settler colonial studies blog

Just ‘Black’, ‘Black’ or ‘Red’, or ‘Black’ and ‘Red’? J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, ‘Tracing Historical Specificity: Race and the Colonial Politics of (In)Capacity’, American Quarterly, 69, 2, 2017, pp. 257-265

02Jul17

Excerpt: I want to take up [Wolfe’s] work to examine Afro-Pessimism […].

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Tracing traces is a spatial practice: Jean M. O’Brien, ‘Tracing Settler Colonialism’s Eliminatory Logic in Traces of History’, American Quarterly, 69, 2, 2017, pp. 249-255

02Jul17

Excerpt: No concept has reoriented the field of Indigenous studies recently more than the theoretical framework of settler colonialism. And although Patrick Wolfe would be the first to insist that he did not invent it, his 2006 article, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” offered a language for settler colonial studies that has been immensely influential. He places genocide in relation to what he calls “the logic of elimination,” concluding, “settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal,” and that “invasion is a structure not an event,” meaning that it is an ongoing process rather than something accomplished at a single moment. As he states, “settler colonialism destroys to replace.” The elimination of Indigenous populations can be accomplished by deliberately genocidal projects, by the unrestrained homicidal actions of boots-on-the-ground settlers, or by assimilatory campaigns of infinite imagination. In the US context, Wolfe foregrounds the postemancipation racial regime dictated by the “one-drop rule” that relegated Black people to slavery, with the polar opposite fate for Indians, who were subjected to the harsh calculations of blood quantum. One of his masterful contributions is not just his incisive and broadly persuasive theorization of settler colonialism but also the elegant simplicity of the language others can deploy in their own work. His insights have become ubiquitous as countless scholars embrace the phrase “the logic of elimination” and point to the fact of invasion as “a structure not an event” that invokes his work without even needing to attach his name to this formulation.

This article deeply influenced his two chapters on the United States that I take up from his magisterial Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, a deeply provocative analysis of race over more than four hundred years. But his book goes much farther, offering a broad and sustained analysis of racialization that attends to settler colonialism. His book is ambitious and bold, stunning in its command of the vast literature it embraces, synthesizes, historicizes, and theorizes. He persuasively argues, “Races are traces of history,” with racial identities emerging out of their enactment, a diversity of unequal outcomes securing White supremacy in dialogue with particular racial regimes that in turn secured colonialism’s domination over time. Racialization for Wolfe is a spatial practice. It comes into being when colonizers must share space with those they seek to dominate, making other people’s homes their own. In the United States, Wolfe triangulates race, differentiating between emancipation for African Americans that produced Jim Crow and “territorial engulfment” of American Indians, in which their territorial exclusion maintained Indian sovereignty as separate from settler sovereignty. He asserts this as a regime that is actively produced through political domination although contested and inherently unstable, thus making it a process rather than an ontology, with an objective of securing White supremacy.

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Introducing an American Quarterly forum on Patrick Wolfe’s legacy and method: Cynthia G. Franklin, Njoroge Njoroge, Suzanna Reiss, ‘Tracing the Settler’s Tools: A Forum on Patrick Wolfe’s Life and Legacy’, American Quarterly, 69, 2, 2017, pp. 235-247

02Jul17

Excerpt: In this forum, scholars from different disciplinary locations take up Patrick Wolfe’s 2016 book, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, and consider its importance for the field of American studies. Contributors discuss challenges that Traces of History poses and the possibilities it opens that are of value to American studies and its approaches to racial formation and settler colonialism. They approach Wolfe’s book as experts in one or more of the racial discourses and histories it takes up, and from different disciplinary homes.

Having this forum in American Quarterly challenges interdisciplinary scholars across fields to explore how and why the study of geographies of settler colonialism has and has not found a home in American studies. Taken together, and in dialogue with the comparative approach Wolfe himself takes, the essays in this forum invite readers to consider the importance of a comparative approach to racialization and settler colonialism that extends beyond US borders. This can enable new and necessary understandings of the articulations among racisms as they take place in disparate sites linked through circuits of imperialism.

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Indigenous resistance is place-based (and has edges): Noura Alkhalili, Between Sumud and Submission: Palestinian Popular Practices on the Land in the Edge Areas of Jerusalem, PhD Dissertation, Lund University, 2017

02Jul17

Abstract: This thesis delves into two ‘edge areas’ located in and around East Jerusalem. It attempts to unfold and analyze the dynamics in these edge areas, while investigating the agency of the people present there through their own perceptions and practices towards the land, the urbanization processes, the power circulation and the structural impositions. Squeezed by a settler-colonial domination that continuously encroaches further on their lives, the Palestinians, in return, seek to carve out a space for their own enduring presence on the land. That pursuit combines elements of sumud (steadfastness) and adaptation, tenacity and accommodation, actions that sometimes subvert the occupation and some other times submit to its logic. The thesis traces the contradiction between a proliferating ethos of individual enrichment and the remaining collective culture of political struggle. It also scrutinizes the ways that Palestinians move between those poles as always conditioned by the pressure from the overarching structure of settler-colonial domination. Furthermore, the thesis examines how certain structural patterns are unconsciously reproduced by the agents of these specific areas, even when their intention and desire could be to resist them. The thesis argues that East Jerusalem should be approached from the theory of settler-colonial hegemony. Thus, these areas are the by-products of the settler-colonial domination present in East Jerusalem, intentionally assembled by the Israeli authorities as “containers” that collect undesired Palestinian Jerusalemites, while leaving them trapped in a state of permanent temporariness. This situation has developed gradually through the construction of the separation wall, so as to further enhance the systematic displacement of the Palestinian Jerusalemites and achieve the Judaization of Jerusalem. The thesis claims that acts of resistance and accommodation of certain colonial practices have the inclination to collide and interact with each other, and hence obfuscate the demarcation between them. This dynamic has been unpacked through coining the concept ‘enclosures from below’. The thesis aims to contribute to scholarship on Palestine and provide a detailed analysis that could feed into a wider analysis of the dynamics of settler-colonialism, as well as inform Palestinian strategies in the ongoing struggle for liberation.

