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Still on settler-colonial biopolitics and its failures: James Boucher, ‘Neoliberal Biopolitics in Michel Noël’s Nipishish: Market Logic and Indigenous Resistance’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 42, 2, 2018, pp. 77-96

03Feb19

Abstract: This article explores the imbrication of history, fiction, and biopolitics in a variety of specific confrontations between the Canadian state and the Anishnaabeg in Michel Noël’s teen novel Nipishish (2004). Situated in Southwest Québec during the second half of the 20th century, the novel lends itself readily to a biopolitical reading which gleans from and expands on the theories of Foucault, Agamben, and Pratt. Focusing on deconstructing biopolitical strategies of the settler colonial state and agentive Native practices, the analysis underscores how Noël’s depiction of Indigenous lifeways and resistance constitute an invaluable political message to Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth alike.


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Settler-colonial biopolitical control against Indigenous refusal: Sheila Collingwood-Whittick, ‘Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Resistance: The Refusal of Australia’s First Peoples “to fade away or assimilate or just die”’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 42, 2, 2018, pp. 11-38

03Feb19

Abstract: During the first century of Australia’s colonization, settler thanatopolitics meant both casual killing of individual Natives and organized massacres of Aboriginal clans. From the mid-nineteenth century, however, Aboriginal Protection Boards sought to disappear their charges by more covert means. Thus, biopolitics of biological absorption, cultural assimilation, and child removal, designed to bring about the destruction of Aboriginal peoples, came to be represented as being in the victims’ best interests. Even today, coercive assimilation is framed in the now-threadbare terms of welfare discourse. Yet, Australia’s Indigenous peoples have survived the genocidal practices of the frontier era and continue to resist the relentless succession of normative policies deployed to eradicate their “recalcitrant” lifeways. This essay presents a brief historical overview of settler Australia’s biopolitics and analyzes the sociocultural factors enabling Aboriginal Australians both to survive the devastating impact of settler biopower and to resist the siren call of assimilationist rhetoric. Drawing on Kim Scott’s Benang and Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise, I discuss how that resistance is reflected in contemporary Indigenous life-writing and fiction.


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On settler-colonial biopolitics: J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, ‘Afterword: A Response Essay’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 42, 2, 2018, pp. 97-102

03Feb19

Abstract: This response addresses aspects of biopolitical regulations by Canada, El Salvador, Australia, and the United States, as critically analyzed in the special issue. Each piece offers much to illuminate different modalities of regulating Indigenous lifeways and Indigenous peoples’ resistance to them on myriad grounds, and this response engages three particular themes that emerge from these articles: (1) structural genocide in settler-colonial states’ attempts at deracination; (2) Indigenous peoples’ agency with regard to anti-normalization; and (3) decolonial resistance outside of imposed settler-colonial binaries. All three aspects challenge the “logic of elimination of the Native” that, as theorized by Patrick Wolfe, is endemic to settler colonialism. The piece also offers some thoughts on these same three key nodes in the case of Hawai‘i and the United States.


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Settler-colonial biopolitics in Australia: René Dietrich, ‘Introduction: Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Lifeways’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 42, 2, 2018, pp. 1-10

03Feb19

Abstract: Drawing on recent Australian historiography, two works of Indigenous fiction, and the latest staggering figures on Indigenous incarceration and child removal, this article develops two main ideas. Firstly, a seamless ideological continuity exists between the biopolitics settler colonial Australia pursued in previous centuries and the striking resurgence today of those earlier biopolitical practices of mass internment and separating Indigenous children from their families. Secondly, contemporary Indigenous Australians not only continue to resist the relentless succession of normative policies, through both political acts and cultural endeavors, but they are now also defiantly affirming their adherence to their own traditional values.


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Decolonising as a joint effort: Mirjam B. E. Held, ‘Decolonizing Research Paradigms in the Context of Settler Colonialism: An Unsettling, Mutual, and Collaborative Effort’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18, 2019, 1–16

03Feb19

Abstract: All research is guided by a set of philosophical underpinnings. Indigenous methodologies are in line with an Indigenous paradigm, while critical and liberatory methodologies fit with the transformative paradigm. Yet Indigenous and transformative methodologies share an emancipatory and critical stance and thus are increasingly used in tandem by both Western and Indigenous scholars in an attempt to decolonize methodologies, research, and the academy as a whole. However, these multiparadigmatic spaces only superficially support decolonization which, in the Canadian context of settler colonialism, is a radical and unsettling prospect that is about land, resources, and sovereignty. Applying this definition of decolonization to the decolonization of research paradigms, this article suggests that such paradigms must be developed, from scratch, conjointly between Indigenous and Western researchers.


