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The reservation and the reserve lie beyond the boundary of the settler normal: Jessica Hansen, ‘Boundaries on the “Wild” : Late Nineteenth-Century Governmental Language Concerning Yellowstone National Park and the American Indian’, Kalamazoo College, 2017

30Apr17

Abstract: This project examines how these two differing land preserves with opposite goals were promoted and defended in similar ways and run in similar manners. It examines the reservations and the park through the governmental language used to discuss each at the times of their creations. Though founded on vastly different purposes—a site of preservation versus a site of conversion—the two can be seen as abstractly similar in ways. Making use of worthless land, undesirable to white settlers, the boundaries of each served to supposedly protect that which inhabited the land. Both were sites of culture, with reservations promoting acculturation, while Yellowstone eventually being seen as a cultural gemstone to rival the man-made sites of Europe. The development of the American Indian reservation system and Yellowstone National Park parallel and yet contradict one another. The development of the American Indian reservation system and Yellowstone National Park parallel and yet contradict one another. While Yellowstone was meant to preserve the wild and reservations were meant to “tame the wild,” the early establishment and administration of each mimicked the other. Though very different, the reservation system and Yellowstone can be seen as related in their early days of conception. This is a comparative study to understand further how the West was seen through the eyes of federal officials and how it was conquered and handled on a frontier driven by greed and glory. The study begins by examining the thoughts and events that led to government officials deciding to take an active role in the distribution of land in the West and what land they thought could be set aside. It then moves on to the inherent value of the land. What qualities must the land have in order to justify the creation of a public park when western land was in high demand? What land could be used for the purposes of assimilating American Indians and what land did settlers have inherent rights to? This section examines the undesirability of the land in the West. Once established what could be set aside, what did the boundaries around the lands hope to accomplish? The land reserves hoped to protect what resided inside from those who might take advantage of them and cause depredations. The difference between the park boundaries and those of the reservation was that latter was not only meant to keep unwanted people from entering but they were also meant to keep the inhabitants within. The study then moves to at the malleability of both. While both Yellowstone and the reservation system went on to become permanent institutions in the United States, neither were necessarily meant to. The section examines the flexibility and malleability that characterized each, giving greater insight into governmental thought on both preservation and the future of American Indians. The last section focuses on how the government handled each after their establishment. It examines the priority of each in the eyes of Washington and how it led in one case to a change in procedure and policy and what that confirmed about the government’s priorities. Through the comparative examination and analysis of both Yellowstone National Park and the American Indian reservation system, this study hopes to arrive at a better understanding of Indian and land protection policies of the time. 


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Connecting ‘the ideological with the material forces of settler colonialism’ (and a triangular system of relations): Sarah Rotz, ‘”They took our beads, it was a fair trade, get over it”: Settler colonial logics, racial hierarchies and material dominance in Canadian agriculture’, Geoforum, 82, 2017, pp. 158–169

30Apr17

Abstract: Canada is in a liminal space, with renewed struggles for and commitments to indigenous land and food sovereignty on one hand, and growing capital interest in land governance and agriculture on the other. While neoliberal capital increasingly accumulates land-based control, settler-farming communities still manage much of Canada’s arable land. This research draws on studies of settler colonialism, racial hierarchy and othering to connect the ideological with the material forces of settler colonialism and show how material dominance is maintained through colonial logics and racially ordered narratives. Through in-depth interviews, I investigate how white settler farmers perceive and construct two distinctly ‘othered’ groups: Indigenous peoples and migrant farmers and farm workers. Further, I show the disparate role of land and labour in constructing each group, and specifically, the cultural and material benefits of these constructions for land-based settler populations. At the same time, settler colonial structures and logics remain reciprocally coupled to political conditions. For instance, contemporary neoliberalism in Canadian agriculture modifies settler colonial structures to be sure. I argue, however, that political economic analyses of land and food production in Canada (such as corporate concentration, land grabbing and farm consolidation) ought to better integrate the systemic forces of settler colonialism that have conditioned land access in the first place. Of course, determining who is able to access land—and thus, who is able to grow food—continues to be a territorial struggle. Thus, in order to shift these conditions we ought to examine how those with access and control have acquired and maintained it.


