settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism is transcolonial as well as transnational: Briony Neilson, ‘Settling Scores in New Caledonia and Australia: French Convictism and Settler Legitimacy’, Australian Journal of Politics & History, 2018

10Oct18

Abstract: This article explores the entanglements of Australia and New Caledonia as settler colonies with convict histories. Existing historiography focuses on the importance of the Australian model in inspiring the French to transport convicts to settler colonies, and has explored the moral panic that erupted over the menace of escaped French convicts invading the Australian colonies after the abolition of British convict transportation. My analysis shifts the focus onto the construction of settler colonial authority, analysing the ways in which comparisons drawn by contemporary observers of New Caledonia and Australia served primarily to solidify the legitimacy of settler rule in Australia and increase its regional hegemony into the first few decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on original French and English‐language sources, including the writing of the obscure French convict poet Julien de Sanary, this article makes the case for understanding New Caledonia and its bagne not as unwanted reminders of Australia’s penal origins, but rather as useful sites of projection for settlers in Australia. Constant arguments about the archaic and authoritarian nature of French penal policy and colonialism helped erase the memory of convictism and strengthen settler authority and legitimacy in Australia and internationally. By considering the trans‐imperial entanglements of Australia and New Caledonia, we can further reveal the dynamics of settler colonialism and the processes of disavowal and disassociation that sustain it.

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Feeding settler colonialism: Sarah Rotz, Lauren Wood Kepkiewicz, ‘Settler colonialism and the (im)possibilities of a national food policy’, Canadian Food Studies, 5, 3, 2018, pp. 248–258

07Oct18

Abstract: In this perspectives piece we ask: is it possible for a national food policy to form the foundation for sustainable and equitable food systems in Canada? First, we argue that under the current settler government, such a policy does not provide this foundation. Second, we consider what might be possible within the scope of a national food policy, examining our responsibilities as settlers to hold our government accountable so policies do not further exacerbate food system inequities. To mitigate some of the harmful effects of current food-related policy, we offer several suggestions regarding how settlers might begin to rethink our investments in the Canadian state and settler food systems: 1) repatriate land and transform private property structures; 2) support Indigenous food provisioners; and 3) build knowledge and support for non-extractive relationships. These suggestions will not decolonize a national food policy; rather, they present short-term actions that we urge settlers to advocate for in order to address some of the ways the Canadian government attempts to restrict Indigenous food systems.

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Indigenising settlers: Roger Blackley, Galleries of Maoriland: Artists, Collectors and the Māori World, 1880–1910, Auckland University Press, 2018

05Oct18

Description: Galleries of Maoriland introduces us to the many ways in which Pākehā discovered, created, propagated and romanticised the Māori world at the turn of the century – in the paintings of Lindauer and Goldie; among artists, patrons, collectors and audiences; inside the Polynesian Society and the Dominion Museum; among stolen artefacts and fantastical accounts of the Māori past.

The culture of Maoriland was a Pākehā creation. But Galleries of Maoriland shows that Māori were not merely passive victims: they too had a stake in this process of romanticisation. What, this book asks, were some of the Māori purposes that were served by curio displays, portrait collections, and the wider ethnological culture? Why did the idealisation of an ancient Māori world, which obsessed ethnological inquirers and artists alike, appeal also to Māori? Who precisely were the Māori participants in this culture, and what were their motives?

Galleries of Maoriland looks at Māori prehistory in Pākehā art; the enthusiasm of Pākehā and Māori for portraiture and recreations of ancient life; the trade in Māori curios; and the international exhibition of this colonial culture. By illuminating New Zealand’s artistic and ethnographic economy at the turn of the twentieth century, this book provides a new understanding of our art and our culture.

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Self determination and its settler-colonial ends: Joseph Massad, ‘Against Self-Determination’, Humanity, 2018, pp. 161-191

03Oct18

Excerpt: Settler-colonists would only accede to a recognition that the indigenous peoples whose lands they usurped are nations on condition that self-determination not only would not lead to the declared goals of “independence” and “liberation” from settler-colonialism, but would effectively obstruct any path towards those goals. This can be observed in settler-colonies around the globe.

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The urban form of settler colonialism: Naama Blatman‐Thomas, Libby Porter, ‘Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2018

30Sep18

Abstract: In the conspicuously geographical debate between ‘North’ and ‘South’ urbanism, settler colonial cities remain displaced. They are located in the ‘North’ but embody ‘South‐like’ colonial dynamics and are hence neither colonial nor postcolonial. Heeding the call to theorize from ‘any city’, this article aims to contribute to a more systematic theorization of the urban from settler colonial cities. In it we focus on the work property does to materialize the settler colonial city and its specific relations of power. We identify three faces of property—as object, as redress and as land—and use case vignettes from Israel/Palestine and Australia to consider how each register continues to inform the functioning of settler colonial cities. We find that, through property, dispossession and settlement are continuously performed and creatively enacted. At the same time, the performance of property reaffirms the endurance of Indigenous land systems amid ongoing colonization. The article makes a contribution to contemporary debates in urban studies about the importance of surfacing the specificities of urban experiences around the world, while further unsettling the dissociative nature of urban property.

