settler colonial studies blog

On the fiscal settler: Shiri Pasternak, ‘The fiscal body of sovereignty: to ‘make live’ in Indian country’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

21Oct15

Abstract: Fiscal relations between the state and Indigenous peoples in Canada are a matter of life and death. By bringing to light techniques of economic rationality and governance of Indigenous peoples, this paper demonstrates a vital, yet overlooked trajectory in an ongoing colonial war. I examine specifically how Canada investigated and intentionally distorted Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s band finances as a way to discredit her demands that governments respect her community’s treaty rights. Further, I will analyze how these economic mechanisms and discourses functioned to ‘settle’ Indigenous territorial demands for self-determination in order for states and private industry to gain valuable access to Indigenous lands and resources. A multi-million dollar De Beers diamond mine operates 90 kilometers west of the Attawapiskat reserve and serves as an important site for examining how colonial forms of fiscal warfare work. For the past two centuries, an expectation of ‘self-sufficiency’ has been demanded from Indigenous peoples in tension with state investment in the dispossession of Indigenous lands; this tension defines Crown-Indigenous fiscal relations to this day and has been amplified recently in public discourses demanding accountability and transparency from Indigenous peoples while simultaneously decrying their dependency on the state. These discourses have developed in distinct relation to the conjoined historical and structural imperatives of settler colonial governance: territorial possession and resource access. I propose that by surveying the recent economic history of a resource periphery such as Attawapiskat First Nation, we may examine the kinds of power invested and produced in governing the lives and deaths of Indigenous peoples in Canada today.

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On the settler memories of cores and diasporas: Adam Hjorthén, Border-Crossing Commemorations: Entangled Histories of Swedish Settling in America, PhD Dissertation, Stockholm University, 2015

21Oct15

Abstract: Different groups from both sides of the Atlantic have since the 1930s come together to commemorate histories of Swedish settling in America. They have celebrated the founding of the New Sweden colony in the Delaware Valley (1638–1655), and the mid-nineteenth-century arrival of Swedish pioneers in the Mississippi Valley. Border-Crossing Commemorations investigates this continuing practice in studies of the 1938 New Sweden Tercentenary and the 1948 Swedish Pioneer Centennial. It analyzes how histories of colonization, pioneering, and migration have been made functional and meaningful in these border-crossing commemorations.

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the ways in which actors entangled historical representations in the 1938 New Sweden Tercentenary and the 1948 Swedish Pioneer Centennial. On a more general level, the study explores the question of what happens when different people, with different agendas, in different parts of the world, commemorate the same history, at the same time, in the same places. It proceeds from a critique of the national paradigm in commemoration research, and thus contributes to the emerging field of cross-border memory studies and cultural history. The study adopts entanglements as a way-of-seeing, influenced by the theoretical discussions on histoire croisée. Methodologically, this approach entails studies of interactions and the use of a wide range of source materials from the major groups involved in the commemorations, gathered from fifteen archives in both Sweden and the United States. By investigating both the planning and performance of the commemorations, the study analyzes the ways in which actors entangled history through the analytical concepts of modernity, race, and settler colonialism. These concepts provide an understanding of how actors made history meaningful in the present by, for example, emphasizing historical ruptures (through modernity), continuities (through racial genealogies), and significances (through claims that the settlers founded “civilization” in America).

Empirically, the dissertation discusses why certain groups appropriated the histories of New Sweden and the Swedish pioneers as their own; which histories that the actors agreed to commemorate and how these histories were characterized by settler colonial claims; how delegations were framed as traveling in the footsteps of the past, and made to represent shared social, political, and technological progress; how community festivals were forums where Swedes and Swedish Americans could interact and manifest their, sometimes differing, ideas about Swedishness; and how dinners were forums for international political and commercial relations, promoted through teleological claims of historical friendship. The study demonstrates how actors during the 1938 and 1948 commemorations entangled histories of mutual modernities, of friendly relations, and of Swedishness. These histories were permeated by contemporary social, political, and commercial interests as politicians, businessmen, cultural leaders, and others, claimed that Swedish settlers had founded civilization in North America. The study shows that these historical representations have been resilient and malleable, and that they have continued to be circulated during the twenty-first century.

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On indigeneity: Mark Rifkin, ‘On the (geo)politics of belonging: Agamben and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

21Oct15

Abstract: This essay considers the significance of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben in order to do so. UNDRIP provides means for developing a comparative framework for conceptualizing the situation of Indigenous peoples globally, focusing on the ways they defy settler-state norms and expectations of what constitutes politics and governance. Reciprocally, the essay addresses how UNDRIP reframes Agamben’s notion of exception by emphasizing less the eradication of sovereignty than the recognition of simultaneous, interlacing sovereignties whose terms may not be commensurate and whose nonexclusivity troubles a notion of jurisdictional closure – the a priori coherence of ‘domestic’ space on which the exception depends.

