settler colonial studies blog

‘Indian Nullification’ actually says it: Adam Dahl, ‘Nullifying Settler Democracy: William Apess and the Paradox of Settler Sovereignty’, Polity, 21/03/16

27Mar16

Abstract: This essay examines the concept of “Indian nullification” in the political writings of William Apess by situating his defense of native self-determination in the context of debates about the legitimacy of nullification in U.S. constitutionalism. It illustrates how Indian nullification operates, not as a feature of constitutional design asserting minority rights over the tyranny of the majority, but rather as a rhetorical form of political contestation exposing the constitutive exclusions of American settler democracy. Apess illuminates how constitutional ideals of popular sovereignty cohere around regimes of settler colonialism and indigenous dispossession, highlighting the paradox of settler sovereignty that provides the basis for American democracy. Indian nullification is not a simple demand that the boundaries of liberal citizenship be expanded to include Indians. It is a way of narrating and rhetorically representing the forms of settler conquest that establish the material and conceptual foundation of popular self-rule for white settlers.

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Settlers need to control indigenous reproduction: Cutcha Risling Baldy, ‘mini-k’iwh’e:n (For That Purpose—I Consider Things) (Re)writing and (Re)righting Indigenous Menstrual Practices to Intervene on Contemporary Menstrual Discourse and the Politics of Taboo’, Cultural Studies = Critical Methodologies, 2016

27Mar16

Abstract: Historically, studies of Indigenous menstrual practices were mired in assumptions that these practices were oppressive toward women. The high regard for menstruation as demonstrated through Indigenous women’s coming of age ceremonies and the continuing rituals of menstruation among Indigenous peoples has not been critically engaged with, and is often relegated to dismissive and oversimplified statements. The Western menstrual taboo not only influences theories of Indigenous menstrual customs but also relies on settler colonial rhetoric to help support a continuing politics of taboo. Although there have been numerous cultural studies of modern menstrual discourse focused on how contemporary Western menstrual practices are rooted in patriarchal bias, even self-declared feminist literature treats the menstrual taboo as nearly universal to Indigenous menstrual practices. This article provides an Indigenous feminist critique of contemporary menstrual discourse. I begin with a short history of settler colonialism and menstrual discourse and then analyze contemporary popular menstrual discourse. The final part of this article is an intervention on the assumed Indigenous menstrual taboo by looking at menstrual practices of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, located in Northern California, to demonstrate that for this culture and society, there is no menstrual taboo. It is through this in-depth analysis of Hupa menstrual practices that we see how Indigenous feminisms challenge settler colonialism and provide a decolonizing lens to contemporary scholarship that not only imagines alternative analyses but also acknowledges that these alternatives did, have always, and will always exist.

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Settler colonialism as the default option? Tallie Ben-Daniel, ‘Zionism’s Frontier Legacies: Colonial Masculinity and the American Council for Judaism in San Francisco’, American Studies, 54, 4, 2016, pp. 49-71

27Mar16

Excerpt: In 2011, San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum curated an exhibit called California Dreaming: Jewish Life in the Bay Area from the Gold Rush to the Present. The ambitious exhibit illustrated the specific regional history of San Francisco’s Jewish community. Arranged chronologically, most of the exhibit focused on the successes of Jewish families in San Francisco and the origin of major Jewish organizations—until the exhibit reached the end of World War II. Instead of celebrating the end of the Holocaust, the exhibit instead needed to contend with the American Council for Judaism (ACJ), a Jewish anti-Zionist organization whose strongest chapter was in San Francisco. The wall text of the exhibit explains the ACJ’s popularity as a reflection of “local comfort,” in that “the Jewish elite of San Francisco, who experienced very little anti-Semitism and held many public offices, found it difficult to imagine the dangers encountered by Jews in Europe or even in American cities that were less welcoming toward Jews.” The strength of San Francisco’s anti-Zionism was glossed over as a temporary aberration […].

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The possible alliance of environmentalist and indigenous politics: Eve Vincent, Timothy Neale, ‘Unstable relations: a critical appraisal of indigeneity and environmentalism in contemporary Australia’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2016

27Mar16

Abstract: The 1970s witnessed the emergence of a protest-based environmental movement in Australia. We outline here the history of the unstable meeting of environmentalism and Aboriginal interests, before turning to Marcia Langton’s recent critique of the progressive ‘green left’ in Australia.1 We summarise Langton’s argument: environmentalists would deny Aboriginal groups the benefits that flow from native title-related agreements; environmentalists live at luxurious distance from the realities of remote and rural Aboriginal poverty and social problems; environmentalists exalt ‘noble savages’. We critique these claims on the basis that they pay inadequate attention to the structural inequities that underpin the market in native title interests and, further, deny the reality that Aboriginal groups often seek to form strategic alliances with green groups, arguing for conservation of their country on their own—or shared—terms. We argue that any appraisal of the present status of ‘green-black’ relations needs to consider these factors seriously.

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Militarism and settler colonialism: Joshua Inwood, Anne Bonds, ‘Confronting White Supremacy and a Militaristic Pedagogy in the U.S. Settler Colonial State’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2016

22Mar16

Abstract: We argue that understanding contemporary geographies of race and militarism is predicated on understandings of settler colonialism and white supremacy. Settler colonialism is a continuously unfolding project of empire that is enabled by and through specific racial configurations that are tied to geographies of white supremacy. In a U.S. context, settler colonialism begins with the removal of first peoples from the land and the creation of racialized and gendered labor systems that make the land productive for the colonizers. In this context, settler colonialism is an enduring structure—an interrelated political, social, and economic process that continuously unfolds—requiring continued reconfigurations and interventions by the state. Such a framing connects landscapes of militarism and geopolitics with everyday forms of violence, social difference, and normalized power hierarchies and relationships of oppression. Building from these insights we argue that theorizations of U.S. militarism must be connected to the spatialities of white supremacy and grounded in the U.S. imperial settler state. Finally, we end by engaging with a broader discussion on the ways in which the discipline and academic institutions are complicit in practices that contribute to white supremacy, poverty, inequality, and the continuation of settler colonial practices. For these reasons it is necessary to cultivate a broadly conceived and militantly uncompromising peace agenda premised on antiviolence and the rejection of the racism (and its intersections with gender, class, and sexuality) implicit in the settler colonial state.

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Representing settlement, erasing indigenes: Beenash Jafri, ‘Black Representations of Settlement on Film: Thomasine and Bushrod’ Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 2016

22Mar16

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.

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Lybia as a settler promise: Emanuele Ertola, ‘‘Terra promessa’: migration and settler colonialism in Libya, 1911–1970’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016

22Mar16

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/

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The settler scoop: Dale C. Spencer, ‘Extraction and pulverization: a narrative analysis of Canada scoop survivors’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016

22Mar16

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.

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Vampires and the settler colonies: Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield, ‘Hybrid empires: Hollywood convention and the settler colony in Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016

22Mar16

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.

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On blooming deserts: Shmuel Lederman, ‘Making the Desert Bloom: Hannah Arendt and Zionist Discourse’, The European Legacy, 2016

22Mar16

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.

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