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On pre-settler colonial settler pasts: Ashley Riley Sousa, ‘“An Influential Squaw”: Intermarriage and Community in Central California, 1839–1851’, Ethnohistory, 62, 4, 2015, pp. 707-727

18Oct15

Abstract: Historians examining relations between Indian women and non-Indian men on the California frontier have focused on the gold rush era and later. These interactions were often violent and degrading to native women and a source of disease, despair, and population decline in Indian communities. Less attention has been paid the pre–gold rush period, in which a more complex social and sexual milieu emerged, influenced by the labor and familial relations of the fur trade. In California’s Central Valley, white and Native Hawaiian settlers pursued relationships with Plains Miwok– and Valley Nisenan–speaking women with great enthusiasm. Closer examination of these interracial and interethnic relationships at John Sutter’s New Helvetia colony suggests that intimate relationships between Indian women and settler men helped anchor these newcomers to communities that provided companionship, security, and access to labor and valuable resources. More than simply temporary arrangements of convenience, these relationships helped revitalize Indian communities and were essential to the colonization of central California.


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On the nostalgia of dispossessed indigenous people: Joseph Massad, ‘The Cultural Work of Recovering Palestine’, boundary 2, 42, 4, 2015, pp. 187-219

18Oct15

Abstract: This article examines the Palestinians’ psychological and cultural response to the loss of Palestine and their plan of recovering it. By examining Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of how people cope with loss, especially Freud’s work on mourning and melancholia, the author explores the Zionist and Israeli demand that the Palestinians accept their loss, mourn Palestine privately, and move on to find another love object, coding the Palestinians’ refusal to mourn as a form of “anti-Semitism.” The analysis offered makes use of Freud’s insights and shows the explanatory limits of Freudian theory in examining Palestinian responses to loss. Another explanation examined is “nostalgia” and its manifestation in Zionist and Palestinian cultural forms. The article differentiates between a past-centered nostalgia and a nostalgia for futurity in analyzing these cultural products, concluding that unlike the Zionist movement, which harked back to an imagined fantastical past in establishing a colonial-settler state, the Palestinians deploy a future-oriented nostalgia for the recovery of their stolen lands and country.


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Settler colonialism today and how it works: Linda Tabar and Omar Jabary Salamanca, ‘After Oslo: Settler Colonialism, Neoliberal Development and Liberation’, in Critical Readings of Development Under Colonialism: Towards a Political Economy for Liberation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Regional Office Palestine (RLS), 2015, pp. 10-32

18Oct15

Excerpt: Today, the enduring violence of Oslo and settler colonialism is best reflected in the growing material and symbolic fragmentation of the Palestinian body politic: that is the Diaspora, the Palestinian ‘citizens’ of Israel, and the residents of the occupied territories.


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The frontier and the apocalypse; moving ‘”back” to a brutal settler colonial logic’? Katherine Sugg, ‘ The Walking Dead: Late Liberalism and Masculine Subjection in Apocalypse Fictions’, Journal of American Studies, 2015

