Abstract: This article introduces a method for analyzing Indigenous erasure in popular film that focuses not on the representations (or lack thereof) of Indigenous peoples but on representations of settlement. Whereas much of the scholarship on Native representations in film has been concerned with Hollywood’s promulgation of the “mythical Indian,” I argue that a focus on settlement—rather than on bodies—is significant in the context of the ongoing, unfinished processes of colonialism, which continue to structure life in white settler states. Cultural representations that reconfigure colonial-occupied life as settled life naturalize settler colonialism while erasing and displacing Indigenous claims to land. I illuminate this method by analyzing how the 1974 “blaxploitation Western” Thomasine and Bushrod imagines settlement. The film features a pair of lovers who are on the run from the law in America’s Southwest from 1911 to 1915. Because it is a film that speaks back to historical constructions of Blackness and Indigeneity, Thomasine and Bushrod productively illuminates how representations of Indigenous erasure work in often uneven and contradictory ways.  

Abstract: Italy’s colonial expansion is an interesting case study within the settler colonial world. Although discontinuous, settlement was always present as a founding element of its colonial discourse and practice. In Libya – more than in other Italian colonies like little and sparsely populated Eritrea and Somalia, or the short-lived ‘Empire’ of Ethiopia – the birth and development of a settler ideology can be well observed through the decades/

Abstract: This article is focuses on transracial Indigenous adoption, or what has come to be known in the Canadian context as the ‘Sixties Scoop’ or the ‘Canada scoop’, and its devastating effects on survivors’ lives. While there is some acknowledgement of the sheer number of forced Indigenous transracial adoptions in Canada in the twentieth century, there is very little understanding of the effects of adoption practices on indigenous adoptee childhood and adult lives. Drawing from scholarship on violence, narrative, and embodiment, I focus on the change of identity, the forms of violence related to, and the devastating effects of the Canada scoop on survivors. Drawing on two Canada scoop survivor’s accounts of their adoption and broader life histories, I probe how the violence of forced adoption is weaved into their past, present, and future.

Abstract: Focusing on Guy Maddin’s 2002 film Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, this essay argues that by rejecting Hollywood’s iconic images of Dracula in favor of a silent, montage-heavy ballet performance film, Maddin calls attention to the exclusion of Dracula’s own perspective from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. As a result, Maddin makes parallels between Dracula’s otherness and a multicultural Canada attempting to navigate American media influence. In addition, Maddin’s casting of a member of Canada’s largest minority group as Dracula allows the film to investigate identity constructions of Asian-Canadians, founded on the nation’s relationship to its indigenous populations and molded by American categorizations such as ‘yellow peril’. Through the film’s embrace of silent film esthetics, Maddin denies not only Dracula but also the entire Canadian cast a voice, probing the definition of settler colonials who must contend with the lingering ramifications of British colonialism, their complicity in indigenous erasure and minority representation, and the encroachment of contemporary global imperial presences such as Hollywood.

Abstract: This article discusses an aspect of Hannah Arendt’s treatment of the conflict between the Zionists and the Palestinians that has thus far been overlooked in scholarship: her justification of Zionism through the achievements of the Jewish pioneers in cultivating the land, in contrast to the Palestinians’ failure to do so. The inability of natives to cultivate their land was a familiar argument in the history of colonialism, used to legitimize the colonialists’ right to settle a land and often to displace the natives. How should we understand Arendt’s use of this argument? I show that Arendt’s argument should be understood in the context of, first, the recurrence of this argument in Western political thought and practices. Second, the Zionists’—Arendt included—need of legitimizing Jewish settlements in Palestine. And third, the influence of Arendt’s own political philosophy on her understanding of culture in general, and Palestinian culture in particular.

Abstract: This article examines the political and ideological uses of agronomic research, focusing on state-directed rural white settlements in Angola. Implemented ‘against the tide’, in the mid-1950s, with Angola’s African anti-colonial movement already under way, these schemes contained numerous contradictions. Under a modernising agenda, the Estado Novo dictatorship created the colonatos of Cela and Cunene, with the expressed purpose of reproducing Portuguese rural villages in Africa, settling poor Portuguese peasants and perpetuating colonial rule. Drawing on a range of primary sources from Portuguese colonial and scientific archives and the literature on Angola, I analyse the relationship between policymakers and the agricultural engineers mobilised to study the soils and its agricultural suitability in the regions chosen for the colonatos. I show that several experts criticised state-sponsored development of white rural settlements and exposed the policy’s drawbacks. I also place this particular example within the context of the existing literature on the history of science and development in post-war Africa. I will argue that the Portuguese version of the ‘developmentalist’ colonial state was burdened with an anti-progressive ideology that criticised industrialisation, urbanisation and proletarianisation, ignored technical and scientific conclusions, and despised settlers’ aspirations of upward mobility, seeing such aspirations as potentially politically disruptive. According to this model, the ideal type of white settler – modest, rooted in the land, earning only enough to get by – would be emulated by the African peasant, ensuring both social peace and colonial order. The failure of this experiment illustrates the (dis)connection between science and ideology in the last years of the Portuguese Empire, and the social and economic cost of their disengagement.