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Capturing the border: Liam Midzain-Gobin, ‘Decolonizing Borders’, E-International Relations, 12/01/19

27Jan19

Excerpt: the inter-state system as a particular form of organizing authority is especially important for contemporary settler colonial states such as Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Canada and the United States. Indeed, this distribution of authority in the world has allowed these settler states to establish their own legitimacy through the imposition of state borders on top of the existing national boundaries maintained by Indigenous nations. What I aim to do here is trouble the way in which we accept the sovereign authority produced by the inter-state system at face value, using the [Unist’ot’en Action] Camp as an example of Indigenous nations complicating this view. Taking up more recent understandings of borders as a productive tool, I argue that in the case of what is today Canada, instead of reifying settler coloniality, Indigenous communities are using borders (and bordering practices more broadly) to deconstruct norms of settler sovereignty and claims to authority. In this way, instead of being tools used in service of building a colonial state, borders are being used to create the kind of decolonial futures imagined by Indigenous theorists, and which rest on a refusal of contemporary settler coloniality instead of an acceptance of it.


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Self-repressing authenticity: Dwanna L. McKay, ‘Real Indians: Policing or Protecting Authentic Indigenous Identity?’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2019

27Jan19

Abstract: Research shows that the institutionalization of legitimacy criteria has created contested meanings of being indigenous to the United States, which leads to an unrelenting debate about authentic indigeneity among indigenous people and between indigenous communities. While instituted through colonizing federal Indian policy, the “real Indian” trope is now a social fact for American Indians. Thus, indigeneity claims commonly encounter resistance in the United States, even within indigenous communities. This work explores how indigeneity claims encounter opposition at interpersonal and group levels and the consequences of authenticity policing. I ask two guiding questions: What authenticity markers hold the most value for American Indians? How do American Indians justify authenticity policing? Using a qualitative approach and an indigenous epistemology, I examine the phenomenon of internalizing the real Indian trope and the impact of policing authenticity through conversations with 45 indigenous people. I find that achieving authenticity is elusive because of its dynamic nature within the local specificity of social contexts. I present and discuss two major signifiers of American Indian identity and major sites of authenticity contestation: (1) blood as protection, culture, and belonging, and (2) Indian cards as protection, responsibility, and belonging.


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Settlers on the ground: Carla J. Mulford, ‘”Prevent[ing] … Restless Spirits from Exciting Disturbances”: Benjamin Franklin and the Wyoming Valley’, Pennsylvania History, 86, 1, 2019, pp. 1-37

25Jan19

Abstract: The controversy over the lands in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania has been the stuff of legend (in stories of the Battle of Wyoming) and the historical record. Scholars in recent years have presented the history of the region as a contest between empires, between monied classes and common people seeking to eke out a living in a border region, and between individuals unsure of the political implications of democratic institutions. Left out of the narratives of the 1780s Wyoming controversy is a key figure who assisted in resolving the dispute: Benjamin Franklin. Biographers of Franklin have omitted discussion of his important intervention in the Wyoming events. Yet Franklin had a significant role to play as the controversy reached its resolution in the formation of the county of Luzerne.


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Sociology and settlement: Stepha Velednitsky, Modernizing the Moshav: Israel’s Sociological Management of Mizrahi Jewish Settlement, 1948-1967, MA dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2018

25Jan19

Excerpt: In an effort to understand the coupling of Palestinian displacement with Mizrahi settlement, this project examines the theories and practices developed by Israeli sociologists and land settlement planners to facilitate Mizrahi settlement within the nascent nation’s periphery. I address the confluence of sociological theory and Mizrahi settlement practice to examine the significance of social management to the production of Palestine’s racial settler capitalist landscape. I argue that this synthesis of sociological knowledge and settlement “expertise” laid the groundwork not only for the physical distribution of Mizrahi and Ashkenazi settlement in Palestine, but also for the emergence of Israel’s racialized settler-colonial regime within the territory of Palestine.


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The ‘family farm’ is a settler farm: Kelly Bronson, Irena Knezevic, Chantal Clement, ‘The Canadian family farm, in literature and in practice’, Journal of Rural Studies, 2019

23Jan19

Abstract: Many sociologists and food policy activists are preoccupied with the fate of the family farm. In this paper we ask whether tacit normative beliefs among scholars regarding the family farm as an imagined site of resistance to industrialization and its ills holds up to empirical scrutiny? Using a grounded theoretical approach, we build an understanding of the relationship structures defining the contemporary family farm in its wider assemblages and food system relations. We engage 36 self-identified family farmers in Canada in qualitative interviews from which we constitute a definition of the contemporary family farm and its role in food politics. Our interviews reveal incredible variation in labour arrangements, production styles and strategies as well non-uniform commitments to sustainability among farmers. The interviews also, perhaps most crucially, reveal some of our participants trading upon normative conceptions of “family farm” and mobilizing what we claim is a “floating signifier” (Laclau, 1989) for a variety of food system interests, some arguably unsustainable.


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