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Settlers move back as they move forward: Susan Arthure, ‘Australia’s first clachan: Identifying a traditional Irish settlement system in Nineteenth century South Australia’, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, 45, 2017, pp. 19-30

20Dec17

Abstract: In the mid-nineteenth century, the Great Famine altered the Irish landscape forever, triggering mass migration and the creation of the Irish diaspora. Many Irish migrated to Australia, some to the new colony of South Australia. Here, historically, the Irish have tended to be invisible in the landscape, the predominant view being that, with the exception of religion, they were mainly indistinguishable from their British counterparts. Recent research, however, focusing on an Irish settlement near Kapunda known as Baker’s Flat, indicates that this particular community was distinctively Irish and operated as a clachan, a traditional Irish settlement system characterised by clusters of houses and co-operative farming methods. This article examines the history and archaeology of this Irish community, the first clachan settlement to be recognised so far in Australia.


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Settler colonialism in unexpected places: Sami Mahmoud Tayeb, Manufacturing the McCity: a case study of the Rawabi urban development project in Palestine, MA Dissertation, American University of Beirut, 2017

17Dec17

Abstract: This thesis is a case study of the Rawabi urban development project that is currently in progress in the West Bank. Rawabi is the first master-planned Palestinian city that first broke ground in early 2010 and is the largest private sector project ever carried out in Palestine. Once the city is complete, it is expected to house more than 40,000 residents and cost more than $1 billion. Therefore, this thesis will investigate what recent political, economic, and social changes in Palestine have impacted urban development in the West Bank in ways that have made the emergence of Rawabi possible. Moreover, it seeks to answer what are the social relations that have produced the space that Rawabi occupies and what kind of urban form has materialized as a result. Finally, it hopes to explain what are the main drivers of the new type of urban space that Rawabi embodies, how have they come together to make Rawabi a reality, and what goals do they hope to achieve through the realization of Rawabi. To address these questions, a framework for analysis on urban development in the West Bank that merges spatial theory with political economy will be used to explain how the coalescence of urban spatial production, neoliberalism, Israeli settler-colonialism, and the reconstitution of political-economic networks at local, regional, and transnational levels have made the realization of Rawabi possible. The thesis argues what has emerged out of these processes is a new urban form, which it calls the McCity. Accordingly, this argument will be unpacked in the following chapters. Chapter two consists of two parts where the theoretical framework presents the concepts of conceived space, abstract space, and neoliberalism, while the literature review explores recent political, economic, and social transformations that have occurred in the West Bank – all within the context of Israeli settler-colonialism. Chapters three and four are a socio-spatial analysis of Rawabi that focuses on the project’s urban form […].


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Erasing qualifications is erasure: Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, ‘The biopolitics of declassing Palestinian professional women in a settler-colonial context’, Current Sociology, 2017

17Dec17

Abstract: This article argues that the biopolitics of declassing Palestinian professional women in Israel, which constitutes part of the logic of eliminating the native, is mediated by colonial violence that secures labor market class sovereignty for settlers. In this context, the term declassing refers to rendering this class invisible by disregarding the women’s presence and/or value in the labor market. The study unpacks the logic of elimination through the racialized, everyday lived experience of middle-class professional women in Bedouin society who succeeded in entering the Jewish workplace. These women face sophisticated erasure tactics, paralleling various manifestations of the direct politics of fear that discipline the body, will and mind, as well as indirect opposition reflected in the settler-colonial reinforcement of patriarchal power against women. This article reveals concealed violent forms of power practiced by the colonialists to declass Palestinian women and preserve colonialist class superiority in the labor market.


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Settlers must be armed (reviewing Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Loaded): Patrick Blanchfield, ‘The Brutal Origins of Gun Rights: A new history argues that the Second Amendment was intended to perpetuate white settlers’ violence toward Native Americans, New Republic, 11/12/17

13Dec17

Excerpt: What the Second Amendment guarantees is […] something else: “the violent appropriation of Native land by white settlers … as an individual right.”


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Settler colonialism is an ancient mode of domination: Pekka Pitkänen, ‘Ancient Israelite Population Economy: Ger, Toshav, Nakhri and Karat as Settler Colonial Categories’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 2017

13Dec17

Abstract: This article looks in detail at the often-studied categories for aliens and foreigners, together with thekarat (‘cutting off from his people’) command in the Pentateuchal legal materials from the perspective of ancient Israel as a settler society. In conversation with previous approaches to these categories, this study explores how relating them to concepts of population economy in settler colonial societies can help us better understand the text. Issues such as the tripartite division into settler community, indigenous population and exogenous others are considered, while comparisons with other corresponding societies are also made. This article then also looks at how these categories could fit in with various potential settings in ancient Israel, including pre-exilic and postexilic times.


