settler colonial studies blog

Settlers are lonely: Julia Wells, ‘The “Terrible Loneliness”: Loneliness and Worry in Settler Women’s Memoirs from East and South-Central Africa, 1890-1939”, African Studies Quarterly, 17, 2, 2017, pp. 47-64

05Jul17

Abstract: Descriptions of loneliness and worry fill settler women’s memoirs from British Africa. Despite this prevalence, scholars rarely discuss such emotions at length. This paper explores the themes of loneliness and worry in the memoirs of female settlers from British East and South-Central Africa, 1890-1939. The majority are drawn from Kenya and Rhodesia, and include authors such as Karen Blixen, Elspeth Huxley, Hylda Richards, Jessie Currie, Ruth Fisher, and Mathilde Goy. Unpacking through a close textual analysis what women meant by loneliness and worry, and how they explained those feelings, this paper positions loneliness and worry as crucial aspects of settler women’s colonial memoirs and a defining feature of their experiences of British Africa.

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A future without settler colonialism: David Lloyd, ‘Traces of History, Specters of the Future’, American Quarterly, 69, 2, 2017, pp. 285-290

02Jul17

Excerpt: […] But what I want to dwell on here is what I learned from him in the process of our collaboration, in terms of the analysis that his work had suggested and which, in the final pages of Traces of History, he offers to us in the hope that it might be useful to the forging of solidarity and resistance. Though he demurred when I intimated as much to him as I initially invited him to participate in a panel at ASA in 2013, the notion that the traces of settler colonial logics can be tracked in neoliberal modes of appropriation and rule is a tribute to the contribution that his work had already made through the scattered essays that eventually came together in Traces of History. His analysis of the mobile and differentially articulated apprehension of race as a profoundly historical and transforming set of regimes is invaluable (and not just useful) for understanding our present conjuncture. Race, as he puts it, “is a process, not an ontology; its varying modalities so many dialectical symptoms of the ever-shifting hegemonic balance between those with a will to colonise and those with a will to be free, severally racialized in relation to each other.” The resultant structures, despite the all too often reductively cited aphorism that settler colonialism “is a structure, not an event,” are never inert.

These structures that Patrick terms “regimes of race” transform under the pressure of the unremitting resistance and survival of dispossessed, displaced, and exploited populations.

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Settler colonial studies is comparative: Saree Makdisi, ‘Elimination as a Structure: Tracing and Racing Zionism with Patrick Wolfe’, American Quarterly, 69, 2, 2017, pp. 277-284

02Jul17

Excerpt: One of the great virtues of Patrick Wolfe’s Traces of History is that it locates different settler colonial situations in a comparative framework, thereby allowing us to see both how each situation relates to or draws on the others—but also what renders each distinctive in its own right. The Zionist project in Palestine stands out in this comparative framework, although it has clear relations to other settler colonial endeavors (such as those in Australia and the Americas, also discussed at length in his book). As Wolfe shows, no other settler colonial campaign was so meticulously planned and thought through; none so premeditated; none so wrapped up in so many ideological sleights of hand, so many layers of psychosocial denial and contradiction; none so fraught with anxiety and guilt. And none continues in such an unreconstructed way up to the present. Only in Palestine could one today walk down the street with a yellowing copy of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and without any modification apply that 1961 classic to what one sees before one’s eyes in 2017: “The settlers’ town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. … The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs.”

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Settler colonial studies is related: Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native’, American Quarterly, 69, 2, 2017, pp. 267-276

02Jul17

Excerpt: In Patrick Wolfe we lost an intellectual giant. More than any other scholar, he has emerged as the leading figure in the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies and has done so much to advance its generative theoretical paradigm. We also lost another intellectual giant in 2016: Cedric J. Robinson, whose work challenged liberal and Marxist theories of political change, exposed the racial character of capitalism, unearthed a Black Radical Tradition and examined its social, political, cultural, and intellectual bases, and advanced a concept of racial regimes that deepens our understanding of the historically contingent character of racism. I learned a great deal from both men. When I first read Wolfe’s Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, I found myself returning to Robinson’s work, to places where their ideas converge and, especially, where they diverge. Unfortunately, Robinson’s absence in the discourse on settler colonialism has, in my view, impoverished much of the work—including Wolfe’s outstanding new book. My essay is a modest attempt to wrestle with specific claims in Traces of History, with Robinson’s insights into race, racial capitalism, and colonialism, as well as traces of South African and European history, informing my critique.

