settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous exile: Sophia Brown, Forms of Exile: Contemporary Palestinian Life Writing, PhD dissertation, University of Kent, 2017

14Oct17

Abstract: This thesis is an examination of contemporary exilic Palestinian life writing in English. Attentive to the ongoing nature of Palestinian dispossession since 1948, it focuses on how exile is narrated and the ways in which it informs models of selfhood within a context of conflict and loss. This involves adopting a framework of settler colonialism in order to understand the conflict. Broadly speaking, the thesis conceives of Palestinian life writing as a form of testimony posing an urgent and necessary counternarrative to the hegemony of the Israeli discourse on Palestine/Israel. The thesis examines life writing by different generations of Palestinians, from those who experienced the Nakba of 1948, to those born as second-generation Palestinians in their parents’ adopted homelands. It does not limit itself to examining the work of those at a geographical distance from Palestine but also looks at narratives by those who live, or have lived, under Israeli occupation. This has required paying particular attention to the difference between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ exile. Recognising that Palestinians who live in Palestine/Israel still sometimes articulate their experience as a form of exiling is an integral aspect of this research. The thesis argues that while the ongoing conflict impacts the identity formation and experiences of all the writers under consideration, nonetheless each author is inevitably guided by distinct geographies, temporalities, imaginings and frames of reference, which ultimately determine their relationship to Palestine and what it means to consider themselves exiled. I am, therefore, particularly mindful of the plurality of exilic experience, even while ideas of communality are still hugely important. The thesis consists of three author-led chapters – on Edward Said, Ghada Karmi and Rema Hammami – followed by a final chapter on anthologised life writing, which looks at the work of seven authors. Raising questions of form and how one deals with both the commonality and complexity of exile, this final chapter aims to show recent developments in English-language Palestinian life writing. By demonstrating the distinct ways in which exiled Palestinians relate to Palestine/Israel, this thesis seeks to contribute in particular towards two areas of study that have, for the most part, failed to engage substantially enough with Palestine (or, indeed, with each other): postcolonial and auto/biography studies. These subfields of cultural criticism and their wealth of scholarship therefore provide the necessary tools for this research, but they are also held to account for the relative lack of attention paid to Palestine and the extant nature of the conflict. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate that exilic Palestinian life writing sheds its own light on matters of great import to postcolonial and auto/biography studies – matters such as statelessness, belonging, testimony, selfhood and self- representation – and that there are intersecting aesthetic and ethical reasons for ensuring the visibility of Palestine within these areas of study.

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Decolonisation? Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Decolonizing Settler Colonialism: Kill the Settler in Him and Save the Man’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 41, 1, 2017, pp. 1-18.

10Oct17

Access the article here.

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Feminisms and the west (and settler colonialism): Krista Comer, ‘Accountabilities: Authority, Feminism, West’, Studies in the Novel, 49, 3, 2017, pp. 419-425

10Oct17

Excerpt: Moreover, the critical turn to Wests, to westness as a system and colonial world network, has brought the phenomenon of settler colonialism into the fore of the critical field. The US West is an example par excellence of not just Anglo settler logics and history (Wolfe, Veracini) but simultaneous and competing Spanish colonialities and modernities (Aranda). Settler maps, meanings, and place making has been made more textured still for US West studies by way of the enormous offerings of Indigenous studies. The recent expansion and depth of that field as a field (Allen), what it teaches about ongoing or “enduring” indigeneity (Kauanui), the fact of thoroughly different and incommensurate understandings of place and territory (Byrd) that map over and inhabit the so-called “West” toward indigenous histories and futures (Bernardin)—all of these have reoriented the political and ethical stakes, and epistemological contexts, for scholars’ work. Notwithstanding any of this activity, however, and not a surprise given the imperial origin stories at stake, “the West” of popular discourse—that place of proving and opportunity and settler sovereignty—bounces back in culture and politics with regularity and ease.

