settler colonial studies blog

Decolonising settler-colonial art history: Loraine Becker, South African Art History: The possibility of decolonising a discourse Danielle, PhD dissertation, University of Cape Town, 2017

29Jan18

Abstract: In light of recent calls to decolonise curricula at South African universities there has been a renewed interest in what decolonisation might specifically imply for particular academic disciplines. Art history in South Africa has long struggled to move away from its settler colonial origins towards a more Afrocentric focus and its art world has frequently been criticised for being elitist and dominated by white practitioners. To this end, one of the primary questions that this dissertation seeks to answer is to what extent indigenous, African art and African epistemology has been included in South African art history and the institutions that support despite the discourse’s traces of colonialism. Through a discussion and analysis of South African art history this dissertation seeks to describe the changes in the discourse since the late twentieth-century in light of the entanglements of the national; the colonial and the decolonial. Such an analysis is provided through a discussion of the biases of art history as a discourse originating in Western Europe; the geographical location of museums and university departments; the character of South African art historical writing; the curatorial strategies used to display African art in South African museums and the specific nature of art history curricula as it is taught at South African universities. The dissertation that follows therefore aims to provide an overarching view of South African art history that takes into account a range of factors impacting its particular framing so that the question of decolonisation can be adequately addressed. The dissertation finds that South African art history has a specific, settler colonial character and that historical African art has been neglected in art historical discourse despite overt attempts to transform the nature of the discipline post-democracy. It is argued that this may be the result of a shift in focus towards contemporary practice in the twenty-first century and away from the historical as a result of a resistance to cultural or racial labels attributed to art due to the legacy of apartheid legislation. As such, I argue that South African art history may find a path towards decolonisation through a renewed focus on historical South African and African art that is perceived on its own terms.

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Trauma: Christopher Pexa, ‘Futurity Foreclosed: Jonestown, Settler Colonialism, and the Ending of Time in Fred D’Aguiar’s Bill of Rights’, MELUS, 2018

24Jan18

Abstract: Fred D’Aguiar’s book-length poem, Bill of Rights (1998), imagines the life of a survivor of the November 18, 1978 mass suicide and killing that occurred in Jonestown, Guyana. Using a multi-voiced persona to reflect on both the traumatic events of Jonestown and the problematics of surviving trauma, the poem enacts a ritual performance of remembering and healing for both its poetic persona and audience: a ritual complicated by complexities and contingencies of not only representation, but of trauma itself. The poem’s persona, having escaped death at Jonestown, suffers from the compulsion to repetitively re-enact his experiences there. His repetitions, while aimed at psychic wholeness, only reproduce the original trauma, with the poem fracturing into multiple voices as an enactment of his dissolution. The tacit theory of reiterative performance that D’Aguiar’s poem advances, then, is one of failure rather than liberation: a bill of rights enumerated and desired, but unlived and, perhaps, unlivable. It is in this sense, of a foreclosing of conditions for the present coherence of the subject, that the poem describes an impossible futurity, where the conditions of its impossibility lie in the colonial conditions of Jonestown itself. The poem’s depiction of post-traumatic reconstruction as being necessarily partial is, in effect, an anti-poetics created and maintained by coloniality itself: language fails to remake a coherent subject of experience, and the only future is one where a wounded and unstable subject predominates.

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The archeology of settler colonies: Ewa Magdalena Naum, ‘How to Plant a Colony in the New World. Rules and Practices in New Sweden and the Seventeenth-Century Delaware Valley’, in Barbara Hausmair, Ben Jervis, Ruth Nugent, Eleanor Williams (eds), Archaeologies of Rules and Regulation: Between Text and Practice, Berhahn, 2018, pp. 83-102

