settler colonial studies blog

On the indistinction between colonialism and settler colonialism in Africa: Adelaja Odutola Odukoya, ‘Settler and Non-settler Colonialism in Africa’, in Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba, Toyin Falola (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of African Politics, palgrave, 2017, pp 173-186

15Oct17

Abstract: Africa has celebrated five decades of independence. Yet the continent is neither free nor developed. Some scholars have argued that contemporary crises and contradictions of underdevelopment in Africa echo the path dependency of the continent’s colonial legacies. Others question the propriety of blaming colonialism for Africa’s contemporary woes given that the colonial experience was not exclusive to Africa, and that there were differences in the nature of colonialism within the continent. Against this background, this chapter interrogates the nature, character and dynamic of colonialism in Africa. It shows that though settler and non-settler colonial architectures appear seemingly heterogeneous, their divergent manifestations were but a result of strategic and tactic considerations. The chapter opines that, once the illusion of difference has been discarded, it is clear that colonialism across Africa was informed by the imperative to resolve the crises and contradictions of capitalism in Europe.

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Settler colonialism as archive: Dallas Hunt, ‘Nikîkîwân: Contesting Settler-Colonial Archives through Indigenous Oral History’, Canadian Literature, 230, 1, 2016

14Oct17

Abstract: This paper seeks to unsettle and contest the role of the small town archive in the production of local knowledges, specifically the ways in which these archives conflict with the narratives told by Indigenous elders in surrounding reserve communities. I intend to use the methodologies I have acquired in Indigenous studies to re-read my grandmother’s account of her displacement from the ‘Swan River Settlement’ and from the township that would eventually become to be known as Kinuso, Alberta (Treaty 8 Territory). I situate my grandmother’s narrative against local history texts, specifically Sodbusters: A History of Kinuso and Swan River Settlement, to locate the ways in which family and colonial histories intersect and are embodied by community members of the Swan River First Nation. My account begins with a detailing of the life of my great-grandfather, August Sound, and how the policies of the Indian Act would come to have a profound effect on him and his succeeding relations. I plot the historical trajectory of my family, or, more specifically, the historical trajectories of my grandmother and great-grandfather to demonstrate how personal archives can illuminate the processes of settler-colonialism in detailed and nuanced ways, and how these personal histories can contest the dominant narratives propagated by white settler-colonial imaginaries. The form of this paper will be an inter-weaving of academic texts and theories with the oral and experiential knowledge of my grandmother, with the ‘narrative history’ of my grandmother serving as the primary text.

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Modes of domination travel: Marie Nitta, Lost in Transplantation: Knowledge Production and Memory at U.S. Land Grant Colleges in Colonial and Cold War Japan, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2017

14Oct17

Abstract: The U.S. land grant college model was transplanted to the northern and southern islands of the Japanese archipelago in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, respectively. My dissertation investigates exactly what was transplanted and what was left behind in the history-making process of U.S.-Japan relations. While these historical events are conventionally studied in different fields, this dissertation bridges Indigenous Studies and U.S. and Japanese histories to provide transnational perspectives in its examination of the roles of U.S. land grant colleges in late nineteenth century Japanese settler colonialism and U.S. imperialism and post-1945 Cold War politics in East Asia. Drawing on multi-sited archival research in both countries and critically engaging with national and university archives, “Lost in Transplantation: Knowledge Production and Memory at U.S. Land Grant Colleges in Colonial and Cold War Japan” reveals the intimate connections between U.S. imperialism and Japanese settler colonialism via agricultural colleges that were previously obscured or lost in their different and nationally bounded ways of remembering and forgetting. My dissertation discusses how the U.S. land grant college system, which was invented as a legal device for the distribution of land in the public domain of the United States in 1862, along with land laws enacted for the purpose of U.S. settler colonialism, informed the Japanese during their colonizing projects in Hokkaido. It reveals that agricultural colleges promoted Japanese settler colonialism through land cultivation that relied on U.S. technology, ignored indigenous knowledge production, and transformed native ecology. By extending its temporal scope from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, it further examines how the United States again deployed the U.S. land grant model during its occupation of Japan and Okinawa amidst rising Cold War tension in East Asia. In this global Cold War context, this dissertation further reveals that U.S. officials, U.S. and Japanese university administrators, and Japanese student activists partially and differently invoked historical memories of U.S.-assisted Japanese colonialism, while engaging in critical acts of forgetting their shared pasts. The significance of this project lies in its use of global and transnational perspectives to unveil the material and discursive structures of U.S. and Japanese dual imperialisms and their problematic impacts on indigenous populations.