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Settler objects make settler subjects: Julia M. L. Laforge, Stephane M. McLachlan, ‘Environmentality on the Canadian Prairies: Settler-Farmer Subjectivities and Agri-Environmental Objects’, Antipode, 2017

10Oct17

Abstract: State and institutional actors have been shaping settler-farmer subjectivities in order to transform the landscape and thus the history and geography of the Canadian Prairies. This paper expands the application of environmentality from its origins in colonial forestry to interrogate agriculture on prairie landscapes. The Canadian state used the technologies of environmentality to influence “common sense” attitudes and behaviours, which acted to deterritorialize Indigenous communities and then manipulated their subjectivities to guarantee settler-farmer access to land. Later, institutions and states moulded settler-farmer subjectivities of correct farming behaviour in an effort to convert soil, water, and seeds into economic resources. These environmental objects, in turn, acted upon settler-farmer subjects by setting biophysical and genetic limits such as soil fertility, water quality and quantity, and plant hardiness and disease resistance. Resisting environmentality requires understanding processes of subjugation while also creating counter-narratives of “good” farming behaviour and Indigenous-settler relations.

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Settler communists are settler colonialists: Oleksa Drachewych, The Comintern and the Communist Parties of South Africa, Canada, and Australia on Questions of Imperialism, Nationality and Race, 1919-1943, PhD Dissertation, McMaster University, 2017

07Oct17

Abstract: In 1919, the Bolshevik Party of Russia formed the Communist International (Comintern) to lead the international communist movement. As part of its efforts, it maintained a strong commitment to supporting colonial liberation, self-determination of nations, and racial equality. Many scholars of the Comintern and the Soviet Union assume that Moscow demanded firm discipline of all member parties and these parties largely followed its lead. But the Comintern was not as monolithic as is often presumed. Colonial affairs frequently were overlooked and European Communist Parties often skirted their commitment to supporting their colonial counterparts. Individual communists took it upon themselves to promote anti-imperialism or racial equality, but their efforts were frequently hampered by the tactical shifts of the Comintern and eventually, the erosion of Moscow’s interest. Frequently, the prioritization of certain issues in the Comintern proved to be the most important factor in determining Comintern interference in member parties. This dissertation includes the first comparative analysis of the Communist Parties of South Africa, Canada and Australia on issues of anti-imperialism, nationality, and race. In comparing these parties, this study explores the limits of Moscow’s control of other Communist Parties, while detailing the similarities and differences in the efforts of these three parties to combat imperialism, support colonial liberation, and fight for national rights and racial equality. This dissertation is the first to detail the Canadian and Australian communism’s efforts, sometimes on their own initiative, on anti-imperialism, nationality and racial equality during the interwar period, to provide new conclusions about Comintern intervention in South Africa, and to highlight the prioritization of the Comintern as each party sees Moscow’s intervention on these issues to very different degrees.

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Horses on settler frontiers: Sean McDaniel, ‘Our Greatest Riches’: Horses at the Intersection of Settler and Kazakh Society in the Late Imperial Period’, Journal of Migration History, 3, 2, pp. 210-228

07Oct17

Abstract: This article examines interactions between Slavic peasant migrants and mobile pastoralist Kazakhs within the setting of the Kazakh Steppe during the period of heaviest resettlement to the region beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the early twentieth century. It considers how the importance of horses to both settlers and Kazakhs alike dictated these interactions and how the sedentary world of the settlers disrupted the seasonal migration routes of Kazakh horse herders. Particularly with concern to the greatly expanded horse market, issues regarding land use, and increased instances of horse theft throughout the region, the Russian state’s encroachment into the steppe forever altered the social and economic makeup of the region.

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Settler texts are settler colonial texts: Larissa McLean Davies, Susan K. Martin, ‘Toward Worlding Settler Texts: Tracking the Uses of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career through the Curriculum’, Australian Literary Studies, 32, 2, 2017

07Oct17

Abstract: Using Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career as its focus, this paper explores the institutional possibilities and constraints of ‘worlding’ settler texts in secondary school and university environments. We argue that the teaching of texts, and those who teach texts in schools and universities, play a key role in negotiating national and international textual boundaries. This paper expands on the practices of reading, to incorporate an analysis of documents that frame the intended, espoused, and enacted curriculum. Examining the publication and teaching history of My Brilliant Career in Australia and overseas and the use of literature as a tool of nationalism and globalisation, this paper argues that the teaching of literature in institutions acts as material evidence of our efforts to negotiate the demands of the national and the global. Literature teaching thus powerfully contributes to the ways in which we understand the work that is undertaken, the boundaries crossed and compromises brokered when we study settler texts in globalised contexts.

