settler colonial studies blog

Displacement as method: Halla Anderson, Aidan Parisi, ‘From Harlem to Al-Khalil, Palestine: Displacement is the Method of Colonialism’, Columbia Social Work Review, 17/06/25

17Jul25

Excerpt: Displacement is not only a side effect of colonialism; instead, it is a method. From Harlem to الخليل (Al-Khalīl), displacement impacts those surviving through colonialism. This paper will refer to Al-Khalīl, rather than Hebron, in accordance with the Palestinian Arabic name for Hebron, to respect the pre-colonial name for the land. This paper will also utilize the term IOF, meaning israeli Occupation Forces, in lieu of the term IDF, meaning israeli Defense Forces, to recognize the occupation of Palestinian land and the expansion of military forces as a tool for colonization. Both Harlem and Al-Khalīl have been fighting against colonialism and displacement, which is defined as “The settler goal of seizing and establishing property rights over land and resources required the removal of indigenous, which was accomplished by various forms of direct and indirect violence, including militarized genocide” (Glenn, p.54). Al-Khalīll is actively facing displacement through genocide under the israeli occupation. Harlem faces displacement from gentrification and institutional expansion. Both Al-Khalīl and Harlem serve as examples of how displacement can be engineered under settler and capitalist institutions.

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Settlers are exempted: Nada Elia, ‘The Israel Exemption’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2025

17Jul25

Abstract: This essay proposes a discursive shift from the “Palestine exception” to the “Israel exemption” from accountability, in order to recenter Israel’s culpability. It documents the long record of Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians, beginning in 1948, and peaking during the current intensified genocide. The author argues that this pattern of sexual violence is a feature of settler colonialism and racism, and that Global North feminists’ outrage over allegations of Palestinian rape of Israelis on October 7 while ignoring verified Palestinian experiences illustrates the exceptionalization of Israel. The author concludes by examining how Israel and its allies continue to weaponize antisemitism and feminism to exempt it from its crimes.

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Food for Indigenous thought: Eva L. Barr, ‘Speaking of Food: Indigenous Language Reclamation Through Fruits of the Earth’, Ethnic Studies Pedagogies, 3, 1, 2025, pp. 207-224

17Jul25

Abstract: Within Indigenous struggles for “collective continuance” (Whyte, 2018) in the face of settler colonial hegemony, three powerful forms of resurgence are Indigenous Land-based (or simply Land) education models; language reclamation initiatives; and food systems organizing for food sovereignty. In the interest of contributing to Indigenous resurgence generally and the literature of decolonization in agricultural education more specifically, this paper investigates sites where these three forms of resistance converge, sites where Indigenous ways of knowing are engaged through language and food systems work with young people on the land. Reviewing literature documenting projects on Turtle Island and taking a first look at food systems and language projects in Minnesota, the author proposes that gardens, even with the tension of their colonial traces, may be nurturing sites for collective continuance. Gardens may present learning spaces for language revitalization and Indigenous food security in the present to secure Indigenous food sovereignty for the future.

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Settler colonialism in occupied Kashmir: Iqra Saddique, ‘Shadows of Conflict: The Economic and Political Toll of Militarization in Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir’, International Journal of Kashmir Studies, 6, 2, 2025

15Jul25

Abstract: This paper explores the multifaceted impacts of India’s militarization in the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), particularly following the revocation of Article 370 in 2019. Framed within Patrick Wolfe’s “Logic of Elimination” and the framework of settler colonialism, the study examines the systematic erosion of indigenous rights, identity, and autonomy in the region. Militarization has generated profound economic disruptions, affecting key sectors such as agriculture, tourism, and trade due to armed conflict, prolonged curfews, and large-scale land dispossession. Politically, post-2019 administrative transformations have intensified militarization, altering electoral processes, imposing demographic shifts, and downgrading the region into a Union Territory. Beyond the deployment of military forces, India has armed segments of the local population, further entrenching a militarized governance structure. The Indian Supreme Court’s endorsement of the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and its mandate for local elections have reinforced these developments, resulting in the systematic dispossession of the local population’s political autonomy, cultural identity, and fundamental human rights.

