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A summary: Christoph Marx, ‘Settler Colonies’, EGO: European History Online, 2017

10Jul17

Abstract: Beginning in the early modern age, European settler colonies were founded first beyond the Atlantic Ocean and later in the Pacific, but not in Asia. The territories in question are huge, and settlement often proceeded frontier-style, though processes of urbanization can also be observed from an early stage. With the exception of the Cape Colony, founded in 1652, settler colonies in Africa were not established until the 19th century and led to the dominance of European minorities over the indigenous majority population. Conflicts with local populations erupted over resources claimed by both sides, above all land. The decolonization of settler colonies in Africa was mostly accompanied by armed conflict.


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The (fundamental) role of (indigenous) Irony in shaping the politics of memory: David Myer Temin, Adam Dahl, ‘Narrating Historical Injustice: Political Responsibility and the Politics of Memory’, Political research Quarterly, 2017

10Jul17

Abstract: Memory and justice are intricately linked. To adequately address historical wrongs, liberal democracies must engage the past. Historical memory provides a connective tissue between past wrongs and present injustices. Yet the question that arises with the politics of memory and its usefulness for addressing historical injustice resides precisely in the process by which we create historical memory. More than just an acknowledgment of past events, collective memory is constructed through narrative and memorial practices that impart meaning to past events. This paper amends the politics of memory by attending to the complex relationship between the narrative figuration of historical wrongs and present attributions of collective responsibility. By viewing memory of historical wrongs as narrative constructions of the past, we argue that the narrative form of historical injustice shapes contemporary notions of political responsibility. In elaborating this claim, we examine how different narrative representations of historical injustice engender different understandings of collective responsibility. Through a reading of the Native American political theorist Vine Deloria Jr.’s famous work, Custer Died for Your Sins, we then explore how irony and satire help expose the limitations of tragic, romantic, and comedic narratives in conceptualizing political responsibility for historical injustice.


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The history of settlers: Stephen Jackson, ‘British History is Their History: Britain and the British Empire in the History Curriculum of Ontario, Canada and Victoria, Australia 1930-1975’, Espacio, Tiempo y Educación, 4, 2, 2017, pp. 165-186. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14516/ete.161

10Jul17

Abstract: This article investigates the evolving conceptions of national identity in Canada and Australia through an analysis of officially sanctioned history textbooks in Ontario, Canada and Victoria, Australia. From the 1930s until the 1950s, Britain and the British Empire served a pivotal role in history textbooks and curricula in both territories. Textbooks generally held that British and imperial history were crucial to the Canadian and Australian national identity. Following the Second World War, textbooks in both Ontario and Victoria began to recognize Britain’s loss of power, and how this changed Australian and Canadian participation in the British Empire/Commonwealth. But rather than advocate for a complete withdrawal from engagement with Britain, authors emphasized the continuing importance of the example of the British Empire and Commonwealth to world affairs. In fact, participation in the Commonwealth was often described as of even more importance as the Dominions could take a more prominent place in imperial affairs. By the 1960s, however, textbook authors in Ontario and Victoria began to change their narratives, de-emphasizing the importance of the British Empire to the Canadian and Australian identity. Crucially, by the late 1960s the new narratives Ontarians and Victorians constructed claimed that the British Empire and national identity were no longer significantly linked. An investigation into these narratives of history will provide a unique window into officially acceptable views on imperialism before and during the era of decolonization.


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On the decolonisation and settlers (reflecting on southern Africa): Chris Saunders, ‘Decolonization in Southern Africa: Reflections on the Namibian and South African Cases’, Journal for Contemporary History, 42, 1, 2017, pp. 99-114

10Jul17

Abstract: While the term “decolonization” is now applied in many different situations, with different meanings, its original and prime usage relates to the process leading to the ending of colonial rule. Though there is a large literature on that process, we lack a detailed overview of the way it unfolded in Southern Africa. This article focuses on two countries in that region, Namibia and South Africa, and raises some of the questions that need to be addressed in relation to their “decolonization”. It also seeks to show how complex “decolonization” was in these two instances, and the importance of seeing individual cases in a regional and comparative perspective.


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Settlers are killers: a new map of Australia

05Jul17

Bridget Brennan, ‘New map records massacres of Aboriginal people in Frontier Wars‘, abc.net.au, 05/07/17.

Check the map.


