settler colonial studies blog

On the racial regimes of settler colonialism: Jodi A. Byrd, ‘”Variations under Domestication”: Indigeneity and the Subject of Dispossession’, Social Text, 36, 2, pp. 123-141

16Jul18

Abstract: This essay draws upon critical ethnic studies, Indigenous critical theory, and settler colonial studies to consider how biopolitics and biocapital have converged in North America through the racial regimes inaugurated by settler colonialism. It does so by close reading the popular science fiction television series Orphan Black to interrogate how late colonialism saturates cultural productions and to demonstrate how dispossession functions through durative and recursive structures. Providing the extractive and appropriative logics underlying racial capitalism, dispossession is both generative and procedural as it produces investments in neoliberal subjectivity, property, and territoriality—and their loss—to ensure that the originary colonization of Indigenous peoples in North America remains the condition of possibility for settler colonial social relations.

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The ‘proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism’: Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, Chandan Reddy, ‘Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities’, Social Text, 36, 2, 2018, pp. 1-18

16Jul18

Abstract: This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism.” Financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism. In the Americas broadly and the United States specifically, colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. The conception of economies of dispossession introduced in this essay draws attention to the overriding importance of rationalities of abstraction and commensurability for racial capitalism. The essay problematizes the ways in which dispossession is conventionally treated as a self-evident and circumscribed practice of unjust taking and subtractive action. Instead, working across the lethal confluences of imperial conquest and racial capitalist predation, this essay critically situates the logic of propriation that organizes and underwrites predatory value in the historical present. Against the commensurabilities and rationalities of debt and finance capitalism, conditioned through the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, the essay gestures toward alternative frameworks for building collective capacities for what the authors describe as a grounded relationality.

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The ‘Sixties Scoop’ as a settler-colonial moment: Sarah Carneiro, Policy, Poverty, and Indigenous Child Welfare: Revisiting the Sixties Scoop, MA Dissertation, Queen’s University, 2018

10Jul18

Abstract: I analyse the Sixties Scoop through the lens of Indigenous and feminist scholarship to contextualize the Scoop within the specific historical, political, and cultural moment of the postwar Canadian “welfare state” during which it was occurring. In the 1960s and 1970s, Canada was attempting to foment a unique “Canadian” identity that became increasingly tied to the values of cultural pluralism and tolerance. During this time, both the state and Indigenous activism questioned where and how Indigenous people would “fit” (or would not fit) into the burgeoning Canadian cultural “mosaic” of the late 20th century. Through an analysis of the 1966/67 federal government report, A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada: Economic, Political, and Educational Needs and Policies (The Hawthorn Report), alongside articles from the Journal – Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies (JOACAS), mostly authored by social workers about reserve communities in Northern Ontario during the 1960s and 1970s, I aim to illuminate the intimate relationship between capitalist development, settler colonialism, and patriarchy in postwar Canada. I argue that one of the causes of the Scoop was the inability of governments and Children’s Aid Societies (CAS) administrators and frontline service providers to conceptualize the mass apprehension of Indigenous children from their homes during the 1960s to 1980s as holistically and inextricably connected to the social, political, cultural, and economic aspects of Indigenous people’s lives.

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Decolonising settler education: Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang (eds), Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View, Routledge, 2018

04Jul18

Description: Indigenous and decolonizing perspectives on education have long persisted alongside colonial models of education, yet too often have been subsumed within the fields of multiculturalism, critical race theory, and progressive education. Timely and compelling, Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education features research, theory, and dynamic foundational readings for educators and educational researchers who are looking for possibilities beyond the limits of liberal democratic schooling. Featuring original chapters by authors at the forefront of theorizing, practice, research, and activism, this volume helps define and imagine the exciting interstices between Indigenous and decolonizing studies and education. Each chapter forwards Indigenous principles – such as Land as literacy and water as life – that are grounded in place-specific efforts of creating Indigenous universities and schools, community organizing and social movements, trans and Two Spirit practices, refusals of state policies, and land-based and water-based pedagogies.

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Decolonising settler carceral archipelagos: Christopher Perreira, ‘Unsettling Archives: Cultures of Carceral States and Settler Logics’, American Quarterly, 70, 2, 2018, pp. 327-334

04Jul18

Excerpt: In the opening of “Conquest and Incarceration,” the brief introduction to City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965, Kelly Lytle Hernández begins with the statement: “Mass incarceration is mass elimination” (1). Signaling Patrick Wolfe’s influential theory, which argues that settler societies are the structures built on the logic of Native elimination, the author invites reflection on what might be gained by bringing together, and potentially expanding the parameters of, both carceral studies and settler colonial studies.

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Decolonising settler-colonial landscape design: Bruno Marques, Greg Grabasch, Jacqueline McIntosh, ‘Fostering Landscape Identity Through Participatory Design With Indigenous Cultures of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand’, Space and Culture, 2018

04Jul18

Abstract: To recognize the significance of indigenous cultures and their landscapes as well as to appraise these places, identification and evaluation have to focus on indigenous worldviews rather than on the deeply embedded Western civilization ideals and values of the design. Australian Aboriginal and New Zealand’s Maori cultures are genuinely rooted in experiential interrelationships with land with a particular orientation toward relationship and time entrenched in cosmology, narrative, and place. This article explores a participatory design strategy that facilitates and benefits indigenous cultures in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Using a design-led research approach, this study endeavors to nurture capacity building within “traditional custodians” in order to contribute to the sustainability of rural communities as well as caring for landscape. The article also introduces a framework better suited to nurturing and managing cultural landscapes. This framework demonstrates the potential to simultaneously empower indigenous cultures to protect things that matter but also to enhance their economic, political, and social freedom as they understand it through the lens of their own cultural values.

