settler colonial studies blog

Settler texts are settler colonial texts: Larissa McLean Davies, Susan K. Martin, ‘Toward Worlding Settler Texts: Tracking the Uses of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career through the Curriculum’, Australian Literary Studies, 32, 2, 2017

07Oct17

Abstract: Using Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career as its focus, this paper explores the institutional possibilities and constraints of ‘worlding’ settler texts in secondary school and university environments. We argue that the teaching of texts, and those who teach texts in schools and universities, play a key role in negotiating national and international textual boundaries. This paper expands on the practices of reading, to incorporate an analysis of documents that frame the intended, espoused, and enacted curriculum. Examining the publication and teaching history of My Brilliant Career in Australia and overseas and the use of literature as a tool of nationalism and globalisation, this paper argues that the teaching of literature in institutions acts as material evidence of our efforts to negotiate the demands of the national and the global. Literature teaching thus powerfully contributes to the ways in which we understand the work that is undertaken, the boundaries crossed and compromises brokered when we study settler texts in globalised contexts.

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The settler garden: Jake Arthur, ‘”Fond human enclosures”: Gardening and belonging in Bethell’s “From a garden in the antipodes”‘, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 35, 1, 2017, pp. 28-49

03Oct17

Abstract: Ursula Bethell’s unassuming collection of poems, ‘From a Garden in the Antipodes’, depicts a literature and nation in flux through the central image of the garden. This will not be surprising to anyone who has owned a garden; they exist always in a state of transition, changing from and into. Gardening is a way of negotiating a relationship with an environment, but writing about gardens has also tended to involve negotiating what Benedict Anderson has described as the nation’s ‘imagined political community’. This article views the garden image as part of a wider colonial effort by early New Zealand poets to characterise the landscape, and considers how the tropes involved in that effort are, in the poetry of Bethell, turned towards a more personal politics of belonging. Breaking new ground in the fledgling identity of early twentieth century New Zealand, Bethell’s garden institutes a new relationship with, and language of, antipodean home.

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Settlers need the indigenous child as child and they need the child as victim: Krista Maxwell, ‘Settler-Humanitarianism: Healing the Indigenous Child-Victim’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 59, 4, 2017, pp. 974-1007

03Oct17

Abstract: Victims of colonial, Indigenous child-removal policies have attracted public expressions of compassion from Indigenous and settler-state political leaders in Canada since the 1990s. This public compassion has fueled legal and political mechanisms, leveraging resources for standardized interventions said to “heal” these victims: cash payments, a truth-telling forum, therapy. These claims to healing provide an entry-point for analyzing how and why the figure of the Indigenous child-victim, past and present, is morally and politically useful for settler-states and their public cultures. I use the formulation of “settler-humanitarianism” to express how liberal interventions of care and protection, intended to ameliorate Indigenous suffering, align with settler-colonialism’s enduring goal of Indigenous elimination (Wolfe 2006). Removal of Indigenous children was integral to the late nineteenth-century formation of the Canadian and Australian settler-states. Missionaries and colonial administrators represented these practices as humanitarian rescue from depraved familial conditions. Settler-humanitarians have long employed universalizing moral registers, such as “idleness” and “neglect,” to compel state interventions into Indigenous families. More recently, “trauma” has emerged as a humanitarian signifier compelling urgent action. These settler-humanitarian registers do political work. Decontextualized representations of Indigenous children as victims negate children as social actors, obscure the particularities of how collective Indigenous suffering flows from settler-colonial dispossession, and oppose children’s interests with those of their kin, community, and nation. I analyze how and why Aboriginal healing as settler-humanitarianism has been taken up by many Indigenous leaders alongside settler-state agents, and examine the ongoing social and political effects of the material and discursive interventions it has spawned.

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Settler colonialism in unexpected places: Uditi Sen, ‘Developing Terra Nullius: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Indigeneity in the Andaman Islands’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 59, 4, 2017, pp. 944-973

03Oct17

Abstract: This article explores the legal structures and discursive framings informing the governance of one particular “backward” region of India, the Andaman Islands. I trace the shifting patterns of occupation and development of the islands in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on the changes wrought by independence in 1947 and the eventual history of planned development there. I demonstrate how intersecting discourses of indigenous savagery/primitivism and the geographical emptiness were repeatedly mobilized in colonial-era surveys and postcolonial policy documents. Postcolonial visions of developing the Andaman Islands ushered in a settler-colonial governmentality, infused with genocidal fantasies of the “dying savage.” Laws professing to protect aboriginal Jarawas actually worked to unilaterally extend Indian sovereignty over the lands and bodies of a community clearly hostile to such incorporation. I question the current exclusion of India from the global geographies of settler-colonialism and argue that the violent and continuing history of indigenous marginalization in the Andaman Islands represents a de facto operation of a logic of terra nullius.

