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The settler-colonial labour of settler women: Mary Kitts, ‘She Can Never Be Happy Without All or Some of the Family with Her’: Women’s Lives on the Early National Frontier, MA dissertation, Auburn University, 2018

25Apr18

Abstract: When it comes to the early American frontier, a great deal is known about the men who moved to form the first permanent settlements. Much less has been told about the women they brought with them, the fundamental role these women played in the creation of successful frontier colonies and they labor they performed as part of that success. This blind spot limits the understanding of early American frontier spaces. Without acknowledging the labor and presence of women brought to the frontier, there cannot be a true understanding of its formation or its success. This thesis examines the emotional, reproductive, and economic labor of women who were brought to the early American frontier as part of the first generation of permanent settlers, paying attention to the political and gendered world in which they were living and subconsciously navigating. Male independence was dependent upon the labor of these women, so much so that they were a necessity to these migrations to the frontier. They participated in a type of settler colonialism that mirrored that of early American colonies both in the gendered expectations they experienced and in the success of the settlements built. In this thesis, diaries from women who migrated to the frontier of Alabama and Florida in the early 1800s are examined. Letters written from girls and women who moved to the frontier of Alabama and Kentucky ranging from the late 1700s to the early 1800s are examined as well. These primary sources come from middle to upper class white women, the source base most often available from the period, and provide rich details about what life on the frontier was life for the authors. This thesis, by examining the emotional, economic, and reproductive labor these women performed, looks to reinsert women’s labor into the narratives and understandings of the formation of the frontier and its success, as well as illustrate the integral role played by those whose labor was purposefully devalued due to their gender and dependent status.


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Settler-colonial feminism: Marjorie Johnstone, ‘Settler Feminism, Race Making, and Early Social Work in Canada’, Affilia, 2018

25Apr18

Abstract: Canada was one of the civilizing outposts that formed part of the British plan of imperial hegemony. This liberal democratic white settler society is the context where the new female-dominated social work profession developed. Using various historical archives of the mission statements and practice of early Canadian social work, I critically examine how first-wave feminisms, hegemonic imperial discourses, and settler colonial structures of governance worked as formative factors in the birth of Canadian social work and illustrate this with the life of an early Toronto social worker, Joan Arnoldi.


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On the labour of settlers: Greg Patmore, Shelton Stromquis (ed.), Frontiers of Labor Comparative Histories of the United States and Australia, University of Illinois Press, 2018

20Apr18

Description: Alike in many aspects of their histories, Australia and the United States diverge in striking ways when it comes to their working classes, labor relations, and politics. Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist curate innovative essays that use transnational and comparative analysis to explore the two nations’ differences. The contributors examine five major areas: World War I’s impact on labor and socialist movements; the history of coerced labor; patterns of ethnic and class identification; forms of working-class collective action; and the struggles related to trade union democracy and independent working-class politics. Throughout, many essays highlight how hard-won transnational ties allowed Australians and Americans to influence each other’s trade union and political cultures.


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If settler colonialism is a structure, what about the structures that celebrate settler colonialism? Emily C. Burns, ‘Political Contestation in Cyrus Dallin’s American Indian Monuments’, Archives of American Art Journal, 57, 1, 2018, pp. 4-21

18Apr18

Abstract: Around the turn of the twentieth century, the sculptor Cyrus Dallin made several American Indian equestrian monuments. Critics often construed these sculptures as a connected series that charted the temporal progression of a defeated and dying race. But primary sources reveal an important counternarrative: the artist’s criticism of US treatment of native communities during western expansion. This essay argues that Dallin’s equestrian sculptures can be read as equivocal monuments that challenge dominant narratives of US history.


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The empire of settler literary empire: Philip Steer, ‘The historians, the literary critics, and the Victorian settler empire’, Literature Compass, 2018

18Apr18

Abstract: Victorian literary criticism is yet to fully engage with the new historiography of the 19th‐century settler empire. That body of work has focused attention on a vast transnational network of population, capital, and information exchange, and attending to the centrality of shared ideas of British identity has revealed a uniquely close relationship between cultural and economic forms of imperialism. Significant methodological challenges confront any attempt to seriously consider the literary bonds between Britain and its settler colonies, including issues of form, scale, aesthetics, and politics. However, continued failure to grapple with that difficult critical task risks perpetuating a form of silent approval that so often surrounded the culture of the settler empire in the Victorian era. 


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Modes of domination and their forced encounter: Kathryn Gillespie, ‘Placing Angola: Racialisation, Anthropocentrism, and Settler Colonialism at the Louisiana State Penitentiary’s Angola Rodeo’, Antipode, 2018

18Apr18

Abstract: The Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) is a site embedded with historical legacies of plantation slavery and settler colonialism; as the largest maximum security penitentiary in the United States, the prison also reflects the racial injustice of contemporary US mass incarceration. Situated on the site of an old plantation, the prison hosts the Angola Rodeo twice a year, an event that crystallises violent multispecies social relations in the merging of the US West and South as two distinct kinds of colonial projects. Whereas much scholarship and activism has worked against the wholesale dehumanisation inherent in chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and mass incarceration, this paper works to interrogate and disrupt the human–animal binary through which processes of dehumanisation are sustained. Drawing together postcolonial studies and animal studies, the paper centres empirical research on the Angola Rodeo to highlight how racialisation and anthropocentrism are intertwined logics of subordination and exclusion that carry forward into the present. Ultimately, the paper suggests the need for a mode of analysis and action that does not maintain the subordination of the animal, and instead, takes a de‐anthropocentric and decolonial approach to injustice. 


