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On the population of a place that lies beyond (i.e. beyond the Amur river): Victor Zatsepine, Beyond the Amur Frontier Encounters between China and Russia, 1850-1930, UBC Press, 2017

24Feb17

Description: Beyond the Amur describes the distinctive frontier society that emerged in the Amur, a river region that shifted between Qing China and imperial Russia as the two empires competed for resources. Official histories depict the Amur as a distant battleground caught between rival empires. Zatsepine, by contrast, views it as a unified natural economy populated by Chinese, Russian, Indigenous, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, and Mongol people who crossed the border in search of work or trade and who came together to survive a harsh physical environment. This colourful account of a region and its people highlights the often overlooked influence of frontier developments on state politics and imperial policies and histories.


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On the logic of elimination: Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–196, UNC Press Books, 2017

22Feb17

Description: Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world’s leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration.

But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation’s carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.


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With a section on ‘Settler colonialism and the transformation and regulation of water’: Kate A. Berry, Sue Jackson, Teresa Cavazos Cohn, Kenichi Matsui, ‘Indigenous water histories II: water histories and the cultural politics of water for contemporary Indigenous groups’, Water History, 2017

22Feb17

Excerpt: This second special issue extends coverage to additional Indigenous groups and further examines water histories associated with: the Lumbee and Tuscarora Indians of North Carolina, U.S., as researched by William Maxwell; the Andean people of Tabacundo, Ecuador, as researched by Juan Pablo Hidalgo, Rutgerd Boelens, and Jeroen Vos; the Ngai Tahu (Maori) of the Waitaki River basin, South Island, New Zealand, as researched by Gail Tipa and Kyle Nelson; the Puyallup Tribe of the Pacific Northwest, U.S., as researched by Amory Ballantine; and the Yaqui people of Sonora, Mexico, as researched by Raquel Padilla Ramos and Jose Moctezuma Zamarron. While paying close attention to the significance of rivers, swamps, estuaries, irrigation, and other water systems for these Indigenous communities, each of the authors also stress the dynamics of settler colonialism within which conflicts over water arose and Indigenous resistance and re-appropriation took place. In other words, these articles examine the cultural politics of water from a historical perspective.


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More colonial and settler colonial engagements: Andy Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994, Chicago University Press, 2017

19Feb17

Description: In recent years, as peace between Israelis and Palestinians has remained cruelly elusive, scholars and activists have increasingly turned to South African history and politics to make sense of the situation. In the early 1990s, both South Africa and Israel began negotiating with their colonized populations. South Africans saw results: the state was democratized and black South Africans gained formal legal equality. Palestinians, on the other hand, won neither freedom nor equality, and today Israel remains a settler-colonial state. Despite these different outcomes, the transitions of the last twenty years have produced surprisingly similar socioeconomic changes in both regions: growing inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the racialized poor. Neoliberal Apartheid explores this paradox through an analysis of (de)colonization and neoliberal racial capitalism.

After a decade of research in the Johannesburg and Jerusalem regions, Andy Clarno presents here a detailed ethnographic study of the precariousness of the poor in Alexandra township, the dynamics of colonization and enclosure in Bethlehem, the growth of fortress suburbs and private security in Johannesburg, and the regime of security coordination between the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The first comparative study of the changes in these two areas since the early 1990s, the book addresses the limitations of liberation in South Africa, highlights the impact of neoliberal restructuring in Palestine, and argues that a new form of neoliberal apartheid has emerged in both contexts.


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Colonial and settler colonial engagements: Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, Maud S. Mandel (eds), Colonialism and the Jews, Indiana University Press, 2017

19Feb17

Description: The lively essays collected here explore colonial history, culture, and thought as it intersects with Jewish studies. Connecting the Jewish experience with colonialism to mobility and exchange, diaspora, internationalism, racial discrimination, and Zionism, the volume presents the work of Jewish historians who recognize the challenge that colonialism brings to their work and sheds light on the diverse topics that reflect the myriad ways that Jews engaged with empire in modern times. Taken together, these essays reveal the interpretive power of the “Imperial Turn” and present a rethinking of the history of Jews in colonial societies in light of postcolonial critiques and destabilized categories of analysis. A provocative discussion forum about Zionism as colonialism is also included.


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Greenland’s postcolonialities (on the Reconciliation Commission and Self-Government Act): Kirsten Thisted, ‘The Greenlandic Reconciliation Commission: Ethnonationalism, Arctic Resources, and Post-Colonial Identity’, in Lill-Ann Körber, Scott MacKenzie, Anna Westerståhl Stenport , Arctic Environmental Modernities: From the Age of Polar Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 231-246

19Feb17

Abstract: This chapter addresses the Greenlandic Reconciliation Commission established in 2014. Examining the different agendas and political positions that have shaped the debate around reconciliation, the author shows how the political processes that led to the Act on Greenland Self-Government in 2009 ran parallel to the UN negotiations on the rights of indigenous peoples, while the term “indigenous peoples” is not mentioned anywhere in the act. She argues that the Greenland public discourse of indigeneity is currently being transformed from a language of resistance to a language of independent governance, providing a model of global significance in terms of postcolonial identity and ethnonationalism. The Reconciliation Commission negotiations furthermore address Greenland’s interest in establishing itself as an Arctic resource extraction economy while recognizing its colonial and postcolonial dependency on Denmark.


