equality of marginalized individuals or groups. After differentiating Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of biopolitics from its conventional interpretation in Giorgio Agamben, I show how the Canadian state counterintuitively perpetuates Indigenous exclusion through an inclusive liberalism that re-affirms Indigenous persons as full and equal citizens. I then conclude the article by showing how a statistics or information-based discourse of population—an Indigenous infopolitics—has concomitantly become an indispensible means of Indigenous resistance in Canada today.


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Resisting settler colonialisms: Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, ‘Framing Resistance Call and Response: Reading Assata Shakur’s Black Revolutionary Radicalism in Palestine’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 46, 3-4, 2018, pp. 226-231

31Oct18

Excerpt: My mother was affirming what we grew up knowing with absolute certainty about the United States: It was founded as a settler colonial state that, like Israel, sought (but failed) to erase the existence of Indigenous communities, and consolidated this settler colonial project by first kidnapping and enslaving Africans, and institutionalizing racist discrimination. In our minds, these conditions resonated with the stories of Palestinian uprootedness and dispossession that we heard daily. Neither abstract nor distant, these stories of Black and Indigenous struggle were part of our families’ histories.


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Settler cinema: Lin-chin Tsai, ‘Mapping Formosa: Settler Colonial Cartography in Taiwan Cinema in the 1950s’, Concentric, 44, 2, 2018

31Oct18

Abstract: This paper suggests a methodological intersection of cultural geography and settler colonial criticism to critique and reflect on the Han settler colonial structure in Taiwan by examining two representative but rarely studied propaganda films madeat the inception of the Nationalist rule in the 1950s, Bai Ke’s Descendantsof the Yellow Emperor(1955) and Chen Wen-chuan’s Beautiful Treasure Island (1953). More specifically, by investigating the discursive function of maps and mechanisms of mapping, it will be demonstrated how these two films construct a form of “settler colonial cartography”through the cinematic visualization of space and the use of multimedia, and how the Han settler colonial consciousness is formulated and expressed in cinema. To further differentiate the narrative and discourse of settler colonialism from classic colonialism, I compare these two films with another imperial policy documentary from the Japanese colonial period, Southward Expansion to Taiwan(1940). By doing so, thispaper argues that the comparative analysis between the two modes of colonial domination can allow us to envision more effective ways of decolonization practices to “unsettle”the Han settler society. That is why settler colonial criticism matters, particularly for Taiwan at this point in its history.


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Settlers think the anthropocene: Bruce Erickson, ‘Anthropocene futures: Linking colonialism and environmentalism in an age of crisis’, Environment and Planning D, 2018

28Oct18

Abstract: The universal discourse of the Anthropocene presents a global choice that establishes environmental collapse as the problem of the future. Yet in its desire for a green future, the threat of collapse forecloses the future as a site for creatively reimagining the social relations that led to the Anthropocene. Instead of examining structures like colonialism, environmental discourses tend to focus instead on the technological innovation of a green society that “will have been.” Through this vision, the Anthropocene functions as a geophysical justification of structures of colonialism in the services of a greener future. The case of the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement illustrates how this crisis of the future is sutured into mainstream environmentalism. Thus, both in the practices of “the environment in crisis” that are enabled by the Anthropocene and in the discourse of geological influence of the “human race,” colonial structures privilege whiteness in our environmental future. In this case, as in others, ecological protection has come to shape the political life of colonialism. Understanding this relationship between environmentalism and the settler state in the Anthropocene reminds us that the universal discourse of the Anthropocene is intertwined with the attempt to sustain whiteness into the future.


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Responding: Akim Reinhardt, ‘Indigenous Adaptations to Settler Colonialism’, Middle West Review, 5, 1, 2018, pp. 151-157

28Oct18

Excerpt: Those Native peoples who were able to remain behind in the Midwest have done so either without reservations or with reservations that are generally much smaller than their Western counterparts. They have also done so while maintaining smaller populations amid a more thorough pattern of colonizer settlement. And so during the past 200 years, Indigenous midwesterners have often had to develop somewhat different tactics and strategies for resistance, survival, and adaptation than have some of the Native peoples across the Missouri River. Native nations of the Midwest have countered ongoing colonial pressures through political and economic struggles, and cultural and social adaptations, in a long, multifaceted equation that Ojibwe scholar Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe from Minnesota’s White Earth Reservation) has termed “survivance.”


