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What does the settler REALLY fear? Kai Bosworth,'”They’re treating us like Indians!”: Political Ecologies of Property and Race in North American Pipeline Populism’, Antipode, 2018

09Sep18

Abstract: While political ecologists have analysed the role of private property in creating and sustaining ecological inequalities, this approach does not often take property as a foundational element of racial capitalism. I argue that the defence of private property in contestation of North American oil pipelines demonstrates the centrality of property not only to the structural reproduction of capital, but also to its Euro‐American subject. Emphasising their affective attachments to land and resentment at dispossession, landowners and populist environmental organisations in the Great Plains frequently compared individual, white experiences of eminent domain to the historic and ongoing dispossession of Native Nations by suggesting “they’re treating us like Indians”. In order to account for the reproduction of white supremacy in environmentalism, I argue that we must understand how its oppositional politics are linked to economic interests‐in‐land and affective desires‐for‐land that maintain landed private property.


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The settler coloniality of golf: Kalin Bullman, Not the hole story: exclusivity at the Colwood Golf and Country Club, 1913-1934, MA Dissertation, University of Victoria, 2018

05Sep18

Abstract: The purpose of my study is to explore the early history of the Colwood Golf and Country Club as a way of understanding one aspect of settler colonialism – that is to study how certain tracts of Indigenous land were transformed into a rigidly controlled space where the natural environment was manipulated to exclude certain undesirable plants and non-human creatures, just as the social environment restricted access to a self-defined elite with prescribed cultural norms including behaviour, language, and protocols. Established in 1913, the Colwood Club became an important sporting space for upper-class individuals, and through its organisation, rules, by-laws, and entry process, the Colwood Club was fashioned as an exclusive space in Victoria’s sporting culture and remained so into the 1930s. Through formal and informal measures, the Club’s leadership and membership erected and strengthened various barriers that kept various individuals from joining based on their class, character, gender, race, and religion, among other criteria. Because of these measures, the Club’s property, which included a golf course and a clubhouse, became a restricted and controlled space in which a select number of individuals could enjoy the privileges that the Club offered. By doing a microhistory of the early years of the Colwood Golf and Country Club, I explore both the restrictive measures put in place by the Club and certain cultural concepts that influenced the decisions to make the Club an exclusive space, and demonstrate how this reflected larger trends in Victoria’s upper-class society.


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Settler colonialism’s ugliness, II: Katherine Morton, ‘Ugliness as Colonial Violence: Mediations of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women’, in S. Rodrigues, E. Przybylo (eds), On the Politics of Ugliness, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 259-289

05Sep18

Abstract: The discourse of murdered and missing Indigenous women (MMIW) from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is shaped by ugliness. From the frequent invocation of the colonial stereotype of the licentious and sexually deviant “Indian squaw” to the fetishization of the violence committed against these women, ugliness shapes all aspects of the mediation of Indigenous women’s disappearances. Settler colonial labels of “degeneracy” and “prostitute” are the most common shared ugly identities placed on MMIW in public discourse. There is a common conflation of a missing or murdered Indigenous woman with sex work, drug addiction, criminality and homelessness. All of these conflations hinge on the notion of “high risk” and ugly behaviours. Ugliness is essential to the symbolic and discursive violence found in the mediation of MMIW as amoral, criminal, animalistic, volatile and deviant others. Ugliness allows for a subordination of MMIW by placing them far outside the borders of dominant society. This chapter illustrates how the politics of ugliness have long aided and abetted the settler colonial project in Canada and how ugliness continues to shape the mediation of Indigenous missing and murdered women in mainstream media. By invoking a visual critical discourse analysis, it examines how missing and murdered Indigenous women are framed in missing posters published by the police.


