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Settler colonialism as price tag: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Yossi David, ‘Is the Violence of Tag Mehir a State Crime?’, British Journal of Criminology, 2015

01Nov15

Abstract: This article focuses on the violent acts of Tag-Mehir (Price Tag), a group of Israeli citizens that injure, attack, vandalize and violate Palestinian individuals, communities and property. The paper discusses the criminalities of Tag-Mehir by reporting statistics on their crimes and juxtaposing statistical data with voices and analyses of Israeli officials and media coverage. By looking at the interlocking effects of religious, hate and state crime in the context of Israel’s settler colonialism, we argue that the acts of Tag-Mehir constitute aggressive violence aimed at concealing the state’s criminalities against the colonized Palestinian body and space. The state’s failure to effectively prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes demonstrates a tacit approval for the religiously and nationally motivated violence. Tag-Mehir’s state crimes hide within the resulting violent shuttling between nationalistic hate, violence and religious crimes.


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Managing insanity in settler contexts: Catharine Coleborne, Insanity, identity and empire: Immigrants and institutional confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873-1910, Manchester University Press, 2015

31Oct15

Description: This book examines the formation of colonial social identities inside the institutions for the insane in Australia and New Zealand. It looks at insanity in the context of migration to the colonies by focusing on two urban, public hospitals for the insane in the colonies of Victoria, Australia, and Auckland, New Zealand, between 1873 and 1910. During this period, there was a significant amount of migration from Britain and other parts of the world to both destinations, as part of a widespread Anglo-settler ‘explosion’. This was also the period in which social institutional networks were developed across the Australasian colonies. These social institutions included health, medical, and welfare institutions, all of which were modelled on British imperial institutional spaces and with imperial sensibilities. This volume engages with two important scholarly projects: the examination of gendered and ‘raced’ bodies in the imperial world of the nineteenth century on the one hand, and on the other, a consideration of the imperial discourses of insanity and the formation of colonial institutional knowledge and practice. Of particular interest to students and historians of colonialism, imperialism and medicine at undergraduate and postgraduate level, the book examines the creation of an institutional language of gender and race in two nineteenth-century colonial institutional sites. It will also appeal to the many historians of insanity and its institutions, given that these sites were part of an imperial network of solutions to the problem of ‘madness’ which followed Europeans to new places of settlement.


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Imagining worlds to settler colonise: Jodi A. Bird, ‘”Do they not have rational souls?”: consolidation and sovereignty in digital new worlds’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

28Oct15

Abstract: ‘Prepare to die’ ads for the video game series Dark Souls warn, and indeed the series is known for its punishing, hard core gameplay that promises gamers failure over and over again. Notorious and celebrated for its difficulty, the game series created by FromSoftware, Inc. presents players with an alienated world of violence that demands exploration tied to conquest to control space, advance past demonic creatures, and achieve dominance over terrain. Along the way, players collect the souls of defeated enemies and use them to acquire skills, weapons, and the tools necessary to survive. This article considers the rise of late colonialism alongside neoliberal consolidations of self, narrative, and expression within social, digital, and videogame conventions. Reading the Demon’s Souls/Dark Souls series alongside Bartolomé de Las Casas’ A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth, and Tzvetan Todorov’s Conquest of America, this article examines how structures of colonialism depend upon the procedural elements of enclosure, capture, and narrative to procedurally conscript the Americas into settler colonial territoriality.


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Settler colonialism and Japan: Katsuya Hirano, ‘Thanatopolitics in the Making of Japan’s Hokkaido: Settler Colonialism and Primitive Accumulation’, Critical Historical Studies, 2, 2, 2015, pp. 191-218

28Oct15

Abstract: This article provides an overview of late nineteenth-century Japanese settler colonialism in Hokkaido, a land long inhabited by indigenous people, the Ainu, with a particular theoretical question in mind: What was the precise relationship between the settler colonization of Hokkaido and the Japanese government’s drive for primitive accumulation of capital? This question deepens our understanding of the intrinsic relation between the formation of a capitalist nation-state and that of its colony, a relation through which indigenous people such as the Ainu lost their means of sustenance—the land—and were eventually driven nearly to extinction. It also compels us to rethink the way historians and social theorists, especially those informed by Marxian approaches, have discussed the relation between settler colonialism and primitive accumulation. The article suggests that the Marxian analysis of colonialism seriously consider politics of death, or thanatopolitics, which constitutes the matrix of settler colonization, as an integral component of capitalist formation.


