settler colonial studies blog

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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Writing, mediating, resisting: Authorized Agents: The Projects of Native American Writing in the Era of Removal, PhD Dissertation, University of Michgan, 2015

13Oct15

Abstract: This dissertation examines how Native American writing and performance mediated between tribal nations and colonial institutions during the period of Indian removal. It analyzes collaborative publications by writers, orators, and tribal leaders from four different Indian nations between 1820 and 1860: Sharitarish and Petalesharo (Pawnee); Black Hawk, Keokuk, and Hardfish (Sauk); Peter Pitchlynn (Choctaw); and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Peter Jones, and George Copway (Ojibwe). I argue that these authors generated what I call “publication projects”: collaborative forms of writing and speaking that imagined institutional and discursive change through navigating colonial institutional networks. Embracing oral performance, manuscript writing, and print publishing, Native writers asserted themselves within the overlapping networks of colonial and tribal governments and civil society, such as the Office of Indian Affairs, missionary organizations, and educational institutions. As publication in the nineteenth century was not principally the work of addressing disembodied or cross-regional audiences, these Native American publication projects sought to inflect associational networks wherein Indian policy was made and knowledge created, and in which Indian removal was both promoted and debated. Removal-era Native writings and performances therefore register attempts to assert control over publication technologies in order to alternately critique or modify such networks, or to mobilize them to contribute to the work of Indian nation-building. Through collaborative and highly mediated publications, Native writers, speakers, and tribal leaders asserted themselves as “authorized agents,” performing a public and politicized Native presence to claim a place for tribal nations in North America. As situational acts of writing and performance, these projects negotiated and contested the local and regional pressures through which North American settler colonialism manifested.

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International sport as colonising: Christine O’Bonsawin, ‘From Black Power to Indigenous Activism: The Olympic Movement and the Marginalization of Oppressed Peoples (1968–2012)’, Journal of Sport History, 42, 2, 2015 pp. 200-219

13Oct15

Abstract: During the 2012 London Olympic Summer Games, Indigenous boxer and member of the Australian national team Damien Hooper was nearly disqualified from Olympic competition for entering the ring wearing a shirt inscribed with the Aboriginal flag of Australia. National Olympic officials cited charter rule 50, which forbids political, religious, or racial demonstrations inside an Olympic venue, to immediately reprimand this Indigenous athlete for his actions. Using the Hooper example, this paper argues that Olympic principles and governing laws undoubtedly infringe on the fundamental human rights of marginalized and oppressed populations throughout the world. Specifically, Olympic Charter rule 50 categorically sustains the illegal missions of colonizing settler governments that attempt to rule over Indigenous people and their lands. Within the Olympic domain, Indigenous athletes are forced to assume the identity of the colonizing settler citizenry, thereby further validating the political authority of an illegally imposed governing structure.

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Settler colonial orders are gendered orders: Honor Sachs, Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier, Yale University Press, 2015

13Oct15

Description: On America’s western frontier, myths of prosperity concealed the brutal conditions endured by women, slaves, orphans, and the poor. As poverty and unrest took root in eighteenth-century Kentucky, western lawmakers championed ideas about whiteness, manhood, and patriarchal authority to help stabilize a politically fractious frontier. Honor Sachs combines rigorous scholarship with an engaging narrative to examine how conditions in Kentucky facilitated the expansion of rights for white men in ways that would become a model for citizenship in the country as a whole. Endorsed by many prominent western historians, this groundbreaking work is a major contribution to frontier scholarship.

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On non-settlerist settlers: Dana Rubin, ‘The NonZionist Jewish Settlers of the West Bank’ in Engin Isin (ed.), Citizenship after Orientalism: Transforming Political Theory, Palgrave 2015

13Oct15

Access the book here

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Special forum: ‘Indigenous Histories of The Gilded Age and Progressive Era’, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 14, 4, 2015

13Oct15

Access the articles.

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