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On a settler colonial imginary: Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola, Rutgers University Press, 2016

11Jan17

Description: This book begins with a simple question: why do so many Dominicans deny the African components of their DNA, culture, and history?

Seeking answers, Milagros Ricourt uncovers a complex and often contradictory Dominican racial imaginary. Observing how Dominicans have traditionally identified in opposition to their neighbors on the island of Hispaniola—Haitians of African descent—she finds that the Dominican Republic’s social elite has long propagated a national creation myth that conceives of the Dominican as a perfect hybrid of native islanders and Spanish settlers. Yet as she pores through rare historical documents, interviews contemporary Dominicans, and recalls her own childhood memories of life on the island, Ricourt encounters persistent challenges to this myth. Through fieldwork at the Dominican-Haitian border, she gives a firsthand look at how Dominicans are resisting the official account of their national identity and instead embracing the African influence that has always been part of their cultural heritage. 

Building on the work of theorists ranging from Edward Said to Édouard Glissant, this book expands our understanding of how national and racial imaginaries develop, why they persist, and how they might be subverted. As it confronts Hispaniola’s dark legacies of slavery and colonial oppression, The Dominican Racial Imaginary also delivers an inspiring message on how multicultural communities might cooperate to disrupt the enduring power of white supremacy.


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Sustainable? Caroline Winter, ‘Mormon Tycoon Wants to Build Joseph Smith’s Mega-Utopia in Vermont: David Hall is snapping up farmland to bring his vision of a sustainable high-density community to life’, Bloomberg, 20/07/16

10Jan17

Excerpt: ‘When this square is thus laid off and supplied, lay off another in the same way, and so fill up the world‘. (With thanks to Alex Young)


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Settler appropriations: Kevin Bruyneel, ‘Race, Colonialism, and the Politics of Indian Sports Names and Mascots: The Washington Football Team Case’, Native American and Indigenous Studies, 3, 2, 2016, pp. 1-24

07Jan17

Excerpt: In July 2014 the Center for American Progress released a study titled Missing the Point: The Real Impact of Mascots and Team Names on American Indian and Alaska Native Youth. Written by Erik Stegman and Victoria Phillips, this study further substantiated that the use of Indian team names and mascots has a clear negative social and psychological impact on Indigenous people, especially young people (Stegman and Phillips 2014; Fryberg et al. 2008). To introduce and publicize the report, the Center invited guest speakers and a panel to address the topic. The keynote speaker was Congresswoman Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), who in discussing the controversy over the Washington, D.C., football team’s name noted that i a derogatory word for people who are Jewish, African American, or Chinese was proposed as a sports team name, it “wouldn’t be allowed, no one would stand or it, but for some reason, the term ‘Redskin’ gets a free pass” (Center for American Progress 2014). Rep. McCollum is firmly on the side of those seeking to end the use of these names and mascots for sports teams at the high school, college, and professional levels in the United States. At the same time, her “for some reason” statement reveals an underlying confusion about why this is even an issue at all, and why there has not been comprehensive indignation and swift action to end this practice. McCollum is not alone in her confusion, as it is articulated often by those who oppose such names and mascots. The source of this confusion is the inability to grasp the manner in which settler-colonialism is both ubiquitous and, for most people, relatively invisible in U.S. political and cultural life. The history and present of settler-colonial violence toward and dispossession and appropriation of Indigenous people’s bodies, territory, and identity is ever present in the sports names and mascots issue. However, what most political actors and observers see and discuss in this debate is not settler-colonialism but rather race and racism. To deem as racist names such as the “Redskins” is not so much wrong as it is analytically incomplete and thus politically off the mark for grasping why these names and mascots get a “free pass”—why they were created in the first place, persist, and are so vehemently defended today by those who seek to maintain the status quo.

