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Settler colonialism’s ugliness: Stephanie K. Wheeler, ‘(Un)Mapping the City Beautiful: Orlando Florida’s “Ugly” Settler Colonial Legacy’, in S. Rodrigues, E. Przybylo (eds), On the Politics of Ugliness, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 127-150

05Sep18

Abstract: This chapter reflects on the production of Orlando, Florida and how the prevailing vision of its downtown development reiterates the enduring legacy of settler colonialism through its anti-homeless policies. These policies manifest as ugly laws, laws designed to define the unsightly and unwanted bodies of the citizenry in order to keep them from view. These laws are presented simultaneously as concerning aesthetics, safety issues, and even charity, while also serving the enduring settler colonial power structures that first shaped and sanctioned the state of Florida. The focus for analysis is the existing policies that regulate the downtown district of Orlando. These policies exhibit many of the characteristics that Susan Schweik identifies in the ugly laws, particularly with regard to the social, textual, and performative contexts in which the laws are deployed. Ultimately, this analysis denaturalizes downtown space in order to disrupt notions of white settler innocence and neutrality of space. The chapter demonstrates how Orlando’s strategies of city regulation are used to ensure the absence of ugliness, and how these techniques are deployed to maintain the dominance of both settler colonialism and the dynamics between settler society and ableism.


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‘Affectual erasure’ is settler colonial: Cynthia Margarita Tompkins, Affectual Erasure: Representations of Indigenous Peoples in Argentine Cinema, SUNY Press, 2018

02Sep18

Description: Affectual Erasure examines how Argentine cinema has represented Indigenous peoples throughout a period spanning roughly a century. Cynthia Margarita Tompkins interrelates her discussion of films with the ethnographic context of the Indigenous peoples represented and an analysis of the affective dimensions at play. These emotions underscore the inherent violence of generic conventions, as well as the continued political violence preventing Indigenous peoples from access to their ancestral lands and cultural mores. Tompkins explores a broad range of movies beginning in the silent period and includes both feature films and documentaries, underscored by archival and contemporary film stills. She traces the initial erotic projection, moving through melodrama to the conventions of the Western, into the 1960s focus on decolonization, superseded by allegorical renditions and the promise of self-expression in late twentieth-century documentaries. Each section includes an introduction to the sociohistorical events of the period and their impact on film production. Analyzed chronologically, the films evidence different stages in the projection of the hegemonic Argentine imaginary, which fails to envision the daily life of Indigenous peoples prior to conquest or in colonial times—and remains in denial of their existence in the present.


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Settler colonial violence/education: Lilly Brown, ‘Indigenous young people, disadvantage and the violence of settler colonial education policy and curriculum’, Journal of Sociology, 2018

02Sep18

Abstract: In this article, I argue that settler colonial violence is manifest both in the experiences of Indigenous young people in their engagement with the education system, and in the fact that despite a decade of targeted efforts to close the gap in Indigenous educational ‘disadvantage’ – it still remains. Drawing on a small qualitative study undertaken with Indigenous high school students from across New South Wales, Australia, this research reveals that the dismissal of Indigenous knowledge, stories and perspectives within the classroom is reflective of the broader absence in education policy of a critical engagement with the past and how it impacts both the present and the future. Before concluding, I bring settler colonial theory in relation to sociologist Johan Galtung’s conceptualisation of violence to put forward a complex reading of Indigenous educational disadvantage as a product of colonial dispossession.


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Settler nostalgia: Astrid Rasch, ‘Postcolonial Nostalgia: The Ambiguities of White Memoirs of Zimbabwe’, History and Memory, 30, 2, 2018, pp. 147-180

02Sep18

Abstract: This article introduces the concept of “postcolonial nostalgia” to discuss four memoirs by white expatriate Zimbabweans Alexandra Fuller and Peter Godwin. The authors borrow from colonial discourse, producing nostalgic accounts that may appeal to their Western audiences but which fail to challenge colonial mindsets in the way that their postcolonial self-image might lead us to expect. Written at a time of national crisis in Zimbabwe, the memoirs contrast a past of childhood innocence and settler contributions with a dystopic present. Even as the authors dissociate themselves from the white supremacist regime of the past, they present white settlers as benevolent and productive, and seem to lament the replacement of white order with nothing.


