settler colonial studies blog

The right to the settler colonial: Thiruni Kelegama, ‘The politics of rural access and settler colonialism: Weli Oya and the tensions of a right to the rural’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2025

13Jun25

Abstract: This commentary extends Van Sant and Fairbairn’s right to the rural concept by examining how access claims operate in contested territories through the case of Weli Oya, Sri Lanka. Analysing this Sinhala settlement scheme at the edge of Tamil-claimed territories, I demonstrate how rural access claims transcend agricultural utility to serve territorial control projects and reinforce settler colonial dynamics. These tensions necessitate a more nuanced analytical approach to distinguish between emancipatory and oppressive rural access claims in contested landscapes.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler colonial Japan: Roslynn Ang, ‘Unequally interdependent: Ainu social resilience within Japan settler-nation multicultural discourse’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2025

13Jun25

Abstract: Although the Japanese government gave up its discourse on racial homogeneity to actively promote multiculturalism featuring Ainu cultural heritage, the organizing committee dropped the proposed Ainu performance in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony. This paper examines how the politics of (not) recognizing the Ainu assist in the production of the Japanese settler nation and the Ainu community’s strategies to survive within this context. I argue that the state needs Ainu representations to market itself as a liberal multicultural nation that respects human rights in the global society. However, it faces a dilemma when Indigenous recognition unsettles the legitimacy of settler occupation and exposes the violent colonial heritage of the nation. The Ainu community strategically utilizes this mix of global and local discourse to retain spaces for practicing their intangible cultural heritage and cultural rights to natural resources.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler colonialism is hard labour: Shiri Pasternak, ‘Labour, Settler Colonialism, and Economies of Extraction: The Wages of Settlement’, in Meena Dhanda (ed.), Oxford Intersections: Racism by Context, 2025

12Jun25

Abstract: Indigenous resistance to colonization can intersect uncomfortably and often violently with a fight by workers to access Indigenous lands for extraction and jobs. Jobs have always been a literal frontier of settler colonial conflict because, simply put, colonization takes work. When immigrants began to settle through recruitment programmes en masse in Canada, they benefitted from a scale of colonial land seizure unknown anywhere else in the world at that time. The means by which to settle was the work— both required and provided—by corporations like the railroads, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and colonization enterprises. By the late 19th century, the market for wage labour on farms and in the central manufacturing regions was underway as industrialization took hold; the emergence of capitalism was born through its deep reliance on colonial land policy. For this reason, the political economy of colonialism can be studied through a long history of intersecting class formation and colonial land policy in Canada. We might call this dynamic the wages of settlement.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The discovery we need against settler colonialism: Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, Yale University Press, 2023

11Jun25

Description: The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. The long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a dynamic new generation of scholars insisting that any full American history must address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. In this ambitious book Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non-Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In a transformative synthesis of recent scholarship, Blackhawk shows that European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success, that Native nations helped shape England’s crisis of empire, that the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior, that California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War, that the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West, and that twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy. A full retelling of U.S. history requires much more than a reckoning over disease, violence, and dispossession—it requires acknowledging the enduring power, agency, and survival of Native nations to create a truer account of the formation and expansion of the United States. Studying and teaching America’s Indigenous truths reveals anew the varied meanings of America.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The Marx we need against settler colonialism: Kevin B. Anderson, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism, London, Verso, 2025

11Jun25

Description: In his late writings, Marx went beyond the boundaries of capital and class in the Western European and North American contexts. Kevin Anderson carries out a systematic analysis of Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and related texts on Russia, India, Ireland, Algeria, Latin America, and ancient Rome. These texts, some of them only now being published, provide evidence for a change of perspective, away from Eurocentric worldviews or unilinear theories of development. As Anderson shows, the late Marx elaborated a truly global, multilinear theory of modern society and its revolutionary possibilities.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Destroying to replace: Rafeef Ziadah, Christian Henderson, Omar Jabary Salamanca, Sharri Plonski, Charmaine Chua, Riya Al Sanah, Elia El Khazen, ‘Disruptive Geographies and the War on Gaza: Infrastructure and Global Solidarity’, Geopolitics, 2025