18Oct15

Abstract: From The Road to The Walking Dead, contemporary apocalyptic fictions narrativize the conjunction of two central “crises”: late liberal capitalism and twenty-first-century masculinity. This conjunction underlines the insights of a variety of scholars and cultural critics who analyze the “crisis” of contemporary masculinity, often specifically white masculinity, as a product of recent economic and social transformations, including the perceived disempowering of white male authority in a neoliberal era of affective labor, joblessness and multiculturalism. But the apocalypse, especially as a television series, is a rather peculiar narrative vehicle for the articulation of a transformative future for – or a nostalgic return to – masculine agency and authority. Focussing on questions of subjection and agency in the late liberal/neoliberal moment, I suggest that zombie apocalypse stages a debate on the status of masculine agency that has roots extending deep into the foundations of liberal modernity and the gendered selfhood it produces – roots that are ironically exposed by the popular cultural referent that dominates The Walking Dead: the frontier myth. The frontier and the apocalypse both draw from Hobbesian prognostications of a state of nature as relentless competition and a war of “all against all” that are foundational to modern liberal political theory and questions of sovereignty, self-interest, and collective governance. But they also index a narrative antidote to the erasure of political agency as traditionally enshrined in liberal democratic norms and traditions. Like the western, the zombie apocalypse speculates about possible ways in which masculine agency in liberal modernity might be reimagined and/or reinvigorated. In the place of a tired, automated neo-“official man”, the apocalypse in The Walking Dead promises an opportunity to “finally start living” – reminding us that white masculinity figures precisely the Enlightenment liberal subject-citizen and the authoritative, if highly fictional, agency which has been notoriously crushed within regimes of late capitalist biopower. And yet, even as the zombie apocalypse engages foundational myths of liberal modernity, it elaborates them in surprisingly nihilistic set pieces and an apparently doomed, serial narrative loop (there is no end to the zombie apocalypse and life in it is remarkably unpleasant). The eruption of haptic elements in the television show – especially in the visual and aural technologies that allow representations of bodies, suffering, dismemberment, mutability, disgust – further counters the apparent trajectory of apocalyptic allegory and opens it to alternative logics and directions. The narrative options of the zombie apocalypse thus seem to be moving “back” to a brutal settler colonial logic or “forward” to an alternative, perhaps more ethical, “zombie logic,” but without humans. This essay is interested in what these two trajectories have to say to each other and what that dialogue, and dialectic, indicate about contemporary economic governance as it is experienced and translated affectively into popular narrative and cultural product. That is, to what extent is the racist and economic logic of settler colonialism already infected by the specter of another logic of abjection and otherness, one that is figured both by the zombies and by the nonnarrative function of spectacles of embodied male suffering? And what does that slippage between logics and directions tell us about the internal workings of settler colonialism and economic liberalism that have always been lodged within mythic fantasies of the frontier?


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Highly-governed inclusion as exclusion (and its negotiation): Alexander Page, ‘The Australian settler state, Indigenous agency, and the Indigenous sector in the twenty first century’, Australian Political Studies Association, 2015

15Oct15

Abstract: The Indigenous Sector – thousands of community organisations providing both service delivery and political advocacy functions for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across Australia – occupies a distinct position in the national polity. Indigenous community organisations are largely government funded and incorporated under Commonwealth and state legislation; yet they are a key way for Indigenous populations to speak back to the state through making political, economic, social, and cultural claims which have largely been ignored. While the settler colonial governance environment ensures both highly-governed inclusion and the continued exclusion of Indigenous peoples today, Indigenous populations negotiate this environment using their agency to establish and maintain these unique community organisations. Therefore, the Indigenous Sector should be positioned within this settler colonial environment with both its structural constraints and enabling devices, along with an investigation of the political capacity of people in the day-to-day in future analysis. This paper presents such a theoretical schema. Beginning with a discussion of political sociology and serious games, this paper establishes a theoretical discussion of the Australian settler state as an all-embracing, top-down, settler colonial structure; highlights the reflexive agency of Indigenous Australian populations and explains the power relations between these structures and community organisations; and critically explores how the Indigenous Sector negotiates the settler state governance environment of contemporary Australia.


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Is settlerism democratic? On the relationship between conservative thought and democratic practice: Joshua A. Lynn, Preserving the white man’s republic: The Democratic Party and the transformation of American conservatism, 1847–1860, PhD Dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015

15Oct15

Abstract: In the late 1840s and 1850s, the American Democratic party redefined itself as “conservative.” Yet Democrats’ preexisting dedication to majoritarian democracy, liberal individualism, and white supremacy had not changed. Democrats believed that “fanatical” reformers, who opposed slavery and advanced the rights of African Americans and women, imperiled the white man’s republic they had crafted in the early 1800s. There were no more abstract notions of freedom to boundlessly unfold; there was only the existing liberty of white men to conserve. Democrats therefore recast democracy, previously a progressive means to expand rights, as a way for local majorities to police racial and gender boundaries. In the process, they reinvigorated American conservatism by placing it on a foundation of majoritarian democracy.

Empowering white men to democratically govern all other Americans, Democrats contended, would preserve their prerogatives. With the policy of “popular sovereignty,” for instance, Democrats left slavery’s expansion to territorial settlers’ democratic decision-making. Democrats also applied democracy and individualism to temperance, religious liberty, and nativism. Democratic conservatism would protect white men against “fanaticism,” an ideology which countenanced governmental imposition of moral norms. Democratic principles united white men from the Slave States and Free States, Catholics and Protestants, conservative former Whigs, and native and foreign-born Americans with the promise of moral autonomy on issues like slavery. In addition to political principles, Democrats also ascribed to shared cultural prescriptions regarding whiteness, manhood, and domesticity.