24Jan18

Abstract: The colony of New Sweden (1638–55), like other colonial settlements in America, was structured by a set of laws and regulations. The comprehensive instructions given to the subsequent governors ordered the particulars of everyday life. They dictated settlers’ means of sustenance and rights to trade, detailed rules of engagement with other European colonists and Native Americans, established a system of criminal justice and regulated religious life. Most of these regulations were unquestioned and followed because they constituted a cohesive set of rules that helped to reconstruct settlers’ lives in the colony and instilled a sense of continuity. Others, particularly those laws pertaining to moral and orderly conduct and trade with Native Americans, were frequently transgressed by the colonists, despite the risk of severe punishments. Using historical and archaeological records, this chapter examines obedience and disobedience of the Swedish population of New Sweden and colonial Delaware and Pennsylvania. To better understand the logic behind these actions, the study is set in the context of transatlantic migration as well as the geopolitical realities of the colonial settlements in northeastern America during the seventeenth century.

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Comparisons: Arthur Asseraf, ‘”A New Israel”: Colonial Comparisons and the Algerian Partition That Never Happened’, French Historical Studies, 41, 1, 2018, 95-120

24Jan18

Abstract: In 1960–62 French officials considered partitioning Algeria between European- and Muslim-majority areas, much later and more seriously than the existing historiography shows. Even supporters of partition, however, remained ambivalent, regarding it as a “foreign” approach to decolonization opposed to French principles of territorial unity and racial equality. Thus they discussed partition by comparing Algeria to foreign models, in particular the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine that led to the creation of the state of Israel. Drawing on the private papers of Prime Minister Michel Debré, the writings of Alain Peyrefitte, and archives from the Ministries of Algerian and Foreign Affairs, this article argues that partition plans were failed attempts to deflect colonialism by looking sideways. To do so, the supporters of partition made use of comparison, a long-standing tool of the colonial administration.

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Educating: John Petrovic, Roxanne M. Mitchell (eds), Indigenous Philosophies of Education Around the World, Routledge, 2018

20Jan18

Description: This volume explores conceptualizations of indigeneity and the ways that indigenous philosophies can and should inform educational policy and practice. Beginning with questions and philosophies of indigeneity itself, the volume then covers the indigenous philosophies and practices of a range of communities—including Sami, Maori, Walpiri, Navajo and Kokama peoples. Chapter authors examine how these different ideals can inform and create meaningful educational experiences for communities that reflect indigenous ways of life. By applying them in informing a philosophy of education that is particular and relevant to a given indigenous community, this study aims to help policy makers and educational practitioners create meaningful educational experiences.

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Settler colonialism today: Forrest Wade Young, ‘Rapa Nui’, The Contemporary Pacific, 30, 1, 2018, pp. 195-204

19Jan18

Excerpt: During the review period, Rapa Nui indigenous politics were principally political ecological in scope; they involved struggles to control cultural and material resources and ancestral territory and to regulate island population growth. This review highlights four major contests: the struggle for the self-determination of Rapa Nui patrimony; the continued fight of the Hito/Hitorangi family to regain their ancestral land from the Hotel Hangaroa Eco Village and Spa; political organization to establish a law to restrict Chilean and international migration to the island; and the battle to resist state and transnational forces seeking to develop the ocean surrounding the island into a marine park.

The political reclamation and occupation in March 2015 of the “sacred places” (vahi tapu) that state and transnational forces had developed into the “Rapa Nui National Park” (Parque Nacional Rapa Nui) for global tourism had become embroiled in complex state strategies of criminalization of Rapa Nui leaders by August 2015 but stabilized in favor of Rapa Nui movements for self-determination as the review period began.

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Settlers claim large: Darryl Leroux, ‘”We’ve been here for 2,000 years”: White settlers, Native American DNA and the phenomenon of indigenization’, Social Studies of Science, 2018

16Jan18

Abstract: Relying on a populace well-educated in family history based in ancestral genealogy, a robust national genomics sector has developed in Québec over the past decade-and-a-half. The same period roughly coincides with a fourfold increase in the number of individuals and organizations in the region self-identifying with a mixed-race form of indigeneity that is counter to existing Indigenous understandings of kinship and citizenship. This paper examines how recent efforts by genetic scientists, working on a multi-year research project on the ‘diversity’ of the Québec gene pool, intervene in complex settler-Indigenous relations by redefining indigeneity according to the logics of ‘Native American DNA’. Specifically, I demonstrate how genetic scientists mobilize genes associated with Indigenous peoples in ways that support regional efforts to govern settler-Indigenous relations in favour of otherwise white settler claims to Indigenous lands.