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The settler border is in the way: James M. Hundley, We are Coast Salish: Politics and Society across a Settler Colonial Border in the Post-9/11 World, PhD Dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2017

29Sep17

Abstract: This dissertation contributes to debates on processes of nation building and their relationship to indigenous politics across the Canada/US border in the Pacific Northwest of North America. Specifically, I chronicle the various political, cultural, and environmental strategies taken by the Coast Salish Tribes and First Nations to overcome the obstacles presented by the Canada/US border in the post-9/11 era of increased securitization. Their tactics and strategies rely on the reprisal of oral history and tradition to reunite as an ethnic nation that was slowly transformed during state and nation building processes throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, the Coast Salish are engaged in processes of decolonization by attempting to symbolically erase the international border that separates them.

An annual Canoe Journey celebrates the revitalization of a centuries old tradition of canoe travel that connected communities up and down the coast thus using geography to make the case for a unified group. A new political organization aims to bring back traditional Coast Salish governance practices to protect and restore the Salish Sea by placing indigenous knowledge front and center and inviting the states to participate. Environmental protests surrounding the permitting process for oil pipelines crossing indigenous lands in Canada have enabled the American-based Coast Salish to intervene in the government process by appealing to cross-border kinship ties. Taken collectively, through the data presented in this dissertation, I argue that the Coast Salish are appropriating the term applied to them over a century ago to erase the political border that separates them by foregrounding their transnational, collective identity. This emergent national identity challenges existing theories of nationalism and its relationship to the state and illustrates how the border itself is implicated in the process. I argue that the ways in which the Coast Salish respond to a security-sensitive border mirrors that of how they have long handled interactions with the settler colonial state.

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Taiwan’s settler colonialism: Funie Hsu, Brian Hioe, Wen Liu, ‘Collective Statement on Taiwan Independence: Building Global Solidarity and Rejecting US Military Empire’, American Quarterly, 69, 3, 2017, pp. 465-468

27Sep17

Taiwan exists in the between. In historical terms, Taiwan has existed, and continues to exist, in and between various iterations of colonial occupation: from seventeenth-century Dutch rule and the resulting Han settler colonialism to twentieth-century Japanese occupation and the current colonial occupation of the lingering Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist government. Politically, Taiwan resides in between the competing imperialist discourses of the People’s Republic of China, which has long articulated a goal of “retaking” or “reunifying” the island it claims as a renegade province, and the United States, a nation that has demonstrated an ambivalent stance toward Taiwan and expressions of its independence. As such, it has been appropriated as a space on which to bargain the terms of US–China foreign policy—and negotiate away the island’s right to self-determination—since the 1970s.

Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) culminated in the Shanghai Communiqué, which expressed what would become the United States’ guiding foreign policy principle of One China, with Taiwan subsumed as part of China. Taiwan was thus used as a negotiating tool to solidify a new partnership between the United States and the PRC. The United States expressed its acknowledgment for the idea “that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China,” and declared, “The United States Government does not challenge that position.” By 1979 the United States had pulled military personnel out of Taiwan and severed governmental recognition of the Republic of China. In the space that is in and between occupation, and in between US–China foreign policy, Taiwan has been constituted by colonial and imperial imaginations of its utility and futurity.

The following collective statement represents an intention to articulate and organize a new possibility for Taiwan and its independence. It was crafted as a response to the controversial December 2, 2016, phone call between Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-Wen, and Donald Trump, which presented a new dynamic of [End Page 465] in-betweenness, one that catapulted the question of Taiwan independence from the margins to center stage. Much of the reaction to the call revolved around two general sentiments of panic and potential. US foreign policy experts were anxious to preserve the One China status quo, while many in Taiwan and the Taiwanese diaspora of the United States were cautiously hopeful that it signaled the possibility for renewed American support, especially in regard to independence. Taiwan independence, it is often understood, cannot be practically achieved without the backing of American militarized security. In this statement, a growing contingent of Taiwanese and Taiwanese American scholars, activists, artists, and people in solidarity argue for a reimagination of the possibilities of the in-between to move beyond tactics of dollar diplomacy and hopeful anticipation of American approval, toward more sustainable projects of global solidarity with decolonial justice movements around the world. We offer this perspective as an alternative to the hegemonic logic under which Taiwan independence must be practically aligned with American Empire and bolstered by American militarized peace. Instead, this collective statement attempts to highlight the entrapment such thinking produces and the violent present moment that so-called US security has generated, especially under Trump’s increasingly fascist America. Within this context, we intend for this statement to further transpacific conversations, collaborations, and new configurations for imagining Taiwan and the possibility of independence during these times.