The present debate and politics regarding Indian sports names and mascots, such as with the case of the Washington football team’s name, provides an excellent opportunity to politicize and center settler-colonialism as a historical and contemporary structuring force of the United States. The sports names and mascot issue is a persistent and public practice of U.S. settler-colonial rule. It is a mnemonic device that disavows the dispossession of Indigenous territory and the violent and aggressive assimilatory practices against Indigenous peoples. Paying attention to the political functioning of memory matters here because understanding and intervening in this and other issues requires more than just getting the historical facts straight. Facts matter, but an awareness of facts will not do enough politically to generate change, and this is where we need to see and directly engage with collective memory, specifically settler memory. Settler memory refers to the mnemonics—that is, the functions, practices, and products of memory—of colonialist dispossession, violence, appropriation, and settlement that shape settler subjectivity and governmentality in liberal colonial contexts such as the United States. Settler mnemonics include not only places and teams named after Indigenous peoples, but also calendric commemorations such as Columbus Day and Thanksgiving, military nomenclature such as the Apache helicopter, and many other examples. These mnemonics are so ubiquitous that they are, at once, present and absent in American collective memory.


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Excluding exogenous others while excepting indigenous ones: Kathryn Walkiewicz, ‘Affirmative Exclusions: The Indigenous Exception in Oklahoma’s Official English’, Native American and Indigenous Studies, 3, 2, 2016 pp. 25-44

07Jan17

Excerpt: The decade following 9/11 saw a wave of state and federal legislative efforts to secure borders and identify terrorists. As evidenced perhaps most famously by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the passage of the Patriot Act, the “era of terror” ushered in a new relationship between national security, mobility, and surveillance that functioned in tandem with decreased regulation and transparency of national security efforts. Panic about the falling numbers of jobs and resources during the economic recession that followed the 2008 housing market crash, along with heightened militarization, catalyzed a reactionary swing to the far right that assigned significant blame for these national “crises” onto the figure of the “foreigner” as the cause of this terror. As legal scholar Leti Volpp has shown in her work on post-9/11 hate crimes and racial profiling, the terrorist and the immigrant become figures of suspicion which threaten U.S. surveillance of bodies and capital that travel within its parameters unmonitored. Moreover, they become conflated—almost one and the same. In the post-9/11 United States, immigration has produced a correlative relationship between the “illegal immigrant” (often read as Spanish-speaking) and the “foreign terrorist” (often read as a Muslim extremist)—both seen as threats to the state’s militarized autonomy and economy, and both aligned in racially and historically loaded ways.

In the mid-2000s, official English legislation (also known as the “English-only movement”) gained short-term popularity as a way for states to assert a political stance on autonomy, foreign affairs, and multiculturalism under the valence of patriotism. Thus English became a weapon in the global war on terror, and non-English-speaking individuals became suspect, made synonymous with the figure of the threatening outsider, the immigrant other. Arizona’s official English debates received the lion’s share of media attention, but Idaho, Kansas, and Oklahoma followed suit by passing legislation of their own. In this essay I argue that the Oklahoma Official Language Implementation Act, authorizing an amendment to the state constitution, marked a key rhetorical shift in Indigenous–settler relations. By including an exception for Native language use in the amendment, Native nations are understood as “affirmative exclusions” (or positive exceptions) to the legislation, in contrast to the perceived foreign “other” targeted under the changes. I begin by outlining the stakes of these changes and presenting an analysis of the exception made for Indigenous languages in the amendment. I then provide historical context for current Indigenous–settler relations in Oklahoma. After situating the amendment in a longer regional history, I move into an analysis of the legislative debates and their contemporaneous press coverage, as well as a discussion of the logics of neoliberal multiculturalism that undergirded the debates. I end with considerations of the larger impact official English may have both in Oklahoma and beyond its borders.

The amendment received overwhelming support in a 2010 general vote, but while under discussion in both houses of the legislature in 2009 it garnered outspoken criticism from some key constituents. English symbolically registered national and state pride for many Oklahomans, but compulsory language use also triggered memories of the state’s long colonial history. As State Representative Mike Brown (D) emphatically insisted in 2009 legislative debates, official English “reek[ed] of forced assimilation.” The legislation echoed language debates of a prior era in which Native peoples, particularly children, as a method of assimilation and colonial acculturation were forcibly required to stop speaking their Indigenous languages and only speak English; history threatened to repeat itself (yet again) in Oklahoma. But legislators who supported the bill insisted that it was not about repeating the sins of Oklahoma’s colonial past. Rather, they assured, it was about protecting current citizens from the threat of a cultural and economic terror ushered in by an imagined inundation of immigrants.