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A settler-colonial historiography: Agnès Delahaye, ‘Jeremy Belknap’s History of New Hampshire in Context: Settler Colonialism and the Historiography of New England’, Journal of Early American History, 8, 1, 2018, pp. 60-91

18Apr18

Abstract: This essay is a contextual analysis of the History of New Hampshire (1784–1792) by Jeremy Belknap, founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society. I situate Belknap’s historical and institutional achievements within the framework of settler colonialism studies to argue that Belknap used his profound knowledge of previous New England historiography to write a settler history of American colonization—a narrative of expansionist settlement over indigenous land sustained by cultural, political, racial and social norms at the root of its enduring success. Belknap’s settler history effectively negated both British and indigenous sovereignty and shifted the historical focus prevalent in his time away from the empire and onto the specific, and in his mind, unique, story of the violent formation of white, self-governing and autonomous expansionist settler societies that he believed were the real locus of American identity.


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Indefinite detention is informed by the logic of elimination: Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, ‘Sexual Violence and the Border: Colonial Genealogies of US and Australian Immigration Detention Regimes’, Social & Legal Studies, 2018

15Apr18

Abstract: This article is concerned with delineating the material manifestations of state violence, with a particular focus on sexual violence in immigration detention prisons in the context of two settler-colonial nation states: Australia and the United States. It draws its impetus from the projected work of the late sociolegal scholar, Penny Pether, and her outline for a large-scale project on comparative regimes of indefinite detention. In our article, we pursue an exchange between the draft of Pether’s first chapter, ‘Beginning Again’, for her projected book, and elements of a transnational project titled ‘Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States’ that we initiated in partnership with colleagues in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. We track these linkages in order to argue that these similar, if often different, colonial histories both inform and continue to shape contemporary regimes of detention and their reproduction of sexual violence and assault against their captive populations.


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The anthropocene is actually the settlerocene! Kyle B. Keeler, “The earth is a tomb and man a fleeting vapour”: The Roots of Climate Change in Early American Literature, MA Dissertation, Kent State, 2018

15Apr18

Abstract: Extreme temperatures, radical weather events, and species’ extinctions have all taken place or been foreshadowed during the Earth’s current ecological crisis. Since this crisis was named the “Anthropocene” (new, human) epoch, scholars from a range of disciplines have sought to find both a reason for and start to this geological era. Usually, the Anthropocene is thought to have begun during the Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century, following the carbon dioxide that was released into the Earth’s atmosphere from that period onward. However, this thesis argues that the roots of the Anthropocene, and the climate change that goes with it, can be traced back to the century before the Industrial Revolution.

I argue that the roots of the Anthropocene are first apparent in Lydia Maria Child’s 1824 novel, Hobomok. Set in early seventeenth-century New England, I seek to show that the Puritan settlers within the novel are carriers of what ecological philosopher Timothy Morton calls “agrilogistical” norms and subscribers to the reductive material philosophy of “Easy-Think Substances.” Moreover, I posit that the American Indians to which the Puritan settlers believe themselves superior to can be viewed as bearing material philosophies more akin to Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s new materialism and Jane Bennett’s vital materialism, which offer a more ecologically sustainable viewpoint regarding nonhuman materiality. The competing viewpoints regarding nonhuman nature and materiality further serve to divide the Puritans and Amerindian characters, and this separation is seen further in ethnocentric colonialism apparent in Hobomok and furthered in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans.

Set a century after Hobomok, Cooper’s novel serves to show the advancement of agrilogistical policies that began in Hobomok, and would continue through “civilization,” farming practices, war, and colonialization. In tracing these agrilogistical norms through the growth of America from Hobomok to Mohicans alongside weather and climatic events in both novels and their historical setting, I ultimately argue that these viewpoints would result in an ethnocentric European culture of death regarding the Amerindian and the natural world. These anthropocentric, agrilogistic, and ethnocentric modes of thinking both precede the Industrial Revolution and continue into our contemporary moment through dispossession of First Peoples for governmental and corporate interests that have distinct human and ecological consequences. In this thesis, therefore, I view literary colonial relations with nature and American Indians at the dawn of colonization and scrutinize a less common starting point for America’s thought in the Anthropocene, both in history and in literature.


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The settler-colonial empathy is selective: Naomi J. Andrews, ‘Selective Empathy: Workers, Colonial Subjects, and the Affective Politics of French Romantic Socialism’, French Politics, Culture & Society, 36, 2018, pp. 1-25

15Apr18

Abstract: During the 1830s and 1840s, romantic socialists in France wrote about three subjugated groups in the French empire: metropolitan workers, slaves in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean colonies, and Algerian civilians. Although these three groups ostensibly shared similar conditions of deprivation and violent treatment at the hands of the French state, socialists depicted them in importantly different terms, with the effect of humanizing workers and slaves, while dehumanizing the Algerians suffering French conquest and colonization. This article explores these presentations and examines the way they worked together to champion the socialist priority, the emergent working classes of the July Monarchy, and to indirectly endorse the settler colonial project in Algeria.


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