settler colonial studies blog | A blog for the advancement of settler colonial studies | Page 549

On historical treauma, its impact, and settler colonialism: Yin Paradies, ‘Colonisation, racism and indigenous health’, Journal of Population Research, 33, 1, 2016, pp 83-96

22Apr16

Abstract: In settler-colonies such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, the historical impacts of colonisation on the health, social, economic and cultural experiences of Indigenous peoples are well documented. However, despite being a commonly deployed trope, there has been scant attention paid to precisely how colonial processes contribute to contemporary disparities in health between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in these nation-states. After considering pertinent issues in defining indigeneity, this paper focuses on operationalising colonisation as a driver of indigenous health, with reference to emerging concepts such as historical trauma. Conceptualisations of coloniality vis-à-vis health and their critiques are then examined alongside the role of racism as an intersecting and overlapping phenomenon. To conclude, approaches to understanding and explaining Indigenous disadvantage are considered alongside the potential of decolonisation, before exploring ramifications for the future of settler-indigenous relations.

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Staging settler violence: Sarah Emily MacKenzie, ‘White Settler Colonialism and (Re)presentations of Gendered Violence in Indigenous Women’s Theatre’, PhD Dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2016

19Apr16

Abstract: Grounded in a historical, socio-cultural consideration of Indigenous women’s theatrical production, this dissertation examines representations of gendered violence in Canadian Indigenous women’s drama. The female playwrights who are the focus of my thesis – Monique Mojica, Marie Clements, and Yvette Nolan – counter colonial and occasionally postcolonial renditions of gendered and racialized violence by emphasizing female resistance and collective coalition. While these plays represent gendered violence as a real, material mechanism of colonial destruction, ultimately they work to promote messages of collective empowerment, recuperation, and survival. My thesis asks not only how a dramatic text might deploy a decolonizing aesthetic, but how it might redefine dramatic/literary and socio-cultural space for resistant and decolonial ends. Attentive to the great variance of subjective positions occupied by Indigenous women writers, I examine the historical context of theatrical reception, asking how the critic/spectator’s engagement with and dissemination of knowledge concerning Indigenous theatre might enhance or impede this redefinition. Informed by Indigenous/feminist poststructuralist and postcolonial theoretical perspectives that address the production and dissemination of racialized regimes of representation, my study assesses the extent to which colonialist misrepresentations of Indigenous women have served to perpetuate demeaning stereotypes, justifying devaluation of and violence – especially sexual violence – against Indigenous women. Most significantly, my thesis considers how and to what degree resistant representations in Indigenous women’s dramatic productions work against such representational and manifest violence.

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On the settler colonial origin of urban bias and its absence: David Waldner, Brenton Peterson, Jon Shoup, ‘Against the Grain of Urban Bias: Elite Conflict and the Logic of Coalition Formation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 2016

19Apr16

Abstract: The theory of urban bias was a major contribution to the evolution of contemporary theories of political economy that remains highly relevant today. Yet theorists of urban bias have still not produced a general explanation that accounts for anomalous cases of what we call “rural incorporation,” or coalition strategies based on modest rural producers. These anomalous cases suggest that the collective action underpinnings of urban bias theory underdetermine outcomes. This paper advances a new explanation of the anomalous African cases of Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, and Zimbabwe. After detailing the costs of rural incorporation, we theorize the conditions that would motivate state elites to overcome their pro-urban biases and offer substantial material benefits to non-elite agrarian producers. Rural incorporation is an optimal strategy only when state elites are locked in unusually intense conflict with their rivals. Most nationalist movements in Africa did not meet this condition and their leaders followed pro-urban policies. The three outliers are all cases of settler colonialism: bitter rivalry between European settlers and native planters created the conditions for rural incorporation. We show how native planters and their political allies selected rural incorporation as a political-economic instrument of commercial competition and political supremacy. Case studies of Ghana and Nigeria demonstrate that in the absence of political and economic rivalry with settlers, African leaders selected the “default” strategy of urban bias.

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Queer and settler solidarities: Michael Connors Jackman, Nishant Upadhyay, ‘Pinkwatching Israel, Whitewashing Canada: Queer (Settler) Politics and Indigenous Colonization in Canada’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 42, 3-4, 2014, pp. 195-210

