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Soldier settlements: Christian K. Melby, ‘”Of Paramount Importance to Our Race”: H. O. Arnold-Forster and South African Soldier-Settlement’, History, 102, 352, 2017, pp. 597–616

09Nov17

Abstract: In the aftermath of the opening months of the South African War, British imperialists considered the settling of retired soldiers in South Africa as an efficient way of creating a loyal colony. This article explores the 1900 South African Lands Settlement Commission, and specifically the role of its chairman, the Liberal Unionist politician Hugh Oakeley Arnold-Forster. It shows how the findings and recommendations of Arnold-Forster’s commission were presented as a way of keeping the British empire together through government involvement rather than private initiative. While often ignored because of its failure, the commission and the ideas behind it illustrates the link between imperialism, military planning and nationalism in British politics. Proponents of soldier-settlement in South Africa argued that only by creating a majority population of British veterans, combining the roles of farmers and military reservists, could the colony be secure. The article examines the commission and the settler plan in conjunction with Arnold-Forster’s background and imperial ideology, arguing that the commission’s failure does not mean that such ideas were unimportant. The opposition to the settler scheme could utilise the language of anti-imperialism alongside criticism of Arnold-Forster’s views on Ireland, showing how the soldier-settlement idea could be larger than the sum of its conclusions. Rather than seeing the soldier-settlement scheme in isolation, the article argues that the case of Arnold-Forster and the Lands Settlement Commission provides a valuable insight into wider British political debates at the turn of the century.


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On settler colonial studies and colonial unknowing: Alex Trimble Young, ‘A Response to “On Colonial Unknowing”‘, Theory & Event, 20, Number, 2017, pp. 1035-1041

07Nov17

Abstract: This response to the editors of “On Colonial Unknowing” both acknowledges the vital intervention of their special issue and contests their characterization of settler colonial studies as an “academic field formation” marked by dogmatic and hermetic methodological tendencies. Settler colonial studies, we argue, is a still emergent subfield marked by a dynamic interchange with related fields and disciplinary formations. Settler colonial studies and its critique of a specific and contingent structure of violence has continuing utility, we suggest, not as a hegemonic discourse (a condition the field never aspired to), but rather as a supplement to adjacent field formations engaged in the critique of racialization and empire. 


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Indigenous homelessness is settler colonialism: Jesse A. Thistle, Definition of Indigenous Homelessness in Canada, Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press, 2017

07Nov17

Definition: Indigenous homelessness is a human condition that describes First Nations, Métis and Inuit individuals, families or communities lacking stable, permanent, appropriate housing, or the immediate prospect, means or ability to acquire such housing. Unlike the common colonialist definition of homelessness, Indigenous homelessness is not defined as lacking a structure of habitation; rather, it is more fully described and understood through a composite lens of Indigenous worldviews. These include: individuals, families and communities isolated from their relationships to land, water, place, family, kin, each other, animals, cultures, languages and identities. Importantly, Indigenous people experiencing these kinds of homelessness cannot culturally, spiritually, emotionally or physically reconnect with their Indigeneity or lost relationships (Aboriginal Standing Committee on Housing and Homelessness, 2012).


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On Prairie Rising: Robert Nichols, ‘Indigenous Struggles Against Participatory Power: Dhillon’s Prairie Rising’, Theory & Event, 20, 4, 2017, pp. 1063-1069

07Nov17

Excerpt: The last ten to fifteen years has seen the rapid expansion and professional consolidation of ‘Settler Colonial Studies’ as a distinct body of research. This field takes as its point of departure the observation that in many parts of the world, the dominant form of imperialism did not mimic the vast overseas extraction colonialism that was characteristic of, say, the British rule over India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead, in significant swaths of the earth, imperialism entailed the large-scale transplantation of European peoples whose primary aim was to eradicate, or otherwise displace, the original Indigenous inhabitants so as to build neo-European societies in perpetuity.

As with any relatively new body of work, Settler Colonial Studies has developed with certain lacuna and limitations, two of which are most pertinent here. First, the field partially emerged through the work of such thinkers as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, whose primary initial aim was to distinguish settler colonialism from other forms of imperial domination and rule. As such, early work was characterized by a set of conceptual generalizations that were useful in differentiating the field but, for that reason, remained at a very high level of generality. Put differently, these thinkers were mostly concerned with demonstrating that settler colonialism could be analytically distinguished, and less concerned with how settler colonialism actually functioned in its internal complexity and variety. The second major area of concern and caution pertains to the relationship between Settler Colonial and Indigenous Studies. Whereas the primary task of the former has been to study settler colonialism as a distinct social and political formation from the standpoint of those who designed and implemented it (i.e., European settlers and their descendants), a much longer body of scholarship has, in an important sense, already been doing this from the perspective of those who were most targeted by settler power (i.e., Indigenous peoples and their descendants).