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On the psychology of settlers: Phil Henderson, ‘Imagoed communities: the psychosocial space of settler colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

28Oct15

Abstract: Settler colonialism is a unique form of colonial domination, as its successful operation makes it increasingly difficult to identify as a colonizing project. The author asserts, in agreement with much of the literature, that settler colonialism follows a spatializing logic that transmorgrifies the territory of indigenous peoples into settler spaces. Moving beyond the literature, the author asserts that production of settler spaces simultaneously produces the settler as a political subject deeply invested in the reproduction and naturalization of those spaces. More importantly, that this process of subjectification remains open to radical instability in the face of assertive indigenous presences.


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On two modes of domination/being and their interaction: Geraldine Pratt, ‘Between colonialism and settler colonialism: Filipino youths in Canada’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2015

28Oct15

Description: Commentary on Philip F. Kelly’s ‘Transnationalism, emotion and second-generation social mobility in the Filipino-Canadian diaspora’.


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A struggle (also) against settler colonialism: Melissa M. Forbis, ‘After autonomy: the zapatistas, insurgent indigeneity, and decolonization, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

28Oct15

Abstract: In 2014, the Zapatistas (EZLN) celebrated the twentieth anniversary of their 1 January uprising in Chiapas against the Mexican state and the imposition of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The uprising took place in the aftermath of an upswing in hemispheric indigenous organizing around the quincentennial anniversary of the conquest of the Americas, and the 1992 constitutional recognition of Mexico as a ‘pluricultural’ nation. From the beginning, the Zapatistas rejected this recognition as purely symbolic, and instead demanded collective rights and resources. They also refused to see their demands as local, linking historic issues of dispossession and racism to contemporary global capitalism, while opening a space for transnational solidarity with other social and revolutionary movements. For over two decades, the Zapatistas have built a project of autonomy with the formation of autonomous municipalities, which they later consolidated into a system of territorial governance. Alongside these changes have been a global rise and interest in theories and practices of decolonization, and a questioning of the politics of national and transnational solidarity. Can Zapatista autonomy be understood as a practice of decolonization? This essay draws on longitudinal community work and ethnographic research conducted since 1994, and examines the Zapatistas’ construction of an insurgent indigenous identity, attempts to regulate the boundaries of what it means to be ‘indigenous’, and emerging new geographies of belonging in order to open a conversation about what their modes and strategies of political organizing may offer, particularly to struggles in settler colonial states.


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Settlers colonialism? Julia Landau, ‘Specialists, Spies, “Special Settlers”, and Prisoners of War: Social Frictions in the Kuzbass (USSR), 1920–1950’, International review of Social History, 2015

28Oct15

Abstract: The Kuzbass coalmining region in western Siberia (Kuznetsk Basin) was explored, populated, and exploited under Stalin’s rule. Struggling to offset a high labour turnover, the local state-run coal company enrolled deportees from other regions of Russia and Siberia, who were controlled by the secret police (OGPU). These workers shared a common experience in having been forcibly separated from their place of origin. At the same time, foreigners were recruited from abroad as experts and offered a privileged position. In the years of the Great Terror (1936−1938) both groups were persecuted, as they were regarded by the state as disloyal and suspicious. After the war, foreigners were recruited in large numbers as prisoners of war. Thus, migrants, foreigners, and deportees from other regions and countries constituted a significant part of the workforce in the Kuzbass, while their status constantly shifted due to economic needs and repressive politics.


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Exogenous others play Indian too: Bruno Cornellier, ‘Jackie Chan’s Indian play: immigration, Asianness, and the contracting self in the American settler colony’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