19Apr16

Excerpt: Queer organizing against Israel’s deployment of gay rights discourses to mask the occupation of Palestine—referred to as “pinkwashing” within academic and activist circles—has raised pertinent questions about the relations between settler colonialism, sexuality, gender, race, and (gay) imperialism. Such campaigns have directed attention to the realities of occupation in Palestine/Israel while simultaneously obscuring the historical and present-day colonial processes that enable transnational political intervention on Turtle Island—or what is commonly known as Canada and the United States. In this essay, we ask how critics of Israeli pink-washing—known as pinkwatchers—varyingly challenge, engage, negotiate, perform, or reproduce settler colonialism on Indigenous lands. We examine debates over the participation of Queers Against Israeli Apart-heid (QuAIA) in Pride Toronto (Pride) in 2010 and the subsequent formation of the Pride Coalition for Free Speech (PCFS). By focusing on these debates, we seek to critically explore how certain queer praxes have worked to normalize and invisibilize settler colonialism in the Canadian context and to reproduce Canada as a progressive queer-friendly liberal state. While our discussion focuses on QuAIA, PCFS, and Pride 2010, the objective of our essay is not to single out groups and organizations but to contribute to conversations about the broader political stakes of anti-racism, anticolonialism, and decolonization in radical queer organizing. These examples serve as the entry point for us to consider in what ways the articulation of “radical queer perspectives” might be complicit with the white settler state project, wherein the casting of Canada as a gay-friendly nation invisibilizes past and ongoing processes of colonialism. Our essay suggests that criticism of the use of queer rights and liberal tolerance to justify governmental, industrial, and military actions often works to limit discussions of settler colonialism to places, nations, and peoples who are already invisible within that frame. Describing how queer groups naturalize notions of belonging and Canadian identity, as well as how queer critiques of pinkwashing fail to address settler colonialism in Canada, we seek to underscore the way Indigenous struggles for sovereignty are invisibilized in activists’ attempts to address issues of free speech, homonationalism, and occupation in Palestine/Israel. Where the pinkwashing of Israel has been criticized by queer activists who effectively surveil and organize against, or pinkwatch, such activities, the complicity of their activist efforts with settler colonialism ultimately whitewashes colonization in Canada. We argue, therefore, that the pinkwatching of Israel enables the pinkwashing, or rather whitewashing, of Canada.

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Demography records it all: Jeanne Alexandra Cilliers, ‘A demographic history of settler South Africa’, PhD Dissertation, Stellenbosch University, 2016

16Apr16

Abstract: Economic incentives affect demographic outcomes. That is to say, fertility, mortality, migration and mobility are a result of economic performance, growth and inequality. While demographic changes may be slow, the long-run effects can be significant. The Western demographic transition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has had a profound effect on the living conditions of people across the world. Instead of having six or more children, most families today have only two, and life expectancy in most Western countries doubled in the four or five decades around the turn of the twentieth century. It is within this broad framework relating to the nature and causes of demographic transitions that this dissertation is orientated. How these demographic changes spread across the globe remains an important question for theoretical and empirical research, with obvious policy implications. It is therefore surprising that so little is known about the demographic history of South Africa, the wealthiest African country during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the first to undergo a demographic transition. There is remarkably limited empirical evidence of what living conditions, social interactions and family formation might have been like for the inhabitants of eighteenth, nineteenth and early-twentieth century South Africa. By focusing on the demographic characteristics of European settlers and their descendants in South Africa, this dissertation begins to provide a more comprehensive account of South Africa’s demographic history. The first question addressed in this study investigates the nature and causes of the settler fertility decline. It aims to provide, for the first time, a thorough descriptive account of the changing levels of fertility and explores land constraint as a potential mechanism for the limitation of fertility. To do so, it uses geographic and socioeconomic differentials in fertility over time, first, in a simple regression analysis framework and second, in an event-history analysis framework, to allow for a deeper understanding of the possible mechanisms at work at the individual level. The second question addressed in this study relates to the gender composition of offspring as a determinant of future fertility behaviour. While couples in modern societies have been shown to have gender neutral preferences for their offspring, new research on past populations suggests that a preference for sons over daughters might have influenced couples’ fertility decision-making behaviour, and potentially have limited the onset of the fertility decline. An investigation into whether a preference for sons existed in the settler Cape Colony context, through an eventhistory analysis of birth-spacing behaviour at high parities, conditional on the couple’s existing offspring gender-mix, informs the debate on within-marriage birth control practices in history, as well as the effect of economic development on couples’ fertility behaviour. Finally, in societies with a large rural majority and a small group of elites, the prospects for social mobility are said to be limited. However, the liberal theory of industrialism suggests that social mobility will likely increase as a result of the process of industrialisation itself, as new occupations replace those held by members of previous generations. Industrialisation is also expected to result in a shift away from ascription by birth towards achievement-based mobility. The third question addressed in this study investigates whether social (occupational) mobility increased under late nineteenth and early twentieth-century South African industrialism and whether or not this translated into real improvements in settler living standards.

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The sound of settler colonialism: Matthew C. Graham, ‘Heralding the Other: Sousa, Simulacra, and Settler Colonialism’, Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education, 15, 2, 2016, pp. 146-177

16Apr16

Abstract: This paper addresses the role of music and music education in the perpetuation of settler colonialism (a particular colonial configuration predicated on the expulsion of indigenous people and occupation of indigenous land) within the United States. Using Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra, or “false truths,” to look at racialized depictions in John Philip Sousa’s 1910 suite, Dwellers of the Western World, this article identifies both the historic and ongoing discursive functions of such representations in the maintenance of a specific set of social relations. Through such examination, we can engender conversations regarding music education’s roll within settler colonial society and work towards redressing the resulting inequities of this societal structure. It is only through a resultant praxis that we can affect material change.

