settler colonial studies blog

Slavery as a foundation of settler colonialism: Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, Monthly Review Press, 2018

12Mar18

Description: Virtually no part of the modern United States—the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements—can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation. To that end, historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe’s colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus’s arrival until the Civil War, some 13 million Africans and some 5 million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling “liberty and justice for all.” The seventeenth century was, according to Horne, an era when the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism became inextricably tangled into a complex history involving war and revolts in Europe, England’s conquest of the Scots and Irish, the development of formidable new weaponry able to ensure Europe’s colonial dominance, the rebel merchants of North America who created “these United States,” and the hordes of Europeans whose newfound opportunities in this “free” land amounted to “combat pay” for their efforts as “white” settlers.

Centering his book on the Eastern Seaboard of North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and what is now Great Britain, Horne provides a deeply researched, harrowing account of the apocalyptic loss and misery that likely has no parallel in human history. This is an essential book that will not allow history to be told by the victors. It is especially needed now, in the age of Trump. For it has never been more vital, Horne writes, “to shed light on the contemporary moment wherein it appears that these malevolent forces have received a new lease on life.”

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Settler colonialism has a reproductive (as well as an eliminationist) logic: Sigrid Vertommen, ‘Researching assisted reproduction in Israel/Palestine: A fertile ground for mayhem’, 2018

10Mar18

Excerpt: When analysing Israel’s remarkable reproductive policies, I use a broad variety of theoretical perspectives and conceptual tools, including cultural-religious, settler colonial, feminist techno-scientific and biocapitalist perspectives that other scholars have fruitfully used to analyse this issue in the United States (Roberts, 1998; Weinbaum, 2004;Berend, 2017), India (Pande, 2014; Rudrappa, 2015), Spain (Pavone and Arias, 2012), theUnited Kingdom (Franklin, 2013) or Puerto Rico (Briggs, 2003). Applied to the Israeli case specifically, this means that I take into account 1) the centrality of reproduction and fertility in Jewish culture and tradition; 2) the history of violence against Jews in Tsarist Russia and Europe, culminating in the Shoah, which increasingly transformed individual procreation into a matter of collective survival; 3) Zionist settler colonial ambitions of creating and consolidating a Jewish demographic majority in a Jewish state inIsrael/Palestine; 4) Israel’s position in global health and research markets with fertility treatments being a highly profitable industry; and 5) the special role of women in this fertility regime, both as reproducers of the nation and producers of bio value (Waldby,2002).

From all these paradigms, it is the settler colonial approach that has triggered worries,concern and even outrage among certain people and organisations who feel they must defend Israeli policies against critical analysis, including scholarly ones.

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Poor settlers are settlers: Nicola Ginsburgh, White Workers and the Production of Race in Southern Rhodesia, 1910-1980, PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2018

10Mar18

Abstract: Scholarship on lower class whites, the worlds of white labour and poor whites in African settler states have been dominated by a geographical focus on South Africa, Algeria and to a lesser extent Mozambique and Angola. Research on the Southern Rhodesian settler population has tended to focus on middle class and rural whites. Wage labourers comprised a significant part of the Southern Rhodesian settler population and offer the opportunity to redress these current imbalances and challenge orthodoxies concerning white workers in racially-stratified labour markets. Through examining the struggles over the racialisation and gendering of particular categories of work, this thesis unearths the ways in which race, gender, ethnicity and nationality were differentially understood and performed. It examines white workers outside of the typical temporal and thematic parameters which have been pursued by labour historians of Southern Rhodesia by interrogating the neglected realms of culture and identity and extending the chronological focus from the first decades of settlement through the Second World War, the Central African Federation and Rhodesian Front period to the end of minority settler rule in 1980. Through analysing women as part of the formal labour force it reveals the diverse experiences of white women in the colonies, examines how work was gendered, and corrects a longstanding omission in existing labour histories. Its originality lies not only in its focus on under-researched aspects of female wage labour, white identity and class experience in Southern Rhodesia, but in its methodological and theoretical synthesis of work on gender, whiteness studies, settler colonialism, emotions, the New African Economic History, space and borders.

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What is needed for space settlement (power, atmosphere, water, soil)? John C. Mankins, Willa M. Mankins, Helen Walter, ‘Biological challenges of true space settlement’, Acta Astronautica, 2018

10Mar18

Abstract: “Space Settlements” – i.e., permanent human communities beyond Earth’s biosphere – have been discussed within the space advocacy community since the 1970s. Now, with the end of the International Space Station (ISS) program fast approaching (planned for 2024–2025) and the advent of low cost Earth-to-orbit (ETO) transportation in the near future, the concept is coming once more into mainstream. Considerable attention has been focused on various issues associated with the engineering and human health considerations of space settlement such as artificial gravity and radiation shielding. However, relatively little attention has been given to the biological implications of a truly self-sufficient space settlement. Three fundamental questions are explored in this paper: (1) what are the biological “foundations” of truly self-sufficient space settlements in the foreseeable future, (2) what is the minimum scale for such self-sustaining human settlements, and (3) what are the integrated biologically-driven system requirements for such settlements? The paper examines briefly the implications of the answers to these questions in relevant potential settings (including free space, the Moon and Mars). Finally, this paper suggests relevant directions for future research and development in order for such space settlements to become viable in the future.