07Jun25

Abstract: This forum explores the geopolitics of infrastructure in the context of Israel’s war on Gaza, situating the current genocide within longer histories of settler colonialism, spatial control, and transnational complicity. As homes, hospitals, and schools are reduced to rubble, this destruction is not only military, but infrastructural – an assault on the material conditions of Palestinian life. Infrastructure emerges here not as background, but as a primary mechanism of governance, dispossession, and colonial reordering. From roads and borders to electricity grids and telecommunications, the systems that organise everyday life in Gaza and the West Bank are also those that fragment space, enforce dependency, and suppress self-determination. Rather than viewing this destruction in isolation, contributors trace how it is sustained by regional and global circuits of capital, logistics, arms, and energy. Gaza’s collapse is embedded in a broader political economy of militarism, where supply chains, defence industries, and financial infrastructures turn dispossession into profit. Yet, this forum also foregrounds counter-infrastructures and practices of resistance: from survival networks and subterranean spaces of refusal, to workers’ strikes and transport disruptions that challenge the flows sustaining Israeli militarism. Together, these essays ask what it means to ‘follow infrastructures’ in a moment of mass atrocity – what such a method reveals about power, complicity, and potential rupture. The forum moves beyond documenting destruction to consider how infrastructure is both a tool of domination and a terrain of struggle. Across scales and contexts, it highlights how Palestinians resist infrastructural warfare and how international solidarity movements can intervene in the systems that enable it. In doing so, the forum contributes to a growing body of politically accountable scholarship, mapping not only how infrastructures sustain violence, but how they might be reimagined.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

‘Spanish’ and settler question: Daniela Edmeier, ‘The Spanish Question: Migration, Identity, and Settler Politics in French Algeria, 1830-1939’, PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2025

07Jun25

Abstract: “The Spanish Question: Migration, Identity, and Settler Politics in French Algeria, 1830-1939” examines the place and influence of Spanish immigrants and their French-naturalized descendants (néos) in shaping – and being shaped by – French Algeria’s evolving social, political, and racial order. Focusing on the period from France’s occupation of Algeria in 1830 through the interwar era, it demonstrates how Spanish settlers served as a vital labor force and a persistent source of anxiety for both colonial administrators and established French settlers (Français d’origine). Although formally integrated via naturalization legislation, the néos remained subject to suspicion and marginalization, prompting them to navigate a precarious “in-between” status that reveals larger tensions underlying France’s colonial vision of citizenship, politics, whiteness, and social hierarchies. Through a multi-archival approach – encompassing French governmental records, Spanish consular correspondence, press publications, and select personal testimonies – this dissertation investigates the mechanisms by which néos were both included and excluded and their responses. It shows how transnational networks, local patronage, and governmental debates and anxieties around nationality, citizenship, and identity intersected. Neither wholly imposed upon, nor wholly powerful, Spanish immigrants and néos navigated a precarious terrain of partial acceptance and lingering suspicion, forging alliances and adopting strategies that at times reinforced and at other times subverted the colonial status quo. Simultaneously, French officials, journalists, and settler elites policed and perpetuated ethnic boundaries, insisting upon distinctions between “pure” and “paper” French people in the colony. These internal settler divisions, generally overshadowed by the stark divide between Europeans and Indigenous Algerians, represent a critical but underexplored dimension of colonial Algerian history. By weaving together immigration histories, diplomatic and governmental correspondence, municipal politics, and local reporting, the study illuminates how the néos leveraged limited resources and social capital to negotiate shifting political landscapes. Across the decades in question, patterns of inclusion and exclusion were further entangled with broader changes in the French Empire, including the rise of republican egalitarian ideals, the rhetoric of “Pan-Latin” solidarity, and heightened global anxieties about communism, fascism, and other transnational ideologies. As public debates on colonial citizenship intensified, the néos confronted ongoing challenges to their legitimacy and, in turn, influenced local realignments, especially with the extreme right, that shaped Algerian settler politics. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that Spanish settlers in Algeria played a pivotal and revealing role in exposing the fragility of French assimilationist frameworks. While naturalization nominally expanded the ranks of “white” citizens in Algeria, it also exposed fractures within the settler community itself, creating new arenas for social conflict and political competition. By tracing these developments, “The Spanish Question” speaks to broader historiographical conversations on the fluid boundaries of European settler identity and the complexities of colonial rule, offering a counter-narrative that goes beyond a simple colonizer-colonized binary. In so doing, it not only situates Spanish migration within the larger story of French Algeria but also enriches our understanding of how competing notions of race, belonging, and governance evolved and were contested in an empire that never fully resolved its own contradictions.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The ‘quarry noir’ of settler colonialism: Meg Brayshaw, ‘Quarry noir: Settler anxiety and the politics of mining in contemporary Australian crime fiction’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2025

