settler colonial studies blog

Playing Indian at home! Frank Usbeck, Fellow Tribesmen The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany, Berghahn, 2015

13Jan16

Description: Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germans exhibited a widespread cultural passion for tales and representations of Native Americans. This book explores the evolution of German national identity and its relationship with the ideas and cultural practices around “Indianthusiasm.” Pervasive and adaptable, imagery of Native Americans was appropriated by Nazi propaganda and merged with exceptionalist notions of German tribalism, oxymoronically promoting the Nazis’ racial ideology. This book combines cultural and intellectual history to scrutinize the motifs of Native American imagery in German literature, media, and scholarship, and analyzes how these motifs facilitated the propaganda effort to nurture national pride, racial thought, militarism, and hatred against the Allied powers among the German populace.

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Settler colonialism as the ‘geopolitical production of disablement’: Laura Jordan Jaffee, ‘Disrupting global disability frameworks: settler-colonialism and the geopolitics of disability in Palestine/Israel’, Disability & Society, 2015

13Jan16

Abstract: In recent years, Israel has seen an increase in disability studies scholarship and disability rights activism. At the same time, critical disability studies scholars have begun calling attention to the role of colonization and neocolonial powers, too often obscured in disability studies work, in disabling oppressed nations. This article brings these critiques in conversation with disability studies scholarship regarding Occupied Palestine to argue that disability is inextricably intertwined with the settler-colonial project of the Israeli state. By highlighting the geopolitical production of disablement, this work suggests that social approaches to disability have largely effaced disability injustice rooted in geopolitical power imbalances.

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On Athenian settler colonialism: W. M. U. I, Weerakoon, ‘Athenian ‘Cleruchies’ of the 5th century BCE: An analytical study of colonization as a political and military strategy of the Athenian imperial administration’, Proceedings of the International Postgraduate Research Conference, University of Kelaniya, 2015

13Jan16

Abstract: ‘Cleruchies’ are generally defined in scholarship as special Greek colonies in which the settlers received a plot of land and retained their original citizenship. The epigraphs of Classical Athens indicate a widespread popularity of the imposition of ‘cleruchies’ by Athens in the territories of the rebellious subject-allies towards the middle and the late 5th century BCE. However there is no intricate separate study in scholarship on ‘cleruchies’ and their importance in the Athenian imperial administration in the 5th century BCE. This research is intended to identify the factors that led to the widespread imposition of ‘cleruchies’ and their strategic importance in the Athenian empire. Moreover this study examines the nature of relations between Athens and the subjects upon which ‘cleruchies’ were imposed. The information for this qualitative research is gathered by the analytical study of the epigraphs and numismatics of the particular period and by the critical examination of the primary and the secondary sources. The findings of the research suggest that the allotments of the land received by the settlers in the cleruchies contributed to the ascendency in their property classes which thereby increased the Athenian citizens‘ eligibility for military service. The geographical locations of the cleruchies indicate the strategic importance of the settlements in securing the corn-routes and the sea trade routes of the Athenian empire. Moreover the cleruchies with permanently resident settlers acted as political and military defense during the Peloponnesian Wars against Sparta as well as the non-Greek communities. The findings of this study have helped to identify the political and military strategies implemented in the earliest western empire to control the autonomy and the sovereignty of the allies. This inquiry also shed light on the manner in which the earliest western empire strengthened her political stronghold while advancing her socio-economic interests at the expenses of the subjects.

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On the poverty of settler colonialism: Julius, Wilm, ‘Poor, white, and useful: settlers in their petitions to US Congress, 1817–1841’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016

10Jan16

Abstract: This article examines the multilateral negotiation of aggressive white settler identity and practice in the USA during the 1820s and 1830s. Drawing upon a large sample of petitions to Congress from the records of the Senate, it shows how white US Americans from the western states and territories addressed frontier relations when calling for a more accommodating land policy. Petitions framed requests for free land and preferential purchasing rights as efforts to remake white frontier inhabitants as market producers and patriots who would direct their energies towards the common wheal. As entitled landowners, petitions claimed, settlers would help to incorporate the frontier-space into the white social and economic order of the USA. White frontier settlements would lower government expenditures on American Indian wars, because entitled whites would by their own actions and motivated by their self-interests help to displace Indigenous groups.

