settler colonial studies blog

On the politics of settler coethnicity: Barbara Hankes, ‘Shifting Identifications in Dutch-South African Migration Policies (1910–1961)’, South African Historical Journal, 2016

26Jun16

Abstract: This article examines the migratory movement from the Netherlands to South Africa and the associated migration policies in both countries over the years 1910 to 1961. Migration acts as a lens through which shifting constructions of national, transnational and racial identities can be observed. Depending on the politicians in charge, the contribution of Dutch migrants to the South African nation was alternately framed in terms of their white, civilised Europeanness (as opposed to black, uncivilised Africanness), and in terms of their alleged ‘kinship’ (stamverwantschap) with the Afrikaners (as opposed to the British). Under the restrained immigration policy of the Nationalist Party in the 1950s this gave Dutch immigrants a privileged position regarding admission to South Africa, and it gave South Africa a special appeal as country of destination for Dutch emigrants. This changed only when the ethnic identification with white Afrikaners, and European settlers in general, since 1960 gradually gave way to an internationally shared political identification with the struggles of black Africans against apartheid. By studying the migration dynamics between both countries we may gain insight into the making and unmaking of both Dutch and South African national and racial identifications, against the backdrop of a colonial heritage.

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On the politics of settler politics: Fall Makhete, Early Political Discord in Kenya: European Settlers’ Political Struggles in the East Africa Protectorate, 1902-1912, PhD Dissertation, West Virginia University, 2016

26Jun16

Abstract: This study of European settlers’ political struggles encompasses a ten-year period (1902-12) during which the foundations of Kenya’s modern politics were established. The dissertation follows political contestation originating from the East Africa Protectorate’s small European settler community during the administrations of four commissioners/governors. The politics of this period involved varied individuals and organizations that sought to move the colonial state in the direction of policies European politicians advocated in such critical areas as land and labor, the administration of justice, and in the system of government that applied to them and other residents of the protectorate. The settler politicians pushed for a voice in protectorate affairs on the way to the achievement of responsible government on the pattern of South Africa, from which so many of them came to the Kenya highlands. The drive to attain a “white man’s country” that marked this decade was thus very critical for future politics. The segregated system demanded by the Europeans had a huge impact on Kenyan history as did the types of organizations they founded and the tactics they adopted. Nevertheless, the European political struggles, while influential, never led to European political control and the establishment of a minority-ruled Kenya as the political agitation did not cause the Colonial Office to bow to the settler politicians’ demands.

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Comparing the politics of settler affection: Affrica Taylor, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, ‘Kids, raccoons, and roos: awkward encounters and mixed affects’, Children’s Geographies, 2016

26Jun16

Abstract: Within the Western cultural imaginary, child–animal relations are characteristically invoked with fond nostalgia and sentimentality. They are often represented as natural and innocent relations, thick with infantilizing and anthropomorphizing ‘cute’ emotions. Our multispecies ethnographic research – which is conducted in the everyday, lived common worlds of Australian and Canadian children and animals – reveals a very different political and emotional landscape. We find these embodied child–animal relations to be non-innocently entangled, fraught, and messy. In this article, we focus on some awkward encounters of mixed affect when kids and raccoons co-inhabit an urban forest setting in Vancouver, and when kids and kangaroos bodily encounter each other in a bush setting in Canberra. We trace the imbroglio of child–animal curiosities, warinesses, risks, inconveniences, revulsions, attachments, and confrontations at these sites as generative of new ethical logics.

