settler colonial studies blog

How Zionism used/uses the Bible: Ilan Pappe, ‘The Bible in the Service of Zionism’, in Ingrid Hjelm, Thomas L. Thompson (eds), History, Archaeology and The Bible Forty Years After ‘Historicity’, Routledge, 2016

26Feb16

Access the chapter here.

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Indigenous queer and a search for indigenisation? Casey S. O’Higgins, ‘Two-Spirit Indigenous Americans: Fact not Fiction’, Student Publications, 403, 2015

26Feb16

Abstract: This paper examines the narratives of Two-Spirit Indigenous Americans who have been oppressed by heteropatriarchal norms of colonization. Two-spirit creation stories are explored to show the prevalence and importance of their identities prior to contact with Euro-American settlers and the evolution of violence, exclusion, and marginalization due to colonization.The term “Two-Spirit” is examined as a cultural identity of the Indigenous Americans. Finally, the paper looks at how Two-Spirit scholars are looking to combine Queer Theory with Indigenous Studies to deconstruct colonial heteropatriarchal America.

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Incarcerating indigenous people is just that: Miriam Kelly, Hilde Tubex,’Stemming the Tide of Aboriginal Incercaration’, The University of Notre Dame Australia Law Review, 17, 2, 2015

26Feb16

Abstract: Western Australia’s prison population has the highest rate of Aboriginal over-representation in Australia. Research on the criminogenic effect of imprisonment suggests that the use of imprisonment as a deterrent to future offending is not empirically supported and that imprisonment may in fact contribute to further offending. Consequently, this article explores theoretical debates surrounding penality as a way to
inform alternative crime control strategies to imprisonment. It will be argued that any strategy to reduce Aboriginal imprisonment rates could benefit from a perspective that views Aboriginal imprisonment as a manifestation of Aboriginal resistance to settler colonial dominance.

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Same story? Calla Wahlquist, ‘It’s the same story’: How Australia and Canada are twinning on bad outcomes for Indigenous people’, The Guardian, 25/02/16

25Feb16

Check the article here.

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Problematising ethnography in a settler context: Dolores Calderon, ‘Moving from Damage‐Centered Research through Unsettling Reflexivity’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 47, 1, 2016, pp. 5-24

24Feb16

Abstract: The author revisits autoethnographic work in order to examine how she unwittingly incorporated damage‐centered (Tuck 2009) research approaches that reproduce settler colonial understandings of marginalized communities. The paper examines the reproduction of settler colonial knowledge in ethnographic research by unearthing the inherent surveillance that partly constitutes settler colonial subjectivities in the United States. Finally, the author discusses unsettling methodological approaches as a way to disrupt damage‐centered practices in ethnographic research. In the author’s data collection at the U.S./Mexico border, the deeply introspective method of unsettling reflexivity—the ways we might (both indigenous and non‐indigenous scholars) reproduce settler colonialism—helps challenge colonial‐blind knowledge production, which has affected our understanding of colonial histories and often shaped the research process.

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The media technologies of settler colonial dispossession: Kyla C. Schuller, ‘The Fossil and the Photograph: Red Cloud, Prehistoric Media, and Dispossession in Perpetuity’, Configurations, 24, 3, 2016

24Feb16

Abstract: Two late-nineteenth-century media technologies purportedly recording the evolutionary past —the fossil and the photograph—helped naturalize the spread of settler colonialism across the Northern Plains. Settler colonial biopower works in the spaces in-between life and death to dispossess indigenous peoples of their land in perpetuity, seizing prehistory simultaneously with the present and the future. I uncover how Oglala leader Red Cloud drew on indigenous epistemologies of both fossils and photographs to negotiate the nuances of temporal and material dispossession, particularly through his work as a photographic subject. Red Cloud’s interventions with paleontologists and photographers illuminate how new approaches to media history that question the biopolitical divide between the organic and inorganic could be important components of denaturalizing settler colonialism.