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Just ‘Black’, ‘Black’ or ‘Red’, or ‘Black’ and ‘Red’? J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, ‘Tracing Historical Specificity: Race and the Colonial Politics of (In)Capacity’, American Quarterly, 69, 2, 2017, pp. 257-265

02Jul17

Excerpt: I want to take up [Wolfe’s] work to examine Afro-Pessimism […].

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Tracing traces is a spatial practice: Jean M. O’Brien, ‘Tracing Settler Colonialism’s Eliminatory Logic in Traces of History’, American Quarterly, 69, 2, 2017, pp. 249-255

02Jul17

Excerpt: No concept has reoriented the field of Indigenous studies recently more than the theoretical framework of settler colonialism. And although Patrick Wolfe would be the first to insist that he did not invent it, his 2006 article, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” offered a language for settler colonial studies that has been immensely influential. He places genocide in relation to what he calls “the logic of elimination,” concluding, “settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal,” and that “invasion is a structure not an event,” meaning that it is an ongoing process rather than something accomplished at a single moment. As he states, “settler colonialism destroys to replace.” The elimination of Indigenous populations can be accomplished by deliberately genocidal projects, by the unrestrained homicidal actions of boots-on-the-ground settlers, or by assimilatory campaigns of infinite imagination. In the US context, Wolfe foregrounds the postemancipation racial regime dictated by the “one-drop rule” that relegated Black people to slavery, with the polar opposite fate for Indians, who were subjected to the harsh calculations of blood quantum. One of his masterful contributions is not just his incisive and broadly persuasive theorization of settler colonialism but also the elegant simplicity of the language others can deploy in their own work. His insights have become ubiquitous as countless scholars embrace the phrase “the logic of elimination” and point to the fact of invasion as “a structure not an event” that invokes his work without even needing to attach his name to this formulation.

This article deeply influenced his two chapters on the United States that I take up from his magisterial Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, a deeply provocative analysis of race over more than four hundred years. But his book goes much farther, offering a broad and sustained analysis of racialization that attends to settler colonialism. His book is ambitious and bold, stunning in its command of the vast literature it embraces, synthesizes, historicizes, and theorizes. He persuasively argues, “Races are traces of history,” with racial identities emerging out of their enactment, a diversity of unequal outcomes securing White supremacy in dialogue with particular racial regimes that in turn secured colonialism’s domination over time. Racialization for Wolfe is a spatial practice. It comes into being when colonizers must share space with those they seek to dominate, making other people’s homes their own. In the United States, Wolfe triangulates race, differentiating between emancipation for African Americans that produced Jim Crow and “territorial engulfment” of American Indians, in which their territorial exclusion maintained Indian sovereignty as separate from settler sovereignty. He asserts this as a regime that is actively produced through political domination although contested and inherently unstable, thus making it a process rather than an ontology, with an objective of securing White supremacy.

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Introducing an American Quarterly forum on Patrick Wolfe’s legacy and method: Cynthia G. Franklin, Njoroge Njoroge, Suzanna Reiss, ‘Tracing the Settler’s Tools: A Forum on Patrick Wolfe’s Life and Legacy’, American Quarterly, 69, 2, 2017, pp. 235-247

02Jul17

Excerpt: In this forum, scholars from different disciplinary locations take up Patrick Wolfe’s 2016 book, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, and consider its importance for the field of American studies. Contributors discuss challenges that Traces of History poses and the possibilities it opens that are of value to American studies and its approaches to racial formation and settler colonialism. They approach Wolfe’s book as experts in one or more of the racial discourses and histories it takes up, and from different disciplinary homes.

