settler colonial studies blog

Trans-indigenous art is a sign of a global settler world: Mark Watson, ‘Centring the Indigenous’, Third Text, 29, 3, 2015, pp. 141–54

04Dec15

Abstract: Recent years have seen numerous contemporary Indigenous artists contribute to global art exhibitions. A growing Indigenous-centred literature unpacks the particular critical agenda of this global Indigenous art, while also contextualising it in within the wider field of contemporary art. This article enters into dialogue with this literature through a close reading of a multimedia installation created for the Biennale of Sydney in 2012 by the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity. It introduces the theoretical concept of the ‘trans-Indigenous’ to situate this distinctive collaborative art in the context of global Indigenous cultures. Explaining this concept through a close reading of Postcommodity’s work, the article outlines aspects of a shared Indigenous worldview found in the work. It then situates this trans-Indigenous relational art within the critical debates surrounding relational art, describing trans-Indigenous relational art as ‘double-edged’, incorporating both Indigenous commonality and an agonistic friction and unease in relation to the contemporary art context.

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Reconciling indigenous elimination and settler humanity: Alan Lester, ‘Settler colonialism, George Grey and the politics of ethnography’, Environment and Planning D, 2015

02Dec15

Abstract: This article suggests that the spaces of British settler colonialism and metropolitan science were interconnected, underexamined, grounds upon which both ethnography and colonial governance developed. Focusing on the governmental and ethnographic activities of Sir George Grey during the mid-19th century it argues that the origins of ethnography and the specifically humanitarian governance of spaces invaded by settlers were co-constituted. Although anthropologists have long recognised the complicity of ethnography in modern colonialism, the relationship runs far deeper and extends far more broadly, than has been appreciated in even the most incisive critiques. That relationship was also located in violent settler colonial spaces that have been relatively neglected in the anthropological historiography. The article concludes that Grey’s governmental practices, and his representations of them, established the terms upon which cultural genocide, with its logic of elimination, could be posited as a humane alternative to racial extermination. It shows that Grey’s promotion of amalgamation, articulated as a preferably cultural and social extinction over a physical one, went on to influence the highest levels of colonial administration. On behalf of the British Empire as a whole, Grey thus helped to reconcile settler colonialism with humanitarian governance.

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Linking the settler international: Frances Steel, ‘The “Missing Link”: Space, Race, and Transoceanic Ties in the Settler-Colonial Pacific’, Transfers, 5, 3, 2015, pp. 49-67

02Dec15

Abstract: The inauguration of a steamship route between Canada and Australia, described as the “missing link,” was envisaged to complete Britain’s imperial circuit of the globe. This article examines the early proposals and projects for a service between Vancouver and Sydney, which finally commenced in 1893. The route was more than a means of physically bridging the gulf between Canada and Australia. Serving as a conduit for ideologies and expectations, it became a key element of aspirations to reconfigure the Pacific as a natural domain for the extension of settler-colonial power and influence. In centering the “white” Pacific and relations between white colonies in empire, the route’s early history, although one of friction and contestation, offers new insights into settler-colonial mobilities beyond dominant themes of metropole–colony migration.

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Challenging settler colonialism one headpiece at a time: Nadia Rhook, ‘“Turban-clad” British Subjects: Tracking the Circuits of Mobility, Visibility, and Sexuality in Settler Nation-Making’, Transfers, 5, 3, 2015, pp. 104-122

02Dec15

Abstract: The late nineteenth century saw a wave of Indian migrants arrive in Victoria, many of whom took up the occupation of hawking. These often-described “turban-clad hawkers” regularly became visible to settlers as they moved through public space en route to the properties of their rural customers. This article explores how the turban became a symbol of the masculine threat Indians posed to the settler order of late nineteenth-century Victoria, Australia. This symbolism was tied up with the two-fold terrestrial and oceanic mobility of ‘turban-clad’ men; mobilities that took on particular meanings in a settler-colonial context where sedentarism was privileged over movement, and in a decade when legislators in Victoria and across the Australian colonies were working out ways to exclude Indian British subjects from the imagined Australian nation. I argue that European settlers’ anxieties about the movements of Indian British subjects over sea and over land became metonymically conflated in ways that expressed and informed the late nineteenth-century project to create a settled and purely white nation. These findings have repercussions for understandings of the contemporaneous emergence of nationalisms in other British settler colonies.

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Writing multiaxial histories of settler colonialism: Samia Khatun, ‘Beyond Blank Spaces: Five Tracks to Late Nineteenth-Century Beltana’ , Transfers, 5, 3, 2015, pp. 68-86

02Dec15

Abstract: From the 1860s, the colonial settlement of Beltana in the northern deserts of South Australia emerged as a transportation hub atop an existing, cosmopolitan center of Aboriginal trade. Viewing a colonial settlement on Kuyani land through a mobilities paradigm, this article examines intersecting settler and Aboriginal trajectories of movement through Beltana, illuminating their complex entanglements. Challenging the imperial myth of emptiness that shaped how Europeans saw the lands they invaded, this article renders visible the multiple imaginative geographies that existed at every colonial settlement. Examining mobility along Kuyani and Wangkangurru tracks alongside British mobilities, this article makes a methodological argument for writing multiaxial histories of settler colonialism.