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Settler colonialism and informal empire: Kurt Korneski, ‘”A Great Want of Loyalty to Themselves”: The Franco-Newfoundland Trade, Informal Empire, and Settler Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of World History, 29, 2, 2018, pp. 145-183

31Aug18

Abstract: Historians of settler colonialism have posited that the interplay of four interlinked types of relations are central to settler societies. In particular, they emphasize shifting interactions between indigenous peoples and a settler collective; between the settler group and exogenous subaltern groups (for example, migrants of Asian and African descent in North America); between indigenous and exogenous subaltern groups; and the overlap between settler states and the imperial metropoles that spawned them. This case study of the Franco-Newfoundland trade suggests that analyzing and theorizing settler contexts also requires close attention to the informal, mainly commercial, linkages between settler states and the multiplicity of rival metropoles vying for access to spaces and resources in the “Age of Empire.”


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Neo-Victorian fiction returns to settler colonisation: Jessica Hewenn, Unsettling: Settler Colonial Environments in Neo-Victorian Fiction, PhD Dissertation, the Australian National University, 2018

29Aug18

Abstract: In the introduction to the first issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, Marie-Luise Kohlke specifically emphasised neo-Victorian texts concerning ecological trauma, and called for an examination of how such texts represent “the commodification and destruction of the natural world and its biodiversity, and the resulting alienation of humankind from its environment” (2008, 8). Neo-Victorian fiction concerned with colonialism and its environmental impact is abundant, with three of the ten Costa Book Awards since the turn of the new millennium granted to novels taking this as their subject. Yet to date scholarship has largely foregone examination of environmental concerns. Neo-Victorian scholarship that has explored the representation of natural history has done so by focalising through the religion/science dichotomy, examining texts that are concerned with the crisis-of-faith provoked by Darwinian theories of natural selection. This has missed what I argue is the significance of many of the post-millennial British novels set in the colonies: that they are staged not at the frontiers of the expanding empire, or at the forefront of the intellectual disruption caused by Darwin’s theories, but in the literal and figurative settlements that follow. By reimaging the process of settling, particularly the way in which settlers assume a form of indigeneity to the new landscape and reshape their identity through it, these novels grapple with the ongoing issues of identity in a world of dislocation, both literal and metaphorical, from the natural world. This thesis takes up Kohlke’s original call for engagement with colonialism’s environmental impact as is represented in neo-Victorian texts. Drawing on settler colonial theory in order to redress the occlusion of the specific and ongoing politics of settler colonies in existing debates, I argue that post-millennial British neo-Victorian fiction is returning to sites of settler colonisation to question the settlement narrative, often disrupting it by forestalling the possibility of remaining unsettled. Examining Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000), Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves (2006), Jem Poster’s Rifling Paradise (2006), Nicholas Drayson’s Love and the Platypus (2007), Jeremy Page’s The Collector of Lost Things (2013) and Rebecca Hunt’s Everland (2014), this thesis explores texts set in Australia and Canada, and extends to the polar regions as the limit of Victorian settlement, in which the landscapes are simultaneously beyond human encapsulation and profoundly susceptible to human impact. Taken together, these analyses demonstrate that settler colonial neo-Victorian novels incorporate and disrupt the process of identification with the colonial natural world, and in doing so present settler colonial ecological identity as unresolved. Moreover, I argue that it is by reading these texts with a focus on their representations and interrogations of the natural world that their ambivalence about belonging becomes evident, and that this unsettled effect is a reflection of postmillennial concerns about ecological awareness. In their witness-bearing to the trauma of settlement and their questioning of what it means to belong to an environment, these texts are willing to face the possibility of permanent unsettlement.


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Immersive invisibility against settler‐colonial exclusion: Andreas Hackl, ‘Immersive invisibility in the settler‐colonial city: The conditional inclusion of Palestinians in Tel Aviv’, American Ethnologist, 2018

26Aug18

Abstract: The inclusion of indigenous people into settler‐colonial cities is often highly conditional. For middle‐class Palestinian citizens of Israel in Tel Aviv, the invisibility of their ethnonational identity is a precondition for their access to the city’s neoliberal economy and “liberal” lifestyle. To increase their mobility and socioeconomic opportunities, they employ diverse tactics of immersive invisibility. Some, in hopes of overcoming their stigmatized identity, aspire to be recognized as unmarked individuals and successful professionals. Although immersive invisibility does not change settler‐colonial exclusion, it determines how much individuals can achieve within existing parameters. Tactics of immersive invisibility do not necessarily enable one to transcend categorical difference and racialized exclusion, but they reveal how neoliberal inclusion and the settler‐colonial politics of exclusion become entangled and constitute each other.


