settler colonial studies blog

Slow violence on indigenous ground (and the paradox of struggle): Paige Raibmon, ‘Obvious but Invisible: Ways of Knowing Health, Environment, and Colonialism in a West Coast Indigenous Community’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 60, 2, 2018, pp. 241-273

04Apr18

Abstract: This paper interrogates the specific workings and stakes of slow violence on Indigenous ground. It argues that despite similarities with other environmental justice struggles, Indigenous ones are fundamentally distinct because of Indigenous peoples’ unique relationship to the polluted or damaged entity, to the state, and to capital. It draws from Indigenous studies, history, anthropology, geography, sensory studies, and STS, to present results from research with the Mowachaht Muchalaht First Nation, an Indigenous people on the west coast of British Columbia. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, this community used successive strategies to try to render its knowledge about health, environment, and authority visible to the settler state. Each strategy entailed particular configurations of risk, perceptibility, and uncertainty; each involved translation between epistemologies; and each implicated a distinct subject position for Indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the state. The community’s initial anti-colonial, environmental justice campaign attempted to translate local, Indigenous ways of knowing into the epistemologies of environmental science and public health. After this strategy failed, community leaders launched another that leveraged the state’s legal epistemology. This second strategy shifted the balance of risk and uncertainty such that state actors felt compelled to act. The community achieved victory, but at a price. Where the first strategy positioned the community as a self-determined, sovereign actor; the second positioned it as a ward of the state. This outcome illustrates the costs that modern states extract from Indigenous peoples who seek remedial action, and more generally, the mechanisms through which the colonial present is (re)produced.

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Settlers imprison political thought: Hedi Viterbo, ‘A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Imprison: Confining Palestinian Political Thought’, Jadaliyya, 03/04/18

04Apr18

Excerpt: Like incarceration in the physical sense, the incarceration of the mind inside Israeli prisons resonates with Israel’s outside control mechanisms. In addition to rendering the Gaza Strip and West Bank prison-like in the physical sense, Israel has also, at different points in time and in specific but important ways, erected barriers to the movement of thought, information, and communication.

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The necessary rediscovery of inter-national politics: Hayden King, ‘Discourses of conquest and resistance: International Relations and Anishinaabe diplomacy’, in Randolph Persaud, Alina Sajed (eds), Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations: Postcolonial Perspectives, Routledge, 2018

01Apr18

Abstract: Indigenous nations have much to contribute to an understanding of global politics, political community, war, peace, and so on. However, they do not appear in International Relations texts or come up in classroom discussions. Attempting to address this puzzle, this chapter proceeds in two parts. The first begins by explaining IR’s erasure of both contemporary settler colonialism and Indigenous politics. The second part re-inserts Indigenous peoples into the disciplinary landscape and articulates an Indigenous – and specifically Anishinaabe – theory of inter-national politics by focusing on three core concepts in the study of IR: the state, sovereignty and anarchy. It finds that Indigenous peoples have and continue to cultivate and practice a sophisticated, counter-hegemonic politics of the international.

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The nonsovereign on the coin: Sarah Marusek, ‘Appreciation orAppropriation? An Indigenous Moment in the American Numismatic Narrative (1999–2009)’, in Stefan Huygebaert, Angela Condello, Sarah Marusek, Mark Antaki (eds), Sensing the Nation’s Law: Historical Inquiries into the Aesthetics of Democratic Legitimacy, Springer, 2018

28Mar18

Abstract: American coinage, both circulated as well as commemorative, involves a host of cultural markers that represent the legal iconography of American national identity. The umbrella of American identity is one that covers places and peoples living in the continental United States, arctic and subarctic Alaska, and islands in the Pacific and Caribbean Oceans. As legal iconography, state and territorial American quarters serve as emblems of folk legality in which culture and law constitutively craft one another in ordinary tangible ways. While these quarters depict, and perhaps even celebrate a multicultural polity, the iconographic process of remembering may be more a statement of post-colonial design rather than genuine commemoration of the past and indigenous present of American Indian, Samoan, Native Hawaiian, Native Alaskan, Chamorran, Puerto Rican, and other indigenous peoples under American jurisdiction. These quarters present a theoretical paradox involving the portrayal of images that appear on them. This paradox represents an indigenous moment numismatically framed through non-English phrases and depictions of culture outside the continental forty-eight states. This chapter will examine this paradox as an indigenous moment in the numismatic construction of public memory illustrated by the minting of linguistic variety and cultural imagery on American state and territorial quarters.

