« Older posts
Newer posts »

Interstellar colonialism starts here: Luis Hernan, ‘Reaching for the Stars: Boca Chica and Interstellar Colonialism’, in Gihan Karunaratne (ed.), Displaced Urbanism, Routledge, 2025

27May25

Abstract: In this article, I ask whose bodies are disciplined, silenced and displaced to make way for the interplanetary utopia of Starbase, the launchpad of SpaceX in Boca Chica, Texas. Its location in the borderlands speaks of a troubled legacy which mobilises the home as a symbolic ordering of bodies that excludes the racial other. Against the mythologising of Starbase, and its symbolic and material destruction of the past of the site, I write Boca Chica through a description of Elon Musk’s home at the site, suggesting its interior as a performance of geek cultures and hegemonic masculinities. It is this performance, I argue, that shows the continuities of a historical settler-colonial project on the site, starting with the establishment of Clarkesville shortly after the Mexican-American war, with modern colonialism embedded in the techno-utopias of Silicon Valley.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The race of settlers: Nancy Huayan Carranza, ‘Problematizing the Multiracial Promised Land: Multiracial Settler Belonging in Hawaiʻi in the Asian American Literary Imagination’, MELUS, 2025, #mlaf012

27May25

Excerpt: Puanani Burgess’s poem “Choosing My Name” (1998) articulates the fraught positioning of multiracial Asian-Native Hawaiians under the conditions of settler colonialism and the tenacity of Indigenous genealogy to persist under what Patrick Wolfe calls the “logic of elimination” (“Settler” 387), as the poet-speaker demands recognition and refuses erasure of her Kanaka Maoli heritage by both the settler state and her own Japanese American family. This “logic of elimination” operates not only through state institutions that uphold the poet-speaker’s English name “Christabelle” as the “real” and “safe” name but also in settler colonialism’s assimilative demands on Asian migrant-settlers, as seen in her “home name,” “Yoshie,” which “made [her] acceptable” to her Japanese American family (Burgess 278), signaling the disavowal of Indigeneity as a precondition for belonging. Burgess’s poem also highlights the way that racial and ethnic identification via naming becomes linked to specific spatial imaginaries: “Christabelle” operates in state institutions such as the school; “Yoshie” offers conditional acceptance in the migrant-settler home; and the “chosen” name “Puanani” tethers the poet-speaker to the land (āina) and the sea (kai) as an umbilical cord (piko) to her Indigenous genealogy.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Talking about your colonial ex: Simone Bignall, ‘Deleuzian Concepts for Ex-colonialism’, in Henry Somers-Hall, Jeffrey A. Bell (eds), The Deleuzian Mind, Routledge, 2025

25May25

Abstract: This essay elaborates how a Deleuzian mind conceives the becoming of history in terms of ‘end’ or ‘exit’. A novel focus on ‘exiting’ from histories of colonialism offers an important paradigm shift away from the prevailing models of ‘post-colonial reconciliation’ and ‘de-colonisation’ that provide the concepts and language most often used for thinking about transforming colonialism. Such models have a limited application in settler-colonial nations, where the colonial imposition on Indigenous peoples is not in any way ‘post’, but rather is ongoing. Here, I articulate the idea of a discontinuous process of ‘exit-from-colonisation’ – or ‘ex-colonialism’ – that builds from Deleuzian understandings of temporality, existence, politics and philosophical activity. I argue that ‘ex-colonialism’ addresses three key problems in settler-colonisation: the need to disrupt historical progression from a troubled origin; the issue of co-constitution in contexts where unhappy relationships prevail; and the systemic or structural nature of the reforms required to accommodate political and legal pluralism in jurisdictions characterised by a post-colonial imposition of legal, political and cultural uniformity in the form of the settler-colonial nation-state. We will see how Deleuzian concepts for ex-colonialism align with First Nations’ aspirations for self-determination and release a line of flight from colonial power formations, distinct from – and resistant to – continuous (post-)colonialism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Make settler colonialism history: Janna Martin, ‘Unsettling public history: a promising methodology for settler decolonization’ Settler Colonal Studies, 2025