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How did a settler empire turned into a capitalist one: James Parisot, ‘The Two Hundred and Fifty Year Transition: How the American Empire Became Capitalist’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 2016

07Jan17

Abstract: This paper aims to rethink United States history from the colonial era through the Civil War and Reconstruction by examining how capitalism and empire joined together as the logic of expansion increasingly became driven by the logic of capital over approximately two hundred and fifty years. Specifically, it argues that (what became) the United States originated as a ‘society with capitalism’ and became a ‘capitalist society’. This transition was a highly complex and uneven process as a variety of social forms developed and interacted, and in which there was not one road to capitalism, but a variety, depending on the historical circumstance. To accomplish this, first, the article reviews the Marx-Weber debate to develop a theoretical and methodological approach to the historical sociology of capitalism. The remainder of the paper focuses on narrating an empirical interpretation of the transition to capitalism including the diversity of labor forms capital historically utilized.


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Remembering a great scholar: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Patrick Wolfe’s Dialectics’, Aboriginal History, 40, 2016, pp. 249-260

05Jan17

Excerpt: Patrick Wolfe’s Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology appeared in 1998. Wolfe’s provocation was to look for settler colonialism in the ongoing subjection of indigenous peoples in settler societies. The contemporary settler polities, he later argued, have been ‘impervious to regime change’. It was an Australian-produced response to the consolidation and global spread of postcolonial studies as discourse and method (quite interestingly, postcolonial studies had also originally been an Australian intellectual export). Wolfe’s call became very influential and inspired the consolidation of settler colonial studies as a distinct scholarly field. This tribute focuses on his method and influence.


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Distinct colonial regimes produce distinct subalternities: Amahl Alexis Bishara, ‘Palestinian acts of speaking together, apart: Subalterneities and the politics of fracture’, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6, 3, 2016

05Jan17

Abstract: Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank both protested in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza during the 2014 war. They did so with what Charles Tilly would regard as distinct repertoires of contention, though they both referenced the same heritage of resistance. I argue that we should interrogate the boundaries that states establish to see how different forms of sovereignty and state violence shape resistance and expression. This approach highlights the role of the state in constituting the public sphere. The distinct subalterneities of these two Palestinian communities are a product not only of their political positions under Israeli rule, but also of the larger dynamics of fragmentation that separate them from one another. An analysis of their forms of protest demonstrates that in both cases, Palestinian protesters performed political community, whether by establishing a collective voice or by taking over space.


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Settler political science hates indigenous peoples: Kennan Ferguson, ‘Why Does Political Science Hate American Indians?’, Perspectives on Politics, 14, 4, 2016, pp. 1029-1038

03Jan17

Abstract: Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a set of alternative formulations that could expand our understanding of politics, including attention to other forms of law, constitutions, relationships to the environment, sovereignty, collective decision-making, U.S. history, and majoritarianism.


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Settler colonialism is about looking sideways: Oana Godeanu Kenworthy, ‘Fictions of Race: American Indian Policies in Nineteenth-Century British North American Fiction’, Journal of American Studies, 2016

03Jan17

Abstract: This article explores the hemispheric and transatlantic uses of race and empire as tropes of settler-colonial otherness in the novel The Canadian Brothers (1840) by Canadian author John Richardson. In this pre-Confederation historical novel, Richardson contrasts the imperial British discourse of racial tolerance, and the British military alliances with the Natives in the War of 1812, with the brutality of American Indian policies south of the border, in an effort to craft a narrative of Canadian difference from, and incompatibility with, American culture. At the same time, the author’s critical attitude towards all European military and commercial interventions in the New World illuminates the rootedness of both American and Canadian settler colonialisms in British imperialism, and exposes the arbitrariness and constructedness of the political boundaries dividing the continent.


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Making settler places (II): Karin Zbinden Gysin, ‘Re-Creating an Alpine Way of Life: Tyrolean Settlers in the Peruvian Jungle’, Journal of Alpine Research, 104, 3, 2016

03Jan17

Abstract: The paper shows how an ethnic group in Pozuzo, an old colony founded by Tyrolean and German settlers in the Peruvian jungle, recreates an alpine way of life. This case study, which is based on evidence from the field in Pozuzo and in Tyrol, illustrates how cultural resources linked to ‘alpine’ ways of life are constructed and claimed within the multi-ethnic rural community of Pozuzo as well as in Tyrolean NGOs.


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