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Settler colonialism is a gendered mode of domination: Emily Macgillivray, Indigenous Trading Women of the Borderland Great Lakes,1740 to 1845, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2017

14Oct17

Abstract: This dissertation illustrates the role of indigenous trading women in significant events that shaped the borderlands Great Lakes region, including the French and Indian War, the American Revolutionary War, the Northwest Indian War, and treaty negotiations. Understanding the role of Native women traders is necessary to understanding both how these events unfolded and how they were affected by gendered indigenous practices, including kinship and hospitality. These women influenced the flow of commerce by producing and distributing valuable trade goods and contributed to the mapping and enforcement of political borders through their participation in legal conflicts and treaty negotiations. Recognizing the lives of Great Lakes trading women is essential to understanding the intertwined development of economics and politics in the region. Furthermore, ignoring the contributions of indigenous trading women enforces male-centered, settler colonial narratives of the region that demotes the women to the accessories of their EuroAmerican partners. While previous scholarship on gender and the Great Lakes has focused on indigenous women’s role in fur trade marriages, this project examines indigenous women in the Great Lakes borderlands as independent economic and political agents and illustrates how settler colonialism operated as a gendered process. As EuroAmerican settlement increased, customs like coverture were enforced and Native kinship networks and forms of inheritance were eroded, creating fewer opportunities for indigenous women to acquire property. However, elite Native women drew on multiple subversive and gendered forms of resistance, including kinship networks, language skills, and knowledge of trade networks, to attempt to navigate a settler colonial system designed to deny indigenous land claims. This project covers the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century and is grounded in the lives of Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe women who operated as adroit transnational actors in the borderlands Great Lakes, including Sally Ainse (Oneida), Molly Brant (Mohawk), Ozhaguscodaywayquay (Ojibwe), and Magdalene Laframboise (Odawa). While Haudenosaunee women traders in the lower Great Lakes struggled to retain their political influence and control of property amidst intensifying settler colonialism after the turn of the nineteenth century, Anishinaabe women traders maintained their political and economic influence in the upper Great Lakes into the mid-nineteenth century. Indigenous women traders throughout the region were transitional figures of Native survivance who worked to preserve themselves and their families among intensifying settler colonial development in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Tracking the lives of indigenous trading women in the Great Lakes borderlands requires a broad territorial focus, including the Susquehanna and Mohawk River Valleys to the south shore of Lake Superior. By demonstrating how Ohio Valley, western Pennsylvania and New York, and the Ontario Peninsula operated as a distinctive lower Great Lakes region, this project demands a reorientation of Great Lakes geography. Trading women’s political and economic networks demonstrate connections between the political and economic systems in the lower and upper Great Lakes, while simultaneously illustrating how each region was gendered differently due to indigenous roles, EuroAmerican marriages customs, and colonialism.

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Indigenous exile: Sophia Brown, Forms of Exile: Contemporary Palestinian Life Writing, PhD dissertation, University of Kent, 2017

14Oct17

Abstract: This thesis is an examination of contemporary exilic Palestinian life writing in English. Attentive to the ongoing nature of Palestinian dispossession since 1948, it focuses on how exile is narrated and the ways in which it informs models of selfhood within a context of conflict and loss. This involves adopting a framework of settler colonialism in order to understand the conflict. Broadly speaking, the thesis conceives of Palestinian life writing as a form of testimony posing an urgent and necessary counternarrative to the hegemony of the Israeli discourse on Palestine/Israel. The thesis examines life writing by different generations of Palestinians, from those who experienced the Nakba of 1948, to those born as second-generation Palestinians in their parents’ adopted homelands. It does not limit itself to examining the work of those at a geographical distance from Palestine but also looks at narratives by those who live, or have lived, under Israeli occupation. This has required paying particular attention to the difference between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ exile. Recognising that Palestinians who live in Palestine/Israel still sometimes articulate their experience as a form of exiling is an integral aspect of this research. The thesis argues that while the ongoing conflict impacts the identity formation and experiences of all the writers under consideration, nonetheless each author is inevitably guided by distinct geographies, temporalities, imaginings and frames of reference, which ultimately determine their relationship to Palestine and what it means to consider themselves exiled. I am, therefore, particularly mindful of the plurality of exilic experience, even while ideas of communality are still hugely important. The thesis consists of three author-led chapters – on Edward Said, Ghada Karmi and Rema Hammami – followed by a final chapter on anthologised life writing, which looks at the work of seven authors. Raising questions of form and how one deals with both the commonality and complexity of exile, this final chapter aims to show recent developments in English-language Palestinian life writing. By demonstrating the distinct ways in which exiled Palestinians relate to Palestine/Israel, this thesis seeks to contribute in particular towards two areas of study that have, for the most part, failed to engage substantially enough with Palestine (or, indeed, with each other): postcolonial and auto/biography studies. These subfields of cultural criticism and their wealth of scholarship therefore provide the necessary tools for this research, but they are also held to account for the relative lack of attention paid to Palestine and the extant nature of the conflict. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate that exilic Palestinian life writing sheds its own light on matters of great import to postcolonial and auto/biography studies – matters such as statelessness, belonging, testimony, selfhood and self- representation – and that there are intersecting aesthetic and ethical reasons for ensuring the visibility of Palestine within these areas of study.

