settler colonial studies blog

Interwar settler modernism: Melinda Cooper, ‘”Adjusted” Vision: Interwar Settler Modernism in Eleanor Dark’s Return to Coolami’, Australian Literary Studies, 33, 2, 2018

04Aug18

Abstract: This essay uses the interwar writing of Eleanor Dark to destabilise the binary between nationalist-realism and experimental modernism in accounts of Australian literature. Dark’s novels mix modernist and experimental styles with middlebrow and vernacular forms, while also legitimating settler nationalist desires. This constellation was not unique to Dark but was part of a broader phenomenon which I call interwar settler modernism: the modernism produced by settler artists and writers between the wars, often through a promiscuous engagement with elite, middlebrow and vernacular forms of culture. Dark’s novel Return to Coolami (1936) exemplifies interwar settler modernism, combining recognisably modernist techniques with middlebrow romance, elements of vernacular culture such as photography, cinema and motor travel, and cultural-nationalist ideas. This study traces some of the contours of interwar settler modernism through examining Dark’s ideas about visual perception, time, memory and interior psychological states. It will explore the implications of settler modernism for studies of Australian literature and, more broadly, for global modernism studies.

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Settler belonging facing other-than-human-actors: Margaret Boyce, ‘Taking Cereals Seriously in Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese’, Canadian Literature, 234, 2017

02Aug18

Abstract: This articles proposes a fresh reading of the classic Canadian novel, Wild Geese, by Martha Ostenso. By way of Anna Tsing’s discussion of the cross-species influence of crops on the development of Western agricultural societies, I reconceive of the novel’s surly antagonist Caleb as beholden to the fruits of his labour. I thereby develop a reading of Ostenso’s frontier narrative that takes seriously the role of other-than-human actors in the novel, which counters scholarship that ascribes solely symbolic status to the novel’s plantlife, while also revealing the novel’s instrinsic anxiety regarding the limitations of settler belonging.

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Ignorance in the settler colony: Angélique Stastny, Settler regimes of ignorance: teaching indigenous-settler relationships in schools in Australia and Kanaky/New Caledonia, PhD Dissertation, University of Melbourne, 2018

31Jul18

Abstract: Schools are institutions for knowledge dissemination but at the same time also sites of power. They inculcate students into specific ideological and emotional norms and social relations. Far from being politically neutral institutions, schools disseminate government-sanctioned ways of understanding and engaging in Indigenous-settler relationships. Schooling, as a form of power, has particular salience in settler colonial societies such as Australia and Kanaky/New Caledonia. In these societies, schools have, historically, been a crucial tool for the assimilation and oppression of Indigenous people. The latter have contested, refused, but have also used to their advantage these colonial education institutions to challenge colonial hegemony. In response to continued Indigenous resistance and struggles, schools have attempted more recently to reform historical knowledge and redefine Indigenous-settler relationships. This thesis focuses on the ways that the historical and political relationships between Indigenous people and settlers are taught in public schools in two settler colonial societies: Australia and Kanaky/New Caledonia.

Based on an analysis of history curricula, textbooks and interviews with history teachers carried out in these two societies, this thesis addresses the following questions: What political understandings of Indigenous-settler relationships are disseminated in schools? To what extent can or does the teacher – as the ultimate institutional actor, the inheritor of a historiography, and a political and emotional agent – shape the relationships between Indigenous people and settlers in schools? Can the school system decolonise itself? Pushing the existing boundaries of research on settler colonialism and decolonisation, and taking the original approach of engaging with settler colonialism across European colonialisms by bringing together British/Australian and French forms of settler colonialism in the analysis, the thesis examines processes of producing both knowledge and ignorance. It argues that settler colonial power rests on settler regimes of ignorance that sustain the political status quo. This thesis interrogates the ways that teachers deal with these settler regimes of ignorance and their capacity (or lack thereof) to challenge them. The thesis concludes that the production of knowledge may not necessarily be a solution to settler colonial ignorance but, rather, that the attitudes towards that ignorance are both where the problem is and where the solution lies.

