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Settler colonialism is transnational: Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform, Harvard University Press, 2018

09Dec18

Description: The paradox of progressivism continues to fascinate more than one hundred years on. Democratic but elitist, emancipatory but coercive, advanced and assimilationist, Progressivism was defined by its contradictions. In a bold new argument, Marilyn Lake points to the significance of turn-of-the-twentieth-century exchanges between American and Australasian reformers who shared racial sensibilities, along with a commitment to forging an ideal social order. Progressive New World demonstrates that race and reform were mutually supportive as Progressivism became the political logic of settler colonialism. 

White settlers in the United States, who saw themselves as path-breakers and pioneers, were inspired by the state experiments of Australia and New Zealand that helped shape their commitment to an active state, women’s and workers’ rights, mothers’ pensions, and child welfare. Both settler societies defined themselves as New World, against Old World feudal and aristocratic societies and Indigenous peoples deemed backward and primitive.

In conversations, conferences, correspondence, and collaboration, transpacific networks were animated by a sense of racial kinship and investment in social justice. While “Asiatics” and “Blacks” would be excluded, segregated, or deported, Indians and Aborigines would be assimilated or absorbed. The political mobilizations of Indigenous progressives—in the Society of American Indians and the Australian Aborigines’ Progressive Association—testified to the power of Progressive thought but also to its repressive underpinnings. Burdened by the legacies of dispossession and displacement, Indigenous reformers sought recognition and redress in differently imagined new worlds and thus redefined the meaning of Progressivism itself.


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Settler colonialism is economical: Benjamin Huf, Making Things Economic: Theory and Government in New South Wales, 1788-1863, PhD Dissertation, Australian National University, 2018

09Dec18

Abstract: This thesis is a study of the invention and consolidation of a domain of knowledge and government we today denominate as the ‘economic’ in the particular context of the British colonisation of New South Wales. Two lines of argument are pursued. The first recovers the idea of British imperialism in New South Wales as an ‘economic’ project, in which phenomena that have been typically assumed as essential to colonial development – convict work, land settlement, wool growing, migration and their impact on Aboriginal societies – came to be classified, organised and administered as distinctly economic problems. As imperial and colonial authorities increasingly appropriated the ‘constitutive metaphors’ of Ricardian political economy in their reports, inquiries and correspondence, they re-narrated these phenomena from discrete problems of state to integrated dynamics of production, distribution and wealth-accumulation. This economic project is studied in distinction from, even as it intersected with, the paradigms of democratisation, settler colonialism and legal-positivist statism with which historians have tended to frame the colony’s political and intellectual history in the first half of the nineteenth century. Its legacies, in the identities it forged and projects it legitimated, have been as enduring as the colonial constitution but less closely assessed. The second line of argument, arising from this reading of colonial history, revises the significance of nineteenth-century political economy as an emergent political vocabulary in a nascent Australian political culture, and in English-speaking Anglophone culture more generally. In appropriating political economy as an official discourse, imperial authorities not only helped insulate the ‘economic’ as a domain of knowledge, but consolidated a new, reductive framework for interpreting, governing and debating social interaction, regulated by the imperatives of supply and demand, profits and wages. Together, these two lines of argument are offered as a critical exercise in recovering and recognising the historical functioning of economic language in official, public and everyday speech. They provide a fresh perspective on aspects of the colonial past, and recover legacies which continue to shape our world today.


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Uncanny creature against settler colonialism: Penny Edmonds, ‘The Bunyip as Uncanny Rupture: Fabulous Animals, Innocuous Quadrupeds and the Australian Anthropocene’, Australian Humanities Review, 63, 2018, pp. 80-98

09Dec18

Excerpt: The Macleay Museum ‘bunyip’ can be traced back to an era of colonial expansion in southeastern Australia that violently displaced Aboriginal peoples and wrought rapid, widespread change to local biosystems. It therefore takes us to the unsettling antipodean Anthropocene, to the midst of invasion of Aboriginal worlds concurrent with the importation and acclimatisation of new species in the name of perfection. Here, colonists brought in new animals and rearranged biota, disordering landscape, environment, and animal and human bodies. The bunyip thus, as I will show, takes us to the violence of settler colonialism and its restless, productive energy, with its ever ‘vanishing endpoint’ (Strakosch and Macoun). As Aboriginal people were rapidly removed and dispossessed of their lands, the Macleay bunyip emerged as a confounding mythical figure: it was made from the bones of a colonial import—the horse of European invasion and pastoralism—but was mistakenly thought to be native and ancient. In the 1840s scientific men in southeastern Australia took this confected bunyip specimen as a serious object of enquiry and hypothesised that it may have been a living prehistoric relic, in a period which saw the first scientific discoveries of megafaunal fossils.


