settler colonial studies blog

The port, and the settler hinterlands: Olivia Irena Durand, ‘Labour, trade, and settler colonisation: the role of Odessa and New Orleans on new imperial peripheries’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

03Jan26

Abstract: The Russian Empire’s conquest of Southern Ukraine in the 1780s inaugurated an era characterised by the convergence of internal and external colonisation. This southward expansion granted Russia access to lucrative maritime trade routes and established a fertile agricultural frontier on Ukrainian lands. Contemporary observers likened the colonisation of the Black Sea steppes to overseas imperial projects, drawing direct comparisons between ‘New Russia’ and the American West. These parallels rested on shared features of settler colonisation, unfree labour regimes, and the export of staple commodities. As Odessa emerged as a key port city, this article situates its early development within the broader history of settler colonialism by comparing it to New Orleans and its influence over the Mississippi Basin. Between 1800 and the 1860s, both cities became major economic centres, serving as gateways for immigration and capital due to their geographical locations and inflows of foreign investment. Yet their shared reliance on bound labour also proved a structural vulnerability, hindering commercial modernisation and industrial diversification. By placing Odessa’s economic trajectory in a transatlantic framework, the study highlights how Russian settler colonialism shaped labour relations, commerce, and the integration of Southern Ukraine into global economic networks.

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The settler’s cosmopolitanism (cosmosettlerism): Fabián Flores Silva, ‘Kantian Cosmopolitanisms Encountering Isolated Indigenous Groups: Between Ambiguous Anti-colonialism and Risky Oversight’, Revista de ciencia política (Santiago), 45, 3, 2025

02Jan26

Abstract: This paper compares Kant’s cosmopolitan right with the Kantian-rooted cosmopolitan proposals of Seyla Benhabib and Jacques Derrida, assessing their ability to support South American isolated indigenous groups’ claims to reject external intrusion in their lands, as a way of counteracting damaging settler-colonialist dynamics. It argues that despite Kant’s cosmopolitan right, which includes a problematic racialized and teleological aspect that precludes understand it as a full anticolonial perspective, it primarily endorses non-state peoples with a right to reject external requests for hospitality. Conversely, the ethical commitments in Benhabib’s and Derrida’s cosmopolitan propositions for the sovereign states to accept external solicitations for hospitality not only neglects isolated indigenous claims but may unintendedly contribute to their physical and cultural destruction. The tension that emerges between Kant’s minimalist focus on international peace and the justice-oriented perspectives of contemporary Kantian thinkers underscores the need for cosmopolitan theories to more effectively engage with the struggles of indigenous peoples.

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The settler’s anthropocentrism (settlerocentrism): Avlokita Sodhi, ‘The Settler’s Gaze: Patrick White and the Problem of Anthropocentrism’, Literary Endeavour, 2025, 119-123

02Jan26

Abstract: This paper interrogates the complex negotiation of anthropocentrism within the literary imagination of Patrick White. While his oeuvre is celebrated for its profound engagement with the Australian landscape, this analysis argues that White simultaneously employs and subverts the settler-colonial gaze, exposing the inherent violence of an anthropocentric worldview. Through an ecocritical and postcolonial lens, this study deconstructs White’s narrative strategies in key works such as Voss and The Tree of Man. It examines how his protagonists—from the megalomaniacal explorer Voss to the pioneering Stan Parker—initially impose a hermeneutics of domination upon the land, perceiving it as a space for conquest, spiritual trial, or material utility. However, White systematically dismantles this gaze. The Australian environment is not a passive backdrop but an active, agential force that resists, transforms, and ultimately obliterates human pretensions of mastery. This paper traces the progression from a colonizing perspective to moments of ecological reckoning, where the human subject is rendered vulnerable and re-situated within, rather than above, the more-than-human world. By foregrounding the land’s formidable alterity and its capacity to erode ego and identity, White’s fiction performs a crucial critique. It reveals the spiritual and ecological poverty of anthropocentrism, suggesting that a tenuous, fraught coexistence, predicated on a recognition of human insignificance, is the only alternative to the settler’s doomed project of domination.