25May25

Abstract: Facilitating settler decolonization is multi-faceted and non-linear. Based on existing scholarship, the key components that facilitate settler decolonization encompass taking responsibility for one’s own learning and unlearning, self-examining that leads to a decolonial practice, building relationships with Indigenous people and place, and revising settler narratives to acknowledge the settler problem and Indigenous sovereignty. While this theoretical framework provides principles for settler decolonization, there is a research gap in applying settler decolonization theory in particular places and cases. Employing theories of whiteness in this framework, I explore an approach for settler decolonization through re-storying public history. To enrich the methodology, I utilize a case study of early Indigenous-Mennonite relations in what is now the Waterloo Region. I argue that through the braiding of Indigenous and Western historiography, a decolonial public history would centre Indigenous sovereignty, recognize the settler problem, acknowledge complicity, deepen relationships with place, renew treaty relationships, disrupt affect and embrace uncertainty, and foster settler responsibility.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Market settler colonialism: Joseph Whitson, Marketing the Wilderness: Outdoor Recreation, Indigenous Activism, and the Battle over Public Lands, University of Minnesota Press, 2025

25May25

Description: Marketing the Wilderness analyzes the relationship between the outdoor recreation industry, public lands in the United States, and Indigenous sovereignty and representation in recreational spaces. Combining social media analysis, digital ethnography, and historical research, Joseph Whitson offers nuanced insights into more than a century of the outdoor recreation industry’s marketing strategies, unraveling its complicity in settler colonialism. Complicating the narrative of outdoor recreation as a universal good, Whitson introduces the concept of “wildernessing” to describe the physical, legal, and rhetorical production of pristine, empty lands that undergirds the outdoor recreation industry, a process that further disenfranchises Indigenous people from whom these lands were stolen. He demonstrates how companies such as Patagonia and REI align with the mining and drilling industries in their need to remove Indigenous peoples and histories from valuable lands. And he describes the ways Indigenous and decolonial activists are subverting and resisting corporate marketing strategies to introduce new narratives of place. Through the lens of environmental justice activism, Marketing the Wilderness reconsiders the ethics of recreational land use, advocating for engagement with issues of cultural representation and appropriation informed by Indigenous perspectives. As he discusses contemporary public land advocacy around places such as Bears Ears National Monument, Whitson focuses on the deeply fraught relationship between the outdoor recreation industry and Indigenous communities. Emphasizing the power of the corporate system and its treatment of land as a commodity under capitalism, he shows how these tensions shape the American idea of “wilderness” and what it means to fight for its preservation.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Picture settler colonialism: Peter H. Hoffenberg, Brian C. Black, Libby MacDonald Bischof, Jarrod Hore, ‘Review Forum: Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism’, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, 4, 1, 2025

25May25

Abstract: For this review forum, Peter H. Hoffenberg, Brian C. Black, and Libby MacDonald Bischof were invited to explore issues raised in Jarrod Hore’s Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler fantasies and their sympathies: Leila Ben Abdallah, ‘On Sympathies and the work of Public Things: Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s Challenge to Lorado Taft’s Eternal Indian Statue and Settler Fantasy’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2025

25May25

Abstract: Focusing on recent community efforts to repair Lorado Taft’s Eternal Indian statue, this article reads the statue as a public thing. In doing so, I argue that sympathy active at the 1911 unveiling of Taft’s Indian statue and 2020 restoration capture what I call settler sympathy. Instead of granting the ability to see from the other’s perspective, I illustrate how settler sympathy relies on image and myth fundamental to sustaining the settler nation. I turn to the thought of Oneida activist-intellectual Laura Cornelius Kellogg to locate settler sympathy as well as another sympathy, what I call fraternal sympathy. Where settler sympathy takes fiction to make things public for settler gain, I argue that fraternal sympathy finds in fiction a means to make alternative places where publics thrive through things that do not annihilate but rather affirm self-determination.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonial propaganda: Yiwen Xia, ‘Man’ei film in China 1937–1945: The Ideological Weapon of Japanese Settler Colonialism’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2025

