settler colonial studies blog

Settler emigrants are invisible (that is because they are settlers): Eric Richards, ‘British Emigrants and the Making of the Anglosphere’, History, 103, 355, 2018, pp. 286-306

04Apr18

Abstract: British emigrants tend to be lost in their vast numbers and in their historiographical anonymity. They feature very marginally in most interpretations of British expansion in the age of imperialism. There was a remarkable surge in emigration in the 1820s which presaged the Age of Emigration in the Victorian era. This was also a prototype of modern international migration. The origins of this momentous increase in emigration are unclear but recent emphasis gives priority to the influence of the new forms of propaganda and ‘puffery’. In this article it is contended that more consideration should be accorded to bedrock changes in British demography and agrarian life in the propulsion of this mass emigration, which eventually involved about 19 million people from the British Isles in the long nineteenth century.

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Manu Vimalassery on Iyko Day’s Alien Capital: MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 64, 1, 2018, pp. 198-201

04Apr18

Excerpt: Operating in a framework that crosses the Canada-US border, Alien Capital argues that Asian Americans personify abstract value in North American settler colonial capitalism and provide a racial target for the anxieties of settlers reacting to capitalist abstraction. Day’s argument hinges on the ways that settler colonial glorification of the concrete—as exemplified in whiteness and the nuclear family and revolving around settler appropriations of indigenous relations with place (in which settlers substitute themselves as native)—manifests anxieties concerning the contradictions of settler capitalism. Settlers displace these anxieties onto variously racialized aliens, violently associating Asian bodies with the domination of capitalist abstraction. Elimination and exclusion, Day convincingly argues, are interlinked modes of settler colonialism. “Asians,” she writes, “are as unnatural to the landscape as Indigenous peoples are natural. This is the double edge of settler colonialism” (112). I understand North American settler sovereignty to be a reactive set of future-oriented claims articulated and levied against indigenous relationalities, which I call counter-sovereignty. Day’s argument helps me understand that alien desires, as queer desires, potentially disrupt settler futurity, and given the fact and necessity of ongoing indigenous existence to the stability of settler colonialism, futurity is all that settlers can actually claim. Settler sovereignty is preemptive. Alien desires, then, potentially disrupt settler sovereignty, and anti-Asian racism anxiously lashes out in the present against the possible displacement of settler futures.

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Settler girls play Indian too! Kiara M. Vigil, ‘Charles Eastman’s “School of the Woods”: Re-creation related to Childhood, Race, Gender, and Nation at Camp Oahe’, American Quarterly, 70, 1, 2018, pp. 25-53

04Apr18

Abstract: This essay examines a program of outdoor education created by Charles (Ohiyesa) Eastman—Dakota physician, author, and activist—which has been largely absent from scholarly work on his life and writings. The Eastman family founded Oahe in 1916 in New Hampshire as a summer camp for girls. Reading the Eastmans’ camp through the lenses of redfacing and survivance, I provide new insights into the “playing Indian” phenomenon associated with outdoors education that was part of an American youth wilderness movement promoted by groups like the Camp Fire Girls and Boy Scouts of America. For the Eastmans, “Indian play” served a broader pedagogical and political purpose. Their camp was distinct from other wilderness outfits because they did not view Native practices as “savage” and part of an early stage in child development that young people had to experience and overcome to become successful adults. Rather, the Eastman family sought to engage white girlhood to teach the future mothers of the nation about the values of Dakota teachings to recast Indian culture. Oahe was led by Eastman and his wife as well as their three eldest daughters, who were themselves exemplars of a Native cosmopolitanism that they hoped white campers would embrace to fully accept Indian people as shapers of American society and as integral to the past as well as future of the United States. The story of Oahe highlights a new venue Eastman used to represent himself as a Native intellectual and reveals his awareness of the structural limits of settler colonialism. Oahe illuminates Eastman’s cultural politics of recognition as someone poised to respond to the threats of erasure and dispossession posed by the colonial state. In this context, the Eastman family’s camp sought to counter prevalent notions of savagery and primitivism by using redfacing as an embodied performative tactic and instructive cultural force that constituted survivance. Whether performed by the Eastmans or their campers, redfacing in this context differed from the minstrel tradition of “blackface,” since Indian people remained in control of how to deploy these strategic performances of Indianness. This essay provides new analysis of early twentieth-century gender roles, dynamics, and expectations related to Indian people to reveal another dimension of outdoors education in shaping American attitudes toward identity, family, childhood, and nation.

