settler colonial studies blog

Settlers need therapy: Galia Plotkin Amrami, ‘“Denial or Faith?” Therapy Versus Messianism in Preparing for the Evacuation of Israeli Settlements’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 46, 4, 2015, pp. 414-430

18Nov15

Abstract: This article offers an ethnographic account of the professional activities of mental health practitioners, employed by the state’s religious education system. I analyze various models implemented by practitioners for the purposes of preparing pupils for the state-mandated evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza and the West Bank. By focusing on the interaction between psychological and religious-national cultural frameworks I show how practitioners imbue familiar professional concepts with new meanings and create hybrid models of intervention.

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On ‘racial boundary shifting’ (i.e., ‘the movement of racial boundaries across people’ – transfer): Joseph O. Jewell, “We Have in This City Many Good Mexican Citizens” The Race-class Intersection and Racial Boundary Shifting in Late Nineteenth-century San Antonio’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2015

18Nov15

Abstract: Access to public spaces played an important role in constructing and defining racial boundaries in the late nineteenth century. In 1883, San Antonio’s Mexican American elites protested an order permanently barring them from using the dance pavilion in San Pedro Springs Park, resulting in the public censure of the park manager who gave the order and affirmations of Tejano elites’ right to equal access to public spaces. The author analyzes this historical case to show the importance of the race-class intersection, specifically racialized class identities, as a resource in racial boundary shifting: the movement of racial boundaries across people. Public exchanges in the “San Pedro Park incident” either challenged or defended Mexican Americans’ equal access to a white public space by drawing on competing racial narratives about their fitness for middle-class identity. The author argues that analyses of racial boundary shifting must give careful consideration to how social actors use understandings of class to expand or contract racial boundaries. Reproducing class identities that ensure continued economic domination over racial minorities is a central part of maintaining the racial order.

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On decolonisation and its necessary impermanence: Alexandra Crampton, ‘Decolonizing Social Work “Best Practices” through a Philosophy of Impermanence’, Journal of Indigenous Social Development, 4, 1, 2015

15Nov15

Abstract: In the book, Decolonizing Social Work, a common theme is how decolonization requires more than surface level change. In social work, changing theories and intervention practices will not bring true transformation without attending to underlying western beliefs that perpetuate problems. This essay uses Shawn Wilson’s metaphor of an island to identify one such belief, explain how it is damaging to social work practice, and propose an alternative (Wilson, 2013). I first explain this alternative through a story of successful decolonization of sacred practices by the Zuni people. I then apply lessons learned from this story to the social work concepts of best practices and evidence-based practice. My overall argument is that these concepts can have destructive effects when informed by a belief in permanence, and that these concepts are better realized through an underlying philosophy of impermanence.

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On resistance, arborescent or rhyzomatic (a test case from New Caledonia): Leah S. Horowitz, ‘Rhizomic Resistance Meets Arborescent Assemblage: UNESCO World Heritage and the Disempowerment of Indigenous Activism in New Caledonia’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2015

15Nov15

Abstract: This article draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of arborescent and rhizomic assemblages to examine encounters between large-scale conservation and grassroots resistance to industry. I explore how the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage listing of New Caledonia’s reefs contributed to the demise of Rhéébù Nùù, an indigenous activist group that had been targeting a multinational mining project. I also interrogate how an assemblage’s form enables certain modalities of power while constraining others and how these differences in power modalities inform relationships between types of assemblages. Mistakenly expecting assistance in protecting their coral reef from mining impacts, Rhéébù Nùù relinquished the coercive power inherent to their rhizomic form in favor of participation in UNESCO’s arborescent structure via World Heritage “management committees”—a globally promoted, but locally inappropriate, comanagement diagram that targeted local fishing activities despite an absence of overfishing. Thus, this article argues that rhizomic structures have unique means of influence, exercised through particular modalities of power, which might be lost through cooptation into arborescent assemblages that exercise different modalities of power and might employ locally inappropriate diagrams. Ultimately, conservation does not only result in the extension of state powers, as the literature has shown; as this study demonstrates, it can surreptitiously support the extension of environmentally damaging industrial development at the expense of grassroots action.

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Neoliberalism as settler colonialism: Elizabeth Strakosch, Neoliberal Indigenous Policy: Settler Colonialism and the ‘Post-Welfare’ State, Palgrave, 2015

15Nov15

Description: This book explores the changing dynamics of Indigenous policy in English-speaking settler states. Such policy is slowly moving away from a self-determination paradigm, conditioned by a post-war social liberal vision of an enfolding state that secures citizen entitlements. New policies, rather, reflect neoliberal logics in their focus on economic mainstreaming, community ‘dysfunction’ and individual opportunity. Through a case study of Australian policy between 2000 and 2007, this book traces these policy shifts. It examines the federal dismantling of the official self-determination and reconciliation policy framework, and analyses policy experiments with voluntaristic contracts and coercive crisis intervention. It argues that neoliberal policies are creating a newly flexible relationship between inclusion in and exclusion from liberal citizenship regimes, and are altering the terms of Indigenous-settler political interaction. This book therefore challenges mainstream approaches to public policy since it locates domestic Indigenous policy in settler states as a crucial but often neglected site of political encounter and sovereign negotiation.