Having this forum in American Quarterly challenges interdisciplinary scholars across fields to explore how and why the study of geographies of settler colonialism has and has not found a home in American studies. Taken together, and in dialogue with the comparative approach Wolfe himself takes, the essays in this forum invite readers to consider the importance of a comparative approach to racialization and settler colonialism that extends beyond US borders. This can enable new and necessary understandings of the articulations among racisms as they take place in disparate sites linked through circuits of imperialism.

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Indigenous resistance is place-based (and has edges): Noura Alkhalili, Between Sumud and Submission: Palestinian Popular Practices on the Land in the Edge Areas of Jerusalem, PhD Dissertation, Lund University, 2017

02Jul17

Abstract: This thesis delves into two ‘edge areas’ located in and around East Jerusalem. It attempts to unfold and analyze the dynamics in these edge areas, while investigating the agency of the people present there through their own perceptions and practices towards the land, the urbanization processes, the power circulation and the structural impositions. Squeezed by a settler-colonial domination that continuously encroaches further on their lives, the Palestinians, in return, seek to carve out a space for their own enduring presence on the land. That pursuit combines elements of sumud (steadfastness) and adaptation, tenacity and accommodation, actions that sometimes subvert the occupation and some other times submit to its logic. The thesis traces the contradiction between a proliferating ethos of individual enrichment and the remaining collective culture of political struggle. It also scrutinizes the ways that Palestinians move between those poles as always conditioned by the pressure from the overarching structure of settler-colonial domination. Furthermore, the thesis examines how certain structural patterns are unconsciously reproduced by the agents of these specific areas, even when their intention and desire could be to resist them. The thesis argues that East Jerusalem should be approached from the theory of settler-colonial hegemony. Thus, these areas are the by-products of the settler-colonial domination present in East Jerusalem, intentionally assembled by the Israeli authorities as “containers” that collect undesired Palestinian Jerusalemites, while leaving them trapped in a state of permanent temporariness. This situation has developed gradually through the construction of the separation wall, so as to further enhance the systematic displacement of the Palestinian Jerusalemites and achieve the Judaization of Jerusalem. The thesis claims that acts of resistance and accommodation of certain colonial practices have the inclination to collide and interact with each other, and hence obfuscate the demarcation between them. This dynamic has been unpacked through coining the concept ‘enclosures from below’. The thesis aims to contribute to scholarship on Palestine and provide a detailed analysis that could feed into a wider analysis of the dynamics of settler-colonialism, as well as inform Palestinian strategies in the ongoing struggle for liberation.

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Education is important (if you think about it, it literally means ‘to lead out’, something settlers would always like to do to indigenes): Hilary N. Green, ‘Educating Imperial Citizens: New Perspectives of Race, Nation, Empire, and American Public Schools’, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 16, 3, 2017, pp. 368-371

28Jun17

Access the article here.

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It’s about relations (i.e., power relations): G. Mitchell Bringeland, ‘Winter Studies and Summer Rambles and Power Relations: Integrating Experiential Knowledge into Canadian Discourses of Ecology’, Making Nineteenth-Century Literary Environments, 435, 2017

28Jun17

Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between settler and First Nations groups in the nineteenth century and today. Anna Brownell Jameson’s account of settler/indigenous relations is similar to contemporary power imbalances between First Nations and governmental/corporate organizations. First Nations groups are frequently ignored in discussions of eco-development, and their concerns and fears over land use are often brushed aside by developers. In the case of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, Tsleil Waututh concerns regarding their quality of life and environmental degradation to their territories have not been addressed by Kinder Morgan. By integrating postcolonial concerns into discussions of the environment, Canada can ensure that First Nations voices are heard and that their concerns are assuaged, potentially preventing ecological destruction and protecting food security and cultural practices. Additionally, by rejecting the Cartesian binary view of nature and society as inherently in opposition and incompatible, we can ensure that hierarchical colonial mindsets, which marginalize and derogate certain groups of people by placing them “outside society,” are also rejected.

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