ABstract: In the early 20th century, Baltic German landowners recruited German farmers from Russia. The immigration of these farmers – at that time called “German colonists” – inspired a variety of colonial discourses.

Abstract: This essay considers the legal and literary construction of terra nullius through the early fiction of Australian author Gerald Murnane. Focusing on The Plains and “Land Deal,” I explore how Murnane puts to work settlercolonial myths of empty land, property, and possession. By staging rival ontologies of land between Indigenous custodianship and settler commodification, I suggest that this work dramatizes the imaginative and juridical mechanisms by which terra nullius was rendered present and real. Murnane’s fiction can be thought of as an implicit challenge to the colonial impulse to impose meaning, revealing the enduring tension between narrative, law, and landscape.

Excerpt: Settler colonialism was never inevitable in North America. It was always vulnerable to defeat at the hands of the colonized who waged anticolonial wars in defense of their territories and governance. Anticolonial war was the reminder of settler colonialism’s limits and weaknesses that its narratives of conquest disavowed. When US settlers invaded Indigenous lands of the western seaboard following the United States’ imperial war that seized Mexico’s northern territories in 1848, they confronted erupting anticolonial wars with the potential to upend US rule. One of the most formidable anticolonial war campaigns during this period was the Garra Uprising of 1851. Antonio Garra, a leader of the Cupeño nation, united and led the Cupeños, Cahuillas, Cocopahs, Kumeyaay, Luiseño, and Quechan in armed rebellion to rout US settlers from southern California. Garra’s forces seized settlers’ livestock, destroyed enemy infrastructure, and killed in battle those who tried to repress the uprising. Garra specifically targeted settlers known for anti-Indigenous abuse and violence. US military forces and state militias scrambled to contain the uprising. It only came to an end due to internal disunity. Garra was betrayed by a fellow leader, Juan Antonio of the Chuillas, who used a coalition meeting with Garra as a trap to capture and deliver him to US authorities. Joshua Bean, the Major General of California’s state militia, formally arrested Garra and charged him with treason against the United States. Despite arguing that he had never pledged loyalty to the United States as the leader of a sovereign Indigenous nation fighting to end unjust US rule over Cupeño lands, Garra was found guilty and executed by firing squad.

Abstract: The article explores the strategic use of the pseudonym “Yakut” by a group of Sakha (Yakut) intellectuals in the late Russian Empire to assert their political voice against imperial authority and settler colonialism. Operating from the margins of the empire, this collective voice engaged in sophisticated public discourse that did not merely respond to imperial misrepresentation but actively constructed a political language of Indigenous self-assertion. The article systematically examines three key thematic areas in which the pseudonym was deployed: rewriting Sakha history to legitimize traditional governance, rigorously critiquing land policy and settler colonialism with environmental realism, and advocating for Indigenous self-government by repurposing imperial legal frameworks. Ultimately, the article argues that “Yakut” was a discursive position crafted by an educated elite to assert intellectual sovereignty and redefine the terms of Sakha participation within a contradictory imperial system.

Abstract: This essay is framed by the author’s decision to invent a historical document – a fictitious guide to colonization management written by the imagined bureaucrat Andrei Ivanovich Korotich – to visualize the real but unsystematized Russian colonization ideology of the 1840s. Focused on peasant resettlement ( pereselenie) as a bureaucratic tool for rationalizing the relationship between land and people, this invented “Guide to Russian Colonization Management,” highlights the chaos, corruption, and “unauthorized” movement of state peasants. This thought experiment synthesizes a nonexistent bureaucratic manual based on the general governmentality of the era, as represented by Nicholas I’s legislation and numerous instructions. Published alongside a real analytical memo on colonization penned in 1907 by the longtime colonization expert Fyodor Umnov, this essay exposes the limitations of applying settler colonialism models based on clear binaries and homogenizing the “colonial mind” as suggested by settler colonial theorists. The complex and historically evolving semantics of settler colonization in the imperial context renders those binaries uninformative – whether these are empire versus subject or resettlement versus the state.