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Settler play: Jacob Euteneuer, ‘Settler Colonialism in the Digital Age: Clash of Clans, Territoriality, and the Erasure of the Native’, Open Library of Humanities. 4, 1, 2018

28Mar18

Abstract: In the past ten years, two seemingly unconnected fields of study have risen to prominence. Patrick Wolfe’s 2006 theorization of settler colonialism called for the development of a distinct set of literature and analytical tools to analyze the relationship between indigenous peoples and occupying settlers. Meanwhile, Ian Bogost’s 2007 elaboration of the notion of procedural rhetoric provided a theoretical framework to approach the critical analysis of the ideology modeled by a game’s rules and design. While each of these theories have proliferated and prospered within their disciplines, this article seeks to bring the two fields together in order to establish a critical framework that can be used to highlight the presence of settler colonialism in popular mobile videogames, in particular Supercell’s 2012 mobile game Clash of Clans. Within this framework, the essay analyzes how the game engages in a system of play driven by its focus on improvement, progression, and expansion, which ends up operating under the same principles settler colonialism has used to justify the expansion of settler-states and the eradication of indigenous populations. Through an examination of the game’s economy, enemies, maps, and music, the essay connects the game’s systems of play to the embedded nature of settler colonialism in the videogame industry—particularly the mobile or casual scene—and contemporary life in settler-states. The ultimate goal is to explain how social meaning is derived from these types of games and what that means for both players and creators in terms of developing new, progressive opportunities for play.

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Different modes of domination, different built environments: Liora Bigon, Ambe J. Njoh, ‘Power and Social Control in Settler and Exploitation Colonies: The Experience of New France and French Colonial Africa’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2018

28Mar18

Abstract: This paper analyzes strategies for articulating power and effectuating social control in the built environment by French colonial authorities in New France and colonial Africa. The former was a settler colony while the latter comprised colonies of economic exploitation. Despite their different colonial status, they shared much in common. In this regard, French colonial authorities recycled spatial control strategies they had employed in New France a century earlier for use in Africa. However some changes commensurate with the changing priorities and objectives of the French colonial project were instituted. In particular, recycled policies from New France were made more stringent, less tolerant and ostensibly oppressive in French colonial Africa.

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Triangular relations: JoeKnetsch, ‘The Army Vs. The Indians Vs. The Settlers: The South Florida Frontier Between the Seminole Wars’, Sunland Tribune, 26, 2018

28Mar18

Abstract: One of the constant themes of Florida frontier history is the continued threat of violence. Either real or imagined, the threat of a painful death at the hands of unknown assailants, normally alleged to be Indians, loomed in the background of every settlement on the frontier. The acts of providing settlers with ammunition, weapons and constant patrols put the U.S. Army in the middle of all potential outbreaks. Therefore, any act, or reported act, of violence by the remaining Indian population had to be investigated, thwarted or rebuffed, and the settlers reassured that the incident was either false or isolated. The Army’s predicament on the southern frontier of Florida between the Second and Third Seminole Wars becomes obvious with the study of many of the remaining documents. There was, to be sure, some violence caused by Indians straying outside of the 1842 boundary, however, some of the violence was not directly caused by this group but by whites hoping to manipulate the Army into a position of removing the remaining Indians, by force if necessary.

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Seeing the settler state: Margaret D. Jacobs, ‘Seeing Like a Settler Colonial State’, Modern American History, 2018

25Mar18

Excerpt: In 1998, the Canadian historian and politician Michael Ignatieff wrote: “All nations depend on forgetting: on forging myths of unity and identity that allow a society to forget its founding crimes, its hidden injuries and divisions, its unhealed wounds.” Ironically, Ignatieff’s home country has belied his assertion. Canada has engaged in collective remembering of one of its hidden injuries—the Indian residential schools—through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from 2009 to 2015. Australia, too, has reckoned since the 1990s with its own unhealed wounds—the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, or, in common parlance, the “Stolen Generations.”

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Indigenous street gangs are in the way: Robert Henry, ‘Sites of survivance: A symposium on global Indigenous street gangs’, Journal of Applied Youth Studies, 2, 3, 2018, pp. 70-75

25Mar18

Abstract: Researchers and community knowledge experts from across Western Canada, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia participated in ‘Sites of survivance: A global symposium on Indigenous street gangs’, 23-24 August 2017, at the University of Calgary, Canada, located in Treaty 7 and Metis Region 3 territory. This report from the symposium includes some of the discussion session findings and a suggested research model.

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Aiming beyond ‘Allozionism’ without focusing on settler colonialism is like having a meal without food: Johannes Becke, ‘Beyond Allozionism: Exceptionalizing and De-Exceptionalizing the Zionist Project’, Israel Studies, 23, 2, 2018, pp. 168-193

25Mar18

Abstract: Based on Zygmunt Bauman’s understanding of Allosemitism, this article introduces the concept of Allozionism, a form of exceptionalism which assumes that Zionism and the State of Israel are fundamentally different from all other nationalist movements and nation-states. Instead of tracing exceptionalist claims about the Zionist project back to its attributes or the politics of affinity and resentment, this approach investigates the epistemic function of Allozionism, understood here as Allosemitism in postcolonial times: While European Allosemitism projected its anxieties about the problematic distinction between believer/non-believer and nation/non-nation on the Jewish people, global Allozionism projects its ambivalences about the indigenous/colonial distinction on the Zionist project as a puzzling case of colonization in the name of indigeneity. In order to overcome Allozionist exceptionalism, de-exceptionalizing the Zionist project implies the recognition of its cultural and political ambivalence, including colonial, anti-colonial, and post-colonial elements—both before and after 1967.

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