settler colonial studies blog

You cannot ‘repatriate’ a settler constitution: Madeline Rose Knickerbocker, Sarah Nickel, ‘Negotiating Sovereignty: Aboriginal Perspectives on a Settler-Colonial Constitution, 1975-1983’, BC Studies, 190, 2016

20Jul16

Abstract: In contrast to settler colonial legal understandings of Aboriginal rights and title as existing within the Canadian state, BC Aboriginal political actors in the 1970s and 1980s relied on philosophical notions of Aboriginal rights as stemming from the inherent, pre-colonial sovereignty and nationhood of First Nations peoples. These concepts run throughout the history of Aboriginal experience and remained foundational to the discourse of Aboriginal sovereignty in British Columbia during debates surrounding the patriation of the Canadian constitution. Existing Canadian historiography has located Aboriginal activists as key and yet marginal figures in the constitutional debates, while a broad range of interdisciplinary scholarship has helped us understand the concept of Aboriginal sovereignty in theory. Building on these insights, our work shifts Aboriginal people into the foreground and emphasizes their centrality in the patriation debates, which, as an example, grounds and historicizes the theoretical work on Aboriginal sovereignty. As we argue, between 1975 and 1983 Aboriginal peoples relied on oral histories and traditions of sovereignty and mobilized these in response to the settler colonial state’s push for constitutional patriation. In this sense, BC Aboriginal peoples who protested constitutional patriation were not ahistorical agents participating in an isolated movement, but were informed by both their knowledge of their communities’ embedded sovereignties, and generations of historically entrenched Aboriginal resistance.

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Is settler colonialism racist? Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, ‘At the limits of the human: reading Postraciality from Palestine’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2016

20Jul16

Abstract: Drawing from David Goldberg’s attentiveness to racism and ‘postraciality’, I read the role of racial violence and terror in the making of Palestine and the Palestinians. The paper shows how Goldberg’s book unsettles racialized convictions of postraciality, and deconstructs the uncompromising global narrative of race. Following Goldberg’s analysis, this paper challenges racialized Zionist ideologies by considering how we might understand the marking of Palestinian homes, bodies, and lives that have become sites of racialized incarceration and brutality through the process of Israeli settler colonialism. I suggest that there is a need to pay close attention to mundane, everyday modes of suffering in order to understand the postraciality of racial suffering in the context of Palestine. I explore how the equation of Palestinians with non-humans requires them either to disappear or submit to racialized exercises of power. These questions allow us to critically analyze postraciality in the context of those living at the limits of humanity.

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Introducing a special issue on indigenous peoples and tourism: Anna Carr, Lisa Ruhanen, Michelle Whitford, ‘Indigenous peoples and tourism: the challenges and opportunities for sustainable tourism’, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 2016

20Jul16

Abstract: The Indigenous tourism focus of the 16 papers in this special issue provides readers with an opportunity to explore the dynamics behind an array of issues pertaining to sustainable Indigenous tourism. These papers not only provide a long overdue balance to the far too common, negatively biased media reports about Indigenous peoples and their communities but also highlight the capacity of tourism as an effective tool for realizing sustainable Indigenous development. Throughout the papers reviewed in detail here, readers are reminded of the positive (capacity building) and negative (commodification) realities of Indigenous tourism development. Concomitantly, readers are privy to the practical and theoretical contributions pertaining to the management of cultural values and Indigenous businesses and the social and economic empowerment of Indigenous groups. The main contribution of this special issue, however, is a call for increasing research by, or in collaboration with, Indigenous researchers so that Indigenous authors and editors of academic journals become the norm in academia. Ultimately, Indigenous scholars and tourism providers should be the major contributors to, and commentators about, mainstream and niche approaches to Indigenous tourism management, whilst communities gain visibility not just as the visited “Other”, but as global leaders within tourism and related sectors.

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Settler colonialism is indigenous incarceration: Stephanie Lumsden, ‘Reproductive Justice, Sovereignty, and Incarceration: Prison Abolition Politics and California Indians’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 40, 1, 2016, pp. 33-46

17Jul16

Access the article here.

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On genocide and settler colonialism: Walter L. Hixson, ‘Policing the Past: Indian Removal and Genocide Studies’, Western Historical Quarterly, 2016

17Jul16

Excerpt: For scholars Gary Clayton Anderson, John Mack Faragher, and Guenter Lewy, among many others, genocide appears to be a term reserved for Turks, Nazis, Cambodians, Rwandans, and other truly evil peoples but is unsuitable for application to American history.

Anderson has decided that the correct term to apply to the history of American Indian policy is ethnic cleansing, and that the 1998 Rome Statute provides the singularly correct bureaucratic entity to determine such matters. He glosses in passing that “[t]he Rome Statute does not specifically outline the crime of ‘ethnic cleansing,’” his own preferred term. He also incorrectly states that the United States has “accepted” the International Criminal Court; in fact, the United States continues to reject the jurisdiction of the ICC as a matter of state policy.

The historian’s task is to interrogate, frame, and contextualize terminology rather than assert (or dismiss) terms as if the meaning of these representations was precise or self-evident. I heartily concur with Anderson that ethnic cleansing is an excellent term to describe what happened in the colonial encounter. In American Settler Colonialism: A History, I employed it liberally, but I also argued that the United States “pursued a continuous ‘foreign-policy’ of colonial genocide targeting indigenous North Americans.” I added that, through centuries of borderland conflict, Americans “internalized a propensity for traumatic, righteous violence, and a quest for total security, which came to characterize a series of future conflicts.