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The settler garden: Jake Arthur, ‘”Fond human enclosures”: Gardening and belonging in Bethell’s “From a garden in the antipodes”‘, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 35, 1, 2017, pp. 28-49

03Oct17

Abstract: Ursula Bethell’s unassuming collection of poems, ‘From a Garden in the Antipodes’, depicts a literature and nation in flux through the central image of the garden. This will not be surprising to anyone who has owned a garden; they exist always in a state of transition, changing from and into. Gardening is a way of negotiating a relationship with an environment, but writing about gardens has also tended to involve negotiating what Benedict Anderson has described as the nation’s ‘imagined political community’. This article views the garden image as part of a wider colonial effort by early New Zealand poets to characterise the landscape, and considers how the tropes involved in that effort are, in the poetry of Bethell, turned towards a more personal politics of belonging. Breaking new ground in the fledgling identity of early twentieth century New Zealand, Bethell’s garden institutes a new relationship with, and language of, antipodean home.

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Settlers need the indigenous child as child and they need the child as victim: Krista Maxwell, ‘Settler-Humanitarianism: Healing the Indigenous Child-Victim’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 59, 4, 2017, pp. 974-1007

03Oct17

Abstract: Victims of colonial, Indigenous child-removal policies have attracted public expressions of compassion from Indigenous and settler-state political leaders in Canada since the 1990s. This public compassion has fueled legal and political mechanisms, leveraging resources for standardized interventions said to “heal” these victims: cash payments, a truth-telling forum, therapy. These claims to healing provide an entry-point for analyzing how and why the figure of the Indigenous child-victim, past and present, is morally and politically useful for settler-states and their public cultures. I use the formulation of “settler-humanitarianism” to express how liberal interventions of care and protection, intended to ameliorate Indigenous suffering, align with settler-colonialism’s enduring goal of Indigenous elimination (Wolfe 2006). Removal of Indigenous children was integral to the late nineteenth-century formation of the Canadian and Australian settler-states. Missionaries and colonial administrators represented these practices as humanitarian rescue from depraved familial conditions. Settler-humanitarians have long employed universalizing moral registers, such as “idleness” and “neglect,” to compel state interventions into Indigenous families. More recently, “trauma” has emerged as a humanitarian signifier compelling urgent action. These settler-humanitarian registers do political work. Decontextualized representations of Indigenous children as victims negate children as social actors, obscure the particularities of how collective Indigenous suffering flows from settler-colonial dispossession, and oppose children’s interests with those of their kin, community, and nation. I analyze how and why Aboriginal healing as settler-humanitarianism has been taken up by many Indigenous leaders alongside settler-state agents, and examine the ongoing social and political effects of the material and discursive interventions it has spawned.

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Settler colonialism in unexpected places: Uditi Sen, ‘Developing Terra Nullius: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Indigeneity in the Andaman Islands’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 59, 4, 2017, pp. 944-973

03Oct17

Abstract: This article explores the legal structures and discursive framings informing the governance of one particular “backward” region of India, the Andaman Islands. I trace the shifting patterns of occupation and development of the islands in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on the changes wrought by independence in 1947 and the eventual history of planned development there. I demonstrate how intersecting discourses of indigenous savagery/primitivism and the geographical emptiness were repeatedly mobilized in colonial-era surveys and postcolonial policy documents. Postcolonial visions of developing the Andaman Islands ushered in a settler-colonial governmentality, infused with genocidal fantasies of the “dying savage.” Laws professing to protect aboriginal Jarawas actually worked to unilaterally extend Indian sovereignty over the lands and bodies of a community clearly hostile to such incorporation. I question the current exclusion of India from the global geographies of settler-colonialism and argue that the violent and continuing history of indigenous marginalization in the Andaman Islands represents a de facto operation of a logic of terra nullius.

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