Jaskiran Dhillon’s book, Prairie Rising, makes a sharp and important contribution at precisely these two junctures. It is a study of the governmentality of a particular settler colonial formation (a study of how power works, rather than what it ‘essentially’ is), which takes Indigenous participation and resistance as central to that operation of power. The book takes up the lived experience of settler colonial governmentality in contemporary Saskatchewan, Canada, especially as it is mediated through a set of semi-governmental agencies (paramount among them, the Indian Alliance) in the context of increased pressure on official state policy to ‘recognize’ and ‘accommodate’ Indigenous peoples in the actual working of governance over them. This book is extremely rich and complex. It makes a number of contributions to fields such as anthropology, sociology, political science, youth studies, and the like. It is moreover a model of how to bridge academic scholarship and responsible community advocacy.


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Settler colonialism in unexpected places: Rhone Fraser, ‘Confronting Prospero: Elizabeth Nunez’s Exposure and Critique of Hegemony and Its Industries in Beyond the Limbo Silence and Boundaries’, Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, 10, 8, 2017, pp. 89-105

05Nov17

Abstract: […] sociologist Robert L. Allen writes about how liberalism is defended by a kind of Black tokenism run by hegemony that puts Black individuals in high administrative places only to still continue an economic system based on these exclusions. Elizabeth Nunez crafts stories with protagonists that confront liberalism the way Prospero tried to confront and murder Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This paper will discuss how Nunez in her fiction specifically exposes liberalism in the academic and book publishing in her second and eighth novels (Beyond the Limbo Silence and Boundaries) in ways that challenge hegemony and its liberalism. Nunez shows through her protagonist Sara in Beyond the Limbo Silence, how her scholarship from her fictional College of the Sacred Heart depended on her distancing herself from the local Black population and see herself in isolation from the emerging civil rights movement. Through her protagonist Anna in Boundaries, Nunez shows how her function in the book publishing industry required her promoting books for their “commercial value” and not “their aesthetic and intellectual merits.” Through her protagonist Emile in “Even In Paradise,” Nunez shows how the newspaper industry in Jamaica is run by editors who dont want writers, like Emile’s love interest Corinne, writing pieces deeply “involved in politics.” Although Nunez’s novels make incredibly profound statements on the dysfunction of Black tokenism in these academic, book publishing and newspaper industries, her protagonists except Sara, ultimately commit to joining these tokenist systems and make profound statements on the hegemony’s still influential propaganda that discourages independent ownership by Black communities of schools and presses.


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Imperatives (from imperium): Darren Reid, ‘Imperial or Settler Imperative? Indigenous Reserves as a Case Study for a Transcolonial Analysis of British Imperial Indigenous Policy’, The Arbutus Review, 8, 1, 2017, pp. 55-71

05Nov17

Abstract: My paper presents a comparative analysis of the development of reserve systems in British North America and Western Australia across the 19th century. The existing historiography seeks to comprehend the relationship between the British metropole and the colonial periphery, and two opposing frameworks of colonial governance have been developed. One holds that the British Empire operated as an interdependent system, in which colonial Indigenous policies were determined by overarching imperial imperatives based upon imperial capitalism and liberal humanitarianism. The other holds that the explosive growth of settler communities undermined these imperial imperatives and facilitated governance guided by the settlers’ need for land, labour, and security. This paper seeks to end the tension between these two frameworks by using Indigenous reserve systems as a case study for understanding colonial governance. Through an analysis of correspondence between local and imperial administrators, this paper argues that the development of Indigenous reserve systems reveals an entrenched conflict between imperial and local administrators lasting throughout the nineteenth century, a conflict in which the local governments of British North America and Western Australia subordinated imperial imperatives of imperial capitalism and liberal humanitarianism to local concerns of security and sovereignty.