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Indigenous politics as ‘a state of reclamation’: Robin R. Gray, Ts’msyen Revolution: The Poetics and Politics of Reclaiming, PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 2015

15Nov15

Abstract: As a result of the settler colonial project in North America, Ts’msyen have been thrust into a state of reclamation. The purpose of this study was to examine the distinctiveness of what it means for Ts’msyen to reclaim given our particular history and experiences with settler colonialism. Utilizing the poetics and politics as a theoretical, methodological and practical framework, this dissertation synthesizes the motivations, possibilities and obstacles associated with Ts’msyen reclamation in the contemporary era. Further, as a contribution to the literature on decolonization, Indigenous nationhood, Indigenous subjectivity, Indigenous methodologies and repatriation of Indigenous cultural heritage, I report on two multi-sited, auto-ethnographic, and community-based research initiatives: (1) a repatriation case study focusing on the legal and ethical dimensions associated with reclaiming Ts’msyen songs from archives, and (2) a case study focusing on embodied sovereignty and heritage reclamation with an urban Ts’msyen dance group. To contextualize the information generated from my engagements with over 200 Ts’msyen, I also offer my own experiences as a Ts’msyen hana’ax (woman), and as a dancer and a
singer. Primary data are derived from a series of listening gatherings, translation workshops and talking circles from the repatriation case study; and a Photovoice project, talking circle and dance ethnography from the dance group study. Secondary data are derived from Ts’msyen lived social realties in the third space; academic literature; current affairs and archival research. Key findings show (a) the ways in which Ts’msyen laws and systems of property ownership are enacted when Ts’msyen sing and dance, (b) how an Indigenous research paradigm develops organically based on an ethos of relational accountability, (c) how Indigenous standpoints alter ethnographic form and disrupt objectified knowledge production, (d) and where to put the theories of decolonization into praxis in settler colonial contexts. Ultimately, this dissertation is representative of a Ts’msyen manifesto. It is a call for a renunciation of contemporary ethics, policies, laws, discourses and practices that continue the work of structured dispossession and Indigenous elimination, while it is also an active assertion of Ts’msyen nationhood, sovereignty, precedent, laws and ways of knowing, being and doing.

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And what about repressive authenticity? Eric March, ‘An Alaska Native group decided to make a video game. It’s like nothing you’ve ever played before’, Upworthy, 02/11/15

13Nov15

Access the article here.

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On white supremacy and settler orders: Anne Bonds, Joshua Inwood, ‘Beyond white privilege: Geographies of white supremacy and settler colonialism’, Progress in Human Geography, 2015

13Nov15

Abstract: This paper builds from scholarship on whiteness and white privilege to argue for an expanded focus that includes settler colonialism and white supremacy. We argue that engaging with white supremacy and settler colonialism reveals the enduring social, economic, and political impacts of white supremacy as a materially grounded set of practices. We situate white supremacy not as an artifact of history or as an extreme position, but rather as the foundation for the continuous unfolding of practices of race and racism within settler states. We illustrate this framework through a recent example of a land dispute in the American West.

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On the gendered dimension of settler colonial orders: Kate Law, Gendering the Settler State: White Women, Race, Liberalism and Empire, Routledge, 2015

13Nov15

Description: White women cut an ambivalent figure in the transnational history of the British Empire. They tend to be remembered as malicious harridans personifying the worst excesses of colonialism, as vacuous fusspots, whose lives were punctuated by a series of frivolous pastimes, or as casualties of patriarchy, constrained by male actions and gendered ideologies. This book, which places itself amongst other “new imperial histories”, argues that the reality of the situation, is of course, much more intricate and complex. Focusing on post-war colonial Rhodesia, Gendering the Settler State provides a fine-grained analysis of the role(s) of white women in the colonial enterprise, arguing that they held ambiguous and inconsistent views on a variety of issues including liberalism, gender, race and colonialism.

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On settler sentimentalities: Melissa Bellanta, ‘His Two Mates Around Him Were Crying: Masculine Sentimentality in Late-Victorian Culture’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 20, 4, 2015, pp. 471-490

11Nov15

Abstract: Commentators on late-Victorian culture often tell us that two interrelated developments took place. First, there was a shift away from Victorian sentimentality; second, there was a growing insistence on toughness and emotional reserve as desirable for white men. Commentators on late-Victorian Australia often suggest that these developments were unusually conspicuous there. This is what the historian of mourning Patricia Jalland tells us in a discussion of the paradigmatic representation of death in Victorian Australian culture. In the Australian colonies, she writes, the paradigmatic death was the tough white man’s in the solitary bush. Representations of such deaths were legion, most often infused with ‘ironic realism’ rather than sentiment. In this article I challenge this view. Focusing on the work of popular Australian writer, Henry Lawson, I show that depictions of white men dying in the bush were profoundly sentimental in that they promoted pathos for white men’s suffering and grief in conventional ways. Representations of dying bushmen were indeed part of a specifically white, masculine sentimentality emerging throughout Anglophone culture in the late-Victorian years, part of a process through which white men insisted on the primacy of their emotional experiences and needs. In Australia and other settler colonies, this new masculine sentimentality also supported settler colonialism because promoting tenderness for hardy white frontiersmen diverted sympathy from the Aboriginal peoples they dispossessed. This article accordingly rethinks the dynamic between masculinity and sentiment in late-Victorian culture, paying particular attention to its relationship to power.

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