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Settler colonialism is a disaster (check chapters 8 and 9): Jennifer L. Lawrence, Sarah Marie Wiebe (eds), Biopolitical Disaster, Routledge, 2018

05Jul17

Description: Biopolitical Disaster employs a grounded analysis of the production and lived-experience of biopolitical life in order to illustrate how disaster production and response are intimately interconnected. The book is organized into four parts, each revealing how socio-environmental consequences of instrumentalist environmentalities produce disastrous settings and political experiences that are evident in our contemporary world.

Beginning with “Commodifying crisis,” the volume focuses on the inherent production of disaster that is bound to the crisis tendency of capitalism. The second part, “Governmentalities of disaster,” addresses material and discursive questions of governance, the role of the state, as well as questions of democracy. This part explores the linkage between problematic environmental rationalities and policies. Third, the volume considers how and where the (de)valuation of life itself takes shape within the theme of “Affected bodies,” and investigates the corporeal impacts of disastrous biopolitics. The final part, “Environmental aesthetics and resistance,” fuses concepts from affect theory, feminist studies, post-positivism, and contemporary political theory to identify sites and practices of political resistance to biopower.


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Queer settlers are settlers: Brett Cassady Willes, Drag, Demons, and Dirt: Centering Indigenous Thought in Critiques of Prairie Queer Settler Colonialism, MA Dissertation, Queen’s University, 2017

05Jul17

Abstract: My thesis takes as its central question ongoing colonialism in white queer settler affective and discursive relationships to the prairies and to “home.” I engage with the works of queer and feminist Indigenous theorists, poets, and arts by the likes of Gregory Scofield, Adrian Stimson, Erica Violet Lee, Zoe Todd, Billy-Ray Belcourt in order to fully articulate my critique of queer settler colonialism. I observe how white queer settlers experience their queerness as an obstacle to full and immediate participation in the settler colonial project, which hinges on cis and heteronormativity, and then recuperate their belonging through queer articulations of colonial claims to home on occupied Indigenous lands. Over the course of this project, I also notice how whiteness mobilizes both anti-Black racism and Indigenous dispossession. In order to investigate these white queer affective attachments to home, I work closely with cultural production made by white queer settlers from Edmonton and Calgary, specifically works by Darrin Hagen, Trevor Anderson, and Rae Spoon. I find it necessary to take these books, films, and music seriously as they are located within and reproduce larger systems of settler colonialism.


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Representing Pakeha on stage: Adriann Smith, ‘Performing emotion to remember a Pakeha worldview’, Australasian Drama Studies, 70, 2017, pp. 113-134

05Jul17

Abstract: The theatrical depiction of emotion can be a powerful vehicle for the representation of cultural identity.Examining the theatrical use of emotion in Gary Henderson’s play Home Land and Stuart Hoar and Chris Blake’s opera Bitter Calm, this article considers how performed emotions may represent Pākehā cultural identity on the stage.

The cultural memories underlying theatrical emotions empower them to challenge ideas, and this article considers how the theatrical use of emotion represents memories of, and ideas about, Pākehā cultural identity.As a form of cultural language, a performance, as Bert O.States observes, ‘offers an aesthetic completion to a process we know to be endless … The play imitates the timely in order to move it from time, to give time a shape.’

Within this shape, the remembered and reconfigured past is emotionally represented, at multiple performances, to an ever-changing present.This representation to an audience allows for an ongoing examination of personal and cultural identity in which emotional representation performs a key role.For, as Peta Tait notes, ‘[i]f emotions are socially meaningful only as natural, this locates them as opposite to culture and camouflages their immense social power’.


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With an opening chapter on ‘Colonizing Terra Incognita’: Stephen A. Kent, Susan Raine (eds), Scientology in Popular Culture Influences and Struggles for Legitimacy, ABC-Clio, 2017

05Jul17

Access the book here.


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Decolonising international law requires legal pluralism: Jonas Perrin, ‘Legal Pluralism as a Method of Interpretation: A Methodological Approach to Decolonising Indigenous Peoples’ Land Rights under International Law’, Universitas, 26, 2017, pp. 23-60

05Jul17

Abstract: Ever since the arrival of the European colonisers, theories of international law have been used to justify the process of dispossession of indigenous lands. Even though the adoption of human rights have led to some amelioration, the author claims that this has proved unsatisfactory to address indigenous concerns for one reason: international law remains deeply rooted in colonial concepts, such as the concepts of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘property’. Given that these concepts clearly contradict indigenous cosmovisions, the author proposes a pluralist interpretation of indigenous land rights under international law. Understood as a method of interpretation, it is able to take into account not only ‘state law’ but also indigenous conceptions of the relationship between human beings and the land. It is thus proposed that such a methodological approach may decolonise colonial concepts of international law.


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