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Being an indigenous man in a settler society: Robert Alexander Innes, Kim Anderson (eds), Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration, University of Manitoba Press, 2015

02Dec15

Description: What do we know of masculinities in non-patriarchal societies? Indigenous peoples of the Americas and beyond come from traditions of gender equity, complementarity, and the sacred feminine, concepts that were unimaginable and shocking to Euro-western peoples at contact. “Indigenous Men and Masculinities”, edited by Kim Anderson and Robert Alexander Innes, brings together prominent thinkers to explore the meaning of masculinities and being a man within such traditions, further examining the colonial disruption and imposition of patriarchy on Indigenous men. Building on Indigenous knowledge systems, Indigenous feminism, and queer theory, the sixteen essays by scholars and activists from Canada, the U.S., and New Zealand open pathways for the nascent field of Indigenous masculinities. The authors explore subjects of representation through art and literature, as well as Indigenous masculinities in sport, prisons, and gangs. “Indigenous Men and Masculinities” highlights voices of Indigenous male writers, traditional knowledge keepers, ex-gang members, war veterans, fathers, youth, two-spirited people, and Indigenous men working to end violence against women. It offers a refreshing vision toward equitable societies that celebrate healthy and diverse masculinities.

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Afronormativity and its settler colonial origins: Jordache A. Ellapen, From black to brown: Race, diaspora, and post-apartheid South Africa, PhD Thesis, Indiana University, 2015

29Nov15

Abstract: In 1994, South Africa became a democratic country and has since prided itself with having the most progressive constitution in the world. However, I argue that the post-apartheid nation-state is Afronormative and has become a site of regulation for social formations like race, gender, and sexuality. I coined the term Afronormativity, to examine how political culture produces and relies on normative social identities. Furthermore, Afronormativity, as a structure, makes visible the hierarchical nature of the post-apartheid nation-state. Through analysis of the reconstitution of the black-white binary in the post-apartheid period, I examine the limited forms of legibility and visibility this binary offers for certain kinds of minoritized subjects like Indians, who were introduced to South Africa in 1860 through the British Empire’s indentured servitude scheme. I argue that since the colonial period, notions of citizenship and national belonging have relied on the construction of the Indian as the “alien-other”. The post-apartheid nation-state still relies on political identities formed during colonialism and apartheid that reiterate stereotypes of the Indian as Other. I analyze how such stereotypes obscure the manner in which settler colonialism operates in the contemporary period, where the Indian functions as a scapegoat to deflect attention away from the continuing effects of white supremacy on the majority black population.

By drawing on a visual culture archive that extends beyond material culture (films, photographs, and fine art exhibitions) to consider the visuality of everyday life in South Africa, I shift my focus from the recuperation of the Indian subject to consider brownness, influenced by a queer diasporic framework, as an analytic that destabilizes and critiques Afronormativity. Located interstitially between black and white, I argue that brownness queers the black-white binary and a queer framework also challenges binaries related to gender and sexuality. This dissertation is interdisciplinary and draws from Queer of Color Critique, African Studies, African-American and African Diaspora Studies, Asian American and South Asian Diaspora Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Visual Culture Studies in order to examine questions related to race, diaspora, nation, settler colonialism and the limits of neoliberal citizenship in an era of global capital.

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On indigenous education and settler colonialism: Luis Urrieta, ‘Native and Indigenous Education in the Americas: Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Equity, and Economies’, in George W. Noblit, William T.Pink (eds), Education, Equity, Economy: Crafting a New Intersection, Springer, 2015, pp. 161-174

29Nov15

Abstract: This chapter addresses the complex, historical, socio-political context of Native and Indigenous education within several national and regional contexts. Settler colonialism is particularly highlighted as a source of Native and Indigenous land dispossession, dehumanization, and disenfranchisement. Attention is devoted to the interplay between economic development, equity and human rights discourses in education, with a critical eye toward the Euro-dominance that allows limited forms of Native and Indigenous cultural and linguistic autonomy. Finally, neoliberal global capitalism’s impact on the educational contexts of Native and Indigenous peoples is explored in various specific social locations with specific examples.

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Belonging through non-belonging: Emma Kowal, ‘Welcome to Country: Acknowledgement, Belonging and White Anti-racism’, 21, 2, 2015

29Nov15

Abstract: The Welcome to Country (WTC) ceremony and its twin, the Acknowledgement of Traditional Owners, have become prominent anti-racist rituals in the post-settler society of Australia. These rituals are rich in meaning. They are simultaneously emblems of colonisation and dispossession; of recognition and reconciliation; and a periodic focus of political posturing. This article analyses the multiple meanings of WTC ceremonies. In particular, I explore the politics of belonging elicited by WTC and Acknowledgement rituals. Drawing on ethnography of non-Indigenous people who work in Indigenous affairs, I argue that widespread enjoyment of these rituals among White anti-racists is explained because they paradoxically experience belonging through a sense of not belonging.

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A settler nation and its incompatibilities: Nicolette Bragg, ‘Between Belonging and Dwelling: The Hospitality of David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon’ Cultural Studies Review, 21, 2, 2015

29Nov15

Abstract: This article argues that David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon relates two narratives, one of hospitality and one of the nation. Rather than corroborating each other, these narratives conflict. By emphasising the novel’s account of hospitality and the accommodation of the stranger, this article intervenes in readings of the novel as a national allegory. Rather than simply a legacy of colonialism with revised legitimacy, the nation in Remembering Babylon signals the failure of hospitality.

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