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The Nortwest Ordinance had an implicit twin (the Southwest Ordinance?): they both stole indigenous land: Robert Alexander, The Northwest Ordinance Constitutional Politics and the Theft of Native Land, McFarland, 2017

28Apr17

Description: Passed by Congress in July 1787, the Northwest Ordinance laid out the basic form of government for all U.S. territory north of the Ohio River. That summer, the Constitutional Convention drafted the defining document of the American Republic as a whole. A bargain struck between Congress and the Convention outlawed slavery north of the Ohio, but gave Southern states a Congressional and Electoral College representation based on population figures that included slaves—each valued at three-fifths of a free white citizen.

Because of this agreement, the western lands acquired from Great Britain after the Revolutionary War were divided into slave and free states—a compromise which, when it failed, precipitated the Civil War 74 years later. For years most historians denied that this political deal took place. Drawing on contemporary letters and documents, this detailed analysis re-examines the Ordinance and how Congress silently permitted the South’s “peculiar institution” to move westward.


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Indigenous protest is violent; is settler repression peaceful? Ueslei Marcelino, Anthony Boadle, ‘Indigenous protest over land rights turns violent on front steps of Brazil Congress’, The Age, 26/04/17

26Apr17

Excerpt: Indigenous people and police have clashed in Brazil’s capital city, as officers fired rubber bullets and tear gas while tribe members shot arrows in return during a protest against planned government changes to reservation legislation.

The Tuesday demonstration was peaceful until police blocked some protesters, their bodies painted and carrying colourful headdresses, from climbing a ramp that leads into the congressional building.


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Anticapitalism is not enough (we really need to know how settler colonialism works): Oliver W. Baker, ‘Democracy, Class, and White Settler Colonialism’, Public, 28, 55, 2017, pp. 144-153

26Apr17

Abstract: This essay offers a critique of a set of responses to neoliberalism that emphasize liberal democracy and class solidarityy (worker identity) as the paramount sites today for productive collective struggle and creation of democratic life. Drawing on the insights of Indigenous critical theory and Afro-pessimist theory, I argue that theories of liberal democracy and worker-centered struggle fail to consider how the colonial antagonisms of Indigeneity and Blackness continue not only to underpin neoliberal forms of exploitation and dispossession but to overdetermine how we conceptualize and organize our struggles for genuine forms of democratic life. To create genuine forms of democratic life we must conceptualize and build struggles not around points of convergence among differentially positioned groups in capitalism, but around the antagonisms that make democratic social belonging impossible in the first place. This requires that we confront the colonial antagonisms that remain with us today in the structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism.


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Anticapitalism is not enough (we need to know how settler colonialism works): Kevin Bruyneel, ‘The White Settler Romance with Anticapitalism: On Day’s Alien Capital’, Theory & Event, 20, 2, 2017, pp. 564-570

26Apr17

Excerpt: Iyko Day is here to warn us about the seductions of romantic anti-capitalism. This is a romance with the notion of concrete labor over and against the abstractions of exchange, the role of the producer over the financier, and that of ennobled, naturalized Indigeneity over the hyper-rational and manipulative alien—once Jewish, now Asian. The romantic anticapitalist is seduced by a fantasy of the authentic relationship of productive human capacity, agency, and concrete value over and against the seeming inauthenticity and oppressive manipulability of representation itself. For romantic anticapitalists, concrete labor stands for value that is produced through an unmediated ‘dirt-under-the-fingernails’ relationship to the material. This unmediated relationship is impeded by abstract forces, embodied in racialized others whose labor is central to the workings of white settler colonial capitalism but whose role in this system is constructed as an abstract threat to the status and freedom of the white settler. In this sense, romantic anticapitalism is a sublimated romance with racial-colonial capitalism.

Day’s Alien Capital attends to an under-examined historical, political and human register, that of Asian identity, representation, and experience in the North American settler colonial states. One can productively read Day’s work alongside Jodi Byrd’s The Transit of Empire, as Day’s concern with the alien settler openly draws from and speaks to Byrd’s conceptualization of the role of the ‘arrivante’ in settler colonial contexts. However, Day’s attention to the alien in relation to settler colonial capital focuses specifically on the Asian migrant/laborer, and in so doing offers a way to deconstruct the racialized, gendered, sexualized and colonial nature of the representation of value, and of indeed representation itself. In Day’s telling, it is the Asian migrant who comes to stand for the evils of abstraction with regard to valuation, exchange, and thus capitalism itself. 

