Abstract: I critique Glenn’s article on settler colonialism and Bonilla-Silva’s article on critical race analysis from Indigenous perspectives, including racial genocide and world-systems analysis, to cover five centuries of global systemic racism during the conquest of the Americas, by Spanish and English colonizers and United States imperialism. I also propose macro-structural, comparative-historical analysis of racism including the destruction, resistance, and revitalization of Native Nations and American Indians.http://sre.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/08/05/2332649215598158.abstract

Abstract: Scandinavians constantly left their homelands during the Viking Age, and some of them settled new islands in the North Atlantic. The settlers in Iceland and Greenland attempted to create an idealized version of society, much of which was based on their experiences in Norway. Both countries faced different challenges as they developed, and ultimately Iceland survived while Greenland failed sometime in the fifteenth century. Each country, though unique, developed along the same pattern and had many similar characteristics. Iceland and Greenland both dealt with the introduction of Christianity, an overbearing Norwegian king who succeeded in the thirteenth century of annexing both countries, and the effects of environmental and climactic changes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Society also flourished in the North Atlantic as did travel and trade, with Icelanders and Greenlanders reaching as far as the Byzantine Empire. The Greenlanders also continued to travel west, reaching the shores of North America around the year 1000, the effects of which are still trying to be understood. The settlement of Iceland and Greenland offers an analysis of two countries that shared much in common, but only one survived.

Abstract: In this essay, the authors respond to several of the papers included in this special issue. First reflecting on the relation between waters, ‘First law’, and settler law, the authors then draw connections between some of the contributions to the issue. Water, the authors contend, is a productive site for thinking through the organs and processes of settler law, though such attention, they argue, also reveals how the ‘constitutional’ question of waters is occluded by the presence and dominance of settler law. The final section turns to Aotearoa/New Zealand as a negative example of this situation, one in which the constituting force of waters is nullified by the incorporation of indigenous politics within the processes and institutions of the settler legal order.

Abstract: This paper examines the temporality of urban planning in contemporary London, especially with regard to the 2012 Olympic Games. I argue that planners and officials deployed a rhetoric of permanence to validate not only the Games themselves, but also the costly development and infrastructural changes in the city as well as human displacements. Specifically, a decentralized network of planners, officials, consultants, and administrators used temporal concepts such as ‘legacy’, ‘sustainability’, and ‘regeneration’ in describing the benefits of hosting the Games, all of which purposely ignored the temporary and unsustainable nature of the two-week sporting event. I further argue that this rhetoric could be sustained only through an implication that the Olympic site—and East London as a whole—was in a state of ruin, a state which could be ameliorated through the production of this sporting ‘mega-event’. Above all, the Olympics attempt to rhetorically mitigate their own temporary, ‘pop-up’ quality for the sake of an urban settler colonialism.

Abstract: Expansion of the oil sands industry in Canada has caused land destruction and social friction. Canada could become a leader in climate governance by honouring treaty commitments made with indigenous peoples.

Abstract: A tradition of imperial geographical fantasy fuses India and Australia. This paper discusses the strategic role these utopian proposals played in imperial erotics, in aiding the foundational ambition of empire, which is to connect. The proponents of these geographical hybrids (T.J. Maslen, W. Pickering and Thomas Livingston Mitchell) occupied very different positions in Greater Britain’s colonial administration and the minority knowledges represented by their speculative overlays of India onto Australia circulated in very different cultural circles. The insider/outsider status of these ex-army, turned surveyors suggests a more complex ecology of alternative discourses circulating in the imperial imaginary: as proposals for future places, the schemes discussed in this article were fictions that aestheticized invasion, making it a metaphor for ultimate unity.

Description: Bounded by the St. Lawrence Valley to the north, Lake Champlain to the west, and the Gulf of Maine to the east, New England may be the most cohesive region in the United States, with a long and richly recorded history. In this book, Richard W. Judd explores the mix of ecological process and human activity that shaped that history over the past 12,000 years. He traces a succession of cultures through New England’s changing postglacial environment down to the 1600s, when the arrival of Europeans interrupted this coevolution of nature and culture.

A long period of tension and warfare, inflected by a variety of environmental problems, opened the way for frontier expansion. This in turn culminated in a unique landscape of forest, farm, and village that has become the embodiment of what Judd calls “second nature”— culturally modified landscapes that have superseded a more pristine “first nature.”

In the early 1800s changes in farm production and industrial process transformed central New England, while burgeoning markets at the geographical margins brought rapid expansion in fishing and logging activities. Although industrialization and urbanization severed connections to the natural world, the dominant cultural expression of the age, Romanticism, provided new ways of appreciating nature in the White Mountains and Maine woods. Spurred by these Romantic images and by a long tradition of local resource management, New England gained an early start in rural and urban conservation.

http://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/second-nature

Abstract: This article explores how affect and discourse intertwine. We analyse a corpus of newspaper editorials and comment pieces from 2013 to 2014 concerning Aotearoa New Zealand’s national day investigating how affective-discursive practices are mobilised to ‘cover the nation’ and ‘settle space’. We identify pervasive formulations of ‘bitter Māori’ and ‘indifferent Kiwis’ and the canon of affective-discursive repertoires and subject positions routinely set up as part of continuing white settler (Pākehā) cultural projects. A second objective is to contribute to the development of theory and method in studies of affect. We argue against non-representational perspectives and for a practice viewpoint that can work with entanglements of semiosis and embodied affect. Concepts from social psychological studies of discourse are applied in preference to ‘structures of feeling’, ‘affect economies’, ‘emoscapes’ and ‘emotion styles’.

Abstract: This article argues that while neoliberalism has supposedly been about ‘more markets’ in practice it has fostered the monopolisation of former state-owned assets by transnational owners. Neoliberalism is then a herald for neocolonialism, in which forms of political autonomy are undermined by transnational ownership. This process is mediated by a comprador bourgeoisie that owes very little to autonomy or development in New Zealand. The article revisits a Trotskyist polemic about the need for a transitional programme as the core of a progressive alternative.

Abstract: Henry Samuel Chapman (1803-1881) was one of the leading advocates of Responsible Government in the white-settler colonies. In tracing the biography and political opinions of one of its main proponents, we can trace roots of Responsible Government in 1830s-40s British radicalism, and see how its principles evolved in specific settler-colonial contexts, as well as being carried and adapted from Canada, to New Zealand and the Australian colonies. Chapman’s extensive writings, including his influential legal judgments, show how a high-level colonial official expressed his contradictory views on Indigenous people, both before and after his own extensive encounters with Maori in particular.