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Education is important (if you think about it, it literally means ‘to lead out’, something settlers would always like to do to indigenes): Hilary N. Green, ‘Educating Imperial Citizens: New Perspectives of Race, Nation, Empire, and American Public Schools’, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 16, 3, 2017, pp. 368-371

28Jun17

Access the article here.

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It’s about relations (i.e., power relations): G. Mitchell Bringeland, ‘Winter Studies and Summer Rambles and Power Relations: Integrating Experiential Knowledge into Canadian Discourses of Ecology’, Making Nineteenth-Century Literary Environments, 435, 2017

28Jun17

Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between settler and First Nations groups in the nineteenth century and today. Anna Brownell Jameson’s account of settler/indigenous relations is similar to contemporary power imbalances between First Nations and governmental/corporate organizations. First Nations groups are frequently ignored in discussions of eco-development, and their concerns and fears over land use are often brushed aside by developers. In the case of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, Tsleil Waututh concerns regarding their quality of life and environmental degradation to their territories have not been addressed by Kinder Morgan. By integrating postcolonial concerns into discussions of the environment, Canada can ensure that First Nations voices are heard and that their concerns are assuaged, potentially preventing ecological destruction and protecting food security and cultural practices. Additionally, by rejecting the Cartesian binary view of nature and society as inherently in opposition and incompatible, we can ensure that hierarchical colonial mindsets, which marginalize and derogate certain groups of people by placing them “outside society,” are also rejected.

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Is it a triangle (it would seem so)? Gregory Evans Dowd, ‘Indigenous Peoples without the Republic’, Journal of American History, 104, 1, 2017, pp. 19-41

28Jun17

Excerpt: The past several decades of scholarship offer two powerful themes touching on the relationship between the American Revolution and indigenous peoples. The first holds that on the eve of revolution, ordinary European settlers were already American Indians’ greatest danger, a danger only to be restrained by indigenous action, imperial intervention, or both. The second closely allied theme holds that the American Revolution greatly advanced Indian dispossession. These story lines weave a narrative that begins in the 1760s, when financially strapped Great Britain, facing powerful Indian resistance to British claims of conquest, extended meaningful protection to Native Americans from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. Settlers, locally oriented in politics and anti-Indian in sentiment, scrapped such imperial plans, often by murdering Indians, precipitating war. Metropolitan officials and appointees endeavored to regulate expansion, commerce, and violence. They offered coexistence and prospective subjecthood to Indians. The American Revolution dashed this incipient accommodation. It unleashed land-seeking, racist, backcountry men backed by a responsive government. Overthrowing an empire of graded rank in favor of a white settlers’ republic, the Revolution endangered Native America.

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The transforming citizenships of settler societies (there are two meaning of ‘transforming’): Jatinder Mann (ed.), Citizenship in Transnational Perspective: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, Springer, 2017

26Jun17

Description: This edited collection explores citizenship in a transnational perspective, with a focus on Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. It adopts a multi-disciplinary approach and offers historical, legal, political, and sociological perspectives. The two overarching themes of the book are ethnicity and Indigeneity. The contributions in the collection come from widely respected international scholars who approach the subject of citizenship from a range of perspectives: some arguing for a post-citizenship world, others questioning the very concept itself, or its application to Indigenous nations.

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Sharing public space: Avril Bell, ‘Co-existing Indigenous and Settler Worlds: Ontological Styles and Possibilities’, Journal of New Zealand Studies, 24, 2017, 15-24

26Jun17

Abstract: Settler colonialism involves processes of destruction and substitution aiming to replace indigenous with European/western worlds. But indigenous worlds persist in numerous spaces, moments and interactions where distinct ontologies and ways of being-in-the-world prevail. In Aotearoa New Zealand these spaces of the Māori world persist most obviously on marae. Māori and western worlds also briefly come together in public contexts where Māori protocols are used to mark openings of various sorts, temporarily governing public space and sociability. In this paper, I explore a different case where, I argue, Māori and western worlds are entangled or knotted together in the carved pou in the atrium space of a new community building in Kaitaia.

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Data sharing and data withholding (it is not about the data): Emma Kowal, Bastien Llamas, Sarah Tishkoff, ‘Consent: Data-sharing for indigenous peoples’, Nature, 546, 474, 22/06/17

26Jun17

Excerpt: Broad-consent models for human studies, which leave decisions on data-sharing to the researchers, may not be appropriate for work with indigenous peoples. Making the sharing of data almost impossible is also problematic. Everyone stands to benefit from responsible data-sharing innovations that can be applied more widely.

The largest volume of genomic data amassed so far from Aboriginal Australians is deposited in the European Genome–phenome Archive. The Australian board for ethical review permits access to the data only for “verification” purposes, and subject to ethical approval. For any other use of the data, researchers must seek permission from the original researchers, obtain ethical approval and contact the donors individually for their re-consent. This becomes prohibitive because donors are spread all over the continent.

These hurdles may be intended to protect participants from the harms of data-sharing, but they also exclude them from the potential benefits. Other models better address the foundational principles of responsible sharing, as proposed by the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, and the control of research by indigenous study participants.

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