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Indigenous futures demand indigenous self-determination when it comes to indigenous pasts: Sara L. Gonzalez, Ian Kretzler, Briece Edwards, ‘Imagining Indigenous and Archaeological Futures: Building Capacity with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde’, Archaeologies, 2018

04Apr18

Abstract: Collaborative archaeological research with indigenous communities, in addition to fostering culturally specific, community-centred research programmes, also encourages meaningful shifts in archaeological research on the ground. Field Methods in Indigenous Archaeology (FMIA), a community-based research partnership between the University of Washington and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, highlights these dual possibilities. The project seeks to strengthen the tribe’s capacity to care for cultural resources, to recover histories of survivance on the Grand Ronde Reservation, and to develop a low-impact, Grand Ronde archaeological methodology. These goals are realized through a summer field school, which joins comprehensive field instruction with overviews of tribal historic preservation and engagement with the Grand Ronde community. FMIA encapsulates the ethical imperative to work with, for, and by indigenous communities in archaeological research and the opportunities such work brings in transforming archaeological method, theory, and practice.

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There is settler colonialism in German colonialism (and there is colonialism in German modernity): Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, ‘Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Decolonization’, Central European History, 51, 1, 2018, pp. 83-89

04Apr18

Abstract: In the past two decades, colonial studies, the postcolonial turn, the new imperial history, as well as world and global history have made serious strides toward revising key elements of German history. Instead of insisting that German modernity was a fundamentally unique, insular affair that incubated authoritarian social tendencies, scholars working in these fields have done much to reinsert Germany into the broader logic of nineteenth-century global history, in which the thalassocratic empires of Europe pursued the project of globalizing their economies, populations, and politics. During this period, settler colonies, including German South West Africa, were established and consolidated by European states at the expense of displaced, helotized, or murdered indigenous populations. Complementing these settler colonies were mercantile entrepôts and plantation colonies, which sprouted up as part of a systematic, global attempt to reorient non-European economies, work patterns, and epistemological frameworks along European lines. Although more modestly than some of its European collaborators and competitors, Germany joined Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States in a largely liberal project of global maritime imperialism.

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Slow violence on indigenous ground (and the paradox of struggle): Paige Raibmon, ‘Obvious but Invisible: Ways of Knowing Health, Environment, and Colonialism in a West Coast Indigenous Community’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 60, 2, 2018, pp. 241-273

04Apr18

Abstract: This paper interrogates the specific workings and stakes of slow violence on Indigenous ground. It argues that despite similarities with other environmental justice struggles, Indigenous ones are fundamentally distinct because of Indigenous peoples’ unique relationship to the polluted or damaged entity, to the state, and to capital. It draws from Indigenous studies, history, anthropology, geography, sensory studies, and STS, to present results from research with the Mowachaht Muchalaht First Nation, an Indigenous people on the west coast of British Columbia. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, this community used successive strategies to try to render its knowledge about health, environment, and authority visible to the settler state. Each strategy entailed particular configurations of risk, perceptibility, and uncertainty; each involved translation between epistemologies; and each implicated a distinct subject position for Indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the state. The community’s initial anti-colonial, environmental justice campaign attempted to translate local, Indigenous ways of knowing into the epistemologies of environmental science and public health. After this strategy failed, community leaders launched another that leveraged the state’s legal epistemology. This second strategy shifted the balance of risk and uncertainty such that state actors felt compelled to act. The community achieved victory, but at a price. Where the first strategy positioned the community as a self-determined, sovereign actor; the second positioned it as a ward of the state. This outcome illustrates the costs that modern states extract from Indigenous peoples who seek remedial action, and more generally, the mechanisms through which the colonial present is (re)produced.