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Settler colonialism’s ugliness: Stephanie K. Wheeler, ‘(Un)Mapping the City Beautiful: Orlando Florida’s “Ugly” Settler Colonial Legacy’, in S. Rodrigues, E. Przybylo (eds), On the Politics of Ugliness, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 127-150

05Sep18

Abstract: This chapter reflects on the production of Orlando, Florida and how the prevailing vision of its downtown development reiterates the enduring legacy of settler colonialism through its anti-homeless policies. These policies manifest as ugly laws, laws designed to define the unsightly and unwanted bodies of the citizenry in order to keep them from view. These laws are presented simultaneously as concerning aesthetics, safety issues, and even charity, while also serving the enduring settler colonial power structures that first shaped and sanctioned the state of Florida. The focus for analysis is the existing policies that regulate the downtown district of Orlando. These policies exhibit many of the characteristics that Susan Schweik identifies in the ugly laws, particularly with regard to the social, textual, and performative contexts in which the laws are deployed. Ultimately, this analysis denaturalizes downtown space in order to disrupt notions of white settler innocence and neutrality of space. The chapter demonstrates how Orlando’s strategies of city regulation are used to ensure the absence of ugliness, and how these techniques are deployed to maintain the dominance of both settler colonialism and the dynamics between settler society and ableism.


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‘Affectual erasure’ is settler colonial: Cynthia Margarita Tompkins, Affectual Erasure: Representations of Indigenous Peoples in Argentine Cinema, SUNY Press, 2018

02Sep18

Description: Affectual Erasure examines how Argentine cinema has represented Indigenous peoples throughout a period spanning roughly a century. Cynthia Margarita Tompkins interrelates her discussion of films with the ethnographic context of the Indigenous peoples represented and an analysis of the affective dimensions at play. These emotions underscore the inherent violence of generic conventions, as well as the continued political violence preventing Indigenous peoples from access to their ancestral lands and cultural mores. Tompkins explores a broad range of movies beginning in the silent period and includes both feature films and documentaries, underscored by archival and contemporary film stills. She traces the initial erotic projection, moving through melodrama to the conventions of the Western, into the 1960s focus on decolonization, superseded by allegorical renditions and the promise of self-expression in late twentieth-century documentaries. Each section includes an introduction to the sociohistorical events of the period and their impact on film production. Analyzed chronologically, the films evidence different stages in the projection of the hegemonic Argentine imaginary, which fails to envision the daily life of Indigenous peoples prior to conquest or in colonial times—and remains in denial of their existence in the present.


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Settler colonial violence/education: Lilly Brown, ‘Indigenous young people, disadvantage and the violence of settler colonial education policy and curriculum’, Journal of Sociology, 2018

02Sep18

Abstract: In this article, I argue that settler colonial violence is manifest both in the experiences of Indigenous young people in their engagement with the education system, and in the fact that despite a decade of targeted efforts to close the gap in Indigenous educational ‘disadvantage’ – it still remains. Drawing on a small qualitative study undertaken with Indigenous high school students from across New South Wales, Australia, this research reveals that the dismissal of Indigenous knowledge, stories and perspectives within the classroom is reflective of the broader absence in education policy of a critical engagement with the past and how it impacts both the present and the future. Before concluding, I bring settler colonial theory in relation to sociologist Johan Galtung’s conceptualisation of violence to put forward a complex reading of Indigenous educational disadvantage as a product of colonial dispossession.


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Settler nostalgia: Astrid Rasch, ‘Postcolonial Nostalgia: The Ambiguities of White Memoirs of Zimbabwe’, History and Memory, 30, 2, 2018, pp. 147-180

02Sep18

Abstract: This article introduces the concept of “postcolonial nostalgia” to discuss four memoirs by white expatriate Zimbabweans Alexandra Fuller and Peter Godwin. The authors borrow from colonial discourse, producing nostalgic accounts that may appeal to their Western audiences but which fail to challenge colonial mindsets in the way that their postcolonial self-image might lead us to expect. Written at a time of national crisis in Zimbabwe, the memoirs contrast a past of childhood innocence and settler contributions with a dystopic present. Even as the authors dissociate themselves from the white supremacist regime of the past, they present white settlers as benevolent and productive, and seem to lament the replacement of white order with nothing.


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Settler colonialism and informal empire: Kurt Korneski, ‘”A Great Want of Loyalty to Themselves”: The Franco-Newfoundland Trade, Informal Empire, and Settler Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of World History, 29, 2, 2018, pp. 145-183

31Aug18

Abstract: Historians of settler colonialism have posited that the interplay of four interlinked types of relations are central to settler societies. In particular, they emphasize shifting interactions between indigenous peoples and a settler collective; between the settler group and exogenous subaltern groups (for example, migrants of Asian and African descent in North America); between indigenous and exogenous subaltern groups; and the overlap between settler states and the imperial metropoles that spawned them. This case study of the Franco-Newfoundland trade suggests that analyzing and theorizing settler contexts also requires close attention to the informal, mainly commercial, linkages between settler states and the multiplicity of rival metropoles vying for access to spaces and resources in the “Age of Empire.”