28Oct15

Abstract: This paper is concerned with what I define as a cultural politics of ‘being from’ in the American settler colony. I use Tom Dey’s Western/‘cop-buddy’ hybrid Shanghai Noon (2000), and most specifically what is presented in the film as actor Jackie Chan’s failed and comedic partaking in the white and homosocial tradition of Indian play. I use the film as a textual anchor for the critical analysis of the types of contracting subjectivities that are implicitly privileged within the foundational delineations separating settlers, Natives, and arrivants in what President Obama described as a nation of immigrants that is carried on the back of the non-immigrant status of Native Americans. I explain that in his conversion from Chinese national to Asian American – a transition that is prefaced by his disqualification from the settler’s exclusive struggle over nativeness, followed by his peculiar transition into an (Asian) American cowboy – Chan’s character becomes representative of this dialectical (and, in his case, always already incomplete) movement from genealogy to autology, or from pre-modern forms of marriage, ethnic affiliations, and social constraints, to a settler-liberal ideal of intimacy, reasoned consent, and self-sovereignty. In other words, once Chan’s character fulfils this trajectory of self-discovery in the refashioning of place and self, his new-found voice and sexuality bespeak his idiosyncratic conversion into an Asian American. I argue that his conversion illuminates some of the complex modalities of raced and gendered intimacy in settler articulations of the privileged, contracting subjectivity of liberal colonialism. What such representation of an idealized, autological migrant subject allows us to suggest, is that non-Native people of colour, as they re-enact themselves settler colonial modes of Native dispossession and/or co-optation, often remain peculiarly moored to the hegemonic structure of feeling of American settlerism in ways that often put upon them assimilationist demands that are parallel to those imposed upon Indigenous bodies as always incomplete white liberal subjects in the making.


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Refusing settler colonialism: Kennan Ferguson, Refusing Settler Colonialism: Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus, Theory & Event, 18, 4, 2015

25Oct15

Excerpt: Resistance as a political strategy proves unsatisfying, but often seems to be the only trope available to contemporary political theory. Theorists find “resistance” in movements from Occupy to protests against racialized police brutality, and often imply that all political engagement must, at some deep level, be about resisting. But the individual and collective aptitudes for politics are more capacious than that. And so others have begun to examine modes of political behavior which operate along other lines. Paying attention to affect has been one method; focusing on quotidian life, another; so has been interrogating the distinction between the human and the nonhuman; and a fourth could be called investigating practices of intensification. Each of these approaches denies the dualism between resistance and power, finding other channels in which politics takes place.

Audra Simpson, in her analysis of American Indian relations to the settler state, adds another philosophical concept to this list of alternatives to resistance: refusal. Refusal, in her rendition, operates very differently from resistance. As a weapon of the weak, resistance can reinscribe weakness as an identifying formulation of identity. Theorists from Friedrich Nietzsche to William Connolly to Wendy Brown have noted the replication of superiority and inferiority in such a dynamic. Refusal, on the other hand, interrupts the smooth operation of power, denying presumed authority and remaking ignored narratives. Historically, it is empirical; strategically, it is oppositional; psychically, it is enjoyable (106). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, makes an extended argument for this political approach, both as a way of understanding Native relations with the U.S. and Canadian governments, and as a model for further forms of political action.

Put simply, refusal does not take authority as a given. Where resistance looks for lacuna and interruptions in the constancy of power, refusal denies its very legitimacy. This might emerge from emphasizing alternative forms of legitimacy, for example the legal structures of the Mohawk people, or it may draw on practices which predate and thus do not depend on state formations. Where the modern nation-state insists on its own totalizing reality, those who refuse deny its authority and its domination. Where the state claims a monopoly on violence, those who refuse deny its universality and capacity. Where the state claims to determine what laws, treaties, and norms should be followed and which should be ignored, those who refuse turn to history, international law, and documentation not merely to resist, but to insist on alternative rationalities and legitimacies.

This is not a safe approach, of course. Where resistance incurs compulsion and persuasion, refusal can be met with outrage and incomprehension. How dare a small group reject the wisdom and success of settler colonialism? Such refusal throws into doubt the entire system of North American rectitude, majoritarian representational democracy, and constitutional justice. It implies, even states outright, that a political system founded upon the systematic delegitmation and elimination of a resident population with ethically and legally recognized rights to their land never can be a just one. The procedures of refusal, Simpson shows, “requires a legal response to contain those who refuse, a move that then incites settler anxiety about the containability of Indian bodies and practices” (128).

Capitalist settler states prefer resistance, which can be negotiated or recognized. Thus the historical attempt to refigure “the Native American” as just another racial or “cultural” minority, one whose grievances have more to do with an exclusion from mainstream American and Canadian life than anything else. Of course Indians can be equal, liberal individuals in a democratic country, the state suggests; once racism and the social ills of poverty and addiction are solved, Indians will become just like everyone else. Note, Simpson points out, what is elided in such a move: the history of colonial appropriation of land, the destruction of native languages and collective practices, and the legal status of Indian peoples as sovereign nations. Positioning Native peoples as liberal individuals has been the logic of genocide for hundreds of years. The only proper response to this is a refusal of such a logic.

What does such refusal look like in practice? At its most basic level, it insists upon the historical truth of Indian…


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