23May25

Abstract: Man’ei, established in 1937 by Japan’s Kwantung Army in the occupied northeast region of China, was Japan’s core cultural propaganda institution overseas during World War II. This study systematically examines the origins and developmental background of Man’ei, with a particular focus on the colonial policies promoted by the Kwantung Army, such as the ‘Twenty-Year Million-Household Sending Plan’ and the ‘Essentials of the Japanese Language Popularisation Policy’. It then investigates Man’ei’s production methods and, through a textual analysis of Winter Jasmine (1942), explores how the Kwantung Army employed entertainment films to further its expansive colonial propaganda agenda. Unlike colonial films from other imperial powers, Man’ei’s productions idealize the colony, Manchukuo, as part of a positive response to the Kwantung Army’s immigration and related policies, reflecting Japan’s broader strategic ambitions in China. This research draws on archival materials from the Northeast China Martyrs Memorial Hall and online digital repositories, combined with a historical literature review and film textual analysis, thereby revealing Japan’s overlooked colonial practices and contributing to discussions on imperial colonialism as well as the interplay between cinema, power, and national identity formation.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Really decolonising space: Markus Schwarz, ‘From Colonial Terraforming towards a Planet-Based Solidarity: Indigenous Speculations between Planet Earth and Outer Space’, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 12, 1, 2025

23May25

Abstract: Terraforming has long been one of the most popular concepts in SF and space colonization discourses to think about the necessary territorial changes on other planets to make them livable for human life. More recently, however, terraforming has made the journey from alien environments back to Earth to reflect on how colonialist-capitalist practices have already changed the planet. Anne Stewart conceptualizes the histories and futures of these practices with the term ‘colonial terraforming’ – a praxis which describes the transformation of places to make them habitable only for a particular set of people: European colonial settlers. Thus, terraforming not only changes the land but also can be read as an ontological practices that creates the “ecological genre of the human,” as Derek Woods puts it in conversation with Sylvia Wynter. When land provides the “ontological framework for understanding relationships,” as Glen Coulthard frames it in Red Skin, White Masks, what does it mean for Indigenous onto-epistemologies when the ground is shifting, dispossessed, terraformed? This essay critically engages with this question: translating Coulthard and Leanne Simpson’s concept of “place-based solidarity” to a “planet-based solidarity,” I read Indigenous futurist texts as decolonial practices of relating to the land, planets, and the cosmos. After a theoretical engagement with terraforming and its entanglements within current speculative projects of colonizing Mars and dominant narratives of astrocapitalism, I read three short stories that are set against and beyond the extractive logics of colonial modernity: Adam Garnet Jones’s “History of the New World,” jaye simpson’s “The Ark of the Turtle’s Back” (both published in Love After the End, ed. Joshua Whitehead) and Celu Amberstone’s “Refugees” (first published in So Long Been Dreaming, ed. Nalo Hopkinson). Each of these stories is set in a different moment of extraterrestrial exodus: while still on Earth, during the journey in space, and after arrival on an alien planet. Through their speculative interventions in discourses of climate disaster, colonialism, and the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, I argue that these Indigenous futurist narratives imagine a different cosmic order, marked by a generative refusal of the available scripts of relating to the galaxy.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Decolonising space: Bhargavi PBA, ‘Not “Manifest” but an “Inclusive” Destiny: A Case for Decolonizing Space Exploration’, E-International Relations, 12/05/25

23May25

Excerpt: While interplanetary travel is presented as a valuable endeavor, in which space explorers will visit other planets and colonize them, it has also been termed by some scholars as a ‘renewed form of settler colonialism’—the legacy of colonization on Earth that had led to disastrous consequences such as genocide, displacement of Indigenous communities and cultures, economic inequalities and the degradation of the environment (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; Saini, 2019; Painter, 2010; Bhandar, 2018). It is, therefore, imperative for space explorers to understand the history and legacy of colonialism on Earth to help discern how seemingly innocent curiosity to explore space is entrenched in colonial behaviors.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »