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The ‘friendship’ of (some) settlers: Lucy Taylor, ‘Lifting the veil of kindness: “friendship” and settler colonialism in Argentina’s Welsh Patagonia’, LSE Latin America and Caribbean Blog, 06/09/17

01Nov17

Excerpt: Now a popular tourist attraction, the Welsh community in Patagonia began life in 1865 with the arrival of 153 Welsh-speaking families. They sought to create a new Welsh homeland forged through the Welsh language, reflecting Welsh values, and in defiance of a disparaging ‘English’ elite. The strategy chosen for this anti-colonial enterprise was, paradoxically, the creation of a settler colony.

The myth of friendship is anchored in the story of first encounter, when Cacique Francisco and his wife arrived on a trading mission. The most detailed and reliable account tells us that after initial fearfulness they shared food. However, one of the colony’s leaders suggested that: “’they are just robbers and spies… Kill them both!’”. Everyone else thought differently, though: “‘I will not do that’ said one…’. ‘Let us show more courage and more of our Christian nature than rushing to take the life of an old man and his wife’ [said another]. Everyone agreed with this… In this way we laid the foundations of friendship”.

According to this account, the Welsh resisted the ‘usual’ barbarities of colonial violence and followed the righteous path of Christian charity, adopting a policy of friendship.


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Ongoing settler colonialism, II: Samuel Sellers, Richard Bilsborrow, Victoria Salinas, Carlos Mena, ‘Population and development in the Amazon: A longitudinal study of migrant settlers in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon’, Acta Amazonica, 47, 4, 2017

29Oct17

Abstract: This paper examines changes over time for a full generation of migrant settlers in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon (NEA). Data were collected from a 2014 household survey covering a subsample of households surveyed previously in 1990 and 1999. We observed changes in demographic behavior, land use, forest cover, and living conditions. As the frontier develops, human fertility is continuing to decline with contraceptive prevalence rising. Meanwhile, out-migration from colonist households, largely to destinations within the region, persists. More households have secure land tenure than in 1999, and are better off as measured by possession of assets. There is continued growth in pasture, largely at the expense of forest. Farms still serve as an important livelihood source for families, though growing cities in the NEA are creating more non-agricultural economic opportunities. Our findings provide a snapshot of demographic, economic, land use, and livelihood changes occurring in the NEA during the past quarter century, providing useful information for policymakers seeking to balance economic and environmental goals in order to promote sustainable development as well as protect biodiversity. 


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Ongoing settler colonialism, I: Santhosh Chandrashekar, ‘Not a Metaphor: Immigrant of Color Autoethnography as a Decolonial Move’, Cultural Studies = Critical Methodologies, 2017

29Oct17

Abstract: This essay argues that if “decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of (Native) land”(p. 7), then autoethnography committed to decolonization should first and foremost center Native struggles over land and life. For this task and given my own position as a postcolonial immigrant on Native lands, I elaborate an immigrant of color autoethnography to demystify the discourses that privilege select postcolonial immigrants such as myself over Indigenous people and render me as a desirable minority and settler. I start this project unpacking my journey as an international student through the higher education apparatus in the United States as I narrate how the material structures and academic knowledge that circulate within the university (re)produce the devaluation of indigeneity. Then I shift my attention to my time in Albuquerque, a border city that excludes Indigenous people through a host of policies even as international students are welcomed to make home in the city. Against these two sites, I turn to (un)Occupy Albuquerque to map coalition possibilities between postcolonial immigrants and Indigenous people. Together, these three sites allow for an understanding of the ideological and material structures that rationalize (and disrupt) settler colonialism and Native dispossession.