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Settler colonialism in Western Sahara: Matthew Porges, ‘Western Sahara and Morocco: Complexities of Resistance and Analysis’, in Lotje de Vries, Pierre Englebert, Mareike Schomerus (eds), Secessionism in African Politics: Aspiration, Grievance, Performance, Disenchantment, Palgrave, 2018, pp. 127-149

26Aug18

Abstract: This chapter explores some challenges of analysis faced by scholars of the Western Sahara conflict. Western Sahara is a former Spanish colony that has been largely under Moroccan occupation since the conclusion of a 1975–1991 war between Morocco and the pro-independence Polisario Front. Although the international legal consensus regards Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara as illegitimate and illegal, a UN mission to organize a referendum on independence has so far failed to carry out its purpose. While there are insights to be gained from studying the conflict through the lenses of decolonization, secessionism, and several other frameworks, none of these fully capture the unique history of Western Sahara. This chapter explores some of the challenges that contested history poses to both scholarly analysis and the ongoing political process.


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Tracking academic apartheid: Cacey L. Wells, ‘Understanding Issues Associated with Tracking Students in Mathematics Education’, Journal of Mathematics Education, 11, 2, 2018, pp. 68-84

26Aug18

Abstract: Academic tracking, particularly in subjects like mathematics, has existed in the United States’ education system for decades. A problem with tracking is that, in many cases, students are sorted based on external factors beyond their control, rather than their abilities. This article expounds upon theory supporting these claims, providing support through literature that suggests tracking is rooted in capitalist exploitations and settler colonialism. In deconstructing tracking in schools, connections are made that illustrate how tracking creates cultures of academic apartheid, providing advantages for some and disadvantages for others. To conclude, possibilities are proposed to begin rethinking mathematical curriculum in order to disrupt tracking in education. These possibilities include creating spaces in schools for democratic learning environments to thrive, while calling for curriculum to be structured around students’ interests. Furthermore, ideas like incorporating multiple perspectives in mathematics curricula through rethinking the labels associated with mathematics courses, teaching mathematics through the context of history, and teaching mathematics for social justice, are introduced. Each proposal serves as a potential alternative to traditional, hierarchical mathematics curriculum.


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Sonic indigenous sovereignty against settler colonialism: Trevor George Reed, Itaataatawi: Hopi Song, Intellectual Property, and Sonic Sovereignty in an Era of Settler-Colonialism, PhD Dissertation, Columbia, 2018

22Aug18

Abstract: Hopi traditional songs or taatawi are more than aesthetic objects; they are sound-based expressions of Hopi authority. As I argue in this dissertation, creating, performing, circulating, and remembering taatawi are what we might call acts of sonic sovereignty: a mode of authority articulated within ongoing, sound-based networks that include Hopi people, plants, weather systems, land, and other living things within Hopi territories. I begin by exploring the generative process through which taatawi do their connective work, which includes long-term collaborations between yeeyewat (composers) and environmental actors that establish a collective vision of prosperity that is realized when these songs are performed. Hopi composer Clark Tenakhongva’s taatawi performances during Grand Canyon National Park’s Centennial (a Hopi sacred space currently controlled by settler governments) exemplify the ways Hopi people are actively using taatawi to (re)assert Hopi relations to colonized territories. Because taatawi are closely tied to Hopi relations to one another and the land, and sometimes contain specialized forms of knowledge held closely by Hopi clans and ceremonial societies, their ownership and circulation remains of vital concern to Hopi people. Laura Boulton’s recording of Hopi singers Dan Qötshongva, Thomas Bahnaqya and David Monongye in the Summer of 1940, and the travels of those recordings afterwards, show us the complex politics of Hopi song circulation in the early Twentieth Century up through the present, and how settler cultural and intellectual property laws provide only limited possibilities for indigenous groups seeking to bring their ancestors’ voices back under their control. And even if tribes could reclaim taatawi under settler property laws, these laws require physical and conceptual transformations that effectively sever them from the networks of relations from which they were created. To better support Hopi sonic sovereignty going forward, I offer brief sketches for three potential interventions: (1) an indigenous works amendment to the United States Copyright Act; (2) the use of indigenized licensing frameworks to embed indigenous protocols into the governance and circulation of indigenous creative works both on and off indigenous lands; and (3) establishing a right to indigenous care, similar to Europe’s right to forget, whereby our ancestors’ voices can be subject to indigenous care rather than preserved anonymously and perpetually as archival objects. My hope is that these will allow indigenous communities to better assert and maintain control over their modes of sonic sovereignty despite the increasing colonization of the sonic world by global intellectual property regimes.


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