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Food insecurity as settler colonialism: Megan Mucioki, Jennifer Sowerwine, Daniel Sarna-Wojcicki, ‘Thinking inside and outside the box: local and national considerations of the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR)’, Journal of Rural Studies, 57, 2018, pp. 88–98

13Dec17

Abstract: The Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR) provides a monthly box of U.S. Department of Agriculture foods to low-income, rural Native Americans and is a vital component of food security for recipient households. While the origin of government food annuities dates back hundreds of years to treaties between tribes, pueblos, and nations and the United States Government, FDPIR in its current form and function is 40 years old. The FDPIR food package has faced increasing scrutiny in recent years over the quality, nutritional value, and cultural appropriateness of foods included. Using data collected from three Tribes in the Klamath River Basin as well as national institutions that govern FDPIR, we investigate opportunities and challenges of FDPIR to achieve food security for its clientele, and the extent to which integration of traditional foods can enhance Native American food security, food sovereignty and wellbeing. We conclude with a set of policy recommendations on how to improve Native American food security and food sovereignty outcomes for FDPIR clients.


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Decolonisation as strategy: Jonathan Crossen, ‘Another Wave of Anti-Colonialism: The Origins of Indigenous Internationalism’, Canadian Journal of History, 52, 3, 2017,

13Dec17

Abstract: The global Indigenous rights movement, born in the mid-1970s, found its primary inspiration in the Third-Worldism espoused by anti-colonial leaders over the previous decades. The leadership of both the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (wcip) and the International Indian Treaty Council (iitc), the two flagship organizations of the movement, drew on Pan-Africanism and decolonization in order to promote the rights of Indigenous peoples to self-determination. The two organizations, however, applied the logic of decolonization in different ways. The iitc consciously adopted the discourse of decolonization in order to seek leverage from the Third World voting bloc and gain recognition for new and independent nations at the United Nations. The wcip wished to adapt the decolonization movement, not only by extending it geographically, but also by shifting it conceptually, in order to challenge the use of the nation state as the basic structure of global politics.


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If you resist, you must be a monster: Speculative Imperialisms: Monstrosity and Masquerade in Postracial Times Susana Loza, Lexington Books, 2017

13Dec17

Description: Speculative Imperialisms: Monstrosity and Masquerade in Postracial Times explores the (settler) colonial ideologies underpinning the monstrous imaginings of contemporary popular culture in the Britain and the US. Through a close examination of District 9, Avatar, Doctor Who, Planet of the Apes, and steampunk culture, Susana Loza illuminates the durability of (settler) colonialism and how it operates through two linked yet distinct forms of racial mimicry: monsterization and minstrelsy. Speculative Imperialisms contemplates the fundamental, albeit changing, role that such racial simulations play in a putatively postracial and post-colonial era. It brings together the work on gender masquerade, racial minstrelsy, and postcolonial mimicry and puts it in dialogue with film, media, and cultural studies. This project draws upon the theoretical insights of Stuart Hall, Homi K. Bhabha, Edward Said, Philip Deloria, Michael Rogin, Eric Lott, Charles Mills, Falguni Sheth, Lorenzo Veracini, Adilifu Nama, Isiah Lavender III, Gwendolyn Foster, Marianna Torgovnick, Ann Laura Stoler, Anne McClintock, Eric Greene, Richard Dyer, and Ed Guerrero.


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Indigenous people survive even in video games: Deborah L. Madsen, ‘The Mechanics of Survivance in Indigenously-Determined Video-Games: Invaders and Never Alone’, Transmotion, 3, 2, 2017

13Dec17

Excerpt: Survivance as a legal concept names the right to inheritance and more specifically the condition of being qualified to inherit a legacy. In his essay “Aesthetics of Survivance” (2008), Vizenor describes survivance as “the heritable right of succession or reversion of an estate” (1). This aspect of survivance is overlooked by those scholars of Vizenor’s work who focus rather on the conjunction of the terms “survival” and “resistance,” terms that are important most fundamentally as they intersect with the capacity to transmit and to accept the inheritance of the past that is itself the intersection of survival and resistance. That is to say, acts of resistance and survival form the axiology (or ethical action) of survivance; the preservation of tribal languages, for example, or the transmission of traditional stories, are acts that ensure the continual availability of the tribal values of knowing and being in the world that are encoded in those words and stories. These Indigenous lifeways constitute the inheritance that motivates survivance. Thus, survivance is not a static object or method but a dynamic, active condition of historical and cultural survival and also of political resistance, practiced in the continual readiness of Indigenous communities to accept and continue the inheritance passed on by elders and ancestors. In this sense, claims made by recent Indigenous video-game developers to speak to youth through digital media by creating games that transmit tribal legacies of language, stories, ontologies, and ways of knowing and being in the world, speak to the practice of survivance. Indeed, the particular capacity of video games to engage active participation in the making of stories offers a powerful means to encourage and sustain survivance. In what game designer Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe/Métis) refers to as “Indigenously-determined” video-games, then, survivance is both a substantive dimension of the experience of playing a game and also the underlying structural principle that governs the game mechanics that are determined by Indigenous epistemologies.


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Refusing settler memory: Kevin Bruyneel, ‘Creolizing Collective Memory: Refusing the Settler Memory of the Reconstruction Era’, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy – Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française, XXV, 2, 2017, pp. 36-44.

13Dec17

Excerpt: It is with attention to the unthought, in those times and in ours, that I seek to creolize collective memory through deconstructing the work of what I call settler memory. I do so with attention to a particular era of U.S. history, that of the Reconstruction period, as I consider the collective memory of it to be a good example of creolization that could also do with further creolizing by refusing the influence of settler memory.


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