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It’s all in a name: Kevin Bruyneel, ‘Codename Geronimo: settler memory and the production of American statism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

21Oct15

Abstract: The article examines the use of the name ‘Geronimo’ as the codename that the US Defense Department gave to Osama Bin Laden in their successful mission to assassinate him. In engaging this critique of “Codename Geronimo,” the article offers a way to imagine decolonization and unsettlement through a wider critique of American statism, upon the premise that anti-statism is a necessary component of a decolonizing, unsettling politics. The article argues that American state practices and institutions function and are legitimated, especially in their most warlike functioning, through settler memory. Settler memory is an active practice, not a reference to dislocated past. The American effort to legitimate settlement requires persistent articulation, especially as it concerns statist power that enforces and naturalizes Indigenous territorial dispossession and Indigenous people’s disempowerment. Settler memory is critical to the reproduction of settler colonial assemblage, and thus it must be centered more in our effort to grasp and critique American state practices.

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Reading settler fiction: Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, ‘Creole Frontiers: Imperial Ambiguities in John Richardson’s and James Fenimore Cooper’s Fiction’, Early American Literature, 49, 3, 2014, pp. 741-770

18Oct15

Excerpt: In his 2010 article “Settler Postcolonialism as a Reading Strategy,” Edward Watts argues that by using settler theory to study early American literature, scholars in the field can move away from the binary of empire and resistance, toward a better understanding of the multiple experimental and alternative nationalisms of the early Republic. This timely decentering of the nationalist narrative builds on the shift toward postcolonial studies in American literature, while reflecting the more general transatlantic and hemispheric turn in American studies in recent years. In Watts’s reading, then, settler theory has the potential to transcend what Ralph Bauer describes as “the limitations of critical and theoretical concepts, as well as markers of identity current in US American studies … across cultural and disciplinary borders” (“Early American” 225). On the one hand, postcolonial theory has created useful comparative frameworks for discussing local colonialisms; on the other, the dominant Anglo-American emphasis on the colonizer-colonized conceptual binary fails to prove consistently useful in a hemispheric context. Furthermore, traditional periodizations of literary studies that separate the colonial and the national artificially normalize the American experience of decolonization, since the US model was the exception rather than the norm in the hemisphere until at least 1820 (Bauer, “Early American” 225). Thus, settler theory has the unique potential to address both disciplinary shortcomings by positing the early Americans as just one group of Euro-Creoles in the Americas, simultaneously agents and subjects of imperial power, whose identities and relationship to the land were triangulated across multiple political formations.

This article examines the relationship between such political formations and the competing narratives of indigeneity and authenticity that underpinned frontier fiction in the United States and Canada in the 1820s and 1830s. James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) and his contemporary and admirer, Canadian novelist John Richardson (1796–1852), have been traditionally read through the lens of the national canon as early representatives of Canadian and American literatures, respectively. The works of both have long drawn comparisons, which I do not intend to revisit here. Rather, my goal is to illuminate the commonalities of these two Euro-American Creoles via an examination of the role that the land, empire, and whiteness play in their literary invention of competing national and prenational pasts. In doing so, my use of settler postcolonialism dissociates the term Creole from its racial connotations, dominant in American studies scholarship, and uses it as a marker of difference in the relationship between metropolis and its colonial outposts. At the same time, rather than positing Richardson as a British colonial epigone of Cooper, I view him as the translator of a literary model into a cultural paradigm shaped by different historical circumstances, and informed by different transatlantic and hemispheric power relations. Central to my argument is the fact that, although both authors engage the same empires and the same geography, they wrote from within two concurrent political regimes, one colonial, one national, whose structures and conventions informed their respective “frontiers.”

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the northern borderlands of the American Republic were underpinned by real, albeit contested, ideological fault lines. Early American settlerhood evolved in dialogue with the colonial settlerhood of British North America. British literature was widely read in the colonies, but so were American authors. Early Canadian fiction engaged not only with British imperial narratives and tropes of belonging but also with American nationalism, defining itself in relation to both. Similarly, throughout the nineteenth century American culture remained involved in a series of complex political, cultural, and literary negotiations with Canada. Early American and British North American writers courted a shared transatlantic book market united by the use of the English language but separated by political divisions (Fleming and Lamonde). Canadian authors often wrote to three implied audiences: colonial, metropolitan, and Anglo-continental, adapting their writings to suit local sensibilities (Mount). Much like their American counterparts, writers north of the Great Lakes struggled to manufacture and emphasize a sense of political difference between the two Anglo communities in North America. In their efforts to craft usable pasts for the competing nationalist and imperial projects on the continent, American and Canadian authors grappled with the contradictions between the shared geography…

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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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