07Jun25

Abstract: This article contributes new knowledge to understanding of the effects of extractivism on literature by examining the relationship between settler colonialism, resource extraction, and the operation of genre. It analyses a suite of Australian novels that harness the generic affordances of crime to address contemporary anxieties about the social, environmental, and political impacts of the nation’s reliance on mining. Drawing on definitions of noir that position it as a mode centred on tensions between desire and anxiety, this article classifies these novels as examples of “quarry noir”. The quarry is a site of depletion that symbolizes accumulation. This contradiction informs the novels’ anxious registration of resource extraction as desired and abhorrent. Manifesting when the formulaic crime narrative is complicated by a politicized anxiety that influences the text’s form, style, and tropology, quarry noir shows how literature addresses and is shaped by the extractive logic of the settler colony.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The Swan River Logic (of elimination): Mary Blight, ‘Colonial violence in Australia – “Swan River Logic” and the Voice referendum’, Limina, 30, 1, 2025, pp. 70-78

07Jun25

Abstract: This article looks at the crisis in forgetting and remembering of colonial violence in Australia today. This ‘forgetting’ is one of the factors that led to the Voice referendum resulting in a ‘no’ vote in October 2023. The violence of the colonisation of Australia was actively forgotten by settler society until the 1970s and is an area that still needs research today. Settlers sought to take Indigenous land and ‘replace’ Indigenous people, in line with settler colonial theory. This paper will look at two massacres on Noongar land or boodjarin 1837 and examinethe‘Swan River Logic’ behind settlerjustifications for the violence. Although these two events are on the University of Newcastle Massacre Map, they need to be further researched and explained to facilitate truth telling. Without truth telling the Australian public will continue to be unable to understand the need for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler transubstantiations (how an arid landscape becomes a past place): Joseph F. Getzoff, ‘Masters of the Wasteland: Zionist temporal territoriality and arid zone science’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2025

07Jun25

Abstract: Geographers understand territoriality as the logics of different institutions and actors that work to produce territory as part of a state. However, many geographers of territoriality tend to ignore settler colonial processes and how they may complicate relations to territory. This article contributes to this intervention by investigating specific temporal and environmental dimensions of settler territoriality in the context of the Naqab desert in Palestine-Israel. In Palestine-Israel, Zionists have often claimed that their state building project would rescue the land from Indigenous Palestinian ruin. Such narratives, and the policies that emanate from them, are supported not only by political-ideological actors, but also by scientific and academic institutions. I show how territoriality in this region relies on specific Zionist settler ideas of spatiality and temporality that attempt to efface Bedouin Palestinians’ past, present, and future connections to the land. I draw from the archives of desert research institutions beginning in the 1950s through the 1980s, as well as influential works by Zionist desert scientists, to understand how scientists constructed the ‘Negev’ as integral to state development. However, as I show through a deconstruction of my archival sources, such science is partial and flimsy, constantly negotiating with the biogeography of the Naqab, Indigenous presence, and relies on Bedouin labor and expertise.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute