Excerpt: In contemporary China, it can sometimes seem that the preferred attitude toward this history of imperial expansion is to ignore it and pretend that China was always the same culturally and geographically. There are also some (both inside and outside China, and both inside and outside academic circles) who try to deny the fact that China was built as an expansionist empire, which itself practiced settler colonialism in the lands it conquered.

Excerpt: Indigenous digital games uniquely enact survivance by passing on teachings, telling our stories, and expressing our ways of knowing through varying weavings of code, design, art, music, and audio. Honoring this ongoing work involves recognizing the influence of traditional games as well as the role of the intergenerational kinships among Indigenous game developers and game players. Making and playing games is certainly not new in Indigenous communities. Rather, from analog to the digital, there is a vast network of support that has positioned us here now, with excitement for all that is to come.

Access the special issue here.

Access the special issue here.

Abstract: Although the concept of place has most often been used to examine micro-scale locales, recent explications of place-making and place-framing can usefully inform debates on nations, nationalism, and the nation-state. Viewing the nation as a contested, unstable, and relational place enables a pluralist and dynamic understanding of how nation-places are constructed and contested, by whom, and towards what ends. In this paper, we examine public debates over the extraction of the Canadian tar sands as an illustrative example of how place is negotiated, deployed, and contested to legitimize particular outcomes. We analyzed 50 articles from one of Canada’s most widely circulated daily newspapers, The Globe and Mail. We found diverging place-frames of Canada used by government, industry, Indigenous groups, environmentalists, and other stakeholders as they make cases for and against the development of the tar sands. Framings of Canada promoted by the government and industry—Canada as a modern, rational, and legitimate actor—featured most prominently in the sample. Importantly, however, counter-frames trouble narratives of Canada’s inherent benevolent and responsible nature, and offer a small, yet strong opposition to hegemonic national imaginaries.

Description: Niceness is often assumed to be a superficial concept unworthy of serious analysis. Yet the distinctiveness of Americans has been shaped by values of sociality and likability for which the adjective “nice” became a catchall. In America’s fledgling democracy, niceness was understood to be the indispensable trait of a people who were refreshingly free of Old World snobbery. Bramen elucidates the role niceness plays in a particular fantasy of American exceptionalism, one based not on military and economic might but on friendliness and openness. Niceness defined the attitudes of a plucky (and white) settler nation, commonly expressed through an affect that Bramen calls “manifest cheerfulness.”

To reveal its contested inflections, Bramen shows how American niceness intersects with ideas of femininity, Native American hospitality, and black amiability. Who claimed niceness and why? Despite evidence to the contrary, Americans have largely considered themselves to be a fundamentally nice and decent people, from the supposedly amicable meeting of Puritans and Native Americans at Plymouth Rock to the early days of American imperialism when the mythology of Plymouth Rock became a portable emblem of goodwill for U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines.

Description: Planning in settler-colonial countries is always taking place on the lands of Indigenous peoples. While Indigenous rights, identity and cultural values are increasingly being discussed within planning, its mainstream accounts virtually ignore the colonial roots and legacies of the discipline’s assumptions, techniques and methods. This ground-breaking book exposes the imperial origins of the planning canon, profession and practice in the settler-colonial country of Australia.

By documenting the role of planning in the history of Australia’s relations with Indigenous peoples, the book maps the enduring effects of colonisation. It provides a new historical account of colonial planning practices and rewrites the urban planning histories of major Australian cities. Contemporary land rights, native title and cultural heritage frameworks are analysed in light of their critical importance to planning practice today, with detailed case illustrations. In reframing Australian planning from a postcolonial perspective, the book shatters orthodox accounts, revising the story that planning has told itself for over 100 years. New ways to think and practise planning in Indigenous Australia are advanced.

Planning in Indigenous Australia makes a major contribution towards the decolonisation of planning. It is essential reading for students and teachers in tertiary planning programmes, as well as those in geography, development studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology and environmental management. It is also vital reading for professional planners in the public, private and community sectors.

Excerpt: Videogames have been analyzed from many perspectives in Humanities thinking and in recent years, a closer engagement with issues relating to gender, race, and diversity is in evidence. Despite early depictions of colonization in videogames, such as Sid Meier’s Colonization or Microsoft’s Age of Empires, there has been very little scholarship on postcolonial perspectives on gaming in almost two decades of game studies research. Despite this seeming absence, videogames in non-Western geographies have often critiqued colonialism and more recently, even mainstream titles such as Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry and Far Cry 2 have also addressed themes associated with post colonialism.

Abstract: Settler colonialism in Canada has and continues to dispossess Indigenous nations of their lands and authority. Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing argues that a politics of visibility has been central to these structures of invasion and dispossession. In an effort to transform sovereign Indigenous nations into “Indians”, the state has used techniques of bureaucratic documentation to naturalize the classification of Indigenous bodies as racially inferior and thus subject to a range of violent interventions. This politics of visibility fails to see Indigenous people as people who matter.

Using Indigenous feminist critique, discourse analysis, and aesthetics to analyze federal legislation, policy manuals, and archival documents, I theorize settler colonial ways of seeing as a nexus of techniques and epistemological investments with two aspects: one, the vision of a radically new society that drives settler colonial desire; two, the techniques of seeing used to manage the visibility of Indigenous life. To demonstrate how state techniques structure the visibility of Indigenous life, I investigate four techniques of visibility and erasure: i) classification under Indian Act racial taxonomy; ii) enumeration through the centralized Indian Register; iii) identity documentation with Certificates of Indian Status; and, iv) the numerical re-presentation of the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW).

However, just as settler colonial statecraft operates through ways of seeing, it is also resisted by artistic and political acts that insist on and make visible Indigenous presence. Alongside examples of settler documentation, I analyze artworks by Nadia Myre, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Christi Belcourt, and others, as practices of Indigenous resistance engaged in counter-documentation strategies that make visible and denaturalize the restrictive frames imposed upon their lives. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates how racial classification and documentation attempts to naturalize a way of seeing that devalues Indigenous lives and undermines Indigenous presence, but has always been resisted by the Indigenous lives it seeks to transform.

Abstract: In some ways it is heartbreakingly appropriate to reflect on historian Patrick Wolfe’s last book and intellectual legacy on the tenth birthday of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER, the Intervention). A decade ago, the Intervention left many of us struggling to understand what seemed like a radically changing political landscape in Indigenous policy. Into this confusion, for us and many others, came the powerful and illuminating analysis of Patrick Wolfe.

Abstract: The authors present a comparative analysis of the Saskatchewan Centennial celebrations (2005) and the Québec quatercentenary celebrations (2008) informed by critical race theory, cultural studies, and studies of commemoration as overarching frameworks of analysis. This collaborative work considers two sites rarely analyzed together and examines how these major commemorative events narrate and represent relations among settlers and Indigenous peoples in Saskatchewan and in Québec. The analysis focuses on two significant events in each commemorative celebration: the Centennial Gala in Saskatchewan and Rencontres [Encounters] in Québec. While the contexts and narratives differ in significant ways, the two commemorations reveal their mutual investments in a national settler project. The authors contend that examining how Canada as a nation is remembered and currently imagined through such disparate sites and local histories provides critical insight into ongoing contentions about its constitution as a White settler society.