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Subaltern settler colonialism? Lucy Taylor, ‘Global perspectives on Welsh Patagonia: the complexities of being both colonizer and colonized’, 13, 3, 2018, pp. 446-468

09Nov18

Abstract: The nationalist Welsh colony in Patagonia, Y Wladfa, offers a peripheral vantage point from which to reconsider core assumptions about settler colonialism and the British World. Taking a fresh approach to settler colonial studies, this article both pays close attention to settler motives before embarkation and also analyses the case from a global perspective. It foregrounds the role of unequal power relations in Britain, the British World, and the global arena in shaping social relations at home and in the colony, as well as locating Y Wladfa within a constellation of Welsh sites and influences around the world. Analysis reveals the Welsh to occupy a complex position within such global hierarchies, and to be colonizing Patagonia from a colonized position. As such, this case at the margins of settler power reveals important ambiguities, tensions, and affinities that challenge assumptions in settler colonial theory, and open spaces that might enrich and deepen analysis of this fundamentally global relationship of power.


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Keywords: Melissa Free, ‘Settler Colonialism’, VLC, 3-4, 2018, pp. 876-882

03Nov18

Excerpt: British settler colonies, colonies of occupation, and plantation colonies were built on unequal relationships between colonizer and colonized, and entailed the correlative exploitation of distant land, labor, and other resources. While distinguishing between them is useful, the terms themselves are Eurocentric constructs, even as they denote material realities; the lines between them are not hard and fast; and no two colonies were exactly alike. British residents of colonies of occupation (like India and Hong Kong) were temporary and largely male. These merchants, missionaries, soldiers, and administrators (who, particularly in the latter two cases, sometimes moved between colonies) formed a “thin white line” of control over indigenous populations. British residents of planation colonies (like those in the Caribbean) were only somewhat more permanent. These mostly upper-class plantation owners often spent months or even years in Britain, where their wives and children, if they had them, were as likelyas not to reside. Because the Caribbean’s indigenous population had been all but destroyed through contact with earlier European settlers, the British generated a labor force by importing Africans as slaves and Indians as indentured servants. Though non-whites outnumbered whites significantly, resistance—to poor working conditions, slavery (pre-1833), and other forms of inequality—was met with brutal reprisal. As in colonies of occupation, resources flowed out.


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Settler colonial elimination is gendered elimination: Sofia Zaragocin, ‘Gendered Geographies of Elimination: Decolonial Feminist Geographies in Latin American Settler Contexts’, Antipode, 2018

03Nov18

Abstract: Gendered geographies of elimination further settler colonialism’s influence on conceptual discussions in human geography on contemporary forms of the place‐based death of indigenous peoples. Through work stemming from scholarship on the gendering of settler colonialism, this paper adds to narratives on place annihilation and dispossession of indigenous territory tied to the slow death of racialised, gendered and sexualised populations. Building on incipient reflections in geography with settler colonialism, I explore the geographic implications from the perspective of Epera women, indigenous women belonging to a trinational ethnicity experiencing elimination along the Ecuador–Colombia borderland from the perspective of decolonial feminist geography frameworks. I claim that attrition implied in settler colonialism’s logic of elimination is a territorial project demonstrated in place‐based elimination and gendered embodied elimination.


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Dest Bowls of settler colonialism: Hannah Holleman, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of ‘Green’ Capitalism, Yale University Press, 2018

03Nov18

Description: The 1930s witnessed a harrowing social and ecological disaster, defined by the severe nexus of drought, erosion, and economic depression that ravaged the U.S. southern plains. Known as the Dust Bowl, this crisis has become a major referent of the climate change era, and has long served as a warning of the dire consequences of unchecked environmental despoliation.

Through innovative research and a fresh theoretical lens, Hannah Holleman reexamines the global socioecological and economic forces of settler colonialism and imperialism precipitating this disaster, explaining critical antecedents to the acceleration of ecological degradation in our time. Holleman draws lessons from this period that point a way forward for environmental politics as we confront the growing global crises of climate change, freshwater scarcity, extreme energy, and soil degradation.


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The settler’s search for psycurity: Rachel Jane Liebert, Psycurity: Colonialism, Paranoia, and the War on Imagination, Routledge, 2018

03Nov18

Description: Across the world, the rhetoric and violence of white supremacy is rising up. Yet, explanations for white supremacist attacks typically direct attention toward an unreasonable, paranoid state of mind, and away from the neocolonial security state that made them.

Offering a response to US expressions of white supremacy, Liebert reads paranoia as a dis-ease of coloniality by following its circulation within the ultimate place of reason, indeed a key arbitrator of it: Psychology. Through reflexivity, interviews, participant observation, scientific artefacts, and public art, this unique work seeks to argue for and experiment with unsettling the entwined coloniality of Psychology and the current political moment, joining with struggles for a world where it is not only white lives that matter. Tracing the spinning cogs and affective coils of the prodromal movement – a program of research that, capturing potential psychosis, illustrates the serpentine workings of a control society – Liebert argues that, within a context of psycurity, paranoia hides as reasonable suspicion, predicts the future, brands threatening bodies, and grows through fear, thereby seeping into the cracks of white supremacy, stabilizing it. Catching this argument as itself enacting psycurity, she then engages the more-than-human to search for paranoia’s decolonizing, otherworldly potential; one that may revive the psykhe – breath – of psychologies too.

Calling for psychologies to leave Psychology’s comfort zone and make space for imagination, this performative, interdisciplinary work will engage students, researchers, and activists from an array of disciplines who wish to examine a critical and creative response to present-day racism and fascism.