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Settling on guilt: Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, Frontier Fictions Settler Sagas and Postcolonial Guilt, Palgrave, 2018

05Dec18

Description: This book compares the nineteenth-century settler literatures of Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States in order to examine how they enable readers to manage guilt accompanying European settlement. Reading canonical texts such as Last of the Mohicans and Backwoods of Canada against underanalyzed texts such as Adventures in Canada and George Linton or the First Years of a British Colony, it demonstrates how tropes like the settler hero and his indigenous servant, the animal hunt, the indigenous attack, and the lost child cross national boundaries. Settlers similarly responded to the stressors of taking another’s land through the stories they told about themselves, which functioned to defend against uncomfortable feelings of guilt and ambivalence by creating new versions of reality. This book traces parallels in 20th and 21st century texts to ultimately argue that contemporary settlers continue to fight similar psychological and cultural battles since settlement is never complete.


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The other dominion: David Rock, The British in Argentina: Commerce, Settlers and Power, 1800–2000, Palgrave, 2018

05Dec18

Description: Drawing on largely unexplored nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources, this book offers an in-depth study of Britain’s presence in Argentina. Its subjects include the nineteenth-century rise of British trade, merchants and explorers, of investment and railways, and of British imperialism. Spanning the period from the Napoleonic Wars until the end of the twentieth century, it provides a comprehensive history of the unique British community in Argentina. Later sections examine the decline of British influence in Argentina from World War I into the early 1950s. Finally, the book traces links between British multinationals and the political breakdown in Argentina of the 1970s and early 1980s, leading into dictatorship and the Falklands War. Combining economic, social and political history, this extensive volume offers new insights into both the historical development of Argentina and of British interests overseas.


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The performance of settler colonialism: Stephanie Nohelani Teves, ‘The Theorist and the Theorized: Indigenous Critiques of Performance Studies’, TDR/The Drama Review, 62, 4, 2018, pp. 131-140

02Dec18

Abstract: Performance studies requires an engagement with Native studies scholarship and settler colonial critiques to be fully accountable to the global stakes of indigeneity and Indigenous performance. An exploration of the legacies of colonialism, scholarly misinterpretation, and the pressures of cultural authenticity reveals the division between performance studies and Native studies and the need for performance studies to engage Native studies scholarship and settler colonial critiques to enrich analyses of Native/Indigenous performance and the field in general.


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The genetics of indigenous elimination: Aviva Chomsky, ‘Making Native Americans Strangers in Their Own Land’, Tomdispatch, 29/11/18

30Nov18

Excerpt: ‘If Native Americans are reduced to little more than another genetic variation, there is no need for laws that acknowledge their land rights, treaty rights, and sovereignty’.


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How about a settler-colonial model? Jacob L. Stump, ‘What Is the Use of the Colonial Model (or, Better Yet, the Concept of Coloniality) for Studying Appalachia?’ Journal of Appalachian Studies, 24, 2, 2018, pp. 151-16

30Nov18

Abstract: This article engages a recent Journal of Appalachian Studies roundtable (Volume 22, Number 1), organized by Steve Fisher and Barbara Ellen Smith, that critiqued the colonial model. My basic argument is that the colonial model has critical value because it offers a well-established orientation, framework, and line of argument to counter the culture of poverty thesis, which was recently re-popularized in J. D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. My argument centers on three main points. First, I concur that the internal colony model warrants scholarly and activist reconsideration. But, in contrast to the majority of the forum voices, I argue that the idea of coloniality is imminently relevant to understanding and acting in the global political economy in which Appalachia is situated. Second, I locate Appalachia in the global political economy. The important and often overlooked point that I make is the global political economy, its historical emergence, and present-day practice are already implicated in Anglo-European colonial relationships. Third, I reconsider the way that colonialism is conceptualized, moving away from colonialism as attributes and toward colonialism as relationships between colonizer and colonized.


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The containment of the newly classified indigene: Susan Slyomovics, ‘”Other Places of Confinement”: Bedeau Internment Camp for Algerian Jewish Soldiers’, in Aomar Boum, Sarah Abrevaya Stein (eds), The Holocaust and North Africa, Stanford University Press, 2019, pp. 95-112

30Nov18

Abstract: A case study of Bedeau Camp for the internment of Algerian Jewish soldiers: During World War II, the violence of French military culture in Algeria was intensified by Vichy-era fascism expanded to the overseas North African settler colony against those racially classed by the colonial bureaucracy as indigènes, or “natives,” a term perennially applied to the Muslim and temporarily, between 1940 and 1943, to the Jew.


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Focusing on settler colonialism in Palestine: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Israel-Palestine Through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens’, Interventions, 2018

28Nov18

Abstract: This essay discusses the conflict in Israel-Palestine and its long-term evolution in the context of a settler colonial studies interpretive paradigm. It argues this analytical paradigm may offer valuable insights both in the interpretation of the historical evolution of the conflict and in the analysis of its current circumstances. The first section briefly outlines the possible benefits of such reframing; the second specifically targets exceptionalist claims.


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