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Indigenous settlers? Caroline Grace Martinez, Transnational Indigeneities: Understanding Latinx American Indian Populations in the U.S. Census (1980-2021) and Indigenous Latinx Racial Identification’, PhD dissertation, UC Irvine, 2025

15Jul25

Abstract: Data from the U.S. Census shows Latinxs have become a significant portion of the American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN) population, with over a fourth of the total AIAN population in the country also identifying as Latinx in 2021. However, scholars focused on Latinx racial identification have not sufficiently examined Latinx identification as American Indian, the only category in the U.S. Census for Indigenous populations. Indigenous peoples from Latin America make up a significant portion of the population of countries that are the top birthplaces of migrants arriving in the United States, such as Mexico. The Indigenous non-Indigenous boundary is also one of the most important racial boundaries in Latin America. Using Census data and interviews with Indigenous Latinxs, I show how the category of Hispanic/Latino and AIAN has been constructed and has changed in the past four decades in the U.S. Census and how Indigenous Latinxs make sense of ethnoracial categories used in the United States to count populations. My findings show that the Latinization of the AIAN category may be explained by a greater number of Indigenous migrants choosing the AIAN category, modifications in the Census that make it more inclusive of Indigenous peoples from Latin America, and changes in coding strategies. Furthermore, my interviews reveal that Indigenous Latinxs selected the Hispanic/Latino category, but did not feel they belonged to it due to experiences of discrimination from non-Indigenous Latinxs. My dissertation contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the transnational identities of Indigenous peoples in overlapping colonial contexts, such as the United States and Latin American countries.

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Aisan settlers? PhD dissertation, Toni Nicole Hays, Racial Site: Landedness and Settler Colonial Fantasies of Home in Asian/America, UC Irvine, 2025

15Jul25

Abstract: My dissertation, Racial Site: Landedness and Settler Colonial Fantasies of Home, argues that Asian/American literature and media articulates a preoccupation with landedness, or the persistent attachment the U.S. settler state draws between landowning status and subjectivity. As in the designation “landed gentry,” landedness emphasizes land ownership as the key criterion for subject formation under the U.S. settler colonial state. In Racial Site, home is the primary space for examining how land appropriation and settler colonialism shape U.S. racial schemas in the U.S. metropole and the global reaches of the U.S. empire. By treating home as a structure of feeling, I analyze how literature and media leverages U.S. settler colonialism to express the varying registers of differential inclusion felt across Asian/America. Then, I historicize how the logics of land appropriation guide U.S. empire building projects in the Asia and the Pacific regions and how settler colonial logics recur domestically to deny Asian/Americans access to immigration, naturalization, property ownership, and citizenship.To understand how the U.S. settler state transports logics of land appropriation between North America and Asia, I take a law and literature approach to understanding the relationship between U.S. settler colonial legislative histories and the literary forms of home in Asian/American cultural production. In the first half of my dissertation, I revisit two key legislative moments in Asian/American history–– the 1898 Treaty of Paris and Executive Order 9066 –– to recontextualize the impact of the U.S. settler state on the racialization of Asian/Americans. In my first chapter, I compare two Filipinx/American texts, Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart. In the second chapter, I situate how the U.S. settler empire deploys the logics of land appropriation to manage racial schemas in the U.S. metropole through Executive Order 9066 –– the policy which permitted the mass incarceration of Japanese/Americans during World War II. Through readings of Okada’s No-No Boy and Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine, I examine how the dispossession of Native Americas via the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851 lay the foundation for the detention and displacement of Japanese/Americans after the signing of Executive Order 9066 and produce the alienation Okada and Otsuka’s characters feel from the former homes. In the second half of my dissertation, I continue to take a law and literature approach to understand how home is a product of U.S.-Asia settler colonial entanglements in the 21st century. In the third chapter, I demonstrate how the process of Asian/American women’s gendered racialization resonates with how the U.S. state collapsed personhood with one’s property- owning status. I argue that the objectification of Asian/American women, or what Anne Cheng describes as the affinity between Asiatic women and objects, becomes akin to how the U.S. state conflates subjectivity with real estate. My of Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and Joanna Gaines, the co-owner of home design and media brand Magnolia, show how the site of the single-family home contains within its walls the transnational histories of gender-based exclusions, property ownership and global capitalism that determine the subjectivities available to Asian/American women. Racial Site concludes with an examination of how contemporary U.S.-Asia trade agreements between the China, Japan, and the U.S. impact the worldmaking premise of Disney’s techno-orientalist film Big Hero 6, in which nostalgia for “Japan panic” assuages anxieties over China’s more formidable threat in the mid 2010s. This taming process, moreover, makes use of the trope of multiracial Japanese/American hybridity, to make a home for the “mixed” identity of the film’s protagonist as well as the “mash-up” visual aesthetic of the film’s setting, “San Fransokyo.”