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Complicit? Cameron David Ian Greensmith, ‘(Unsettling) White Queer Complicities: Toward a Practice of Decolonization in Queer Organizations’, Intersectionalities, 6, 1, 2018

30Sep18

Abstract: This article expands upon important and growing dialogue around how non-Indigenous peoples can work in solidarity with Indigenous peoples to support their nationhood and sovereignty in the wake of ongoing white settler colonialism in Canada. In particular, this article centralizes queer organizations and implicates their investments in white queerness as sustaining contemporary colonial projects. While queer organizations work toward social change surrounding all things queer and trans, their connections to white supremacy and settler colonialism routinely go unexamined. In an effort to bring light to queer organizations’ and workers’ complicities in white settler colonialism, this paper makes use of the narratives of 41 non-Indigenous lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) service providers who voluntarily participated in in-depth interviews. By paying attention to their stories of deflections of responsibility in ongoing white supremacist and settler colonial projects, this article considers the extent to which white service providers and service providers of colour can address and embed decolonization within queer organizations in Canada. Together, these non-Indigenous LGBTQ service providers, organizers, and activists carry the potential to utilize their own experiences and understandings of complicity to shape their relationships with Indigenous peoples in ways that support their nationhood and sovereignty.

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Settler colonialism is a kind of ecopsychology: Alysha Tylynn Jones, David Sean Segal, ‘Unsettling Ecopsychology: Addressing Settler Colonialism in Ecopsychology Practice’, Ecopsychology, 10, 3, 2018

28Sep18

Abstract: This article identifies settler colonialism as a phenomenon existing outside of awareness in the field of ecopsychology and begins to explore what “unsettling” ecopsychology may entail. Unsettling the field is a process of revealing how ecopsychology reproduces and reinforces settler colonialism. This process requires deep reflection among practitioners regarding how they can challenge the dominant colonial narratives that underpin settler privilege within the field itself. Offered as additional points of engagement in the process of unsettling are practices of accountability and relationality through the learning of history and cultural protocols and engagement in acts of solidarity with Indigenous land-based resurgence. By opening up this dialogue, we (the authors) seek to make a critical contribution to the field of ecopsychology and, as non-Indigenous/settler practitioners, to encourage a discussion of accountability for those doing therapeutic land-based nature connection work as visitors on traditional Indigenous territories.

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Native slavery and settler colonialism: John M. Monteiro, Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America, Cambridge University Press, 2019

26Sep18

Description: Beginning in the 1490s in the Caribbean, and through the slow demise of native slavery in North and South America over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of Amerindians were subjected to enslavement, captivity, and forced labor. Indian slavery was practiced across the Americas, at one point in time or another, in jurisdictions claimed by every European power that engaged in New World colonialism. Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, Scottish, French, and Russian colonists held native Americans as slaves, exerting their mastery over them and dealing in them as chattel. In parts of the United States, Mexico, and Brazil, native slavery survived the ending of European colonial claims and the formation of independent nation-states, lasting well into the nineteenth century. By that point, however, the numbers of Amerindians held as slaves in Brazil and the United States were tiny compared to the masses of African and Afro-American captives that made up the absolute majority of the populations of the two country’s plantation zones. Indian slavery thus seemed a small thing-economically, socially, demographically-when set alongside African and Afro-American slavery, on the ascent through the first half of the new century in Brazil and the southern United States alike. Until recently-and for many good reasons-scholarly attention to Indian slavery has been similarly dwarfed by the volume of care and attention paid to African and Afro- American slavery in the Americas. Over the last fifteen years, however, the study of native slavery has undergone a remarkable boom among North American historians

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Settler colonialism’s ‘scenes of captivity’: Jonathan Nash, The Politics of Wounds, Dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2018

23Sep18

Abstract: What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to Fanon and Mbembe, I argue that settler colonialism produces what I term as “scenes of captivity,” where the settler nation-state detains, incarcerates, and interrogates brown, Indigenous, and black bodies both for producing knowledge about those bodies and protecting and securitizing the nation-state. Understanding the ways in which settler colonialism’s logics of detention, captivity, and interrogation, both then and now, provides insights into how we might begin dismantling detention centres.

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The gender of settler colonialism: Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, Kyle Whyte, ‘Theorizing Indigeneity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism’, in Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, Luvell Anderson (eds), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race, 2018, pp. 152-168

23Sep18

Access the chapter here.

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