settler colonial studies blog

Is ‘colonialism without colonies’ settler colonialism? Christine Whyte, ‘Between empire and colony: American imperialism and Pan-African colonialism in Liberia, 1810–2003’, National Identities, 2015

04Nov15

Abstract: Both Liberia and the USA make their independence from the imperial/colonial systems of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries an integral part of their national identities. Despite an upsurge in the use of the term ‘American Empire’ since the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the American government has firmly identified itself as a republic with no colonial ambitions. Liberia, dubbed ‘Africa’s oldest republic’, has similarly fashioned a national self-image of freedom and independence. This article uses the concept of Colonialism without Colonies to critically evaluate these claims, and further open up questions about the nature of imperialism in contrast to colonialism.

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On settler colonial genocides (and knowing about it): Jeffrey Ostler, ‘“To Extirpate the Indians”: An Indigenous Consciousness of Genocide in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes, 1750s–1810’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 72, 4, 2015, pp. 587-622

04Nov15

Abstract: As European Americans invaded the Ohio Valley and lower Great Lakes region from the 1750s to the 1810s, many Indians feared the very worst. Reports from traders, surveyors, missionaries, non-Indian captives, and government officials show that Indians believed that colonizers intended to “extirpate” or “exterminate” them, words equivalent to the modern-day term genocide. In making this allegation, Indians cited numerous instances of nonnatives’ use of biological warfare and violence against them. Most Indians who adopted this perspective were affiliated with international nativist confederations that directly contested Anglo-American expansion. Indeed, allegations of genocidal intent were an important source of mobilization for these anticolonial movements. But even some native leaders who opposed resistance and advocated diplomacy did so because they thought accommodation was the only way to avoid the genocidal destruction of their communities. Recovering an indigenous consciousness of genocide deepens our understanding of Indians’ thinking about race by highlighting its defensive character, in contrast to the more aggressive and hierarchical racial thinking of Anglo Americans at the time. It also offers new approaches to the stale and often unproductive debate about genocide in American history.

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Imagining ’empty’ space for settler colonialism; the Italian case: Jonathan McCollum, ‘Reimagining Mediterranean Spaces: Libya and the Italo-Turkish War, 1911-1912’, Diacronie: Studi di storia contemporanea, 23, 3, 2015

04Nov15

Abstract: The Italo-Turkish War, a struggle over the territory that the Italian occupiers later re-christened as Libya, became a heated ideological battleground for the emerging nationalisms of the Mediterranean. This paper delineates the contours of the geographical imaginaries of Italian and Ottoman imperial nationalisms and how participants and pundits of the conflict incorporated Libya into their national spaces. Examining the writings and publications of influential nationalist leaders Enrico Corradini and Enver Pasha, it compares the idealization of territory and the material limits of national imaginaries in response to European colonialism, the hardening of borders, and the emergence of a world system of nation-states.

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The Middle Ground and its posts: Edward Watts, ‘The Midwest and the Middle Ground’, Middle West Review, 2, 1, 2015, pp. 117-122

01Nov15

Excerpt: It’s been nearly a quarter of a century since Richard White announced that, after the end of the War of 1812 in 1815, throughout the pays d’en haut, the “middle ground” of the upper Great Lakes and Mississippi basins, the Americans “arrived and dictated.” White’s book largely concerns itself with the century and a half leading up to this, so it is not the fault of The Middle Ground that, in these last twenty-five years, historians of the Old Northwest have complicated, problematized, and elongated this transition without intrinsically breaking from its basic narrative of American arrival and the middle ground’s erasure. That is, they show that it was a complicated transition, taking as long as a century, and that the before-and-after binary White suggests was in fact characterized by entanglement and overlapping prior to the final marginality and vanishing of the Creoles.

The two books under review here contribute to this post-Middle Ground narrative in very important and very different ways. While both address Wisconsin’s transition from Catholic Francophone fur-trading region to Protestant Anglophone agricultural-commercial state, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy’s Great Lakes Creoles takes a microhistorical approach while Bethel Saler’s The Settlers’ Empire is macrohistorical in its method, framing the transition to statehood in the global terms of settler colonialism. While each displays some of the flaws intrinsic to its method and scope, each represents a valuable contribution to the ongoing post-Turnerian reinvention and revivification of regional midwestern history catalyzed by White.

For a text addressing the precision of muthiethnic and multigenerational family histories in Prairie du Chien, the imprecision of Murphy’s title represents microhistory’s tendency to overreach when it comes to transposing the archive of a single community over an entire region: Prairie du Chien is on the upper Mississippi—nowhere near the Great Lakes—and its middle ground era fur trade network ran through New Orleans, not Toronto or Montreal. This misdirection, however, is soon a forgotten distraction as Murphy begins to unfold what represents over a decade of painstaking work among the records of this French village.

Murphy begins within the middle ground narrative: “Enormous change came to the old fur trade communities of the Midwest, as the War of 1812 clamped U.S. sovereignty onto the borders of Wisconsin and Michigan.” However, her concern is “What this meant for the residents … [who] became minorities in their own communities” (6). In regard to racial history, she wonders “why the mixed ancestry peoples south of the Canadian border did not develop an identity as Métis?” (7). While it is a historiographical commonplace to say that the dominant American racial formulaic is binary—the one drop rule, for example—it is another to see it taking place in real time as court records, marriage and divorce documents, wills and testaments, and property deeds gradually yet unilaterally write the francophone Métis, French, Ho-Chunk, and other mixed race populations out of the community founded along the improvised and somewhat libertarian ethos of the pays d’en haut.

While Murphy does at times identify some of the paradoxes of French colonialism, for the most part, pre-1815 Prairie du Chien represents a model of multiracial and multiethnic cohabitation. However, by dividing the light-skinned Creoles with French names from their more identifiable Indigenous neighbors and relatives, Murphy’s Americans divided to conquer: “After the conquest, the United States intended to give individual land titles to Euro-Americans, and they did. … Newly and uncertainly dominant, the young United States needed these creoles, people on the margins between Indian and white worlds, to help them achieve the critical mass of population that would allow them to dominate and control the other peoples of the Midwest” (63). By tracking the experiences of certain Creole families through a series of generational transitions, Murphy demonstrates how later, their utility in removing the Indians having passed, they too were gradually marginalized as Americans, becoming more confident in the methods of dominance and colonization.

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The language of settlers: Danae, Perez, ‘English and language shift in Paraguay’s New Australia’, Wrld Englishes, 2015

01Nov15

Abstrat: This paper sheds new light on English in Latin America, more specifically in Paraguay, a still relatively underresearched region in the context of world Englishes. At the turn of the 20th century, almost 600 colonizers from Australia and the UK settled in Paraguay with the goal of setting up an independent English-speaking society. However, the New Australia community was soon divided, and its English language and culture faded away. This paper describes the sociolinguistic history of the Anglo-Paraguayan community and addresses the question of why English disappeared in Paraguay.

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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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