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On Australia’s ‘unsettled settlers’, II: Claire Corbett, ‘Nowhere to run: Repetition compulsion and heterotopia in the Australian post-apocalypse – from “Crabs” to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome’, Science Fiction Film & Television, 10, 3, 2017

24Oct17

Abstract: This article argues that despite the genre status of the Mad Max films as post-apocalyptic sf, the driving force behind many of the images and concerns of the films derives from aspects of Australian history since colonisation. The article compares the way these themes appear in the Mad Max films to the way they are explored in ‘Crabs’, a 1972 short story by Australian writer Peter Carey. This story was later filmed as Dead End Drive-In, a film which itself draws on the aesthetic already developed through the Mad Max films. I use Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion to explore ways in which history is both remembered and deliberately forgotten through imagery that is dislocated from the past to the ‘future’ and thus in effect to a timeless, ever-present or ever-recurring time. The article also argues that Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (a space that is populated by a selected, heterogenerous group such inmates in a prison), describes the reality of the penal colonies forming the origins of settler Australia. The colony’s status as heterotopia has led to a pervasive sense of the ‘irreality’ of Australia for many non-Indigenous Australians, expressed through numerous artworks: a sense that there is no ‘there’ out there, nowhere to run.


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On Australia’s ‘unsettled settlers’, I: Anne Rees, ‘Reading Australian modernity: Unsettled settlers and cultures of mobility’, History Compass, 2017

24Oct17

Abstract: What did Australian modernity look like? Over the last two decades, Australia’s entrenched reputation for ‘cultural belatedness’ has been displaced by the study of ‘colonial modernity’. No longer beholden to the idea that a singular modernity was disseminated from core to periphery, scholars now speak of many localised modernities that arose across colonial and provincial sites. According to this new ‘multiple modernities’ paradigm, Australia was home to its own home-grown incarnation of modern life. But what was distinctively ‘Australian’ about Australian modernity? Although widely discussed in recent historiography, scholars have yet to delineate its distinguishing features. This article posits mobility as a central component of the Australian modern. Drawing upon new scholarship in settler colonial studies and transnational history, it argues that early twentieth-century Australia was home to intense cultures of both domestic and global mobility that were entangled with the geographies and anxieties of the settler colonial project. It shows how the nation’s ‘unsettled settlers’ also became its chief agents of modernity, and in doing so draws together several strands in recent historiography. Although mobility also signified modernity beyond Australia, it was within this settler colonial nation tyrannised by distance that the modern appetite for motion reached especial heights.


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Freedom somewhere else is a settler colonial thing: Ikuko Asaka, Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation, Duke University Press, 2017

22Oct17

Description: In Tropical Freedom Ikuko Asaka engages in a hemispheric examination of the intersection of emancipation and settler colonialism in North America. Asaka shows how from the late eighteenth century through Reconstruction, emancipation efforts in the United States and present-day Canada were accompanied by attempts to relocate freed blacks to tropical regions, as black bodies were deemed to be more physiologically compatible with tropical climates. This logic conceived of freedom as a racially segregated condition based upon geography and climate. Regardless of whether freed people became tenant farmers in Sierra Leone or plantation laborers throughout the Caribbean, their relocation would provide whites with a monopoly over the benefits of settling indigenous land in temperate zones throughout North America. At the same time, black activists and intellectuals contested these geographic-based controls by developing alternative discourses on race and the environment. By tracing these negotiations of the transnational racialization of freedom, Asaka demonstrates the importance of considering settler colonialism and black freedom together while complicating the prevailing frames through which the intertwined histories of British and U.S. emancipation and colonialism have been understood.