Findings from my research reveal that history curricula, staffing trends, textbooks, and some teaching practices sustain settler regimes of ignorance. The school system in both these societies continues to disseminate historical knowledge that fails to comprehend and wilfully ignores the mechanisms and contemporaneity of settler colonialism. This ignorance constitutes a most effective tool of settler colonial power within the school system. However, some history teachers, on an individual level, attempt to destabilise and rethink institutional practices to shift power relationships between Indigenous people and settlers within this public institution. In doing so, teachers’ practices bring an unexpected finding, that is the potential of ignorance – rather than increased knowledge production – to facilitate such a political shift.

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Conviviality in the settler colony: Katie W. Higgins, ‘Tense and the other: Temporality and urban multiculture in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2018

31Jul18

Abstract: Expressions of concern about the national future, or the surfacing of history through postcolonial melancholia and nostalgia for a lost Golden Age, illustrate how temporality and tense have been absorbed into discourses, affective attachments and practices of cultural recognition and national belonging. First, this paper aims to develop the discussion of urban multiculture in human geography in an original direction through a theoretically‐driven argument for the significance of social divisions of tense. It contributes new knowledge about the availability of this discursive field when the issue of cultural recognition arises. Second, through considering the relational dynamics between settler, Indigenous and exogenous peoples together, the paper ties together debate on migration and ethnicity with indigeneity and colonialism. Third, the paper emphasises the importance of careful attention to local histories, contexts and oppressions when researching conviviality and multiculture in a settler colonial context. The analysis draws on 12 months of qualitative research with first‐generation British migrants in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand to examine several illustrative encounters of British migrants with Māori, the Indigenous peoples, and exogenous alterity, a term used to refer to migrants and racialised citizens deemed ‘foreign’.

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Naming settlers: a blog

31Jul18

Access the blog here.

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Settlers and racists: Ronit Lentin, Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism, Bloomsbury, 2018

29Jul18

Description: Positioning race front and centre, this book theorizes that political violence, in the form of a socio-political process that differentiates between human and less-than-human populations, is used by the state of Israel in racializing and ruling the citizens of occupied Palestine.

Lentin argues that Israel’s rule over Palestine is an example of Agamben’s state of exception, Goldberg’s racial state and Wolfe’s settler colony; the Israeli racial settler colony employs its laws to rule besieged Palestine, while excluding itself and its Jewish citizen-colonists from legal instruments and governmental technologies. Governing through emergency legislation and through practices of exception, emergency, necessity and security, Israel positions itself outside domestic and international law.

Deconstructing Agamben’s Eurocentric theoretical position Lentin shows that it occludes colonialism, settler colonialism and anti-colonialism and fails to specifically foreground race; instead she combines the work of Wolfe, who proposes race as a trace of settler colonialism, and Weheliye, who argues that Agamben’s western-centric understanding of exception fail to speak from explicitly racialized and gendered standpoints.

Employing existing media, activist, and academic accounts of racialization this book deliberately breaks from white, Western theorizations of biopolitics, exception, and bare life, and instead foregrounds race and gender in analysing settler colonial conditions in Israel.

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(Indigenous) data sovereignty is sovereignty (settlers make and keep the data): Julie Andrews, ‘Blaks and stats in Aboriginal Victoria: Census resistance and participation’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1, 2018, pp. 43-56.

27Jul18

Abstract: Calls are growing within the social sciences for Indigenous peoples to assume sovereignty over data that are about them and for analysis of these data to be led by, or be inclusive of, an Indigenous perspective (Kukutai and Taylor 2016; Walter 2016; Walter and Andersen 2013). This paper presents data based on interviews with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Melbourne and Victoria that provide an Aboriginal voice to show the degrees of both constraint and choice in the formulation of Indigenous data. The results show that the census as a social instrument needs to be viewed as a dynamic interplay between the state and Indigenous people, and that Indigenous community awareness of their role in this process needs to be further explored. Although volatility of Aboriginal census data is a key focus of this paper, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has attempted to investigate from time to time why the census counts should be so volatile, yet its investigations have been undertaken as an outsider on what makes people (as it puts it) ‘change their identity’. In this paper I examine the issue of census volatility from within the Indigenous community and get people to openly provide their perspectives on census engagement and census utility as an expression of Indigenous data sovereignty. This approach has not been adopted before in relation to the issue of census volatility but the views of Indigenous people on such matters are likely to become more prevalent as the issue of Indigenous data sovereignty gains ground.