Abstract: During the 1880s there was fierce debate in colonial Australia and throughout the English-speaking world about the functioning of increasingly democratic societies and especially who, in terms of race, class and gender, was qualified to participate in the political process. In this formative period of what later became known as the “White Australia policy”, minorities were under intense scrutiny and, within the settler population, the Catholic Irish were the most numerous minority. This paper discusses two controversial and widely-reported 1881 articles by Melbourne writer, A.M. Topp. He argued strongly that the Celtic Irish were actually an “alien” race, fundamentally antithetical to English governance and morality. Mass Irish migration, in Topp’s view, constituted a threat to the political stability and racial superiority of the whole English-speaking world. Topp drew upon contemporary racial science and the works of leading intellectuals, but he was also influenced by political crises then occurring in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. Topp’s articles, and the responses they elicited, highlight the complexities of race in colonial Australia by demonstrating that major racial differences were perceived by some to exist within what has often been portrayed as a largely homogenous “white” settler society.

Excerpt: As Lawrence Buell has observed, the pastoral, which in the ‘old’ worlds of Europe was a type of symbolic allegory not expected to be taken literally, became in Europe’s ‘new’ worlds of settler colonialism, such as the United States and Australia, ‘a vehicle of national self-definition’ as well as a template for the construction of an  idyllic settler colonial pastoral way of life (52). The settler colony was often envisioned as a type of Arcadia. Available here.

Excerpt: Richard White is a historian, not a mad scientist. Yet the career of one of his most celebrated works, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991), is rather like the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monster. The book’s arrival was an electric moment, thanks to its lightning bolt of a thesis. Its illuminating central metaphor of a “middle ground” charged the entire field of early American history with new energy. White’s work countered tired narratives of indigenous defeat with a stunning new portrait of shared cultural spaces that were neither entirely Native nor entirely French and that flourished on inland lakeshores from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth.

White’s admiring readers gave his term an awkwardly lumbering life of its own. The nuanced and place-specific thesis soon became an overused “watered down idea about the mechanics of compromise in all kinds of social and political situations.” Fifteen years after its release, even White mused about how far his creation had wandered from him. In the very field The Middle Ground helped create—North American borderlands—historians now try to keep the concept contained. They argue that the crudely rampant version of the term has damaged our understanding of the past. The concept simply did not apply to every place where invaders and indigenes accommodated each other’s cultures. Before the nineteenth century, that happened everywhere on the Americas to some degree, but the balance of Native-versus-European accommodation see-sawed wildly depending on where one looked.

In more recent scholarship, “middle grounds” are hard to find. Colonists were more likely to submit to indigenous rules in Kathleen DuVal’s take on the Arkansas Valley, Juliana Barr’s study of the southern plains, and Pekka Hamalainen’s overlapping work on Comancheria. Conversely, while Natives set a lot of the initial terms of engagement on the peripheries of British colonies, they would eventually find themselves in two discrete worlds rather than a confusingly shared one in places like James H. Merrell’s Pennsylvania woods or Alan Taylor’s Iroquoia. Some new work actively challenges the concept of a “middle ground” on its home turf. Heidi Bohaker, Brett Rushforth, and Robert Morrissey each argue that White’s thesis is an incomplete characterization of French-Algonquian relations near the Great Lakes.

Yet few things speak as much to the longevity of a thesis than the fact that new books still feel the need to debate it, while others continue to echo it. Though White is never directly cited in Jeffrey Glover’s Paper Sovereigns: Anglo-Native Treaties and the Law of Nations, 1604–1664, the book is evidence of how scholars from other disciplines are still embracing The Middle Ground’s most basic point: that borderlands encounters involved compromises and reconciliations. Glover, a literary critic, prods us to see early American treaties and treaty-making not just as a process of advancing colonial rule but as dense ritual and textual moments created by both foreign and indigenous authors. He correctly points out how in the first century of English colonization, treaties were haphazard affairs that centered as much on performances and exchanges as the scratch of pens on paper.

Abstract: By asserting the realities of settler coloniality in the evolution of southwestern Mindanao as a frontier space, this paper addresses a phenomenon consistently disavowed in mainstream historiographical accounts of the region. It raises three other broad concerns. First, that while resources, territory, and population are factors that figure centrally in the political economy of settler colonialism, they may equally be said to be bound up with the practices of state sovereignty in general, involving ‘white’ settler colonial relations as well as ‘indigenous’ ones competing for spatial hegemony at the frontier. Second, that these processes are embedded in historical narratives of the frontier and its inhabitants that echo, in similar or divergent ways, well into the present. Finally, that settler colonial studies would benefit from a stronger engagement with the political geographic literature and with analyses of the production of (post)colonial state space.