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Irish settlers: Matthew Aaron Schownir, Eire in the Empire: Irish Settlement, Violence, and Identity Formation in New South Wales and Upper Canada, 1823-1868, PhD Dissertation, Purdue University, 2017

27Sep17

Abstract: This dissertation examines Irish Catholic diasporic communities in the early- to mid-nineteenth century British settler colonies of Upper Canada and New South Wales. As one of the “founding peoples” of settler Canada and Australia, Irish Catholic immigrants formed a sizeable minority group burdened by historical stereotypes on account of their religion, class, and ethnicity. Yet historians agree that the Irish successfully integrated into mainstream settler society by the end of the nineteenth century, occupying top political and social positions while regarded as part of the white British colonial project. ^ This study examines Irish settler integration through the lens of immigrant agency and the appropriation of violence to achieve footholds in primarily British and Protestant settler spaces. It examines various modes and moments of violence to examine the processes informing identity and groupness on the imperial periphery that ultimately brought the Irish into closer association with the British imperial state and settler society. By recasting violence in its many forms—from bar fights and boxing matches to political assassinations and colonial revolts—as vital moments of immigrant agency and cultural renegotiation, this dissertation sheds light on the processes that shaped the meanings of Irishness and whiteness in the nascent colonial spaces of the British Empire.

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Settler colonialism and its ends: Elspeth Martini, ‘Borderlands, Indigenous Homelands, and North American Settler Colonialism’, Reviews in American History, 45, 3, 2017, pp. 416-422

27Sep17

Excerpt: Both of these books tell histories of peoples whose nineteenth-century homelands fell within the “northern borderlands” surrounding the U.S–Canadian border. And each, in different ways, evokes the struggles of indigenous peoples who attempted to retain their homelands, as settlers and government agents sought to dispossess and expel them. John Bowes’ wonderful study of Northern Indian removal encompasses the borderlands of the Great Lakes, but it ultimately tells a (mostly) U.S.–focused history that challenges the customary narrative of Indian removal. Generally such narratives are dominated by the Indian Removal Act and the experiences of the Cherokees. Michel Hogue, in contrast, focuses more directly on the politics of the U.S.–Canadian border, masterfully recreating the world of the early nineteenth-century Northern Plains where the Plains Metis emerged and thrived, only to be excluded during the later nineteenth century by U.S. and Canadian settler regimes. As well as making substantive contributions to North American historiography, these works also contribute to the movement among North American scholars to incorporate theories of “settler colonialism.” So while they tell the histories of different peoples, they both frame their narratives with an eye to the more widespread, longer-term dynamics through which North American indigenous homelands became the territories of the United States and Canada.

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Settlers travel with their sovereignty (as sanctioned by their founding documents): Stephen Winter, Chris Jones (eds), Magna Carta and New Zealand History, Politics and Law in Aotearoa, Palgrave, 2017

27Sep17

Description: This volume is the first to explore the vibrant history of Magna Carta in Aotearoa New Zealand’s legal, political and popular culture. Readers will benefit from in-depth analyses of the Charter’s reception along with explorations of its roles in regard to larger constitutional themes.

The common thread that binds the collection together is its exploration of what the adoption of a medieval charter as part of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements has meant – and might mean – for a Pacific nation whose identity remains in flux. The contributions to this volume are grouped around three topics: remembrance and memorialization of Magna Carta; the reception of the Charter by both Māori and non-Māori between 1840 and 2015; and reflection on the roles that the Charter may yet play in future constitutional debate. This collection provides evidence of the enduring attraction of Magna Carta, and its importance as a platform of constitutional aspiration.

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Settler excuses: Anna Stilz, ‘Settlement, expulsion, and return’, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2017

27Sep17

Abstract: This article discusses two normative questions raised by cases of colonial settlement. First, is it sometimes wrong to migrate and settle in a previously inhabited land? If so, under what conditions? Second, should settler countries ever take steps to undo wrongful settlement, by enforcing repatriation and return? The article argues that it is wrong to settle in another country in cases where (1) one comes with intent to colonize the population against their will, or (2) one possesses an adequate territorial base somewhere else, lacks an urgent interest in moving, and seeks to settle in a new place under conditions where settlement would severely harm the practices of prior occupants. It also argues for a presumption of repatriation and return in the first generation of wrongful settlement and holds that these remedies may be extended to second and higher generations in some – but not all – cases.

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