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Settlers imprison political thought: Hedi Viterbo, ‘A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Imprison: Confining Palestinian Political Thought’, Jadaliyya, 03/04/18

04Apr18

Excerpt: Like incarceration in the physical sense, the incarceration of the mind inside Israeli prisons resonates with Israel’s outside control mechanisms. In addition to rendering the Gaza Strip and West Bank prison-like in the physical sense, Israel has also, at different points in time and in specific but important ways, erected barriers to the movement of thought, information, and communication.

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The necessary rediscovery of inter-national politics: Hayden King, ‘Discourses of conquest and resistance: International Relations and Anishinaabe diplomacy’, in Randolph Persaud, Alina Sajed (eds), Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations: Postcolonial Perspectives, Routledge, 2018

01Apr18

Abstract: Indigenous nations have much to contribute to an understanding of global politics, political community, war, peace, and so on. However, they do not appear in International Relations texts or come up in classroom discussions. Attempting to address this puzzle, this chapter proceeds in two parts. The first begins by explaining IR’s erasure of both contemporary settler colonialism and Indigenous politics. The second part re-inserts Indigenous peoples into the disciplinary landscape and articulates an Indigenous – and specifically Anishinaabe – theory of inter-national politics by focusing on three core concepts in the study of IR: the state, sovereignty and anarchy. It finds that Indigenous peoples have and continue to cultivate and practice a sophisticated, counter-hegemonic politics of the international.

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The nonsovereign on the coin: Sarah Marusek, ‘Appreciation orAppropriation? An Indigenous Moment in the American Numismatic Narrative (1999–2009)’, in Stefan Huygebaert, Angela Condello, Sarah Marusek, Mark Antaki (eds), Sensing the Nation’s Law: Historical Inquiries into the Aesthetics of Democratic Legitimacy, Springer, 2018

28Mar18

Abstract: American coinage, both circulated as well as commemorative, involves a host of cultural markers that represent the legal iconography of American national identity. The umbrella of American identity is one that covers places and peoples living in the continental United States, arctic and subarctic Alaska, and islands in the Pacific and Caribbean Oceans. As legal iconography, state and territorial American quarters serve as emblems of folk legality in which culture and law constitutively craft one another in ordinary tangible ways. While these quarters depict, and perhaps even celebrate a multicultural polity, the iconographic process of remembering may be more a statement of post-colonial design rather than genuine commemoration of the past and indigenous present of American Indian, Samoan, Native Hawaiian, Native Alaskan, Chamorran, Puerto Rican, and other indigenous peoples under American jurisdiction. These quarters present a theoretical paradox involving the portrayal of images that appear on them. This paradox represents an indigenous moment numismatically framed through non-English phrases and depictions of culture outside the continental forty-eight states. This chapter will examine this paradox as an indigenous moment in the numismatic construction of public memory illustrated by the minting of linguistic variety and cultural imagery on American state and territorial quarters.

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Settler play: Jacob Euteneuer, ‘Settler Colonialism in the Digital Age: Clash of Clans, Territoriality, and the Erasure of the Native’, Open Library of Humanities. 4, 1, 2018

28Mar18

Abstract: In the past ten years, two seemingly unconnected fields of study have risen to prominence. Patrick Wolfe’s 2006 theorization of settler colonialism called for the development of a distinct set of literature and analytical tools to analyze the relationship between indigenous peoples and occupying settlers. Meanwhile, Ian Bogost’s 2007 elaboration of the notion of procedural rhetoric provided a theoretical framework to approach the critical analysis of the ideology modeled by a game’s rules and design. While each of these theories have proliferated and prospered within their disciplines, this article seeks to bring the two fields together in order to establish a critical framework that can be used to highlight the presence of settler colonialism in popular mobile videogames, in particular Supercell’s 2012 mobile game Clash of Clans. Within this framework, the essay analyzes how the game engages in a system of play driven by its focus on improvement, progression, and expansion, which ends up operating under the same principles settler colonialism has used to justify the expansion of settler-states and the eradication of indigenous populations. Through an examination of the game’s economy, enemies, maps, and music, the essay connects the game’s systems of play to the embedded nature of settler colonialism in the videogame industry—particularly the mobile or casual scene—and contemporary life in settler-states. The ultimate goal is to explain how social meaning is derived from these types of games and what that means for both players and creators in terms of developing new, progressive opportunities for play.

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