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Mining settler manhood: Christopher Herbert, Gold Rush Manliness: Race and Gender on the Pacific Slope, University of Washington Press, 2018

26Oct18

Description: The mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes bring to mind raucous mining camps and slapped-together cities populated by carousing miners, gamblers, and prostitutes. Yet many of the white men who went to the gold fields were products of the Victorian era: educated men who valued morality and order. Examining the closely linked gold rushes in California and British Columbia, historian Christopher Herbert shows that these men worried about the meaning of their manhood in the near-anarchic, ethnically mixed societies that grew up around the mines. As white gold rushers emigrated west, they encountered a wide range of people they considered inferior and potentially dangerous to white dominance, including Latin American, Chinese, and Indigenous peoples.

The way that white miners interacted with these groups reflected their conceptions of race and morality, as well as the distinct political principles and strategies of the US and British colonial governments. The white miners were accustomed to white male domination, and their anxiety to continue it played a central role in the construction of colonial regimes. In addition to renovating traditional understandings of the Pacific Slope gold rushes, Herbert argues that historians’ understanding of white manliness has been too fixated on the eastern United States and Britain. In the nineteenth century, popular attention largely focused on the West. It was in the gold fields and the cities they spawned that new ideas of white manliness emerged, prefiguring transformations elsewhere.


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Settlements and their schemes: Roy Jones, Alexandre M.A. Diniz (eds), Twentieth Century Land Settlement Schemes, Routledge, 2018

26Oct18

Description: Land settlement schemes, sponsored by national governments and businesses, such as the Ford Corporation and the Hudson’s Bay Company, took place in locations as diverse as the Canadian Prairies, the Dutch polders, and the Amazonian rainforests. This novel contribution evaluates a diverse range of these initiatives.

By 1900, any land that remained available for agricultural settlement was often far from the settlers’ homes and located in challenging physical environments. Over the course of the twentieth century, governments, corporations and frequently desperate individuals sought out new places to settle across the globe from Alberta to Papua New Guinea. This book offers vivid reports of the difficulties faced by many of these settlers, including the experiences of East European Jewish refugees, New Zealand soldier settlers and urban families from Yorkshire.

This book considers how and why these settlement schemes succeeded, found other pathways to sustainability or succumbed to failure and even oblivion. In doing so, the book indicates pathways for the achievement of more economically, socially and environmentally sustainable forms of human settlement in marginal areas. This engaging collection will be of interest to individuals in the fields of historical geography, environmental history and development studies.


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Science fiction as a battleground against settler colonialism: Dallas Hunt, ‘”In search of our better selves”: Totem Transfer Narratives and Indigenous Futurities’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 42, 1, 2018, pp. 71-90

24Oct18

Abstract: Much contemporary science fiction urges us to focus on eco-activism and sustainable futures in order to prevent environmental catastrophe. From a critical Indigenous and anticolonial perspective, however, the question becomes “for whom are these futures sustainable”? Set in a nondescript desert dystopia, George Miller’s film Mad Max: Fury Road 2015 alludes to the westerns of yesteryear and the Australian “outback”—spaces coded as menacing in their resistance to being tamed by settler-colonial interests. This article charts how Miller’s film, while preoccupied with issues pertaining to global warming and ecological collapse, replicates and reifies settler replacement narratives, or what Canadian literature scholar Margery Fee has referred to as “totem transfer” narratives (1987). In these narratives, ultimately the “natives” transfer their knowledges and then disappear from view, helping white settlers remedy the self-created ills that currently threaten their worlds and enabling them to inherit the land.

In the second half, I also consider how Indigenous futurist texts offer decolonizing potentials that refute the replacement narratives that persist in settler-colonial contexts. In particular, I examine how Indigenous cultural production emphasizes the importance of the intergenerational transfer of Indigenous knowledges and refuses the hermeneutic of reconciliation that seeks to discipline Indigenous futures in the service of a settler-colonial present.


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