settler colonial studies blog

Stealing the land and tiki: Leah M. Kuragano, ‘Tiki Culture and the Staging of Settler Colonial Hawai’i in Mid-Century America’, American Quarterly, 77, 2, 2025, pp. 257-282

07Jun25

Abstract: This essay traces the genealogy of American tiki culture from the first “Polynesian” restaurant in 1930s Hollywood through the postwar “tiki craze” by examining tiki objects, US and Hawai’i newspapers, and Dole Pineapple Corporation promotional materials through the analytic of settler colonialism. Contrary to popular assertions that tiki has always been innocent fantasy-making rather than appropriative misrepresentation, historical evidence suggests that producers actively authenticated settler colonial knowledge about Hawai’i and Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiians) throughout the twentieth century. Over many decades of tiki-cultural production, white Americans have iteratively staged and occupied an idealized Hawai’i wherein their presence would be unconditionally celebrated. Ultimately, these stagings have reified a fantasy of white belonging in Hawai’i that bolsters the settler colonial project.

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Painting the settler-Indigenous dialogue: Andrew B. Chrystall, ‘Reweaving the Spaces of Inter-Cultural Dialogue in Post-Treaty New Zealand/Aotearoa’, Journal of Intercultural Communication research, 2025

07Jun25

Abstract: This study explores cross-cultural dialogue between Māori and settler colonials through the lens of Emily Karaka’s paintings. Karaka’s paintings are used to probe and reveal the colonial roots of spatial organization at the site where they are displayed. Building on parallels between the life of Karaka’s paintings and Treaty of Waitangi documents, this study finds that post-Treaty dialogue between Māori and settler colonials takes place in spaces built on and informed by the spatial biases of settler colonialism. The study concludes that recognizing these biases is crucial for meaningful dialogue and suggests that the Treaty of Waitangi invites a spatial response.

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The settler deal of the century: Duaa M. Elsemeiri, Ibrahim M. Alsemeiri, Ibrahim S. ALzaeem, ‘A Critical Discourse Analysis of Trump’s 2020 “Deal of the Century”: Marginalizing Palestinians and Its Ongoing Impact’, Almubadara, 5, 2025

07Jun25

Abstract: This study examines the ideological underpinnings and power dynamics embedded in President Donald Trump’s 2020 “Deal of the Century” speech, with a specific focus on the marginalization of Palestinians through discourse. It also seeks to explore how the speech’s discourse continues to influence current geopolitical realities, reinforcing patterns of dispossession, exclusion, and the normalization of structural violence. Adopting a qualitative interpretive approach, the research is grounded in Fairclough’s (1992) model of Critical Discourse Analysis, which enables a multi-level exploration of how language shapes and sustains social hierarchies. Through lexical, metaphor, and transitivity analyses, the study reveals how the speech constructs Palestinians as passive, irrational, or obstructive, while positively framing Israeli and American actors. These discursive strategies not only reinforce asymmetrical power relations but also work to delegitimize Palestinian political agency within a U.S.-centric peace narrative. The findings contribute to understanding how political discourse functions as a tool of ideological control and geopolitical positioning in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ultimately, the study reveals that Trump’s discourse reflects a broader ideological project rooted in Anglo-Zionist imperialism and corporate interests—an agenda that continues to shape global politics today.

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The walking settlers: Brian Grant, ‘Walking Toward Relationality: An Autoethnographic Inquiry of Inner Work for Personal and Systemic Change’, Journal of Awareness-Based System Change, 5, 1, 2025, pp. 98-128

07Jun25

Abstract: In this essay, I share an autoethnographic walking experience that is part of my inner work as an early-career sustainability scholar seeking to relate differently with land, people, and knowledge. This research began after I learned about the Exodus: the 1875 forced removal of Yavapai (Yavapé) and Apache (Dilzhę́’é) peoples from their ancestral lands in today’s Arizona, USA—the region where I, a white settler, was born and raised—which provoked in me intense shame. To unpack my relationships with settler colonialism and begin a process of becoming naturalized to place, I walked a section of the Arizona Trail that is part of the Exodus route. Employing a critical, relational walking methodology, as well as arts-based methods, I propose an autoethnography to illustrate six personal (un)learnings that aim to be insightful for the emerging relational paradigm in sustainability science. This includes drawing attention to the ways in which settler colonialism, intertwined with religions and science, may unconsciously orient relationships to land (ontology), people (axiology), and knowledge (epistemology) that are anti-relational. My walking experience underscores the importance of relational ethics as embedded in Indigenous relationality, which taught me that learning to relate differently with land in a more-than-human sense necessitates healing relationships with the First Peoples. This situates the turn toward relationality as far more than an intellectual endeavor that includes embodied experience, embracing difficult emotions, and acknowledging inner work as important for systems change.

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Settlers from one island: Susan Kingsley Kent, British Settler Colonialism since 1530: Indigenous Peoples in an Imperial World, Bloomsbury, 2025

07Jun25

Description: This book provides an account of British setter colonialism across the globe from 1530 to the present day. Centering the impact of settler colonies on indigenous peoples whose land was taken and populations were disrupted, it traces resistance, revolution, migration, assimilation and elimination in North America, Latin America, South Africa, Kenya, Ireland, the Middle East and Australia. Exploring the concept of settler colonialism, understanding how it differs from other aspects of imperialism and highlighting the importance of centering indigenous peoples in the study of empire, this book clarifies key theories, terms and debates within the field. Each chapter addresses issues of race, gender and the environment through a specific case study along with comparative ‘counterpoint’ examples of other settler colonies. It explores how indigenous peoples tried to preserve, recreate and reassert their cultures and values, and highlights the ongoing impact of settler colonialism and the domination of indigenous peoples and culture that continues to this day. With maps, images, primary documents and suggested further reading British Settler Colonialism provides an introduction to empire and colonialism with a focus on indigenous peoples, cultures and histories.