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The settler colonial dilemma: Maya Zebdawi, ‘Zionism in Disarray: An Interrupted Continuum’, Kohl, 10 No. 1, 2024

15Jul25

Excerpt: The struggle to erase settler consciousness within a settler colonial project is also the struggle to build a nationalist imagination that is hyphenated: anchored in national identity while simultaneously dependent on transnational infrastructures of power. Both the Israeli citizen and the settler live a double existence, as national subjects loyal to the state, and as cosmopolitan actors embedded in global systems. This hyphenation is not incidental; it is essential for the survival of the settler colony against the ongoing militant resistance of the indigenous population. For Israel, this tension points toward two possible futures: either the eradication of the unifying antagonist (the Palestinian), or the dismantling of the settler condition itself through the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. This is why belonging to the state of Israel is marked by a fundamental contradiction: the demand for rooted national belonging collides with the necessity of sustaining a transnational identity. It is within this contradiction that post-Zionism emerges, grappling with the unresolved question of how to mend the split between national loyalty and global dependence. Post-Zionism does not offer a singular solution to this crisis; instead, it is fragmented into multiple strategies, each attempting to negotiate the contradiction in different ways. Some versions lean toward neoliberal globalization, seeking to dissolve national tensions into market cosmopolitanism. Others turn inward, reimagining Jewish identity through cultural critique or diasporic pluralism, loosening the settler state’s exclusive territorial claims. Yet, each of these strategies remains haunted by the same structural dilemma: how to sustain a national project whose infrastructural and material survival depends precisely on transcending its own nationalist foundations. The settler identity has to be resolved to emancipate the settler colony from its structural nature into the modern nation state. The family is where the imaginary (keeping Anderson’s imagined communities in mind) travels, and the “woman” serves to homogenize the settler society in front of the so-called “hand of terror.” To echo Jie-Hyun Lim’s “victimhood nationalism” (2014), gender is added to the matrix of epistemic consciousness. The modus operandi of victimhood nationalism in Israel shows a linguistic and historical (narrative) consumption of victimhood on a gendered basis. Once the victims are gendered, they become a call for collective union in order to reimagine militarist functionality. The woman victim is the epistemological binary of collective guilt and innocence; she is where Zionism resuscitates victimhood as a historical culture of self-confrontation. She is the family where collective guilt and innocence become a homogeneous entity for the modern post-settler to seep through. Ultimately, the complexity of victimhood nationalism is in direct confrontation with liberation movements, its colonized subject, and the “post-colonial” nation-states surrounding it.

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With a chapter on settler colonial ecopractices: Adam Barker, Jenny Pickerill, ‘Settling in colonial ways? Eco-communities’ uncomfortable settler colonial practices’, in Jenny Pickerill (ed), Eco-communities: Surviving Well Together, Bloomsbury, 2025

15Jul25

Access the chapter here.

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Settlers imprison words: Sione Lynn Pili Lister, ‘”We Don’t Want to Use the White Man’s Terminology”: Pacific Islander Identity Formation and Enduring Indigeneity within Settler Colonialism’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2025

13Jul25

Abstract: Drawing from 40 in-depth interviews with self-identified Pacific Islanders, I examine how Pacific Islanders develop their pan-ethno-racial identity alongside their Indigeneity within the U.S. racial hierarchy. I find that settler colonialism plays an active role in individuals’ identity formation—both as a historic event and as a contemporary structure—in three critical ways. First, respondents engage with colonialism as they negotiate ethnoracial labels for themselves. Second, respondents use colonial histories to assist them as they navigate potential panethnic boundaries. Third, respondents center their Indigeneity despite colonial efforts to separate them from their Indigenous homelands and culture through the imposition of a pan-ethnic-racial label, while practicing a trans-Indigenous politic. Throughout, Pacific Islanders reveal how tightly bound their ethnoracial identities are to their Indigeneity, expanding the sociological study of race and ethnicity by turning the race-settler colonialism lens to the Pacific Islander diaspora.

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Settlers imprison children: Lama Alsafi, ‘Settler colonialism and Israel: the incarceration of Palestinian children as a central feature of Israel’s settler colonial project’, Third World Quarterly, 2025

13Jul25

Abstract: This paper investigates the ways in which settler colonialism, and particularly Zionist settler colonialism, explains Israel’s hyperincarceration and hyperpolicing of Palestinian children and the structural abuse these children are subjected to while detained. It argues that it is critical to contextualise Israel’s hyperincarceration of Palestinian children, including the abuse, torture, rape, displacement, and dispossession that accompany it, within the context of settler colonialism and Israel’s settler colonial project. This is because the ultimate goal of Zionist settler colonialism, as with any settler colonial project, is the total extermination, elimination, and replacement of the Indigenous population in order to secure complete and unfettered control of the land and access to and use of its resources, with the mass incarceration of Palestinian children being a key method utilised by Israel to achieve these aims.

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