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The settler is missing (isn’t he mobile, or a key figure?): Noel B. Salazar (ed.), Special Issue: Key figures of mobility, Social Anthropology, 25, 2, 2017

19Feb17

From the introduction: Figures of mobility, from nomads to flâneurs and tourists, have been used to describe both self and other in the social sciences and humanities for a long time. They act as a conceptual shorthand in contemporary scholarly debates, allowing social theorists to relate broad-scale phenomena to the human condition. This repeated usage highlights how these figures have become ‘keywords’, in the sense given by Raymond Williams, which typify much of the vocabulary constituting the study of human mobility today. In this general introduction, I lay out the overall conceptual framework behind the various contributions to this special issue.


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It takes (a settler understanding of) time: Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, Duke University Press, 2017

17Feb17

Description:  What does it mean to say that Native peoples exist in the present?  In Beyond Settler Time Mark Rifkin investigates the dangers of seeking to include Indigenous peoples within settler temporal frameworks. Claims that Native peoples should be recognized as coeval with Euro-Americans, Rifkin argues, implicitly treat dominant non-native ideologies and institutions as the basis for defining time itself. How, though, can Native peoples be understood as dynamic and changing while also not assuming that they belong to a present inherently shared with non-natives? Drawing on physics, phenomenology, queer studies, and postcolonial theory, Rifkin develops the concept of “settler time” to address how Native peoples are both consigned to the past and inserted into the present in ways that normalize non-native histories, geographies, and expectations. Through analysis of various kinds of texts, including government documents, film, fiction, and autobiography, he explores how Native experiences of time exceed and defy such settler impositions. In underscoring the existence of multiple temporalities, Rifkin illustrates how time plays a crucial role in Indigenous peoples’ expressions of sovereignty and struggles for self-determination.


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Restorative justice may not be restorative or just: Maraleigh Short, Frontline Reflections of Restorative Justice in Winnipeg: Considering Settler Colonialism In Our Practice, MA dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2016

17Feb17

Abstract: Based on the reflections of frontline workers, this paper explores restorative justice programming in Winnipeg, Manitoba and critically raises questions around settler colonialism, the justice process, and the “participant” “worker” relationship. Within settler colonial theory, the criminal justice system is seen as a colonial project that continues to disproportionately control and confine Indigenous Peoples. In theory, restorative justice is an alternative to the criminal justice system because of its emphasis on addressing harms rather than doling out punishment, yet it too is constrained by an ongoing settler colonial system. Exploring how workers understand settler colonialism and the restorative justice difference in their work and in their relationship with participants, this thesis argues that, to its detriment, restorative justice theory has not adequately considered settler colonialism. Bringing together Peace and Conflict Studies theories of relationship building and emerging critical theories of settler colonialism, this project explores frontline hopes for and critiques of restorative justice programming in an urban setting. Grounded in a critical constructivist research paradigm, data was collected through one-on-one interviews and focus groups with ten frontline workers who are program coordinators, victim offender mediators, and community workers. Framed by the writer’s own experience as a frontline worker, the collected narratives offer critical, yet hopeful insight into restorative justice theory and practice, particularly within settler colonial contexts.


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Settler colonial studies is not a new approach: Walid Salem, ‘Jerusalem: Reconsidering the Settler Colonial Analysis’, Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture, 21, 4, 2016, pp. 21-27

15Feb17

Abstract: The period from the 1940s to the 1970s was one of decolonization and self-determination for many countries in Asia and Africa. An immense amount of academic and intellectual writings about colonialism, neocolonialism as well as settler colonialism accompanied that process of decolonization. At the same time, the United Nations released several resolutions and documents condemning colonialism and seeking the immediate fulfillment of the right to self-determination for all peoples living under colonial rule. The most famous among these resolutions is the 1960 UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV), Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.

The writings on colonialism at that time focused on military colonialism and the right of all peoples to self-determination and emancipation from colonial occupation, while neocolonialism focused on how colonialism “left through the door and came back through the window,”, using economic and cultural means rather than direct military control as it was the case with colonialism before.

The writings about settler colonialism focused on a type of colonialism which combines military occupation with a settler colonial component that included taking over land, space, territory and landscape, by displacing and uprooting indigenous populations and replacing them with another population. This created, at the cost of the dispossession of the indigenous people, a new society and state with a different type of space, landscape, language and culture. The Palestinian academic and intellectual Fayez Sayigh was one of the pioneers of analyzing the Israeli Zionist settler colonial project, alongside Edward Said, whose book Orientalism is considered a leading work in the field.


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