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Islamophobia and settler colonialism: Heather Porter Abu Deiab, Islamophobia’s Transnational and Settler Colonial Realities: Gaps Within Ethnic Studies Narratives, PhD Dissertation, San Francisco State University, 2016

17Jul16

Abstract: This research traces Islamophobia from 1492 Spain to its institutionalization in the U.S. settler colonial state in 1776.1 argue that settler colonial projects against Indigenous communities and colonized communities inform concepts of race that has developed U.S. Islamophobia and its distinct justifications. My project argues for the centrality of this history of Islamophobia and racial and religious oppression to theoretical frameworks within influential critical race studies and ethnic studies. I offer the tools of transnational and intersectional feminism, and recognition of settler colonialism as intertwined with European colonization as an approach to better incorporate these narratives. Finally I discuss how this invisibilization has undermined the institutionalization of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University. Ultimately my research underscores the need to recognize Islamophobia in studies of systematic oppression as well as the futility of separating the transnational beginnings of Islamophobia in the Americas as well as the grounded realities and struggles of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. from critical race studies.

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Settler colonialism must be represented: Madalena Santos, ‘Palestinian narratives of resistance: The Freedom Theatre’s challenge to Israeli settler colonization’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016

17Jul16

Abstract: This article focuses on the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, Palestine, to consider the Theatre’s project and performances as practices of creative resistance. It theorizes creative resistance to examine the Theatre as a mode of narrative performance against the logics and materiality of settler colonialism. In exploring this creative project, this study conceives of narratives as sites of struggle that are significant in the contestation and transformation of dominant settler colonial myth.

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Settler manhood must be displayed: Melisssa Bellanta, ‘”Poor Gordon”: What the Australian Cult of Adam Lindsay Gordon Tells Us About Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Masculine Sentimentality’, Gender & History, 28, 2, 2016, pp. 401–421

17Jul16

Abstract: The popularity of the British-born Australian poet and sportsman, Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833–1870), flowered after his death. Between 1870 and 1920, he was widely extolled as an exemplar of the Australian bushman and of British imperial masculinity alike. Fans lauded Gordon as a daredevil horseman who had lived in the bush in the Australian colonies’ roaring days. Fascinatingly, though, they expressed their enthusiasm for him in sentimental terms. This article shows that sentimental expressions of devotion to Gordon were part of a distinctive form of masculine sentimentality emerging in Western culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. The proponents of this sentimentality encouraged the members of Western imperial and settler-colonial publics to sympathise with rugged bushmen such as Gordon – to collectively experience their sorrows, griefs and joys. In so doing, they helped to reinforce masculine and settler-colonial power, since they elevated the sentiments of hardy masculine types at the expense of feminine ones. In Australia, sentimental representations of Gordon also helped divert attention from the violence committed by settlers against Aboriginal peoples. Based on the insight that masculinity and sentiment were profoundly intertwined in the day, this article calls for a new way of thinking about the relationship between these two phenomena in the turn-of-the-century era.

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How indigenous are indigenous youth: Audreylee Hudson, Decolonizing Indigenous Youth Studies: Photography and Hip Hop as Sites of Resilience, PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2016

17Jul16

Abstract: This dissertation examines the role an arts-based educational program played in unleashing youth’s creativity as they confront various structures of power that become challenges to social identity, belonging, and self, under different local and national circumstances. My research questions considered how Indigenous youth utilized a photography and hip hop based educational program as a resource to explore social identity and relations, indigeneity, place/space, and the legacy of settler colonialism on education. I also considered how the findings from this study informed and contribute to decolonize Indigenous youth studies and how programs such as mine help Indigenous youth comprehend crisis in the urban environment.

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‘They are the 1%’: Ann Curthoys, ‘The impossibility of section 70 aboriginal protection, amelioration, and the contradictions of humanitarian governance’, Studies in Western Australian History, 30, 2016, pp. 13-28

14Jul16

Abstract: In 1887, as Western Australian demands for self-government were intensifying, and it seemed that Western Australia’s poor record on Aboriginal protection and welfare might prove an obstacle to Britain’s approving a new constitution, the governor of the colony, Frederick Broome, came up with a suggestion. One way to grant responsible government without handing Aboriginal protection and welfare to the very settlers who so opposed it, he wrote to his superiors in the Colonial Office in London, would be to keep the colony’s recently established Aborigines Protection Board under the control of the governor and not hand it over to the proposed elected colonial government. The board, whose task was to oversee Aboriginal protection, education and welfare, could be funded by requiring the colonial government to set aside a reserved annual sum of 5,000 from colonial revenue, thus making the board independent of colonial treasury decisions and indeed colonial politics. To this end, the Constitution Bill Broome drafted in May 1888 included a clause eventually known as section 70, which took his initial idea a step further. It ensured that the payment of 5,000 pounds annually to the board would convert to 1 per cent of the colony’s annual revenue when it exceeded 500,000 pounds. When, after some prolonged debate over a range of issues, the British Parliament passed the colony’s new constitution in 1889 and brought it into operation in 1890, the proposed clause was included.

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