settler colonial studies blog

Collective memory is a weapon: Ilan Pappe, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Collective Memory’, Anthropological Quarterly, 90, 1, 2017 pp. 255-266

21Apr17

Excerpt: One of Michel Foucault’s enduring scholarly legacies is his formulation of biopolitics as a potent force in our lives. What he had in mind, among other issues, was the pervasive and comprehensive power of states and industries to affect all aspects of life. Power, for Foucault, could insinuate itself into all microphysical social and physical contact and thus disciplined bodies and minds alike. Ever since his death in 1984, we are looking for ways of shaking off his gloomy observation that rings true and yet we wish to resist (Foucault 2003:242–243).

Quite surprisingly, Foucault did not relate the concept of biopolitics, or biopower, to racism and colonialism as Robert Young observed already in 1995. For Foucault this was the domain of the modern nation state and its particular mode of domination (although he inspired one of the most important work on colonialism, Edward Said’s Orientalism [1979]). However, what happens if the modern state is a settler colonial state? Are we allowed to apply this micro domination to such a case study? I think we can, as the two books under review—without committing them to this paradigm they have not chosen—indicate the usefulness of this possible departure point for discussing the relationship between the settler colonial state of Israel and the native Palestinian population.

The first book, Palestinian Commemoration in Israel: Calendars, Monuments, and Martyrs, by Tamir Sorek examines the commemorative culture of the Palestinian minority in Israel through formative events in their national lives (beginning, of course, with the 1948 catastrophe, the Nakbah). For Sorek, these commemorative spaces empower the minority within the Jewish state, but also indicate its willingness to dialogue with it. His approach is multidisciplinary and he provides us with a very thorough and comprehensive view on this culture in various manifestations since the inception of the Jewish State.

In Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012, Thomas Philip Abowd roams the streets of Jerusalem with local friends and tries to share with them the harsh reality of colonization. His focus is the urban reality as a scene of colonialist erasure and counter commemoration by the colonized. The book moves in and out of history, covering some of the most known acts of urbicide that Israel committed in Jerusalem as well as less known instances of the colonization as a project of the de-Arabization of the city. He gives much space to the people themselves and conveys not just their thoughts, but their emotions and aspirations as much as he can.

There are still today quite a few students of Israel and Palestine who find it hard to append the adjectives colonial, or settler colonial, to the Jewish State. However, recent scholarship is quite adamant that this is the appropriate paradigm for analyzing the past and the present of Israel and Palestine.¹ This paradigm was applied by scholars to review the events of 1948; the Judaization policies in the south of Israel; the economic policies of Israel in the occupied West Bank and the industrial relationship during the Mandatory period, to mention but few of the major works in this area of inquiry (Lloyd 2012, Nasara 2012, Hever 2012, Mansour 2012). Major works in the field are those by Patrick Wolfe (2006), Lorenzo Veracini (2006), and Gaby Piterberg (2008).

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Settlements are disciplinary spaces (settlements for all means there are no indigenous peoples): Andrea Fischer-Tahir, Sophie Wagenhofer (eds), Disciplinary Spaces Spatial Control, Forced Assimilation and Narratives of Progress Since the 19th Century, Transcript-Verlag, 2017

21Apr17

Description: This volume looks at territories such as reservations, model villages and collective towns as the spatial materialization of forced assimilation and “progress”. These disciplinary spaces were created in order to disempower and alter radically the behavior of people who were perceived as ill-suited “to fit” into hegemonic imaginations of “the nation” since the 19th century. Comparing examples from the Americas, Australia, North and East Africa, Central Europe as well as West and Central Asia, the book not only considers the acts and legitimizing narrations of ruling actors, but highlights the agency of the subaltern who are often misrepresented as passive victims of violent assimilation strategies.

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Cultural production is more than about textual artifacts: Warren Cariou, Isabelle St-Amand, ‘Environmental Ethics through Changing Landscapes: Indigenous Activism and Literary Arts’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 44, 1, 2017, pp. 7-24

19Apr17

Excerpt: aIn her story “Salmon Is the Hub of Salish Memory,” Sto:lo writer Lee Maracle reminds the reader of the relationship between the fish and the women, and she foregrounds the vital importance of honouring and nurturing these living entities and their interrelatedness amongst one another and within the environment that sustains them. Attentive to the context in which she writes, Maracle reiterates the story’s warning that failure to do so will result in their disappearance. She further ponders what “the story does not say” (51), that is, with regards to responsibility when settlers are the cause of the devastation. Her text immediately calls to mind ongoing struggles for the protection of Indigenous lands and lives against the combined forces of global capitalism and settler colonialism. It brings out the necessity for a recovery that Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have described as a fundamental decolonization imperative, one that “must involve repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted” (Tuck and Yang 7). With her re-telling of the Salish story, Maracle puts forth the idea that caretaking—under all circumstances—remains a vital element in the struggles for Indigenous peoples and for the continuation of life in all its forms. Moreover, as Kyle Powys Whyte and Chris Cuomo observe, it is precisely “[a]s enactments of complex commitments to care [that] indigenous environmental movements have made great strides in protecting indigenous lifeways against the parties who are responsible for the environmental problems they face” (5). These parties include “international bodies, nation-states, subnational governments, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations” (Whyte and Cuomo 5-6). The question of responsibility therefore remains at the heart of an understanding of Indigenous environmental ethics and of their actualization in today’s neoliberal globalized colonial settler contexts.

