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Migrants who want to be settlers: Francesco Ricatti, ‘Racism and Racial Ambiguity in a Settler Colonial Context’, in Francesco Ricatti, Italians in Australia, Palgrave, 2018, pp 53-74

31May18

Abstract: This chapter applies a decolonial frame to the study of racism in the Italian-Australian context. The first part provides a historical outline of Australian racist and xenophobic attitudes, policies, and practices against Italians. The second part analyses the strategies these migrants employed in response to such prejudice; it highlights, in particular, Italian migrants’ constant attempts to be recognised as white and respectable, often to the detriment of other, darker, and more subaltern groups. The third part of the chapter argues for the importance of a decolonial approach to the study of Italian migration history. This section emphasises the Italian role in the dispossession of First Nations’ land and the persisting prejudice against Indigenous people, while also drawing attention to the many positive relationships between Italians and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.


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How the settler colony actually works: Penelope Edmonds, Amanda Nettelbeck (eds), Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim, Palgrave, 2018

31May18

Description: Violence and intimacy were critically intertwined at all stages of the settler colonial encounter, and yet we know surprisingly little of how they were connected in the shaping of colonial economies. Extending a reading of ‘economies’ as labour relations into new arenas, this innovative collection of essays examines new understandings of the nexus between violence and intimacy in settler colonial economies of the British Pacific Rim. The sites it explores include cross-cultural exchange in sealing and maritime communities, labour relations on the frontier, inside the pastoral station and in the colonial home, and the material and emotional economies of exploration. Following the curious mobility of texts, objects, and frameworks of knowledge, this volume teases out the diversity of ways in which violence and intimacy were expressed in the economies of everyday encounters on the ground. In doing so, it broadens the horizon of debate about the nature of colonial economies and the intercultural encounters that were enmeshed within them. 


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The settler-colonial everyday: Laura Ishiguro, ‘”A Dreadful Little Glutton Always Telling You about Food”: The Epistolary Everyday and the Making of Settler Colonial British Columbia’, The Canadian Historical Review, 99, 2, 2018, pp. 258-283

27May18

Abstract: The Canadian and international scholarship on settler colonialism has focused primarily on relationships between Indigenous people and settlers and the connected practices of racialization, dispossession, and violence that underpin these. Investigating British family letters from early settler British Columbia – a widely produced and circulated body of sources that largely ignore these scholarly foci – this article contends that settlers’ personal everyday also played a significant role in the foundations of settler colonialism. Taking epistolary discussions of food as a specific lens onto this issue, it explains that correspondents used descriptions of food acquisition and preparation to explain key points of difference between British Columbia and the United Kingdom, while writing about dining in ways that emphasized their continued connections and aspirations to metropolitan family norms. At the same time, this focus sustained silences, most notably about Indigenous people. Overall, the article argues, British family letters largely did not construct meaning for settlers’ lives in antagonistic contrast to the practices of locally racialized “others” but, rather, in trans-imperial communication and comparison to metropolitan “others.” In doing so, this correspondence reproduced Britons’ disregard of Indigenous people, translated British Columbia into a legible, relatable, and exclusive settler home, and entrenched this understanding as colonial knowledge in extended family networks. In this way, letters about food reflected a broader politics of the personal everyday that underpinned the settler colonial project.


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Criminology and settler colonialism: Biko Agozino, ‘The Withering Away of the Law: An Indigenous Perspective on the Decolonisation of the Criminal Justice System and Criminology’, Journal of Global Indigeneity, 3, 1, 2018.

27May18

Abstract: The decolonisation of criminology should not be seen as an event marked by the publication of an eponymous text, rather it should be seen as the scholar-activism that is on-going especially in the face of the reality that postcolonialism appears to be giving way to the project of recolonisation. Moreover, the struggle for decolonisation continues due to the fact that the postcolonial does not capture adequately the ambition of permanence in settler colonialism. Imperialism is stubbornly intolerant of decolonisation especially in an exclusionary scholarly field like criminology that remains under the dominance of patriarchal white supremacist imperialist thought. Like all Eurocentric disciplines, Criminology demands the ‘submission’ of critical Indigenous scholars as a condition for toleration and tokenistic rewards by the ‘guild masters’ in the discipline with the institutionalised racist-sexist-imperialist power to pass or fail, award or deny grants, publish or perish, approve policies or criminalise Others. As a consequence, most of the former colonised locations have failed to develop teaching in criminology with the exception of settler colonial locations where the discipline is booming even while Indigenous scholars continue to be marginalised everywhere.


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‘Settler colonialism depends on erasing Native peoples’: J. Kehaulani Kauanui (ed.), Speaking of Indigenous Politics Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders, University of Minnesota Press, 2018

27May18

Description: Many people learn about Indigenous politics only through the most controversial and confrontational news: the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s efforts to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, for instance, or the battle to protect Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, a site sacred to Native peoples. But most Indigenous activism remains unseen in the mainstream—and so, of course, does its significance. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui set out to change that with her radio program Indigenous Politics. Issue by issue, she interviewed people who talked candidly and in an engaging way about how settler colonialism depends on erasing Native peoples and about how Native peoples can and do resist.