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The other ‘Dominion’: Dan Freeman-Maloy, ‘The international politics of settler self-governance: reflections on Zionism and ‘Dominion’ status within the British empire’, Settler Colonial Studies,2016

26Jun16

Abstract: Before falling into disuse towards the middle of the twentieth century, the term ‘Dominion’ connoted the autonomous status of select polities on the British Empire’s geographic periphery (and Ireland). This concept factored into British discourse as the extension of liberal norms of self-government. Originally associated with the British-majority settler states of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Dominion status was in turn extended to the South African Union in 1910. Advocates for a similar form of ‘self-governance’ sought to see the example emulated elsewhere in Africa and, through the Zionist enterprise, in the Middle East. The reluctance of historians of the British Empire to examine the structural manifestations of racism in British policy has obscured the significance of the Dominion concept and its historical evolution. Settler self-governance within the British sphere is still often framed in terms of liberal conceptions of ‘responsible government’, as Lord Durham phrased it his Report on the Affairs of British North America. However, self-government on the Empire’s periphery was a patently exclusionist and racialised practice. Its exclusionist bounds were not so narrow as the Anglo-Saxonist racism that first marked its introduction. By the early twentieth century, French-speaking Canadians and Boers alike were sharing in the enterprise of British representative government. The bounds of exclusion were nonetheless unmistakable. Today, it is in respectable circles no longer acceptable to present settler rule on the African continent as a liberal enterprise. Yet the histories of the original Dominions and of the Zionist enterprise continue to be distorted by intellectuals leveraging an exclusionist politics of self-representation. The valorisation of Israel in particular through claimed rights to self-determination should prompt renewed engagement with this history. The invocation of the Dominions’ example by an earlier generation of pro-Zionist advocates speaks to a shared history that demands critical attention.

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A group is not a category (groupism is transfer): Jarno Valkonen, Sanna Valkonen, Timo Koivurova, ‘Groupism and the politics of indigeneity: A case study on the Sámi debate in Finland’, Ethnicities, 2016

26Jun16

Abstract: The article addresses the problems of defining an indigenous people by deconstructing the Sámi debate in Finland, which has escalated with the government’s commitment to ratify ILO Convention No. 169. We argue that the ethnopolitical conflict engendered by this commitment is a consequence of groupism, by which, following Rogers Brubaker, we mean the tendency to take discrete groups as chief protagonists of social conflicts, the tendency to treat ethnic groups, nations and races as substantial entities and the tendency to reify such groups as if they were unitary collective actors. The aim of the article is to deconstruct groupist thinking related to indigenous rights by analytically separating the concepts of group and category. This allows us to deconstruct the ethnicised conflict and analyse what kinds of political, social and cultural aspects are involved in it. We conclude that indigeneity is not an ethnocultural, objectively existing fact, but rather a frame of political requirements.

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On the Turkish settlers in Cyprus: Helge Jensehaugen, ‘”Filling the void”: Turkish settlement in Northern Cyprus, 1974–1980’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016

22Jun16

Abstract: Following Turkey’s intervention in and invasion of Cyprus in July and August 1974, the island was split into two. In the north, a Turkish Cypriot political entity was established that was only recognized by Turkey. Turkey played a crucial role in the settlement process of between 30 and 45 thousand settlers from Turkey in Northern Cyprus during the first wave of settlement, from 1974 to 1980. The settlers were largely needed to create and consolidate a viable Turkish Cypriot state. In order to successfully carry out this settlement process, which was characterized by a rapid installation of a large group of settlers, Turkish and Turkish Cypriot authorities had to prepare land and housing for the arriving settlers. This was made possible by the large void left behind by the Greek Cypriots that fled and were transferred to South-Cyprus following the 1974 War. The settlement process was thus carried out through an organized, state-controlled demographic engineering, in which housing, land and resources were promised and given to arriving settlers. A lack of settler agency was a distinguishable characteristic of the settlers from Turkey, and ideological conviction played little, or no, role. Due to the historic conflict between Turkish and Greek Cypriots, the first settlers from Turkey were largely viewed as saviours crucial to the political and economic independence of the Turkish Cypriots from the Greek Cypriots. Good settler-native relations were thus largely a characteristic of this first wave of settlement.