Often, and in many ways, the contemporary productions of Indigenous scholars, activists, writers, and filmmakers relate to Maracle’s assertion that “violence to earth and violence between humans are connected” (53). In their respective works, for instance, Innu poet Natasha Kanapé Fontaine (2014), Blood and Sámi filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (2011), and Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson (2016) have exposed the intricate connections between the settler colonial project, the devastation of ecosystems, and the lives of Indigenous women and girls. Their poetic, filmic, and scholarly narratives contribute to ongoing conversations on environmental ethics and social justice at times of climate crisis by exposing the planetary and the community implications of the state of relationships between the land and the people. Tailfeathers makes this explicit when describing her short experimental film Bloodland, which is broadcast on YouTube, as “a social statement on the irreversible and detrimental impact of gas and oil exploration on our planet; and in particular on the impact that hydraulic fracturing has and will have on Kainaiwa, or Blood land” (Tailfeathers). Drawing on aesthetics of gore, Bloodland shows interspersed images of drilling into the earth and into the body of a young woman. The two sets of images rapidly mingle together to denounce the concomitant taking of Indigenous lands and lives while pointing at the gendered quality of this extractive violence.

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Cultural production is more than about artifacts: Stéphane Guimont Marceau, Janice Cindy Gaudet, Véronique Audet, Marie-Josée Parent, Mélanie Lumsden, Jonathan Abitbol, ‘Urban Indigenous cultural productions in Quebec: vital connections to cultural reconstruction’, AlterNative, 2017

19Apr17

Abstract: This article aims to address a gap in research regarding the dynamics that underpin Indigenous cultural productions in urban areas in Quebec (Canada), to gain an understanding of conditions, practices and relationships surrounding urban Indigenous cultural productions, and to examine their role in cultural reconstruction. The research findings point to how urban Indigenous cultural productions are vital to the survival and reconstruction of Indigenous cultures and identities. Interviews and sharing circles with cultural producers stressed that cultural productions are much more than products. They are a way of life and a way of thinking and being. The research was conducted from August 2015 to April 2016 by an urban Indigenous organization, DestiNATIONS: Carrefour International of Indigenous Arts and Cultures. It involved an intercultural and interdisciplinary research team guided by an Indigenous research methodology. We drew inspiration from the wisdom of close to a 100 cultural producers concerning their cultural productions.

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Settler colonialism is about stereotypes (they may run and be unpredictable, but can they lead?): Nicholas Apoifis, Demelza Marlin, Andrew Bennie, ‘Noble athlete, savage coach: How racialised representations of Aboriginal athletes impede professional sport coaching opportunities for Aboriginal Australians’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 2017

19Apr17

Abstract: Representations of Aboriginal Australian peoples as genetically predisposed to sporting prowess are pervasive and enduring perceptions. This rhetoric belongs to a larger narrative that also describes a peculiarly Aboriginal style of play: full of flair, speed and ‘magic’. Such imagery has informed a common perception that, in many team sports, Aboriginal athletes are biologically more suited to playing positions characterised by pace, trickery and spontaneity, rather than those that utilise leadership acumen and intellectual skill. There has been a great deal of academic research exploring how such essentialised and racialised representations play out for Aboriginal athletes. In this paper, however, we extend that research, examining how racialised representations of Aboriginal athletic ability affect Aboriginal coaches. Premised on interviews with 26 Aboriginal Australian coaches, we argue that representations of Aboriginal athletes as naturally suited to speed and flair, rather than leadership and sporting-intellect, help maintain an environment that limits opportunities for Aboriginal Australians seeking to move into sporting leadership roles, such as coaching. This paper sheds light on the ways in which racialised representations of Aboriginal athletes feed into a settler colonialist narrative that stymies opportunities for aspiring Aboriginal professional coaches, and speculates on the limitations of this approach, in challenging the political hegemony of settler colonialism.

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An anthropology of entanglement: Françoise Dussart, Sylvie Poirier (eds), Entangled Territorialities: Negotiating Indigenous Lands in Australia and Canada, University of Toronto Press, 2017

16Apr17

Description: Entangled Territorialities offers vivid ethnographic examples of how Indigenous lands in Australia and Canada are tangled with governments, industries, and mainstream society. Most of the entangled lands to which Indigenous peoples are connected have been physically transformed and their ecological balance destroyed. Each chapter in this volume refers to specific circumstances in which Indigenous peoples have become intertwined with non-Aboriginal institutions and projects including the construction of hydroelectric dams and open mining pits. Long after the agents of resource extraction have abandoned these lands to their fate, Indigenous peoples will continue to claim ancestral ties and responsibilities that cannot be understood by agents of capitalism. The editors and contributors to this volume develop an anthropology of entanglement to further examine the larger debates about the vexed relationships between settlers and indigenous peoples over the meaning, knowledge, and management of traditionally-owned lands.

