« Older posts
Newer posts »

On urban settler colonialisms: David Hugill, ‘Settler colonial urbanism: notes from Minneapolis and the life of Thomas Barlow Walker’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

18Sep15

Abstract: http://This article considers the explicit link between the historical production of the Twin Cities metropolitan area (Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN) and the violence of settler colonization by examining the life and contributions of one of the urban region’s most celebrated ‘city builders’, Thomas Barlow Walker. Drawing on recent scholarship in the emergent subfield of settler-colonial studies, it demonstrates that Walker’s rise to local fame and fortune is inseparable from strategies of dispossessive accumulation that operated to valorize and legitimate the territorial and social claims of settler colonists, over and above those of Indigenous peoples. In doing so, this article aims to challenge revisionist presentations that interpret the urban region as a strictly settler creation and demonstrates that settler colonial dispossession retains an explicit material trace in the urban present. Full text HTML PDF


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

On contemporarity frontiers: Carl Abbott, Imagined Frontiers: Contemporary America and Beyond, University of Oklahoma Press, 2015

18Sep15

Description: We live near the edge—whether in a settlement at the core of the Rockies, a gated community tucked into the wilds of the Santa Monica Mountains, a silicon culture emerging in the suburbs, or, in the future, homesteading on a terraformed Mars. In Imagined Frontiers, urban historian and popular culture scholar Carl Abbott looks at the work of American artists who have used novels, film, television, maps, and occasionally even performance art to explore these frontiers—the metropolitan frontier of suburban development, the classic continental frontier of American settlement, and the yet unrealized frontiers beyond Earth.

Focusing on writers and artists working during the past half-century, an era of global economic and social reach, Abbott describes the dialogue between historians and social scientists seeking to understand these frontier places and the artists reimagining them in written and visual fictions. This book offers perspectives on such well-known authors as T. C. Boyle and John Updike and on such familiar movies and television shows as Falling Down and The Sopranos. By putting The Rockford Files and the cult favorite Firefly in conversation with popular fiction writers Robert Heinlein and Stephen King and literary novelists Peter Matthiessen and Leslie Marmon Silko, Abbott interweaves the disparate subjects of western history, urban planning, and science fiction in a single volume.

Abbott combines all-new essays with others previously published but substantially revised to integrate western and urban history, literary analysis, and American studies scholarship in a uniquely compelling analysis of the frontier in popular culture.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Mindanao as a case of settler colonialism: Sherwin Mendoza, Landlessness, War, and Displacement in Literatures of Mindanao and Sulu, Kritika Kultura, 25, 2015, pp. 89-141

18Sep15

Abstract: This monograph attempts to clarify the relationships of Filipino Americans to the diaspora of Christian settler colonists in Mindanao with the hope of facilitating solidarity between Filipino Americans and the peoples of Mindanao and Sulu. It begins with a consideration of Carlos Bulosan, perhaps the most prominent figure within the discipline of Filipino American Studies, in terms of the brief appearance of Mindanao in America is in the Heart. The bulk of the monograph, however, is centered on literatures of the Southern Philippines, a region that is often overlooked within the discipline of Filipino American Studies, and in particular it examines the historical evolution of landlessness, displacement, and war in the Southern Philippines through the close reading of texts produced there. The first text is “Blue Blood of the Big Astana,” a story from the Commonwealth period of US-Philippine history, written by Ibrahim Jubaira, the mostrecognized Muslim writer in English from the Philippines. Jubaira’s story is notable for its depiction of the persistence of ideas concerning land tenure, status, and kinship from a time just prior to US colonial rule within a context determined by the increasing inroads of merchant capitalism fostered by the US colonial state. However, Jubaira’s story is very partial when contextualized in terms of debates concerning the fate of Mindanao and Sulu during the years preceding the formal independence of the Philippines. The monograph then moves to the near-present to consider a story by the Maranao writer Loren Hallilah I. Lao, “The Trip to a Forbidden Land,” as a plea for peace that is
constrained by the middle-class setting of the story. Finally, the emphasis shifts to a set of oral histories collected in the volume Land Tenure Stories in Central Mindanao. The shift to this set of texts corrects an urban and middle-class bias in the stories of Jubaira and Lao that would prevent Filipino American readers from understanding the concerns of Muslims and indigenous peoples and the causes of conflicts in the Southern Philippines. The stories of a specific conflict over land told by Muslims and Manobos in Land Tenure Stories highlight the importance of land as a necessary part of the livelihoods of many of the indigenous, Muslim, and Christian people of Mindanao and the ways in which landlessness and the lack of livelihoods are causes of conflicts in the Southern Philippines.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

On settlers and contemporary conflicts: Oded Haklai, Neophytos Loizides (eds), Settlers in Contested Lands: Territorial Disputes and Ethnic Conflicts, Stanford University Press, 2015

13Sep15

Description: Settlers feature in many protracted territorial disputes and ethnic conflicts around the world. Explaining the dynamics of the politics of settlers in contested territories in several contemporary cases, this book illuminates how settler-related conflicts emerge, evolve, and are significantly more difficult to resolve than other disputes.