While richly historical, the book’s subject of study is a diverse range of literary, visual, and cinematic representations—some of which are intentional works of art and others are created for their function in the economy. Examples of the latter frame the beginning and end of the book. An introduction entitled “The New Jews” starts by discussing the 2012 Canadian hundred-dollar bill, which at first depicted a female Asian scientist but was later supplanted by the ostensibly “‘neutral ethnicity'” of a “‘Caucasian-looking woman.” (1) The book’s epilogue pivots around an analysis of an early 20th century salmon-gutting machine from British Columbia called the “Iron Chink.” What connects both is that as “money or machine, the Asian is aligned with the destructive value dimension of capitalism.” (193) The presumption undergirding the analyses of these two subjects and those analyzed in the intervening chapters is nicely captured in Petrus Liu’s insight, quoted by Day, that “‘…the value of the commodity of human labor is determined by moral and discursive operations outside of the capitalist reproduction scheme.'” (47, emphasis original) Day’s approach compels the reader to take discursive practices seriously, rather than dismissively viewing them as epiphenomenal to the ostensibly unmediated, real practices of capitalist reproduction. Day lays bare and pursues the discursive as well as economic practices by which relations between people become transformed, diminished, and fetishized into a relationship between things. In that sense, there is no clear outside here, as moral and discursive operations motivate and define roles in capitalist production. This is a shaping that prefigures the answer to such questions as, who is presumed to serve in what role in the economy, what constitutes the concept of labor and laboring, to what end and what level of deprivation, to whose benefit and under what threat? As Day makes clear throughout the book, the value of a commodity of human labor does not exist apart from racialized, colonialist, gendered, sexualized, classed, and ableist meanings.


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Settler colonialism is the glue that unites the ‘Zionist continuum’: Amal Jamal, ‘Neo-Zionism and Palestine: The Unveiling of Settler-Colonial Practices in Mainstream Zionism’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 16, 1, 2017, pp. 47-78

26Apr17

Abstract: This article examines the rise and key characteristics of Neo-Zionist political thought in Israel and its relationship with mainstream Zionist thought. It argues that despite the radical and repulsive discourses of Neo-Zionism and the critique expressed by liberal Zionists towards it, the former has always been embodied in classical Zionism. The justifications provided by Neo-Zionists are based on principles propagated by central leaders of mainstream Zionism. Utilising new perspectives in Settler-Colonial Studies, the article demonstrates how both strands encapsulate the Zionist continuum and continuous expansionist drive for new settlements in Palestine based on ‘Biblical right’ of Jews over the land of Palestine. Both advocate supremacist, exclusivist, and volkish rights for Jews with disastrous consequences for the indigenous people of Palestine. The convictions and practices of the Neo-Zionists in the post 1967 period help unveil the camouflaged motivations, justifications and practices of mainstream expansionist Zionism.


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Genocide and settler colonialism are implicated: John Docker, ‘Reconceptualising Settler-Colonialism and Genocide with Special Reference to Palestine, Sri Lanka and Australia: Reflections on Damien Short’s Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 16, 1, 2017, pp. 27-45

26Apr17

Abstract: Genocide studies are at a cross-road. In June 2016, the International Network of Genocide Scholars, sponsor of the Journal of Genocide Research, imperilled the future of genocide studies by aligning itself with Zionist Israel, which many scholars consider to be a genocidal settler-colonial perpetrator state. Almost at the same time, Damien Short’s important intervention Redefining Genocide was published, suggesting new directions for genocide studies in the Anthropocene and featuring Palestine as one of its case studies. In considering historical and ongoing genocides in Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Australia, Redefining Genocide inspires a rethinking of the relationship between genocide, settler-colonialism, and the state.


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Cold War to Hot Planet via Aboriginal Rights: Launch; 50-Year Anniversary Issue of Arena Journal & Arena Magazine no. 147 (in case you are in Melbourne)

22Apr17

Access the invitation here.


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De-development is elimination: Marcelo Svirsky, ‘Review of Mandy Turner and Omar Shweiki (eds), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014’, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 2017

21Apr17

Excerpt: As the late Australian historian Patrick Wolfe influentially argued, settler polities are established on, and maintained by the logic of elimination of the Native, though the means to eliminate Indigenous peoples can take different forms – from expulsion and physical extermination, to forced assimilation, and even multicultural politics. Mandy Turner and Omar Shweiki’s edited collection schools the reader on one more form of Native elimination – de-development – as it historically inhibited Palestinian economy and life opportunities since 1948. Though not settler intentions but deeds are what the understanding of settler colonialism needs mainly to focus on, policy statements are nevertheless part of the discursive assemblage of a regime, and Israeli government officials’ testimonials are indeed very informative.


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