settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism is silence: April Anson, ‘Sounding Silence in Sundown Survivance: Ecology and John Joseph Mathews’s Bildungsroman’, Western American Literature, 53, 4, 2019, 439-467

03Mar19

Excerpt: In 2013 a photo of twenty- eight- year- old Amanda Polchies at a Mi’kmaq antifracking protest in New Brunswick, Canada, became iconic as a symbol of Indigenous resistance to industrial extraction. The image draws power in juxtaposition: Polchies silently lifts a delicate feather before a hard horizon of Royal Canadian Mounted Police, whose humanness is lost in the line of force with which they mean to protect the interests of the oil and gas industry. Th e dissonance captured in this photo is disturbing but not unique. Recent images of militarized police blasting water cannons at unarmed water protectors at Standing Rock in subfreezing temperatures also elicited shock and rage. Anger is justified. Surprise is not.

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Settler colonialism and its epigenetics: Megan Warin, Emma Kowal, Maurizio Meloni, ‘Indigenous Knowledge in a Postgenomic Landscape: The Politics of Epigenetic Hope and Reparation in Australia’, Science, Technology & Human Values, 2019

24Feb19

Abstract: A history of colonization inflicts psychological, physical, and structural disadvantages that endure across generations. For an increasing number of Indigenous Australians, environmental epigenetics offers an important explanatory framework that links the social past with the biological present, providing a culturally relevant way of understanding the various intergenerational effects of historical trauma. In this paper, we critically examine the strategic uptake of environmental epigenetics by Indigenous researchers and policy advocates. We focus on the relationship between epigenetic processes and Indigenous views of Country and health—views that locate health not in individual bodies but within relational contexts of Indigenous ontologies that embody interconnected environments of kin/animals/matter/bodies across time and space. This drawing together of Indigenous experience and epigenetic knowledge has strengthened calls for action including state-supported calls for financial reparations. We examine the consequences of this reimagining of disease responsibility in the context of “strategic biological essentialism,” a distinct form of biopolitics that, in this case, incorporates environmental determinism. We conclude that the shaping of the right to protection from biosocial injury is potentially empowering but also has the capacity to conceal forms of governance through claimants’ identification as “damaged,” thus furthering State justification of biopolitical intervention in Indigenous lives.

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If settler colonialism is a structure, then indigeneity is now: Julia Bello-Bravo, ‘When is indigeneity: closing a legal and sociocultural gap in a contested domestic/international term’, AlterNative, 2019

24Feb19

Abstract: Indigeneity is a much contested term, complicated by formal definitions under domestic and international law, the unlimited right to self-identification by indigenous people, conflicts and/or contradictions between these legal principles, and the political inequalities that result from variations in access to the processes and legal actions that invoke these terms. In particular, this generates a gap between legal definitions of indigeneity (framed, then and now, by hegemonic powers) and sociocultural practices of indigeneity (expressed and experienced, then as now, by cultures themselves). Reviewing the conceptual framing(s) of indigeneity both internationally and in a domestic (US) context, this article explores and offers a more flexible, resilient, and just understanding of indigeneity capable of closing the legal/sociocultural gap currently affecting indigenous people worldwide. At root, this less means asking what (or where) is indigeneity, and more instead when is indigeneity.

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Decrepit settlers in a ‘new’ land: Will Jackson, ‘No Country for Old Men: The Life of John Lee and the Problem of the Aged Pioneer’, History Workshop Journal, 2019

24Feb19

Abstract: This article uses a charity appeal made on behalf of one old white man in South Africa in 1912 as an entry into considering the importance of age for social histories of empire – and for settler colonialism in particular. John Lee, aged eighty-five when he made his appeal, demanded the restitution of a piece of land he claimed to have been given by an African king and, to gain public sympathy, had his life story published in the local press. The reception of that story by Lee’s contemporaries shows how the heroic imperial narratives of the nineteenth century were becoming less certain once the violent suppression of African peoples had been achieved and new colonial states established. Yet neither could Lee’s story be entirely discounted, not least because there were thousands of other ‘aging pioneers’ scattered across South Africa in the early twentieth century – each with his own account of the high imperial frontier. Though their memories often appeared exaggerated or deluded, the problem of these men’s credibility was made worse by the problem of their care. Lacking family members able to look after them – who might also validate the stories that they told – the problem of old age thus becomes an exploration into the consequences of heroic masculinity and the apparent invulnerability of the imperial pioneer.

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Settler-colonial poetry sucks: Virginia Jackson, ‘”Our Poets”: William Cullen Bryant and the White Romantic Lyric’, New Literary History, 49, 4, 201p, pp. 521-551

22Feb19

Abstract: William Cullen Bryant’s abstraction of the British Romantic poetics he has been accused of merely borrowing had lasting effects on the lyricization of transatlantic poetics and on current ideas of Romantic lyric (specifically on versions of “the” Romantic lyric taught in American English departments) and on the naturalization of lyric reading. Bryant’s lyricized racism is and was inherent in the very Englishness of the forms he used to establish what it was and is to be a poet in America. By making American poetics in the image of British Romanticism, Bryant made American poetry dead and white at the very moment of its invention. Bryant’s poems were often about that predicament—that is, about whiteness and the difference settler colonialism made to British Romanticism, which is to say that if Cleanth Brooks was right that (what he thought of as) “Romantic poetry . . . foreshadows the characteristic structure” of modern poetry, then this is only true of modern American poetry if we consider the long shadow that Bryant (and nineteenth-century American poetics more generally) cast within that structure.