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Representing indigeneity as an exercise in settler peer-review: Roland Bleiker, Sally Butler, ‘Radical Dreaming: Indigenous Art and Cultural Diplomacy’, InternationalPolitical Sociology, 2016

24Feb16

Abstract: We examine links between art and foreign policy through two important instances of cultural diplomacy in Australia’s history. Each time—in 1941–1942 and in 2009—the government staged an extensive exhibition in the United States. Each time, the exhibition displayed Indigenous art with the explicit purpose of increasing Australia’s political legitimacy and influence. But in each case, the artworks in question resisted and subverted this form of diplomatic instrumentalization. Art managed to insert and communicate political claims that highlighted—against governmental intentions and policies at the time—the suppression of Indigenous rights and demands for sovereignty. In doing so, art challenged not only legal and political norms but also an entire verbal and visual narrative of nation building that emerged out of colonialism. Art thus became political in the most fundamental way, for it directly interfered with what Jacques Rancière called the distribution of the sensible: the boundaries of what is visible and invisible, is thinkable and unthinkable, and thus, can and cannot be debated in politics.

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Settler colonial imaginaries displace capital: Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism, Duke University Press, 2016

24Feb16

Description: In Alien Capital Iyko Day retheorizes the history and logic of settler colonialism by examining its intersection with capitalism and the racialization of Asian immigrants to Canada and the United States. Day explores how the historical alignment of Asian bodies and labor with capital’s abstract and negative dimensions became one of settler colonialism’s foundational and defining features. This alignment allowed white settlers to gloss over and expunge their complicity with capitalist exploitation from their collective memory. Day reveals this process through an analysis of a diverse body of Asian North American literature and visual culture, including depictions of Chinese railroad labor in the 1880s, filmic and literary responses to Japanese internment in the 1940s, and more recent examinations of the relations between free trade, national borders, and migrant labor. In highlighting these artists’ reworking and exposing of the economic modalities of Asian racialized labor, Day pushes beyond existing approaches to settler colonialism as a Native/settler binary to formulate it as a dynamic triangulation of Native, settler, and alien populations and positionalities.

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On the solidity and fragility of settlement (and settlements): Amanda Nettelbeck, Russell C. Smandych, Louis A. Knafla, and Robert Foster, Fragile Settlements: Aboriginal Peoples, Law, and Resistance in South-West Australia and Prairie Canada, UBC Press, 2016

24Feb16

Description: Fragile Settlements compares the processes through which British colonial authority was asserted over Indigenous peoples in southwest Australia and prairie Canada from the 1830s to the early twentieth century. At the start of this period, as a humanitarian response to settlers’ increased demand for land, Britain’s Colonial Office moved to protect Indigenous peoples by making them subjects under British law. This book highlights the parallels and divergences between these connected British frontiers by examining how colonial actors and institutions interpreted and applied the principle of law in their interaction with Indigenous peoples on the ground.

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The ‘modernity/tradition’ dichotomy leads to narrative transfer: Celine Germond-Duret, ‘Tradition and modernity: an obsolete dichotomy? Binary thinking, indigenous peoples and normalisation’, Third World Quarterly, 2016

21Feb16

Abstract: The debates over Indigenous peoples and development are often framed within the discussion on the shift towards modernity, the imposition of economic liberalism and resistance against external interventions, with a tendency to see Indigenous peoples as a possible alternative to the world economic order. However, looking at many development agencies’ discourses, the idea that Indigenous peoples will actually benefit from modernity prevails. The literature is divided along these two conflicting views and dominated by binary oppositions: traditional/modern; backward/advanced; sustainable/unsustainable, etc. This article discusses the tradition/modernity dichotomy and raises the following questions: is it relevant to think in terms of modernity/tradition in the case of Indigenous peoples? What does the use of such a dichotomy imply? What is the alternative? The article demonstrates that this binary opposition is neither relevant nor desirable, and that a new analytical framework is required. Instead, it proposes using a normalisation framework, which focuses on the attempts made to ‘normalise’ Indigenous peoples and to encourage them to comply with existing social and economic models.

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