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Sovereignty is (the ability to sustain) nonrecognition: Elya L Milner, Haim Yacobi, ‘Spaces of sovereignty: A tale of an unrecognized Palestinian village in Israel’, Planning Theory, 2017

16Apr17

Abstract: This article discusses the spatial and political dimensions of an unrecognized Arab village in Israel, which is a subject of houses demolition during the last decade, taking part in parallel to a legal struggle for recognition. This case is part of a wide political act in Israel, where Palestinians are rendered ‘criminal’ and their spaces illegitimate. We will suggest that the unrecognized villages cannot be seen solely as a product of planning policies, but are essential to the understanding of the ways in which Israeli sovereignty is embodied. We will discuss the case using legal documents regarding the latest petition made to the High Court of Justice. Through those documents, we will try to analyse the ways in which Israeli sovereignty is being embodied using theoretical tools by Carl Schmitt and his debate with Hans Kelsen. At the conclusions, we will suggest some thoughts regarding the possibilities of resistance.

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Settler tell fables: Shef Rogers, ‘The instructive power of the fable in New Zealand’s Native School Reader (1886)’, History of Education Review, 46, 1, 2017

16Apr17

Abstract: This essay examines the cultural implications of James Henry Pope’s selection of fables for his 1886 Native Schools Reader designed to teach English to Maori students in Native Schools.The essay takes an historical approach. It surveys attitudes toward the fable as a pedagogical tool prior to 1880 and reviews Pope’s choice of fifty from the three hundred available fables in the Aesopic canon.The study finds that Pope was well informed and well intentioned, but nonetheless appeared to be unaware of potentially unsettling interpretations of his selected fables. While it may be relatively easy for twenty-first-century readers to perceive the cultural tensions of Pope’s work, exploring the historical context helps us to understand both why Pope compiled the text he did, and why he and his books were well regarded by both pākehā and Māori, despite almost certainly not conveying the values the settlers wished to inculcate in Māori.

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Decolonisation is a (up)rising: Jaskiran Dhillon, Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention, University of Toronto Press, 2017

16Apr17

Description: In 2016, Canada’s newly elected federal government publically committed to reconciling the social and material deprivation of Indigenous communities across the country. Does this outward shift in the Canadian state’s approach to longstanding injustices facing Indigenous peoples reflect a “transformation with teeth,” or is it merely a reconstructed attempt at colonial Indigenous-settler relations?

Prairie Rising provides a series of critical reflections about the changing face of settler colonialism in Canada through an ethnographic investigation of Indigenous-state relations in the city of Saskatoon. Jaskiran Dhillon uncovers how various groups including state agents, youth workers, and community organizations utilize participatory politics in order to intervene in the lives of Indigenous youth living under conditions of colonial occupation and marginality. In doing so, this accessibly written book sheds light on the changing forms of settler governance and the interlocking systems of education, child welfare, and criminal justice that sustain it. Dhillon’s nuanced and fine-grained analysis exposes how the push for inclusionary governance ultimately reinstates colonial settler authority and raises startling questions about the federal government’s commitment to justice and political empowerment for Indigenous Nations, particularly within the context of the everyday realities facing Indigenous youth.

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Settler ‘decolonization’ is about the garden: Brett M. Bennett, ‘Decolonization, Environmentalism and Nationalism in Australia and South Africa’, Itinerario, 41, 1, 2017, pp. 27-50

16Apr17

Abstract: Decolonization influenced the rise of environmental activism and thought in Australia and South Africa in ways that have been overlooked by national histories of environmentalism and imperial histories of decolonization. Australia and South Africa’s political and cultural movement away from Britain and the Commonwealth during the 1960s is one important factor explaining why people in both countries created more, and more important, public indigenous botanic gardens than anywhere else in the world during that decade. Effective decolonization from Britain also influenced the rise of indigenous gardening and the growing popularity of native gardens at a critical period in gardening and environmental history. Most facets of contemporary gardening—using plants indigenous to the site or region, planting drought-tolerant species, and seeing gardens as sites to help conserve regional and national flora—can be dated to the 1960s and 1970s. The interpretation advanced here adds to historical research tracing how the former Commonwealth settler colonies experienced effective decolonization in the same era. This article expands the focus of research on decolonization to include environmentalism. The interpretation of the article also augments national environmental histories that have hitherto downplayed the influence of decolonization on the rise of environmentalism. Putting decolonization into the history of the rise of environmental thought and action sheds light on why people in contemporary Australia and South Africa are so passionate about protecting indigenous flora and fauna, and so worried about threats posed by non-native invasive species.

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