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Retrieving native history is resistance: Kathleen Corpuz, ‘Living in Kalihi: Remembering Stories of Struggle and Resistance’, Mānoa Horizons, 2, 2017, pp. 1–6

05Nov17

Abstract: This paper exposes the various ways American settlers remove traces of Kanaka Maoli history while exemplifying colonial narratives of immigrants who struggle to survive in the present colonial space of Kalihi. I will describe the historical and political transformation of Kalihi through an analysis of devices that settlers use in the early twentieth century, such as maps and newspaper advertisements, to dispossess land from Kanaka Maoli. The evidence I have chosen illustrates how the transformation of land has shaped the experiences of residents of Kalihi. While settlers attempt to erase native history in the community, Kanaka Maoli continue to share their stories through their biographies and oral histories to oppose the dominant narrative of blankness forwarded by settler colonialism. Settler colonialism comes in different forms, and this paper reveals the importance of critiquing settler ideologies in order to return ancestral lands to Kanaka Maoli. Since many people are unaware of their participation and existence in colonialism, retrieving native histories will promote a better understanding of the current predicaments indigenous peoples face and will help create alliances among residents to make decisions that will respect the right of Kanaka Maoli to self-determination.


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A settler polity celebrating itself celebrates settler colonialism: Stacie A. Swain, Armed with an Eagle Feather Against the Parliamentary Mace: A Discussion of Discourse on Indigenous Sovereignty and Spirituality in a Settler Colonial Canada, 1990-2017, MA dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2017

05Nov17

Abstract: Canada 150, or the sesquicentennial anniversary of Confederation, celebrates a nation-state that can be described as “settler colonial” in relation to Indigenous peoples. This thesis brings a Critical Religion and Critical Discourse Analysis methodology into conversation with Settler Colonial and Indigenous Studies to ask: how is Canadian settler colonial sovereignty enacted, and how do Indigenous peoples perform challenges to that sovereignty? The parliamentary mace and the eagle feather are conceptualized as emblematic and condensed metaphors, or metonyms, that assert and represent Canadian and Indigenous sovereignties. As a settler colonial sovereignty, established and naturalized partially through discourses on religion, Canadian sovereignty requires the displacement of Indigenous sovereignty. In events from 1990 to 2017, Indigenous people wielding eagle feathers disrupt Canadian governance and challenge the legitimacy of Canadian sovereignty. Indigenous sovereignty is (re)asserted as identity-based, oppositional, and spiritualized. Discourses on Indigenous sovereignty and spirituality provide categories and concepts through which Indigenous resistance occurs within Canada.


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Contradictions catch up: Astrid B. Stensrud, ‘Settlers and Squatters: The Production of Social Inequalities in the Peruvian Desert’, in M. Ystanes, I. Strønen (eds), The Social Life of Economic Inequalities in Contemporary Latin America: Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

01Nov17

Abstract: This chapter discusses the production of social inequalities in the Majes Irrigation Project (MIP) in southern Peru in terms of class, race and gender. More than 30 years after the construction of MIP, and after radical neoliberal structural adjustments in the 1990s, many of the first settlers have lost their farms or are struggling with debt. Nevertheless, Majes is known as a ‘place of opportunities’, and thousands of people have migrated from the poor rural highlands in search of work or informal business, settling in the desert surrounding the irrigated areas. The population in Majes comes from different places, with various cultural, educational and economic backgrounds. The chapter examines how Majes has been generated through relations of capital and labour and how families experience debt and uncertainty, and yet continue struggling to get ahead in a precarious informal economy. The chapter argues that inequality is embedded in the historical intersectionality of class formations, gender and conceptions of race and that these differences have not diminished with various attempts of social reform. On the contrary, social inequality has increased during the past three decades of neoliberalism, with more insecure conditions for farming and work.


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The hostility of (other) settlers: Richard G. Baker, Nadia Verrelli, ‘”Smudging, drumming and the like do not a nation make”: Temporal Liminality and Delegitimization of Indigenous Protest in Canada’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 51, 1, 2017

01Nov17

Abstract: This article explores the threat that Indigenous protest poses to Canada. However, it examines this potential for threat at an ontological level rather than a material level. In adopting a liminality framework, the article traces the capacity for Indigenous protest to menace and undermine Canada’s national identity. More specifically, it analyzes the ways in which editorial and commentary sections of Canada’s national newspapers represented protest and political activity associated with the Idle No More movement. Its findings demonstrate how these prominent social actors in Canada respond to the destabilizing presence of the Indigenous liminar by working to resolve its ambiguity in ways that protect and entrench dominant narratives of Canadian national identity. Acknowledging the role that liminality plays in structuring news media depictions of Indigenous peoples provides insight into how social actors in Canada interpret and respond to Indigenous protest. It demonstrates how such actors are able to exploit popular conceptions of indigeneity to reinforce the ongoing social dynamics working to produce and reproduce dominant narratives of Canadian identity. Moreover, a liminality framework is also valuable in demonstrating the role the news media play in delegitimizing Indigenous political advocacy and perpetuating fears relating to social disorder and violence in Canada.


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