Abstract: Animal rights activism has been criticised in settler-colonial states for overlooking human rights abuses and shielding colonial powers. However, the efforts of animal rights activists to expand their political alliances with subaltern and colonised others are laden with tensions, stemming from the oppression and violence of settler-colonial projects. The steps that progressive non-Indigenous activists can take to support alliances with colonised others are therefore unclear. In this article, we contend that Indigenous activists’ perspectives offer critical insights into the development of alliances between Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists towards linked human and animal rights in settler-colonial states. Drawing on an ethnography with Indigenous activists in Occupied Palestine (pre-October 7), we show that the conditions for alliance-building exceed the rejection of racialised settler colonialism. They also require commitments by non-Indigenous activists towards Indigenous grassroots movements encompassing the diverse political agendas and heterogeneity of Indigenous societies. Beyond the hegemony of Israeli occupation, Palestinian activists seek alliances that centre community and youth development, and self-determination as key dimensions of linked animal and human rights. These priorities unsettle the Western strictures of animal rights anchored in veganism as the sole political concern of Palestinian activists. Questioning the efficacy of inflexible moral and ethical frameworks as platforms for alliance-building, we instead locate alliances for linked animal and human rights within a politics of listening anchored in settler-colonial discomfort, the labour of yielding to Indigenous priorities and remaining open to contingent, ‘on the ground’ politics. In so doing, we show that activist ethnography can reveal complex postcolonial engagements with the political, and the plural and hybrid human and animal activisms that these geographies give rise to.

Abstract: This chapter proposes cement – the world’s most widely used building material, as a lens through which to theorize the processes of Israeli settlement construction in the occupied West Bank. It draws on an ethnographic case study of Israeli settlement construction of private villas in Nokdim and follows cement’s material and immaterial flows. By attending to cement’s material properties, ideological connotations, geopolitical and legal deployment, and unpredictable connections and trajectories, this chapter goes beyond the categorical separation between “the material-lived” (the built environment) and “the representational” (discourse on settlements). The open-ended assemblage that emerges from this case shows that “the material-lived” and “the representational” are co-constitutive and cannot be studied separately and that centring the building material can reconceptualize theory on settler colonialism, its practices, and processes. This chapter invites the political and material anthropologist to think with and through building materials and urges the architect to think of materials beyond their physical, sustainable, and aesthetic properties.

Abstract: In August 2019, the Hindu nationalist government led by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) unilaterally abolished Kashmir’s autonomous status, the basis of its provisional accession to India. Since then, the Indian government has revoked Kashmir’s special land protections that prevented outsiders from buying land in Kashmir. Some scholars have responded to this political moment by situating Jammu and Kashmir within a theoretical settler-colonial model, interpreting India’s past integration policies, surveillance, assimilation agenda, land dispossession, and more through this lens. However, this chapter demonstrates the limitations of the settler-colonial framework to explain the rich and complex post-1947 history of Kashmir. Instead, it places the land question in Kashmir within its unique regional context and examines the complex dynamics at play. Drawing on laws and legislation, court cases, and legal narratives, this chapter historicizes India’s territorialization efforts across different temporal frames against the backdrop of state-subject laws, agrarian reforms, urban spatial changes, and the recent transformation of Kashmir into a site of neoliberal economic extraction. It also highlights the emotional significance of land for Kashmiris and its role in shaping their politics of collaboration and resistance. Ultimately, the chapter argues that India’s forcible integration of Kashmir reflects a postcolonial nation-building strategy focused on producing territorial sovereignty, shaped by the entanglements of imperial capitalism, neoliberalism, and corporate interests.

Abstract: Settler colonialism instantiated not only new regimes of property relations that privilege mastery and ownership but also a suite of concepts that define humans apart from land and Earth processes. Addressing the legacy of settler colonialism warrants addressing not only the historical legacy of political and economic arrangements but also the conceptual legacies that continue to insert, into scholarship, the fiction of human independence of the conditions of local habitability. Building on the call of Danowski and De Castro (2016) to refigure the concept of the human which universalises the illusion of people’s separation from nature, their concept of the “Terran” invites an integrative science of local habitability based on material flows, exchanges, and relations. Critical zone sciences, I suggest, frame the terms of such a science that avoids reducing the world to calculative reason sans context.

• Jane Komori, ‘“Worried Over This Boat”: Archives of Asian Settler Colonial Critique’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: This article examines the history of racialized labor in pre-World War II primary resource industries along British Columbia’s Fraser River. I argue that settler colonial policies and practices that restricted the activities of Indigenous peoples and Asian Canadians – while often meant to divide them – were productive of dynamic relationships and solidarities. At the same time, I articulate a historiographical method for Asian settler colonial critique that brings together the wealth of records of Asian immigrant and Indigenous relationships.