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Decolonising mapping is about decolonising settler colonialism: Dallas Hunt, Shaun A. Stevenson, ‘Decolonizing geographies of power: indigenous digital counter-mapping practices on turtle Island’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016

22Jun16

Abstract: This paper addresses the decolonizing potential of Indigenous counter-mapping in the context of (what is now called) Canada. After historicizing cartography as a technique of colonial power, and situating Indigenous counter-mapping as an assertion of political and intellectual sovereignty, we examine the digital map of Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Plains Cree for Edmonton, Alberta) produced by the Pipelines Collective, which overlays Treaty 6 Indigenous maps onto ‘conventional’ maps to denaturalize and challenge colonial renderings of city space. We then discuss the expanding trend of guerrilla mapping techniques engaged in by Indigenous groups, emphasizing the Ogimaa Mikana project in Toronto, wherein Anishinaabemowin names were stickered over settler street names. Expanding the spatial theories of Michel de Certeau and Gilles Deleuze, and drawing on the research and insights of Indigenous scholars Jodi Byrd and Mishuana Goeman, our paper considers how emerging digital counter-mapping efforts offer ambivalent possibilities for Indigenous peoples to assert their presence in material ways.

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Children as settlers: S. R. Sturm, S. F. Turner, ‘The Tyre-Child in the Early World’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48, 7, 2016, pp. 674-683

22Jun16

Abstract: This article considers the ‘creative education’ of influential Aotearoa/New Zealand art educator Elwyn Richardson, which is based on what he calls the ‘discovery method’: the ‘concentrated study of material from [students’] own surroundings.’ Through a game that his students play with tyres, we explore the role that tools play in Richardson’s classroom and in the imaginary ‘worlding’ of his students’ play. By taking the ‘early world’ of the children’s development to be a product of the tools through which they describe it, we reveal Richardson’s educative process to be essentially technological. His idea of the whole child who emerges through a process of experience and observation – of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, in the well-known phrase of Wordsworth cited by Richardson – conflates the nature of the child and nature of the ‘natural’ world. By this act of ‘natural settlement’ not untypical of settler narratives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the child’s – and, by implication, other settlers’ – relation to the world of nature is naturalized. Instead, we would argue that the child’s relation to nature is altogether unnatural: it is imprinted by the technological means through which she explores the world and makes it her own – and by which she is made over. The ‘tyre-child’ is no child of nature, but a child of technology (as every settler is a technological settler), for whom creative errors – acts of ‘mis-taking’ like the ones Richardson’s children make in playing with tyres – reveal an imaginary capacity at once theoretical and unsettling.

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It’s not about redistribution; it’s about elimination: Catherine Kellogg, ‘”You be my body for me” Dispossession in two valences’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2016

21Jun16

Abstract: Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou’s recent exchange, ‘You Be My Body for Me: Body, Shape and Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, is remarkable because in their rereading of Hegel’s famous lord and bondsman parable, rather than focusing on recognition, work, or even desire, Butler and Malabou each wonder about how Hegel contributes to a new way of thinking about ‘having’ a body and how coming to ‘be’ a body necessarily involves a kind of dispossession. Butler and Malabou’s reading of Hegel is congruent with a current shift on the left away from a liberal politics of recognition to a (post-)Marxist analytic of dispossession: a move, in other words, away from liberal ‘solutions’ of redistribution – of either goods or recognition – towards thinking through issues of settler colonialism, forced migration and empire. Butler and Malabou’s piece points towards the insight that Hegel’s parable must be thought in terms of the political history of possessive individualism, and so in terms of the history of juridically defined property relations; the history of regarding both the body and the land as property. The ‘two valences’ of dispossession, in other words, refers in fact to a logic of property relations, one between those who ‘have’ property (either land or the property of their own bodies) and those who are juridically defined as propertyless.

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It’s about who gets to fill the ’empty’ spaces (and the land those spaces are hovering over): Russell McGregor, Environment, Race, and Nationhood in Australia, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

21Jun16

Description: This new study offers a timely and compelling account of why past generations of Australians have seen the north of the country as an empty land, and how those perceptions of Australia’s tropical regions impact current policy and shape the self-image of the nation. It considers the origins of these concerns – from fears of invasion and moral qualms about leaving resources lying idle, from apprehensions about white nationhood coming under international censure and misgivings about the natural attributes of the north – and elucidates Australians’ changing appreciations of the natural environments of the north, their shifting attitudes toward race and their unsettled conceptions of Asia.

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