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The military/settler/anthropology complex: David Hyndman, Scott Flower, The Crisis of Cultural Intelligence: The Anthropology of Civil–Military Operations, World Scientific, 2019

22Feb19

Description: Military and civilian organizations in the past have attempted to understand culture and the cultural environment of conflict zones through anthropology. While there is a small and growing number of studies examining the use of anthropology for counterinsurgency, no studies have compared the Anglo-Saxon ABCA Armies’ approaches to understanding cultural factors for counterinsurgency and civil-military operations.Crisis of Cultural Intelligence: The Anthropology of civil-military Operations thus represents a timely investigation into a number of issues regarding the past and present relationship between militarized anthropology, settler colonialism, and Indigenous militancy and the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which has internationalized the claim of encapsulated nations for equal rights. Covering issues such as the use of militarized anthropology in the Vietnam War and the controversial Human Terrain System (HTS) program used in Afghanistan, this book addresses the need for constructive and informed discussions about the nature and function of cultural data collection and analysis for counterinsurgency, peace-building, and conflict prevention operations.Crisis of Cultural Intelligence: The Anthropology of civil-military Operations is particularly important today, as cultural values and heritage continue to inform civil-military interventions of intrastate armed conflict amongst the people. Following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this book will provide some insights into how militaries will now need to look ahead and consider the types of conflicts they may become involved in.

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Settler frontiers in unexpected places: Oliver Charbonneau, ‘”A new west in Mindanao”: settler fantasies on the U.S. imperial fringe’, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2019

20Feb19

Abstract: This essay analyzes white settler formations in the Southern Philippines during the early decades of the twentieth century. Occupied by the United States in the wake of the Spanish-American War, the Muslim-majority regions of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago became sites of colonial experimentation and reconfiguration. This led to a brief-but-concerted push by Euro-American fortune seekers to settle the “Muslim South.” Supported by U.S. policy makers and colonial officials, white colonists were drawn to Mindanao-Sulu by visions of permanent settlement and limitless economic opportunity. This analysis contends that settler attempts to build a “white man’s country” in the Southern Philippines were shaped by vernaculars and modes of conquest developed on the continental frontier. It interrogates the creation of transoceanic frontier spaces in Mindanao-Sulu and the practical attempts to exploit them, which drew inspiration from diverse sources in the American West and across the colonized globe. In its study of settler fortunes and failures, the essay blurs distinctions between national and imperial peripheries, and contributes to a growing scholarly interest in reassessing the importance of U.S. extraterritorial possessions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Settler memory: Vicki Hsueh, ‘Reckoning with Settler Memory: Barbara Arneil’s Domestic Colonies and Adam Dahl’s Empire of the People’, Perspectives on Politics, 17, 1, 2019, pp. 168-172

20Feb19

Access the review article here.

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Native title as settler colonialism: Catherine Howlett, Rebecca Lawrence, ‘Accumulating Minerals and Dispossessing Indigenous Australians: Native Title Recognition as Settler‐Colonialism’, Antipode, 2019

20Feb19

Abstract: The changes in regulation of mineral development on Indigenous people’s lands, wrought by the advent of native title in Australia, created an impression that the political economy of mining on Indigenous people’s lands would be fundamentally transformed. In this paper we argue, in reality, a deeply seated settler‐colonial mentality endures in Australia within the institutions presiding over mineral governance, particularly in those States that are heavily dependent upon resource extraction. Focusing on the governance of mineral development in Queensland, Australia, we offer an analysis of the rationalities that inform the endurance of an inequitable architecture of extractive governance in that State. Our conceptual framework draws on a synthesis of the concepts of “accumulation by dispossession”, “settler colonialism”, and Indigenous critiques of the politics of recognition, to argue that liberal states remain deeply committed to the facilitation of mineral development on Indigenous people’s lands in direct contravention to international norms.

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‘Space-off’! Settler colonialism and visual representation: Peta Jeffries, ‘Locating Settler Colonialism in the Myths of Burke and Wills – Aboriginal and Islamic Peoples’s Involvement in Reimagining Successful Exploration of Inland Australia’, Australian Journal of Islamic Studies, 3, 3, 2018

20Feb19

Abstract: Within Australian settler colonial history, a process of ‘space-off’ in exploration cultural representations has created erasure and denial of Aboriginal and Islamic people’s involvement. The implications of this erasure are significant due to the legacy of the myth in maintaining particular views about the Australian inland landscape and the use and appropriation of Indigenous knowledge. Focusing on visual artwork of sociocultural productions associated with the 1860 Victorian Exploring Expedition (VEE), commonly referred to as “Burke and Wills”, this article identifies representations that reflect ongoing social and ecological knowledge of human relationships with nature. As a simple strategy to reimagine Australia’s myths, this article draws on visual artworks and other colonial era secondary sources, plus more recent literature associated with cameleer and Aboriginal histories, to identify representations of settler colonialism and erasure to highlight shared histories worthy of further research. This article examines the structural mechanism of space-off as a strategy to increase understanding of the ways in which settler colonialism pervades not only the national psyche, but also ways in which knowledge and culture are (re)produced based on “an appropriationist logic of domination.”1 Highlighting the ways settler colonialism is maintained, in particular through processes of racialisation, space-off and particular history practices, this article contributes to the growing discipline of Australian Islamic studies and will support further research into shared histories of cross-cultural knowledge production.

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