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If mobility is outlawed only settlers shall have a passport: Sonia Nair, ‘Passport privilege entrenches inequality’, Eureka Street, 27, 24, 2017, pp. 33-36

09Mar18

Abstract: The world is often characterised as porous and easy to manoeuvre in this age of unparalleled technology and a globalised economy. But it’s only ever been this way to people who have a combination of a particular passport and cultural heritage, particularly in settler colonial nations such as Australia.

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If privacy is outlawed, only settlers shall have privacy: Lara Fullenwieder, Adam Molnar, ‘Settler Governance and Privacy: Canada’s Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement and the Mediation of State-Based Violence’, International Journal of Communication 12, 2018, pp. 1332–1349

09Mar18

Abstract: In 2007, the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) was developed to redress the violent and assimilative history of residential schools in Canada. The records collected through the IRSSA represent the most comprehensive documentation of violence against Indigenous populations in Canada: data that range from personal testimonials and records, medical histories, and institutional documents to tested legal statements regarding physical and sexual abuse and its effects. The implementation of the IRSSA has been punctuated by legal conflicts that mobilize discourses and laws centering on liberal-conceived rights concerning access to information and privacy. In this article, we examine how liberal discourses of privacy knowledge and uses of privacy law inform histories and futures of Indigenous and settler memory in the context of state-based violence. The article reveals how liberal notions of privacy, when mobilized alongside federally mandated policies of reconciliation, may reproduce the structural violence of settler colonial governance in liberal democracies.

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Taiwan and settler society: Katsuya Hirano, Lorenzo Veracini, Toulouse-Antonin Roy, ‘Vanishing natives and Taiwan’s settler-colonial unconsciousness’, Critical Asian Studies, 2018

08Mar18

Abstract: This article approaches Taiwan history through the optic of settler-colonial studies, a comparative scholarly field that has consolidated in recent years. The article focuses on uncovering the multiple layers of Taiwan’s settler-colonial past lying beneath dominant historical narratives. It is important to note that processes of profound historiographical transformation are already underway and that our intervention aims to contribute to a revision that is already happening. What we offer is a transnational framework and its language.

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Settlers don’t want indigenous teachers: Lisa Hall, ‘”Not looking at us level”: Systemic barriers faced by Aboriginal teachers in remote communities in Central Australia’, Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, 5, 1, 2018, pp. 74-101

04Mar18

Abstract: This essay is based on doctoral research that examined the reasons behind the low number of young Aboriginal teachers currently undertaking and completing teacher education in remote communities in Central Australia. By listening to the stories of a group of fully qualified and experienced Aboriginal teachers, this doctoral research explored the complex array of barriers, as well as supports, that Aboriginal people from remote communities encounter as educators. The seven teacher participants in this research have each spent between 20 and 35 years working in their respective schools in their home communities (see map below) and have undertaken and completed the requisite study to become fully qualified teachers. The purpose of this essay is to focus exclusively on the examples of systemic barriers experienced by these teachers through the theoretical lens of race, using settler colonial theory, whiteness theory and critical race theory (CRT).

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Indigenous recognition has a colonialist imprinting: Pedro Calafate, ‘The Rights of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil: Historical Development and Constitutional Acknowledgment’, International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, 2018

04Mar18

Abstract: The historical roots of the concept of original rights of the indigenous peoples of Brazil concerning the lands they traditionally occupy, enshrined in Article 231 of the Brazilian Federal Constitution of 1988, refer to the law of nations, taught by Iberian teachers of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, particularly with regard to the scholastic concept of domain. We also show how the concept of Indigenato, formulated in 1912 by João Mendes Junior, considered over the past decades as the one that best illuminates Article 231 of the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, is entirely founded on this Iberian school of natural law and law of nations, inviting us to a dialogue with the classics.

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Domestic colonies are colonies: Barbara Arneil, ‘Domestic Colonies in Canada: Rethinking the Definition of Colony’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2018

04Mar18

Abstract: What is a colony? In this article, I reconsider the meaning of colony in light of the existence of domestic colonies in Canada around the turn of the twentieth century. The two case studies examined are farm colonies for the mentally disabled and ill in Ontario and British Columbia and utopian colonies for Doukhobors in Saskatchewan. I show how both kinds of colonies are characterized by the same three principles found in Lockean settler colonialism: segregation, agrarian labour on uncultivated soil and improvement/cultivation of people and land. Defining “colony” in this way is theoretically interesting as it is different from the definition found in most dictionaries and post-colonial scholarship. There is also an inherent contradiction within domestic colonies as they both support state power over indigenous peoples, Doukhobors and the mentally ill and disabled but also challenge the principles of domination, individualism, private property and sovereignty upon which the Canadian settler state was founded.

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