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Peace-seeking settlers? Rob Harper, Unsettling the West Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

03Nov18

Description: The revolutionary Ohio Valley is often depicted as a chaotic Hobbesian dystopia, in which Indians and colonists slaughtered each other at every turn. In Unsettling the West, Rob Harper overturns this familiar story. Rather than flailing in a morass, the peoples of the revolutionary Ohio Valley actively and persistently sought to establish a new political order that would affirm their land claims, protect them against attack, and promote trade. According to Harper, their efforts repeatedly failed less because of racial antipathy or inexorable competition for land than because of specific state policies that demanded Indian dispossession, encouraged rapid colonization, and mobilized men for war.

Unsettling the West demonstrates that government policies profoundly unsettled the Ohio Valley, even as effective authority remained elusive. Far from indifferent to states, both Indians and colonists sought government allies to aid them in both intra- and intercultural conflicts. Rather than spreading uncontrollably across the landscape, colonists occupied new areas when changing policies, often unintentionally, gave them added incentives to do so. Sporadic killings escalated into massacre and war only when militants gained access to government resources. Amid the resulting upheaval, Indians and colonists sought to preserve local autonomy by forging relationships with eastern governments. Ironically, these local pursuits of order ultimately bolstered state power.

Following scholars of European and Latin American history, Harper extends the study of mass violence beyond immediate motives to the structural and institutional factors that make large-scale killing possible. The Ohio Valley’s transformation, he shows, echoed the experience of early modern and colonial state formation around the world. His attention to the relationships between violence, colonization, and state building connects the study of revolutionary America to a vibrant literature on settler colonialism.


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Indigenous infopolitics is settler colonialism in action: Matthew MacLellan, ‘Indigenous Infopolitics: Biopolitics as Resistance to White Paper Liberalism in Canada’, Theory & Event, 21, 4, 2018 pp. 914-936

03Nov18

Abstract: This article argues for a reading of biopolitics as a mechanism of political empowerment under conditions in which the state perpetuates exclusion by paradoxically affirming the political equality of marginalized individuals or groups. After differentiating Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of biopolitics from its conventional interpretation in Giorgio Agamben, I show how the Canadian state counterintuitively perpetuates Indigenous exclusion through an inclusive liberalism that re-affirms Indigenous persons as full and equal citizens. I then conclude the article by showing how a statistics or information-based discourse of population—an Indigenous infopolitics—has concomitantly become an indispensible means of Indigenous resistance in Canada today.


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Resisting settler colonialisms: Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, ‘Framing Resistance Call and Response: Reading Assata Shakur’s Black Revolutionary Radicalism in Palestine’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 46, 3-4, 2018, pp. 226-231

31Oct18

Excerpt: My mother was affirming what we grew up knowing with absolute certainty about the United States: It was founded as a settler colonial state that, like Israel, sought (but failed) to erase the existence of Indigenous communities, and consolidated this settler colonial project by first kidnapping and enslaving Africans, and institutionalizing racist discrimination. In our minds, these conditions resonated with the stories of Palestinian uprootedness and dispossession that we heard daily. Neither abstract nor distant, these stories of Black and Indigenous struggle were part of our families’ histories.


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Settler cinema: Lin-chin Tsai, ‘Mapping Formosa: Settler Colonial Cartography in Taiwan Cinema in the 1950s’, Concentric, 44, 2, 2018

31Oct18

Abstract: This paper suggests a methodological intersection of cultural geography and settler colonial criticism to critique and reflect on the Han settler colonial structure in Taiwan by examining two representative but rarely studied propaganda films madeat the inception of the Nationalist rule in the 1950s, Bai Ke’s Descendantsof the Yellow Emperor(1955) and Chen Wen-chuan’s Beautiful Treasure Island (1953). More specifically, by investigating the discursive function of maps and mechanisms of mapping, it will be demonstrated how these two films construct a form of “settler colonial cartography”through the cinematic visualization of space and the use of multimedia, and how the Han settler colonial consciousness is formulated and expressed in cinema. To further differentiate the narrative and discourse of settler colonialism from classic colonialism, I compare these two films with another imperial policy documentary from the Japanese colonial period, Southward Expansion to Taiwan(1940). By doing so, thispaper argues that the comparative analysis between the two modes of colonial domination can allow us to envision more effective ways of decolonization practices to “unsettle”the Han settler society. That is why settler colonial criticism matters, particularly for Taiwan at this point in its history.


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Settlers think the anthropocene: Bruce Erickson, ‘Anthropocene futures: Linking colonialism and environmentalism in an age of crisis’, Environment and Planning D, 2018

28Oct18

Abstract: The universal discourse of the Anthropocene presents a global choice that establishes environmental collapse as the problem of the future. Yet in its desire for a green future, the threat of collapse forecloses the future as a site for creatively reimagining the social relations that led to the Anthropocene. Instead of examining structures like colonialism, environmental discourses tend to focus instead on the technological innovation of a green society that “will have been.” Through this vision, the Anthropocene functions as a geophysical justification of structures of colonialism in the services of a greener future. The case of the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement illustrates how this crisis of the future is sutured into mainstream environmentalism. Thus, both in the practices of “the environment in crisis” that are enabled by the Anthropocene and in the discourse of geological influence of the “human race,” colonial structures privilege whiteness in our environmental future. In this case, as in others, ecological protection has come to shape the political life of colonialism. Understanding this relationship between environmentalism and the settler state in the Anthropocene reminds us that the universal discourse of the Anthropocene is intertwined with the attempt to sustain whiteness into the future.


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