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Statistics about indigenes must be accounted for: Tahu Kukutai, Maggie Walter, ‘Indigenous Statistics’, in Pranee Liamputtong (ed.), Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sciences, Springer, 2017

22Oct17

Abstract: Statistics about Indigenous peoples are a common feature of Anglo-colonizing nation states such as Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States (CANZUS). The impetus for the production of most Indigenous statistics is the shared position of Indigenous disadvantage in health and socioeconomic status. In this chapter, we contrast statistics about Indigenous peoples with statistics for Indigenous people and statistics by Indigenous people. There are very significant differences between these categories of Indigenous statistics. At the heart of these differences is the methodology that informs the research processes and practices. Statistics about Indigenous peoples often reflect the dominant social norms, values, and racial hierarchy of the society in which they are created. In the CANZUS states, these statistics are deficit focused and, at times, victim blaming. Also missing from these statistical portrayals is the culture, interests, perspectives, and alternative narratives of the Indigenous peoples that they purport to represent. We contrast these statistics with those from statistical research using processes and practices that are shaped by Indigenous methodologies. Indigenous methodologies are distinguished by their prioritization of Indigenous methods, protocols, values, and epistemologies. We conclude with two examples of what Indigenous quantitative methodologies look like in practice from Aotearoa NZ and Australia.


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Indigenous deaths in custody must be accounted for: Pauline Klippmark, Karen Crawley, ‘Justice for Ms Dhu: Accounting for Indigenous Deaths in Custody in Australia’, Social & Legal Studies, 2017

22Oct17

Abstract: Ms Dhu, an Aboriginal woman belonging to the Yamatji nation, died in police custody in South Hedland, Western Australia, in 2014 within 48 hours of being incarcerated for failing to pay fines. The coroner’s report found that both the police force and medical institution failed to discharge the duty of care owed to Ms Dhu, as their behaviour fell below what was expected of someone in their position. However, the coronial inquiry was unable to account for the ways in which state power and possessive sovereignty is invested in the deaths of Indigenous peoples. This article connects Ms Dhu’s life and death to forms of gendered, institutional and structural racism endemic to the Australian settler state. We then turn to examine the possibilities of justice for Ms Dhu through aesthetic attempts to memorialize her in public spaces of the city of Perth, which carry a promise of justice through their ability to challenge the settler-colonial logic that made possible Ms Dhu’s invisible suffering and the lack of accountability for her death.


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Fascist violence and settler violence: Michael R. Ebner,’Fascist Violence and the “Ethnic Reconstruction” of Cyrenaica (Libya), 1922–1934′, in Philip Dwyer, Amanda Nettelbeck (eds), Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 197-218

22Oct17

Abstract: This chapter examines Fascist Italy’s war against the Senussi anticolonial resistance fighters of Cyrenaica (Libya) between 1923 and 1934. It demonstrates how Italian colonial authorities’ use of military, economic, cultural, and social or ethnic violence functioned not simply to defeat the Bedouins’ resistance and take possession of their land, but also to destroy and refashion anew the people of Cyrenaica. Throughout the ‘re-conquest’ of Cyrenaica, Italian colonial officials acknowledged over and over that their policies might lead to the destruction of the entire civilian population. By the time the regime established concentration camps for civilians, colonial authorities began talking about the ‘ethnic reconstruction of Cyrenaica’, revealing an important motive behind Fascist colonial policy: creating submissive colonial subjects through atrocity.


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Violence in unexpected places: Hijin Park, ‘Racialized Women, the Law and the Violence of White Settler Colonialism’, Feminist Legal Studies, 2017, pp. 1–24

18Oct17

Abstract: In 2001, Rie Fujii, a 23-year-old Japanese national living without legal status in Calgary, Alberta, Canada left her two infant children alone in her apartment for 10 days while visiting her out-of-town boyfriend. The children, Domenic and Gemini, died of dehydration and starvation. Charged with two counts of second-degree homicide, Fujii plead guilty to manslaughter and received an 8-year sentence. Through an analysis of the publicly available judicial documents relating to the crimes of Rie Fujii, this paper explores how the law’s individualization and medicalization of crime and violence may obscure the multiple forms of everyday and structural violence that racialized women in white settler states such as Canada experience and may perpetrate. Drawing on Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois’ concept of the violence continuum, I argue that the law’s conceptualization of crime and violence conceals and thus advances the violence endemic to white settler colonialism.


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