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Neo-Victorian fiction returns to settler colonisation: Jessica Hewenn, Unsettling: Settler Colonial Environments in Neo-Victorian Fiction, PhD Dissertation, the Australian National University, 2018

29Aug18

Abstract: In the introduction to the first issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, Marie-Luise Kohlke specifically emphasised neo-Victorian texts concerning ecological trauma, and called for an examination of how such texts represent “the commodification and destruction of the natural world and its biodiversity, and the resulting alienation of humankind from its environment” (2008, 8). Neo-Victorian fiction concerned with colonialism and its environmental impact is abundant, with three of the ten Costa Book Awards since the turn of the new millennium granted to novels taking this as their subject. Yet to date scholarship has largely foregone examination of environmental concerns. Neo-Victorian scholarship that has explored the representation of natural history has done so by focalising through the religion/science dichotomy, examining texts that are concerned with the crisis-of-faith provoked by Darwinian theories of natural selection. This has missed what I argue is the significance of many of the post-millennial British novels set in the colonies: that they are staged not at the frontiers of the expanding empire, or at the forefront of the intellectual disruption caused by Darwin’s theories, but in the literal and figurative settlements that follow. By reimaging the process of settling, particularly the way in which settlers assume a form of indigeneity to the new landscape and reshape their identity through it, these novels grapple with the ongoing issues of identity in a world of dislocation, both literal and metaphorical, from the natural world. This thesis takes up Kohlke’s original call for engagement with colonialism’s environmental impact as is represented in neo-Victorian texts. Drawing on settler colonial theory in order to redress the occlusion of the specific and ongoing politics of settler colonies in existing debates, I argue that post-millennial British neo-Victorian fiction is returning to sites of settler colonisation to question the settlement narrative, often disrupting it by forestalling the possibility of remaining unsettled. Examining Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000), Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves (2006), Jem Poster’s Rifling Paradise (2006), Nicholas Drayson’s Love and the Platypus (2007), Jeremy Page’s The Collector of Lost Things (2013) and Rebecca Hunt’s Everland (2014), this thesis explores texts set in Australia and Canada, and extends to the polar regions as the limit of Victorian settlement, in which the landscapes are simultaneously beyond human encapsulation and profoundly susceptible to human impact. Taken together, these analyses demonstrate that settler colonial neo-Victorian novels incorporate and disrupt the process of identification with the colonial natural world, and in doing so present settler colonial ecological identity as unresolved. Moreover, I argue that it is by reading these texts with a focus on their representations and interrogations of the natural world that their ambivalence about belonging becomes evident, and that this unsettled effect is a reflection of postmillennial concerns about ecological awareness. In their witness-bearing to the trauma of settlement and their questioning of what it means to belong to an environment, these texts are willing to face the possibility of permanent unsettlement.


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Immersive invisibility against settler‐colonial exclusion: Andreas Hackl, ‘Immersive invisibility in the settler‐colonial city: The conditional inclusion of Palestinians in Tel Aviv’, American Ethnologist, 2018

26Aug18

Abstract: The inclusion of indigenous people into settler‐colonial cities is often highly conditional. For middle‐class Palestinian citizens of Israel in Tel Aviv, the invisibility of their ethnonational identity is a precondition for their access to the city’s neoliberal economy and “liberal” lifestyle. To increase their mobility and socioeconomic opportunities, they employ diverse tactics of immersive invisibility. Some, in hopes of overcoming their stigmatized identity, aspire to be recognized as unmarked individuals and successful professionals. Although immersive invisibility does not change settler‐colonial exclusion, it determines how much individuals can achieve within existing parameters. Tactics of immersive invisibility do not necessarily enable one to transcend categorical difference and racialized exclusion, but they reveal how neoliberal inclusion and the settler‐colonial politics of exclusion become entangled and constitute each other.


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