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And now, ending a massive year in settler colonialism (and inaugurating the Permanent Observatory on Settler Colonialism): Ohio Barbarian, ‘We Are All Indigenous Now: How financial cleansing supplanted ethnic cleansing in the United States’, 29/12/25

30Dec25

A settler, who thinks like a settler and responds like a settler in the face of a settler crisis: access the Substack post here.

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Inconceivable! (The factory of settler colonialism): Mohamad Kadan, ‘The Impossible Factory: Dependency and Elimination in Israel’s Settler-Colonial Economy (1956–1960)’, Middle East Critique, 2025

30Dec25

Abstract: This article examines the failure of the Bal-Gharbieh factory in the late 1950s, an industrial venture proposed under Israeli military rule, to show how ‘economic development’ operated as a tool of elimination through dependency. It argues that understanding the Palestinian economy in Israel requires integrating two frameworks: dependency theory, rooted in Marxist critiques of development, and the logic of elimination in settler-colonial studies. Modernization in Arab villages functioned as a discourse of collaboration with select Palestinian figures and local leaders, reinforcing dependency, while simultaneously undermining their authority – as in the case of Fares Hamdan – by restructuring Palestinian economic and social life. Drawing on archival documents, government reports, and community narratives, the study shows that the factory, promoted as a step toward modernization, was designed to dispossess land, dismantle peasant structures, and control surplus labor. The factory’s rapid collapse was not the product of poor planning but of the settler-colonial state’s policies toward Palestinian citizens. Its failure, shaped by the involvement of local Zionist actors and companies seeking to exploit Arab labor, highlights how development projects intersected with elimination. This case complicates conventional narratives of Israeli development and dependency by showing how military rule extended control beyond the state and how minor Zionist actors reinforced settler-colonial structures.

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Fe(de)ral settler colonialism: Éléna Choquette, ‘Settler Federalism and the Conditions of Indigenous Autonomy: A Comparative Study’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 2025

30Dec25

Abstract: This article examines how different federal configurations can shape Indigenous autonomy across three cases: The United States, Canada, and Australia. While federations might seem better equipped than unitary states to share sovereignty with Indigenous peoples, they often entrench settler authority by internalizing Indigenous affairs, thereby limiting Indigenous self-government. Through a comparative historical analysis, this study shows that Indigenous autonomy is enhanced when settler governments externalize Indigenous affairs—treating them as nation-to-nation relationships through treaties or constitutional agreements. The article identifies two mechanisms that support such externalization: aligning Indigenous affairs with settler powers over foreign relations and separating them from settler control over land and resources. Drawing on constitutional and jurisdictional history, the study offers a novel framework for understanding how federal systems can either constrain or support Indigenous self-determination in the US, Canada, and Australia, highlighting the promise of treaty federalism as a path toward greater Indigenous jurisdiction and autonomy.

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Violence, slow and fast: Elena Ruíz, Structural Violence: The Makings of Settler Colonial Impunity, Oxford University Press, 2024

30Dec25

Description: Enduring social inequalities in settler colonial societies are not an accident. They are produced and maintained by the self-repairing structural features and dynastic character of systemic racism and its intersecting oppressions. Using methods from diverse anticolonial liberation movements and systems theory, Structural Violence theorizes the existence of adaptive and self-replicating historical formations that underwrite cultures of violence in settler colonial societies. Corresponding epistemic forces tied to profit and wealth accumulation for beneficiary groups often go untracked. The account offered here argues that these epistemic forces play a central role in producing and maintaining massive health inequalities and the maldistribution of disease burdens—including those associated with sexual violence—for marginalized populations. It upends the widespread view that structural racism can be dismantled without addressing gendered violence. It also advocates for a theory of change rooted in reparative action and models of structural competency that respond to the built-in design of structural violence and the ecosystems of impunity that allow it to thrive.