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Basic income and specific location (an indigenous predicament): Jon Altman, ‘Basic Income for Remote Indigenous Australians: Prospects for a Livelihoods Approach in Neoliberal Times’, in Jennifer Mays, Greg Marston, John Tomlinson (eds), Basic Income In Australia and New Zealand, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 179-205

15Apr16

Abstract: In early 2015, the prime minister of Australia delivered the seventh annual Closing the Gap Prime Minister’s report (Australian Government, 2015). In it he reported that the government’s goal to halve the gap in employment outcomes between Indigenous and other Australians by 2018 was not on track, a euphemism for failing, and that there was a decline in employment outcomes since the target was set in 2008. The report notes:

It is clear that since 2008, no progress has been made against the target to halve the gap in employment outcomes within a decade (by 2018). The proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples aged 15–64 years who are employed fell from 53.8 per cent in 2008 to 47.5 per cent in 2012–13. In addition to the fall in Indigenous employment, the proportion of non-Indigenous Australians who are employed rose from 75.0 per cent to 75.6 per cent. Consequently, between 2008 and 2012–13 there has been an increase of 6.9 percentage points in the employment gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous working age people (up from 21.2 to 28.1 percentage points). (Australian Government, 2015, p. 18)

The report highlights variation in employment outcomes by remoteness declining from an employment/population ratio of nearly 50 percent in major cities to just 30 percent in very remote regions.

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Reconciliation? Penelope Edmonds, Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings, Palgrave, 2016

15Apr16

Description: In contemporary settler societies, reconciliation has emerged as a potent and alluring form of utopian politics. This book examines the performative life of reconciliation and its discontents in settler societies. It explores the affective refoundings of the settler state and reimaginings of its alternatives and, in particular, the way the past is mobilized in the name of social transformation within a new global paradigm of reconciliation and the ‘age of apology’. In search of a new emancipatory politics, the book takes particular account of Indigenous-led refutations or reworkings of consensus politics in public culture that directly confront the ongoing structural legacy of colonial violence. Taking case studies from the USA, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand the book traces the prehistory of reconciliation’s present in settler states, a contested political process, which is especially salient where formal decolonization cannot occur. The dynamic process of drawing on the past to forge new alliances and imagined futures is a crucial aspect of the political realm – one that we are jointly acting out together; and it is worked out from the affective and overlapping spaces of heart and horror.

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On signing and signs: Alison Jones, Te Kawehau Hoskins, ‘A Mark on Paper: The Matter of Indigenous-Settler History’, in Carol A. Taylor, Christina Hughes (eds), Posthuman Research Practices in Education, Palgrave, 2016, pp. 75-92

15Apr16

Abstract: Here is an object of research, found in the archives: a piece of ‘data’, an ink-on-paper mark. It exists on the bottom right-hand side of a sturdy square of parchment. The intriguing drawing (Figure 5.1) represents the unique tā moko or facial tattoo of a Maori leader, Hongi Hika. The central whorls are the lines from either side of the bridge of Hongi Hika’s nose and the curved lines below frame his mouth — all shapes from the most sacred part of the body: the head. This ink-on-paper mark played a significant role in the earliest Indigenous-settler (Maori-Pakeha) relationships in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Hongi Hika drew his tā moko on 4 November 1819 on the second New Zealand land deed: 13,000 acres at Kerikeri in the Bay of Islands, sold to the Church Missionary Society for 48 axes.

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Most settlers would not dream of doing what they dream of doing (that’s why we need South Park): David Uahikeaikalei‘ohu Maile, ‘Going Native: South Park Satire, Settler Colonialism, and Hawaiian Indigeneity’ Cultural Studies = Critical Methodologies, 2016

13Apr16

Abstract: In South Park’s “Going Native,” the white character Butters becomes inexplicably angry only to uncover that his family contends the anger is “biologically” caused by their “ancestral” belonging to Hawai‘i. He then travels to Kaua‘i to resolve this anger by connecting with his “native” home. To parody the materiality of white settlers playing and going native, Butters is represented as “native Hawaiian.” This parody functions as a satire to ridicule and criticize settler colonialism in Hawai‘i. Yet, it does so by distorting, dismembering, and erasing Hawaiian Indigeneity. By deploying an Indigenous-centered approach to critical theory, I analyze South Park’s “Going Native” as a popular culture satire to make three arguments. First, “Going Native” produces Indigeneity in racialized, gendered, and sexualized (mis)representations. The representations of “native Hawaiians” recapitulate marginalizing misrepresentations of Native Hawaiians, which inverts the parody. Second, as the parody breaks down, “native Hawaiians” reify settler colonialism. South Park’s satire fails and becomes haunted by specters of settlement that call into question its critique. When the “native Hawaiians” eventually liberate themselves from encroaching tourists and U.S. military forces, an impasse emerges. Rather than signifying Native Hawaiians with agency, only “native Hawaiians” demonstrate the possibilities of self-determination, sovereignty, and decolonization, which exempt white settlers from enacting colonization and produce a discursive impossibility for Native Hawaiians. Third, I suggest cultural studies reimagine its scholarship to exercise an alliance politics that interrupts knowledge produced by popular culture satire attempting critiques of settler colonialism that simultaneously naturalize the dispossession and elimination of Indigenous peoples.

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