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Aboriginal activism and negotiated settlements: Shaphan Cox, Tod Jones, ‘Native title and the politics of rejection: beyond the post‐political binary of consensus and dissensus in urban Aboriginal activism’, Geographical Research, 2018

09Nov18

Abstract: This paper uses a settler colonial lens to highlight the limits of the post‐political while interrogating aspects of Indigenous politics and assertions of sovereignty in Perth, Western Australia. One of the ways in which Indigenous rights to urban space are being practiced in cities is through native title claims and negotiated settlements. In the south‐west of Western Australia, including in the capital city of Perth, native title negotiations have been characterised by protracted and acrimonious divisions between the Nyoongar custodians of the area and the State. Among members of the Indigenous population, highly publicised oppositional politics have also been constructed in the mainstream media between the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council and the Nyoongar Tent Embassy. In this paper, we analyse how they have been represented in media discourse and consider how both groups seek to articulate a politics of rejection of the settler colonial logic of elimination. We highlight the dangers that arise if and when researchers are seduced into adjudication on which group is properly political. Our aim is to demonstrate how the current native title regime disavows Indigenous sovereignty, which leads us to advance certain ways in which to understand the spatial effects of this politics of rejection and opposition to assertions of Indigenous sovereignty.


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The indigenous homelands must be vacated: Jon Altman, ‘Raphael Lemkin in Remote Australia: The Logic of Cultural Genocide and Homelands’, Oceania, 2018

09Nov18

Abstract: In the 1970s, Aboriginal people in remote Australia took decisive steps to decentralize from government settlements and missions to live and make a living on their ancestral lands at places that have become known as homelands. Over time, this migration garnered some state support and saw the emergence of new facilitating institutions. But in the last decade homeland living has been discursively demeaned by politicians, and policies have been put in place to undermine the possibility of residing and making a livelihood in these smallest, most remote places mainly located on Indigenous‐titled lands. As Indigenous territorial rights expand, the state looks to extinguish possibilities for current and future generations to utilize the land and its resources for livelihood. In this article, I draw on evidence from political discourse, policy documents and programme design and implementation to outline this state project to eliminate a contemporary lifeway. I provide ethnographic evidence from work with Kuninjku people in Arnhem Land that documents this destruction. I engage with the work of Raphael Lemkin to document and theorize the techniques being deployed in terms of the logic of cultural genocide. I end by asking what homelands people might do to push back and what role anthropologists might play in such a process.


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Settler realism: Hamish Dalley, ‘The Meaning of Settler Realism: (De)Mystifying Frontiers in the Postcolonial Historical Novel’, Novel, 51, 3, 2018, pp. 461-481

09Nov18

Abstract: Dominant theorizations of settler colonialism identify it as a social form characterized by a problem with historical narration: because the existence of settler communities depends on the dispossession of indigenous peoples, settlers find themselves trapped by the need both to confront and to disavow these origins. How might this problem affect the aesthetics of the realist novel? This article argues that the historical novels produced in places like Australia and New Zealand constitute a distinctive variant of literary realism inflected by the ideological tensions of settler colonialism. Approaching the novel from the perspective of settler colonialism offers new ways to consider classic theories of realism and, in particular, reframes Georg Lukács’s concept of reification—and the critical distinction between realism and naturalism he derived from it—as an unexpectedly useful tool for analyzing postcolonial literatures. Doing so, however, requires us to jettison Lukács’s progressive historicism in favor of a model of literary history shaped by uneven temporalities and a fundamental disjunction between the historical perspectives of settler and nonsettler communities—thus complicating our narratives of the development of the novel genre. This argument is illustrated through an extended analysis of two of the most significant young novelists to engage recently with issues of settler colonial history: Eleanor Catton of New Zealand and Rohan Wilson of Australia.


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Settler sport as indigenous elimination: Indigenous Gender Reformations: Moss E. Norman, Michael Hart, LeAnne Petherick, ‘Physical Culture, Settler Colonialism and the Politics of Containment’, Human Kinetics Journal, 2018

09Nov18

Abstract: This paper situates Euro-Western sport within a broader settler colonial logic of elimination that frames Indigenous bodies, cultures, and ideas within a politics of containment in the production of the colonized masculine subject. We use three examples to illustrate our argument, including an examination of the use of Euro-Western sport and physical culture in Indian Residential Schools, the definitional confinement of diverse and constantly adapting Indigenous cultures within contemporary Canadian sport policies, and finally the representational fixing of Indigenous masculinities within stereotypes of the hyper-masculine warrior in dominant sport media. However, sport and physical culture are also central to processes of Indigenous resilience, resurgence, and decolonization and, while these themes run throughout the paper, they are explicitly addressed in the final section.


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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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