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Schooling settler colonialism: Meredith McCoy, On Our Own Terms: Indigenous Histories of School Funding and Policy, University of Nebraska Press, 2024

30Dec25

Description: On Our Own Terms contextualizes recent federal education legislation against the backdrop of two hundred years of education funding and policy to explore two critical themes: the racial and settler colonial dynamics that have shaped Indian education and an equally long and persistent tradition of Indigenous peoples engaging schools, funding, and policy on their own terms. Focusing primarily on the years 1819 to 2018, Meredith L. McCoy provides an interdisciplinary, methodologically expansive look into the ways federal Indian education policy has all too often been a tool for structural violence against Native peoples. Of particular note is a historical budget analysis that lays bare inconsistencies in federal support for Indian education and the ways funds become a tool for redefining educational priorities. McCoy shows some of the diverse strategies families, educators, and other community members have used to creatively navigate schooling on their own terms. These stories of strategic engagement with schools, funding, and policy embody what Gerald Vizenor has termed survivance, an insistence of Indigenous presence, trickster humor, and ironic engagement with settler structures. By gathering these stories together into an archive of survivance stories in education, McCoy invites readers to consider ongoing patterns of Indigenous resistance and the possibilities for bending federal systems toward community well-being.

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Outing settler colonialism: Caitlin Keliiaa, Refusing Settler Domesticity: Native Women’s Labor and Resistance in the Bay Area Outing Program, University of Washington Press, 2024

30Dec25

Description: In the early twentieth century, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women from boarding schools to labor as live-in domestic workers across the San Francisco Bay Area. Outing removed Native people from their communities and transferred them to white homes, farms, and businesses to work as menial laborers. In exchange for room, board, and meager pay, Native women and girls as young as twelve cooked, cleaned, and lived in the homes of their employers. Despite oppressive living and working conditions, they strategically resisted the worst aspects of outing, including Indian child removal, sexual surveillance, criminalization, and exploitation. Throughout, they forged social connections and navigated relationships to refuse domestication and assert their agency. In this groundbreaking work, historian Caitlin Keliiaa examines Native women’s lived experiences of federal policy and connects outing to the region’s longer history of coerced Native labor. Refusing Settler Domesticity explores the unexpected story of Native women in the Bay Area, decades before Indian Relocation, illuminating the women who helped shape the Bay Area Indian community as we know it today. This book, as indictment, expands the existing work on Indian boarding schools, urban Indians, and the history of California and the West.

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Sovereignty is a powerful story: Angela K. Parker, Damming the Reservation: Tribal Sovereignty and Activism at Fort Berthold, University of Oklahoma Press, 2024

30Dec25

Description: “The single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States,” Vine Deloria Jr. called it. For the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara communities living on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, the construction of the Garrison Dam as part of the New Deal–era Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program meant the flooding of a third of their land, including their most fertile agricultural acreage, the loss of their homes, and wrenching relocation. In Damming the Reservation, Angela K. Parker, an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes, offers a deeply researched, unflinching history of the tribes’ fight to preserve and rebuild their culture, shared history, common stories, sense of place, and sovereignty. With the richly informed and deeply personal perspective of a historian and descendant of those who survived these events, Parker tracks the riverine communities from 1920 to 1960, in the years before, during, and after the Army Corps of Engineers did its devastating work. By studying the inextricable link between on-the-ground conditions and national policy, she builds a cohesive narrative for twentieth-century Native American history that hinges on the assertion of Indigenous sovereignties. These battles over land, water, and resources that constitute the “territory” required to maintain a working sovereign body are at the very heart of the Native American past, present, and future. The author shows how Indigenous resistance to the Garrison Dam created a new generation of activists, including Tillie Walker, the focus of the book’s epilogue. Damming the Reservation documents what can happen when a settler colonial nation tramples tribal rights while exerting control over rural hinterlands: in this case, the reservation community developed a praxis of self-determination and tribal sovereignty that trickled up to the national level so that tribal meanings came to saturate federal Indian policy. This is a history whose lessons echo through today’s most pressing environmental justice crises.

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