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Decolonisation? Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Decolonizing Settler Colonialism: Kill the Settler in Him and Save the Man’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 41, 1, 2017, pp. 1-18.

10Oct17

Access the article here.

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Feminisms and the west (and settler colonialism): Krista Comer, ‘Accountabilities: Authority, Feminism, West’, Studies in the Novel, 49, 3, 2017, pp. 419-425

10Oct17

Excerpt: Moreover, the critical turn to Wests, to westness as a system and colonial world network, has brought the phenomenon of settler colonialism into the fore of the critical field. The US West is an example par excellence of not just Anglo settler logics and history (Wolfe, Veracini) but simultaneous and competing Spanish colonialities and modernities (Aranda). Settler maps, meanings, and place making has been made more textured still for US West studies by way of the enormous offerings of Indigenous studies. The recent expansion and depth of that field as a field (Allen), what it teaches about ongoing or “enduring” indigeneity (Kauanui), the fact of thoroughly different and incommensurate understandings of place and territory (Byrd) that map over and inhabit the so-called “West” toward indigenous histories and futures (Bernardin)—all of these have reoriented the political and ethical stakes, and epistemological contexts, for scholars’ work. Notwithstanding any of this activity, however, and not a surprise given the imperial origin stories at stake, “the West” of popular discourse—that place of proving and opportunity and settler sovereignty—bounces back in culture and politics with regularity and ease.

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Settler objects make settler subjects: Julia M. L. Laforge, Stephane M. McLachlan, ‘Environmentality on the Canadian Prairies: Settler-Farmer Subjectivities and Agri-Environmental Objects’, Antipode, 2017

10Oct17

Abstract: State and institutional actors have been shaping settler-farmer subjectivities in order to transform the landscape and thus the history and geography of the Canadian Prairies. This paper expands the application of environmentality from its origins in colonial forestry to interrogate agriculture on prairie landscapes. The Canadian state used the technologies of environmentality to influence “common sense” attitudes and behaviours, which acted to deterritorialize Indigenous communities and then manipulated their subjectivities to guarantee settler-farmer access to land. Later, institutions and states moulded settler-farmer subjectivities of correct farming behaviour in an effort to convert soil, water, and seeds into economic resources. These environmental objects, in turn, acted upon settler-farmer subjects by setting biophysical and genetic limits such as soil fertility, water quality and quantity, and plant hardiness and disease resistance. Resisting environmentality requires understanding processes of subjugation while also creating counter-narratives of “good” farming behaviour and Indigenous-settler relations.

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Settler communists are settler colonialists: Oleksa Drachewych, The Comintern and the Communist Parties of South Africa, Canada, and Australia on Questions of Imperialism, Nationality and Race, 1919-1943, PhD Dissertation, McMaster University, 2017

07Oct17

Abstract: In 1919, the Bolshevik Party of Russia formed the Communist International (Comintern) to lead the international communist movement. As part of its efforts, it maintained a strong commitment to supporting colonial liberation, self-determination of nations, and racial equality. Many scholars of the Comintern and the Soviet Union assume that Moscow demanded firm discipline of all member parties and these parties largely followed its lead. But the Comintern was not as monolithic as is often presumed. Colonial affairs frequently were overlooked and European Communist Parties often skirted their commitment to supporting their colonial counterparts. Individual communists took it upon themselves to promote anti-imperialism or racial equality, but their efforts were frequently hampered by the tactical shifts of the Comintern and eventually, the erosion of Moscow’s interest. Frequently, the prioritization of certain issues in the Comintern proved to be the most important factor in determining Comintern interference in member parties. This dissertation includes the first comparative analysis of the Communist Parties of South Africa, Canada and Australia on issues of anti-imperialism, nationality, and race. In comparing these parties, this study explores the limits of Moscow’s control of other Communist Parties, while detailing the similarities and differences in the efforts of these three parties to combat imperialism, support colonial liberation, and fight for national rights and racial equality. This dissertation is the first to detail the Canadian and Australian communism’s efforts, sometimes on their own initiative, on anti-imperialism, nationality and racial equality during the interwar period, to provide new conclusions about Comintern intervention in South Africa, and to highlight the prioritization of the Comintern as each party sees Moscow’s intervention on these issues to very different degrees.

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Horses on settler frontiers: Sean McDaniel, ‘Our Greatest Riches’: Horses at the Intersection of Settler and Kazakh Society in the Late Imperial Period’, Journal of Migration History, 3, 2, pp. 210-228

07Oct17

Abstract: This article examines interactions between Slavic peasant migrants and mobile pastoralist Kazakhs within the setting of the Kazakh Steppe during the period of heaviest resettlement to the region beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the early twentieth century. It considers how the importance of horses to both settlers and Kazakhs alike dictated these interactions and how the sedentary world of the settlers disrupted the seasonal migration routes of Kazakh horse herders. Particularly with concern to the greatly expanded horse market, issues regarding land use, and increased instances of horse theft throughout the region, the Russian state’s encroachment into the steppe forever altered the social and economic makeup of the region.

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