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Urban agriculture as a settler colonial reflex: Nathan McClintock, ‘Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city’, Geography Compass, 2018

27May18

Abstract: Recent scholarship on urban agriculture (UA)—the production of food in cities—argues that UA can both undergird and resist capitalist accumulation, albeit often at different spatio‐temporal scales. Scholarship that explicitly examines how UA, capitalist development, and racial difference work through one another, however, is less extensive. In this review, I propose that the lens of racial capitalism can elucidate UA’s contradictory motivations and outcomes. As an analytical framework, racial capitalism considers how distinct forms of colonization, settler colonialism, and White supremacy function relationally as part of a unified system of capitalist accumulation built on the exploitation of racialized human and spatial difference. By focusing on UA’s contributions to racial Othering, the racialization of space, and dispossession, on the one hand, and on struggles of resistance and self‐determination, on the other, this review attempts to sheds new light on the dialectical, “both/and” nature of UA, while also addressing recent calls to consider how settler colonial logics persist in the contemporary North American city. 


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Settler commuters! Richard Edwards, ‘To Commute or Not Commute, the Homesteader’s Dilemma’, Great Plains Quarterly, 38, 2, 2018, pp. 129-150

25May18

Abstract: After a long hiatus, scholars are reassessing the Homestead Act of 1862. Most scholars see the Act as a failure, partly because they believe its operation involved massive fraud, for which they blame its “commutation” clause as a chief reason. This article provides a fresh look at homesteading commutations, reframing the question to consider under what conditions an “actual settler” might benefit from commuting his or her claim. The analysis shows that commuting was profitable (rational) when the homesteader was optimistic about the future, undermining most historians’ a priori identification of commutations with fraud. Since allegedly fraudulent commutations play such an outsized role in historians’ conclusion that homesteading was infected with pervasive fraud, this analysis puts their broader verdict in jeopardy as well.


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Indigenous justice against settler lawfare: Jennifer Hendry, Melissa L. Tatum, Miriam Jorgensen, Deirdre Howard-Wagner (eds), Indigenous Justice: New Tools, Approaches, and Spaces, Palgrave, 2018

25May18

Description: ​This highly topical collection of essays addresses contemporary issues facing Indigenous communities from a broad range of multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives. Drawing from across the social sciences and humanities, this important volume challenges the established norms, theories, and methodologies within the field, and argues for the potential of a multidimensional approach to solving problems of Indigenous justice.

Stemming from an international conference on ‘Spaces of Indigenous Justice’, Indigenous Justice is richly illustrated with case studies and comprises contributions from scholars working across the fields of law, socio-legal studies, sociology, public policy, politico-legal theory, and Indigenous studies. As such, the editors of this timely and engaging volume draw upon a wide range of experience to argue for a radical shift in how we engage with Indigenous studies.


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Settler colonialism is settler power + electrification of the whole country: Lauren Rickards, Elspeth Oppermann, ‘Battling the tropics to settle a nation: Negotiating multiple energies, frontiers and feedback loops in Australia’, Energy Research & Social Science, 2018

23May18

Abstract: Multiple forms and spaces of energy are enrolled in nation-building projects. In this cross-disciplinary paper, we outline how struggles to govern the relations between climate and the human body have shaped nation-building efforts and electricity infrastructure in the settler-colonial society of Australia. Focused on Australia’s tropical zone, notably the hot, recalcitrant, militarized region of the Northern Territory, we explore how questions of climate have slowed, undone and accelerated efforts to securely settle its capital city, Darwin. In doing so, we highlight the multiple links between electricity infrastructure and air-conditioning that have made it possible to hold ‘climate’ and ‘body’ together, co-producing indoor microclimates and habitable territory while contributing to the warming climate that is now raising questions about the limits of this electricity-enabled habitability. By examining the intersecting spatialities of electricity, we help advance more ‘thoroughly geographical’ (Bridge, 2018) accounts of the relation between energy infrastructures and nation-building, highlighting the multiple forms, frontiers and feedback loops through which energy – broadly defined, as foundational category – acts as hindrance, enabler and side-effect of nation-building projects. We show how this perspective reveals troubling paradoxes and tensions, including accelerating feedbacks between energy use and climate change extending far beyond Australia’s borders.


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Undoing repressive authenticity: Stephen Warren, Ben Barnes, ‘Salvaging the Salvage Anthropologists: Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, Carl Voegelin, and the Future of Ethnohistory’, Ethnohistory, 65, 2, 2018, pp. 189-214

23May18

Abstract: How should Native and non-Native scholars utilize the work of salvage anthropologists? In this study of Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, Carl Voegelin, and their research among the Shawnee, Stephen Warren and Ben Barnes suggest that Community-Engaged Scholarship (CES) offers a new path forward in examining the difficult legacy of the Boasians and their successors. Collaborative, team-based research can yield important new discoveries as tribal citizens rediscover and use the work of salvage anthropologists. For tribal communities working to recover dormant languages and cultural practices, CES methodologies offer a means of critical and concordant engagement with anthropological texts.


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