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Settlers (even though not only settlers) change the environment: Susan Lawrence, Peter Davies, ‘Archaeology and the Anthropocene in the Study of Settler Australia’, in Marcos André Torres de Souza, Diogo Menezes Costa (eds), Historical Archaeology and Environment, Springer, 2018, pp. 229-251

27Jul18

Abstract: Environmental archaeology of settler colonialism in Australia is well placed to make an important contribution to our understanding of the Anthropocene. Environmental data provide perspectives on settler-driven change and places it in the long-term context of anthropogenic change that began with the arrival of Aboriginal people some 65,000 years ago. Historical archaeology is uniquely placed to interpret this record. It has the capacity to integrate scientific data about the environment with humanities-based understandings about culture and human agency. It also has the capacity to interrogate multi-scalar data about human activity ranging from the site-specific to the global and extending from the present into deep time. This chapter reviews the work of archaeologists using environmental data and the work of natural scientists producing data about environmental change over the past two centuries. Included in this is work on soil erosion and sedimentation as well as floral and faunal research. It is argued that research which more closely integrates archaeological approaches with environmental science has considerable potential to provide insights into anthropogenic environmental change and into human adaptation to the changes caused.

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Settlers target children: Tamara Starblanket, Suffer the Little Children: Genocide, Indigenous Nations and the Canadian State, Clarity Press, 2018

27Jul18

Commentary: “Settler-colonialism reveals the brutal face of imperialism in
some of its most vicious forms. This carefully researched and
penetrating study focuses on one of its ugliest manifestations,
the forcible transferring of indigenous children, and makes a
strong case for Canadian complicity in a form of ‘cultural
genocide’ – with implications that reach to the Anglosphere
generally, and to some of the worst crimes of the ‘civilized
world’ in the modern era“. (Noam Chomsky)

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The lenses of settler colonialism: Karen Hughes, Cholena Smith, ‘Un-filtering the settler colonial archive: Indigenous community-based photographers in Australia and the United States – Ngarrindjeri and Shinnecock perspectives’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1, 2018, pp. 2-18

25Jul18

Abstract: In transnational settler colonial contexts, the photograph has been a tool of suppression, playing a key role in the categorisation of race and difference, as well as furthering the logic of elimination through gestures towards whiteness, authenticity and vanishing races. For Indigenous peoples living in early-invaded, densely settled areas, such as the participants in this study – Ngarrindjeri in south-eastern Australia and the Shinnecock Algonquin in the north-eastern United States (US) – the problem of visual representation has long contributed to a denial of their contemporary identity and to persistent discrimination. Administrative and anthropological photography in the early twentieth century across these settler colonial polities was inextricably connected with policies of assimilation, eugenics and anti-miscegenation, and to the making of racial categories. Yet at the same time that official photographers were consciously filtering out the impacts of colonisation – imaging perennial stereotypes of the lone plains Indian on horseback in full regalia, for example, or the northern Aboriginal man poised on one leg, spear in hand – pioneering Ngarrindjeri and Shinnecock women and men creatively seized upon the camera, experimenting with new technologies and media to counter these colonial imaginings. Producing rich archives in their own communities that assert visual sovereignty, their photographs narrate vital histories not known through other means. This paper arises from research with the Ngarrindjeri and Shinnecock communities to reveal the practice of two prolific Indigenous commuunity-based photographers from the mid-twentieth century: Charlotte Richards and Wickham Hunter. We explore the democratising ways in which they worked intentionally to undo colonial stereotypes and represent their people, shedding new light on Indigenous aesthetic traditions and technologies, identity, cultural continuity and belonging, and adding to recent transnational scholarship on visual sovereignty and the decolonising of the settler colonial archive.

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