As became clear by the late 1850s, however, majoritarian democracy could actually destabilize racial and gender boundaries. Local democracy could undermine the white man’s republic, especially when marginalized Americans turned democracy to their own ends. In basing a conservative political order on the instability of democracy, Democrats failed to bulwark white supremacy and slavery, but did place American conservatism on a new, populist trajectory. The tenets of modern conservatism, culminating in the twentieth and twenty-first-century New Right, coalesced during the 1850s debates over white supremacy and slavery. Historicizing the conjunction of conservative thought and democratic practice reveals the point at which majoritarian democracy and “liberal” antistatism and individualism became the “conservative” means for upholding a specific racial and gendered order.


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Decolonising the settler curriculum? Christopher Lamb, ‘(Neo)Liberal Scripts: Settler Colonialism and the British Columbia School Curriculum’, MA Dissertation,Queen’s University, 2015

14Oct15

Abstract: This thesis explores the challenges to decolonizing education in British Columbia (BC), one of the thirteen provinces and territories in Canada. It is an analysis of the K-12 curriculum documents in BC. The analysis is based on critical literature on settler colonialism, Indigenous critical theory, and critical pedagogy. Recent revisions to the curriculum documents have responded to increasing calls for integration of content about First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples and Indigenous perspectives into education in BC. However, critical silences, problematic representations and placement of content, and subordination of Indigenous ways of knowing and being to settler-colonial epistemology and ontology hinder meaningful integration of Indigenous perspectives into the curriculum. In particular, the naturalization of settler-colonial sovereignty and
territoriality in the curriculum reinstates settler interests and “commonsense.” This tendency is particularly problematic in the context of the contemporary neoliberalization of education in settler societies. This thesis proposes that decolonizing education in BC will require a shift in the ways settlers and Indigenous peoples relate in and with place.


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On children, infantilisation, and colonialism and settler colonialism: Toby Rollo, ‘Why is the Child Crying? Abolition, Decolonization, and the Ontological Misfortune of Childhood’, 2015

14Oct15

Abstract: In this paper, I argue that the enduring figure of the child, understood as a subhuman animal, is the foundation upon which European slavery and colonialism themselves are rooted. In the first section, I show that the colonial structures of social death and violence exacted on black (and also native) peoples are instantiations of the Hellenistic/Christian/Enlightenment subjugation of children. In the formation of the European worldview, the figure of the child features as the ontological Other for whom violence and subjugation are the natural condition. Modelling the peoples of Africa and North America after the irrational, criminal, and sub-human child made possible the institutions of slavery and settler colonialism that advanced into modernity. In the second section, I show that it was not until the late 19th century that western societies began sparing their young from the violence of childhood, usually by positioning children — white youth — as partially benefitting from the mature and therefore fully-human legacy of European civilization. Black and native peoples, on the other hand, remain globally prefigured as children. As a consequence, Black and native youth remain condemned to the status of bestial child from which white children have been partially removed.


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For those who read Italian: Andrea Longo: ‘Il colonialismo settler e il conflitto israelo-palestinese: intervista con Lorenzo Veracini’, NENA News, 13/10/15

14Oct15

Available here.


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Representing indigenous peoples for settler eyes: Katrina Phillips, ‘“Hordes of Red-Skinned Warriors” Performing Race, Sex, and Empire in the Apostle Islands Indian Pageant’, Radical History Review, 123, 2015, pp. 32-36

13Oct15

Abstract: This essay examines four images from the Apostle Islands Indian Pageant staged on the Red Cliff Ojibwe Reservation in northern Wisconsin in the mid-1920s. The essay argues that these photographs embody the gendered, racialized, and sexualized tropes of American Indians wherein indigenous bodies and indigenous histories were used to justify conquest and colonization. Painting Indians as exotic, erotic “others” served a dual purpose: not only did it rationalize colonialism, but it also created a market demand for cultural tourism in which non-Natives leapt at the opportunity to see live performances of traditional songs and dances and to traverse the country to see productions of Indian history performed by Indians. The Apostle Islands Indian Pageant symbolizes the juncture of race, sex, empire, and indigeneity in the early twentieth century.


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