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Decolonising settler-colonial geography: Sarah de Leeuw, Sarah Hunt, ‘Unsettling decolonizing geographies’, Geography Compass, 2018

04Jul18

Abstract: Geographers have long reflected on our discipline’s colonial history. Both Indigenous and non‐Indigenous geographers have discussed ways of engaging Indigenous geographies and sought new ways of opening and expanding spaces for Indigenous peoples and Indigenous ways of knowing and being in our discipline. Like many social scientists, geographers name and frame this work in different ways; of late, decolonizing concepts and practices are increasingly deployed. As documented by especially Indigenous scholars, however, the discipline has yet to achieve much semblance of decolonization. This paper takes as a starting point that, despite good intentions, efforts at decolonizing geography are inherently limited because colonization continues to structure the field of geography and the academy more broadly. We begin by placing ourselves in conversations about Indigenous geographies and colonial violence, using this placement as a jumping off point for discussing ways geographers past and present approach decolonization. We pay particular attention to ways theories and articulations about decolonization may be falling short. Second, we offer a critical analysis of decolonization in relation to settler colonial power, including theories and praxes of engaging Indigeneity and Indigenous peoples and places. We discuss Indigenous geographies, what they mean, and to whom they have those meanings. We then turn to Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous ways of being and living in the world, problematizing how within more purely conceptual realms and often by non‐Indigenous peoples and geographers these can be uncoupled or disconnected from ways decolonization is circulated and lived. We conclude with cautions and suggestions, based especially on provocations of Indigenous scholars, about ways geographers might unsettle our work in ongoing efforts toward decolonizing our discipline.

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The settler’s identity: Sal Englert, ‘The State, Zionism and the Nazi Genocide: Jewish Identity-Formation in the West between Assimilation and Rejection’, Historical Materialism, 2018

27Jun18

Abstract: This paper explores contemporary Jewish identity-formation and the centrality of official Holocaust memory and Zionism – understood as the ongoing settler-colonial project aiming at the formation and maintenance of a Jewish-exclusivist state in Palestine – to this process. It argues that identity politics within the Jewish community are based on an understanding of identity, which assumes it to be static and individual. In doing so, this political approach reproduces the essentialisation of Jewish communities under the banner of Zionism and official state history. The paper aims to show how this process of identification between Judaism, official Holocaust memory and Zionism has been a state-led process, rooted in the historical development of antisemitism and European colonialism. In order to do so, it builds on a critique of classical Marxist analyses of the Jewish question. It finally proposes a more fluid approach to identity, which understands it as socially constructed, contested, and subject to political contestation.

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Settler colonisation is not necessarily Europeanisation: Laura A. Ogden, ‘The Beaver Diaspora: A Thought Experiment’, Environmental Humanities, 10, 1, 2018, pp. 63-85

27Jun18

Abstract: For decades the role of invasive species has been central to discussions of anthropogenic loss and change. Conceptual debates over whether “native” and “invasive” species are useful to our understanding of dynamic processes of world making have significantly challenged traditional approaches to conservation biology and conservation practices. Yet decommissioning the “invasive species paradigm” requires us to grapple with new ethical and political frameworks for stewarding the Earth in a time of loss. In response, this essay offers a thought experiment. Instead of referring to invasive species, I reframe the migration and settlement of nonhuman beings as diasporas. Doing so illuminates the political complexities of loss and change in Chilean Tierra del Fuego, where I have been conducting fieldwork for the past five years. Integrating approaches from political ecology, multispecies ethnography, and postcolonial theory, this essay focuses on the introduction in 1947 of Canadian beavers into the Fuegian archipelago (now considered the region’s most significant environmental problem). The introduction of plant and animal life is bound up in the apparatus of settler colonialism, as what Alfred Crosby so famously called “ecological imperialism.” Yet, as I explore in this essay, ecological imperialism is not just the remaking of landscapes to look like Europe but also a process of remaking nonhuman life through the constitution of new multispecies assemblages. Finally, this reframing allows me to destabilize the species concept as a stagnant and apolitical category of difference.

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The asylum-migration-settler colonialism nexus: Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, ‘The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism’, Refuge, 34, 1, 2018, pp. 16-28

25Jun18

Abstract: This article departs from the discussion by Stephen Castles on the migration-asylum nexus by focusing on the political and cultural effects of the summer of immigration in 2015. It argues for a conceptualization of the asylum-migration nexus within the framework of Anibal Quijano’s “coloniality of power” by developing the analytical framework of the “coloniality of migration.” Through the analytical framework of the “coloniality of migration” the connection between racial capitalism and the asylum-migration nexus is explored. It does so by first focusing on the economic and political links between asylum and migration, and how both constitute each other. On these grounds, it discusses how asylum and migration policies produce hierarchical categories of migrants and refugees, producing a nomenclature drawing on an imaginary reminiscent of the orientalist and racialized practices of European colonialism and imperialism. In a second step, it focuses on migration and asylum policies as inherent to a logic of racialization of the workforce. It does so by first exploring the racial coding of immigration policies within the context of settler colonialism and transatlantic White European migration to the Américas and Oceania in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and second, by discussing migration policies in post-1945 Western Europe.

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