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Indigenous hunger as settler colonial violence: Anne O’Brien, ‘Hunger and the humanitarian frontier’, Aboriginal History, 39, 2015, pp. 109-134

10Jan16

Abstract: Within a few days of settlers’ arrival in Eora country in 1788, disruptions to the ecological balance between population and food supply were set in train. The first conflicts were over fish and the officers soon observed that the local people were ‘very hungry’. Over the next century and a half as settlement spread across the continent, so too did these disruptions. Their rate and extent was not everywhere the same. Different economic modes and different demographics varied their impacts, and bush food continued to be important. Indeed, recent research shows that in some contexts settlers embraced and depended on Indigenous foodways. But while such insights are important in variegating the larger story, disruption to food supplies was one of colonialism’s irrefutable consequences.

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On white possession and the bordered state as sites of settler colonial practice: Fiona Nicoll, ‘Interrupting White Possession and Unsettling State Borders: Expanding Frontiers of Critical Indigenous Studies’, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 8, 1, 2015, pp. 47-59

10Jan16

Excerpt: The White Possessive showcases the unique intellectual contribution of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, both within Australia and internationally. Prising apart concepts of race, ethnicity and cultural difference, her book makes visible and accountable the patriarchal white subject of possession that subtends them. Mohawk Interruptus is a rigorous ethnographic account of the intra-subjective and inter-subjective dimensions of academic disciplines and political practices that produce and police the ‘authenticity’ of Indigenous people.

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Planning is about the future: S. Yvonne Prusak, Ryan Walker, Robert Innes, ‘Toward Indigenous Planning? First Nation Community Planning in Saskatchewan, Canada’, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2015

08Jan16

Abstract: “Indigenous planning” is an emergent paradigm to reclaim historic, contemporary, and future-oriented planning approaches of Indigenous communities across western settler states. This article examines a community planning pilot project in eleven First Nation reserves in Saskatchewan, Canada. Qualitative analysis of interviews undertaken with thirty-six participants found that the pilot project cultivated the terrain for advancing Indigenous planning by First Nations, but also reproduced settler planning processes, authority, and control. Results point to the value of visioning Indigenous futures, Indigenous leadership and authority, and the need for institutional development.

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Comparing settler literatures: Reingard M. Nischik (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature, Palgrave, 2014

06Jan16

Abstract: This book develops a particular analytic approach to the literatures and cultures of North America, elaborating upon a transnational and at the same time comparative perspective on these countries, an approach we may call “Comparative North American Studies” or, when focused largely on literature, as is the case in this handbook, “Comparative North American Literature.” The handbook is meant to chart relevant methodologies and major issues of Comparative North American Literature and to help this approach find its place in the ever-changing constellation of dealing with the United States and Canada and studying them across the disciplines. This recent approach to the study of the United States and Canada is presented at a time when both American Studies and Canadian Studies have been reorienting themselves, opening up in the wake of globalizing tendencies not only in economics, politics, and technology, but also in the context of literature and culture. This process has resulted in a tendency toward “transnational” (i.e., reaching beyond national borders) or sometimes even “postnational” approaches to literature (i.e., contesting the conceptual validity of nation-states in a globalized world), paying tribute to the effects of complex migratory movements as well as to national borders as a colonial overwriting of Indigenous conceptions of what is now designated as “North America.” Since there are few methodological publications yet on Comparative North American Studies, ³ this introductory chapter will approach the topic by first embedding it into the context of American Studies, Canadian Studies, hemispheric studies, and global studies.

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Check out these very important recent instances of anticolonial work: ‘don’t be a settler’

05Jan16

One commercial is available here.

The other here.

Happy 2016 everyone,

LV.

PS: Before everyone gets back to me saying that this is actually not anticolonial work, let me say it: it actually isn’t.

PPS: Thanks to Jeffrey Ostler for his tip!

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On settler art and its histories: A very cool project

30Dec15

Access it here.

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