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Settler-colonial bankruptcy! Max Haiven, ‘The Uses of Financial Literacy: Financialization, the Radical Imagination, and the Unpayable Debts of Settler Colonialism’, Cultural Politics, 13, 3, 2017, pp. 348-369

16Jan18

Abstract: This article is a contribution to critiques of the mainstream trends in financial literacy education and argues that they typically produce a profound financial illiteracy by obfuscating the systemic and structural dimensions of debt, financial hardship, and the patterns of financialization, thus reaffirming a neoliberal trend to privatize social problems. I explore how this financial illiteracy dovetails with the production of “white ignorance” and the erasure of the racialized injustices of contemporary global capitalism. While the case study of financial literacy educational materials targeting Indigenous people in Canada largely confirms this approach, it also gives us clues as to what another, better financial literacy might look like. The article concludes by asking what financial literacy education for the radical imagination might look like and what the further decolonization of that education might imply. It ends with a celebration of settler-colonial bankruptcy as a moral and political-economic opening for a radical way forward.

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If what they do is ‘crime’, they must be criminal (a settler thought on indigenous people): Sohail Hossain Hassanein, ‘Crime and Policing in a Settler-Colonial Context: The Case of Palestinians in Israel’, Research on Humanities and Social Sciences, 7, 24, 2017

16Jan18

Abstract: This article explores how the Israeli politicians and police shape anxieties about crime in a settlercolonial context. I consider three components of this context (control, inequality, and separation) and look specifically at the role of Israeli laws and police, as settler colonial agents, in shaping crime and its control within Palestinian areas. This article assumes that Israeli perception of threat do not depend on public order and security factors. Consequently, the Israeli state aims in controlling Palestinians is to mitigate a perceived national threat by imposing several methods of policing. The article argues that politicians, as settler-colonial ideologists, construct the law as an instrument that is used to criminalize Palestinians by linking them with violence and crime, and emphasizes that police statistics are a social event, which is constructed as a direct result of settler colonialism.

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Indigeneity undoes settler adoption: Sarah Wright Cardinal, Beyond the Sixties Scoop: Reclaiming Indigenous identity, reconnection to place, and reframing understandings of being Indigenous, PhD dissertation, University of Victoria, 2017

16Jan18

Abstract: This study used life experience methods to gather the narratives of seven adult Indigenous transracial adoptees who have reclaimed their Indigenous identities after experiencing closed adoption during the late 1950s through to the early 1980s. Participants had been members of Aboriginal (First Nations, Metis, Inuit) communities at birth but were then raised outside their Indigenous nations in non-Indigenous families. Through analysis of their stories, I identified four themes that marked their trajectories to reclamation: Imposed fracture (prior to reclamation); Little anchors (beginning healing); Coming home (on being whole); Our sacred bundle (reconciling imposed fracture). Their stories of reconnecting to their Indigeneity, decolonizing and healing illustrate their shifts from hegemonic discourse spaces that characterized their lived experiences as “other” to spirit-based discourses that center Indigenous knowledge systems as valid, life affirming, and life changing. This dissertation contributes to the debate on state sanctioned removal of children and the impacts of loss of Indigenous identity in Canadian society. My findings indicate that cultural and spiritual teachings and practices, as well as, the knowledge of colonization and its impacts on Indigenous families, communities, and nations, all contributed to adoptees’ healing and ability to move forward in their lives. Key recommendations include: further exploration of the concept of cultural genocide in relation to settler-colonial relations in Canada; further examination of the intersection of counter-narratives, resistance discourse, and colonial violence; increased investigation of the connections between Indigenous knowledge systems, living spirit-based teachings and educative aspects of community wellness; and more research examining education beyond formal schooling, including the formative effects upon Indigenous youth of social values, public policy, and legal frameworks.

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