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Imagined settler community (micro): Dan Colson, ‘”A Peaceful Place”: Midwestern Colonialism in Ozark (Netflix, 2017–2022)’, Middle West Review, 11, 2, 2025, pp. 533-536

03Jun25

Abstract: Since the time of legal slavery, Missouri has been a site of conflict and geographic uncertainty. The Missouri Compromise (1820) designated Missouri as a slave state, thus aligning it with the American South. During the Civil War, though, Missourians fought on both sides, suggesting a space fully attached to neither the North nor the South. Now, Missouri is most often grouped into the Middle West. Ozark—a Netflix series that ran from 2017 to 2022—refigures this conflict by juxtaposing a White nuclear family with a distorted colonial space: the Ozarks, which are ripe with certain types of resources. This space contains the raw materials that make colonization profitable, from heroin-producing poppies to a dual population (local and tourist) that can sustain criminal activity. But, if the Ozarks stand as a pseudo-colonial space, who is the colonizer and who/what is being colonized? And what does the show say about the nature of midwestern spaces and people?

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Imagined settler community (macro): Jarosław Szczepański, ‘The anglosphere as non-contiguous region: Remarks on CANZUK’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2025

03Jun25

Abstract: The Anglosphere has been analysed perspectives of political science and IR. It is possible to adopt the perspective of humanistic regional studies, which will allow us to present a new way of explaining the phenomenon of the so-called kin nations among the CANZUK group countries. The article presents a way of starting from the non-national imagined community of Anglosphere, which is presented as an imagined place – accordingly to humanistic regional studies. On this basis, the characteristics of the non-contiguous region are indicated, primarily associated with the settler colonial past. The proposed new approach, in comparison with previous studies, indicates a possible deepening of the explanations of political events and processes already made and indicates new important factors allowing for a better understanding of the phenomenon of the Anglosphere.

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The sovereignty of Indigenous care: Theresa Ysabel Rocha Beardall, ‘Indigenous Abolition and the Third Space of Indian Child Welfare’, Genealogy, 9, 2, 2025, #59

03Jun25

Abstract: This article introduces the Third Space of Indian child welfare to theorize how Indigenous nations simultaneously engage and disrupt settler legal systems while building sovereign, care-based alternatives. Drawing from legal analysis, Indigenous political thought, and sociohistorical synthesis, I trace the historical continuity from boarding schools to today’s foster care removals, showing how child welfare operates as a colonial apparatus of family separation. In response, Native nations enact governance through three interrelated strategies: strategic legal engagement, kinship-based care, and tribally controlled family collectives. Building on Bruyneel’s theory of third space sovereignty, Simpson’s nested sovereignty, and Lightfoot’s global Indigenous rights framework, I conceptualize the Third Space as a dynamic field of Indigenous governance that transcends binary settler logics. These practices constitute sovereign abolitionist praxis. They reclaim kinship, resist carceral systems, and build collective futures beyond settler rule. Thus, rather than treating the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) as a federal safeguard, I argue that tribes have repurposed ICWA as a legal and political vehicle for relational governance. This reframing challenges dominant crisis-based narratives and positions Indigenous child welfare as the center of a “global Indigenous politics of care” with implications for theories of sovereignty, family, and abolitionist futures across disciplines, geographies, and social groups. The article concludes by reflecting on the broader implications of the Third Space for other Indigenous and minoritized communities navigating state control and asserting self-determined care.

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Extinction and settler Rebellion: Kyle R. Matthews, Sophie Bond, Karen Nairn, ‘Diffusion as a colonizing process and the challenges of decolonizing Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa New Zealand’, Social Movement Studies, 2025

03Jun25

Abstract: The Extinction Rebellion (XR) model, including three demands and a disruptive theory of change, were transferred from the imperial center of the United Kingdom to Aotearoa. Initially activists assumed that the model required no significant modification to be applied in this new context and built local groups and conducted protests in ways that were like XR in the UK. Yet by late 2019, in response to the critiques of a caucus of Māori and their allies, Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa New Zealand (XRANZ) began to adapt the XR model with the aim of decolonizing it. They did this by adding a fourth demand, translating the demands and principles into Māori, and focusing XRANZ’s activism on a critique of the relationships between colonization and the climate crisis. Through this work there were significant challenges and pushback from some XRANZ members, and outcomes were partial at best. We make four interrelated arguments about these acts of adaptation: that processes of knowledge transfer from one context to another can be colonizing; that confronting the ways that colonial knowledge is entangled with climate activism requires significant work; that XRANZ’s is instructive for XR chapters in other settler-colonial contexts; and that transnational knowledge diffusion needs to be considered through a decolonial lens.

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Settler rights vs Indigenous relations: Laura Barraclough, ‘From rights to relations with the rural: Lessons from Indigenous studies’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2025

01Jun25

Abstract: This commentary responds to Van Sant and Fairbairn’s invitation to consider the meanings, potentials, and pitfalls of land access struggles in settler colonial contexts. Drawing on teachings from the field of critical Indigenous studies, I suggest that the developing idea of a right to the rural may be incommensurable with movements for Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and decolonization. I chart three sources of potential incommensurability between these projects: the colonial blind spots of Lefebvre’s rights to the city, which risk being imported into a right to the rural; the limits of rights for Indigenous peoples living under settler colonialism; and the coloniality of urban and rural scalar divisions. I propose we move away from a nascent right to the rural in favor of an Indigenous-led commitment to nurturing and sustaining relations with the rural. A focus on relations, rather than rights alone, has potential to build more meaningful solidarities between settler movements for rural social justice and Indigenous nations and to heal relations between people, more-than-humans, and the Land.

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