• r. Shizuko Hayashi-Simpliciano, Sachi Edwards, ‘De-Imperializing Through Moshiri: An Ainu in Diaspora Framework for Addressing Internalized Empire and Japanese American Apathy’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: In this paper we introduce the Moshiri Model, a framework to guide the process of de-imperialization that is rooted in Ainu in Diaspora spirituality and experience. Using reconstructed dialogues as a storytelling method, we illustrate what it can look like to engage in de-imperializing work within ourselves and our communities. Doing so requires confronting how internalized Japanese imperialism, Christian supremacy, and Zionism (and their historical interconnections) have shaped, and continue to shape, Asian settler colonialism. Ultimately, the de-imperialization work we describe aims to guide critical reflection about our individual and collective relationships with and responsibilities toward Indigenous communities.

• Tabitha Espina,Kristin Oberiano, Josephine Ong, ‘Deconstructing Asian Settler Colonialism and the American Dream in Guåhan/Guam and Other Sites of U.S. Empire’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: This is a conversation between several co-founders of Filipinos for Guåhan to discuss academic and community work on the specific articulations that Filpino colonial setter colonialism plays in Guåhan/Guam. We consider the ways that Asian settler colonialism enables us to deconstruct dehumanizing social, political, epistemic, and linguistic hierarchies and instead build in and through inafa’maolek as a value and practice.

• Ryan Buyco, ‘Filipinx Reflections on Travel Writing and Asian Settler Colonial Critique in Okinawa’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: This essay is a reflection on my ongoing book project, Island Under the Sun: Filipino American Detours in Okinawa, which is a travelogue informed by Asian settler colonial critique. This project considers how histories of Japanese and American colonialisms shape the relationship that Filipinos have to this place, especially given how the U.S. bases have historically brought, and continue to bring, Filipinos to these islands. In this essay, I suggest that the genre of travel writing can be used in decolonial ways, to express forms of relationality that disrupt the tourist image of Okinawa as “Japan’s Hawai’i.

• Mona Bhan, Hafsa Kanjwal, Goldie Osuri, Beenash Jafri, Zunaira Shakur, ‘Critical Kashmir Studies and Asian Settler Colonial Critique: A Conversation’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: In this conversation, three scholars of Critical Kashmir Studies – Mona Bhan, Hafsa Kanjwal, and Goldie Osuri – reflect on how Asian settler colonial critique might usefully be mobilized toward understanding the Indian occupation of Kashmir. Asian settler colonial critique not only disrupts India’s postcolonial narrative, but also shifts the conversation on Kashmir away from discourses of geopolitical security or bi-lateral relations between India and Pakistan.

• Nabilah Husna Binte Abdul Rahman, Mengzhu Fu, ‘Spiraling In and Out: A Conversation on Decolonial Asian and Indigenous Solidarity from Aotearoa and So-Called Canada to Asia’, Amerasisa Journal, 2025

Abstract: As Indigenous resurgence and resistance globally make visible the violence of colonization, the growth of Asian diasporic solidarity introduces new possibilities and challenges. Literature examining Asian-Indigenous solidarities in settler colonial states primarily focuses on so-called North America. This conversation between organizers Nabilah Husna Abdul Rahman and Mengzhu Fu spirals from Aotearoa-based practices of decolonial solidarity outwards to Singapore, Canada-occupied Indigenous lands, and beyond. They explore place-based practices of solidarity, pedagogies, and their potential connections to international Indigenous communities. Offering practical strategies, from “small” to “big,” they reaffirm the centrality of the protection of Indigenous land and waters in solidarity efforts.

• Nishant Upadhyay, ‘Fraught Solidarities: Diasporic Hindutva and Claims to Indigeneity’, Amerasisa Journal, 2025

Abstract: In recent years, diasporic hindu right has mobilized discourses of indigeneity to forge solidarities with Indigenous peoples across varying white settler colonial contexts of the U.S, Hawaiʻi, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. These solidarities are not decolonial but are colonial and casted manifestations of hindu nationalism. Rooted in brahminical supremacy, these solidarities are not only fraudulent but also disavow the lives and struggles of Indigenous peoples globally. These solidarities demonstrate how the hindu right works in insidious ways in the disguise of multiculturalism and liberal anti-racism to co-opt and manipulate anti-colonial and decolonial agendas.

• Leah M. Kuragano, ‘Four Lessons from Winnipeg on Asian Settler “Belonging”’, Amerasia Journal, 2025

Abstract: This essay contemplates my (re)settlement to Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the form of a personal narrative, mapped out through four lessons in border-crossing, safety, orientation, and unlandedness. Each lesson reflects on the fraught complexities of “belonging” for Asian settlers as well as the liberatory potential of a relationship to place for Asian settlers that takes sacred connection, a love for community, and devotion to land as its lodestar.