Written by country experts, chapters consider Israel and the West Bank, Arab settlers in Kirkuk, Moroccan settlers in Western Sahara, settlers from Fascist Italy in North Africa, Turkish settlers in Cyprus, Indonesian settlers in East Timor, and Sinhalese settlers in Sri Lanka. Addressing four common topics—right-sizing the state, mobilization and violence, the framing process, and legal principles versus pragmatism—the cases taken together raise interrelated questions about the role of settlers in conflicts in contested territory. Then looking beyond the similar characteristics, these cases also illuminate key differences in levels of settler mobilization and the impact these differences can have on peace processes to help explain different outcomes of settler-related conflicts. Finally, cases investigate the causes of settler mobilization and identify relevant conflict resolution mechanisms.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Indigeneity through diaspora? Gregory D. Smithers, The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity, Yale University Press, 2015

13Sep15

Description: The Cherokee are one of the largest Native American tribes in the United States, with more than three hundred thousand people across the country claiming tribal membership and nearly one million people internationally professing to have at least one Cherokee Indian ancestor. In this revealing history of Cherokee migration and resettlement, Gregory Smithers uncovers the origins of the Cherokee diaspora and explores how communities and individuals have negotiated their Cherokee identities, even when geographically removed from the Cherokee Nation headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the author transports the reader back in time to tell the poignant story of the Cherokee people migrating throughout North America, including their forced exile along the infamous Trail of Tears (1838–39). Smithers tells a remarkable story of courage, cultural innovation, and resilience, exploring the importance of migration and removal, land and tradition, culture and language in defining what it has meant to be Cherokee for a widely scattered people.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

On indigeneity as deficit: Cameron Greensmith, ‘The management of indigenous difference in Toronto’s queer service sector’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

13Sep15

Abstract: While the ‘problem’ and ‘pathological’ logics pinned onto the bodies and minds of Indigenous peoples have been exposed as key contributors to the sustainment of white settler colonialism in Canada, their influence on the practices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) service providers working within queer service provision in Canada has received little scrutiny. This paper, evolving out of the narratives of 41 non-Indigenous LGBTQ research participants, showcases how the biopolitics and necropolitics of settler colonialism percolate within queer service provision in Toronto. I pay particular attention to the narratives of encounters with Indigeneity used to lock Indigenous peoples into ‘deficits’ – used to sustain their invisibility, erasure, and containment. In reviewing the research participants’ narratives, this paper calls for a settler colonial analytic within queer service provision in order to start dialogue surrounding individual and practice approaches and the institutional structures that sustain white settler colonialism. Findings highlight the normative practices used by service providers and the ways in which those practices further white supremacist and settler colonial projects.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Memorialising settler and nti-settler violence: BBC News, ‘Kenya Mau Mau memorial funded by UK unveiled’, 12/09/15.

13Sep15

Excerpt: The Mau Mau began a violent campaign against white settlers in 1952, but the uprising was eventually put down by the British colonial government.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Contemporary indigenous-settler relations in Chile: Magdalena Ugarte, ‘Regulating Indigenous-State Relations: Settler Colonialism and the Limits of International Law’, Canadian Political Science Association Conference, 2015

11Sep15

From the introduction: In this paper, I present some preliminary reflections after my recent fieldwork in Chile, which sought to explore the implementation of the duty to consult in the country, in the context of the recent endorsement of UNDRIP in 2007 and C169 in 2008. This initial analysis adds to contemporary debates about the limits and tensions of the international Indigenous rights discourse, and its ability (or the lack thereof) to produce structural transformations. In particular, I question whether these instruments are helping to restructure Indigenous-state relations in the country at some level, or are just reinforcing colonial dynamics in new ways.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Emphasising hybridity as a management strategy: Paul Moon, ‘The Impression of Hybridised Indigeneity: A History of the United Nations’ Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the Emergence of a Globalised Construction of Indigeneity’, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 8, 1, 2015 , pp. 32-46

11Sep15

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to examine how the work of the United Nations (UN) nurtures hybridised constructs of indigeneity, especially through the activities of the United Nations’ Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII). This article surveys particular aspects of the literature relating to cultural and indigenous hybridisation, and then applies this to the activities of the UNPFII as a means of interpreting the contribution of the organisation’s work and objectives to portrayals of indigeneity, drawing in the experiences New Zealand’s indigenous Maori as a case study. It concludes that the UNPFII—as a globalising agent—simultaneously promotes the rights of indigenous peoples while masking many of the cultural differences between its constituent members, resulting in a broad conception presented to outsiders of a single, hybridised indigeneity in the international sphere, which is defined and only exists in the hegemonic space created by the UN.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Mobilising a particular constituency for the purpose of settler colonising: Kelsey Mae Johnson, Performing the Nation at the Frontier: Filipino Immigration and Settlement in Whitehorse, Yukon, MA Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2015

09Sep15

Abstract: Over the past decade, Whitehorse, Yukon has emerged as a prominent site of settlement for Filipino newcomers to Canada. The phenomenon largely results from the implementation of new immigration policy in Yukon (starting in 2007) combined with regional economic growth, particularly in the mining sector. On the surface, immigration to Yukon – ostensibly ‘employer driven,’ with Filipino newcomers primarily finding employment in the service sector – bears resemblances to trends observed elsewhere in Canada. Yet the service sector Filipino workers who increasingly feature in the Yukon’s economy do so as permanent, not temporary, immigrants with the right to settle in Canada. This thesis explores the implications of this dynamic, situating it at the broader intersection of immigration and settler colonialism. I demonstrate how new narratives of northern settlement are enrolled in nation-building discourses of multiculturalism that circulate in and about Yukon. I stress how policy discourses support the essentialization of First Nations and Filipino histories. I also argue that state policies locate immigrants and local Indigenous peoples in competitive labor dynamics. In effect, Yukon’s immigration policy demonstrates how the governing of difference also involves processes of governing by difference – infusing performances of national belonging with powerful state imperatives.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »