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On settler colonialism and indigeneity: Moriel Rothman-Zecher, ‘An American-Israeli’s reflections from Germany: I am indigenous-dispossessed here’, Haaretz, 23/07/15

25Jul15

Read Rothman-Zecher’s intervention here.


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Imagining Mars as a settler colony while imagining ‘freedom’; as settler an exercise one can think of: Charles S. Cockell (ed.), Human Governance Beyond Earth, Springer, 2015

24Jul15

Description: This book extends the discussion of the nature of freedom and what it means for a human to be free. This question has occupied the minds of thinkers since the Enlightenment. However, without exception, every one of these discussions has focused on the character of liberty on Earth.

In this volume the authors explore how people are likely to be governed in space and how that will affect what sort of liberty they experience. Who will control oxygen? How will people maximise freedom of movement in a lethal environment? What sort of political and economic systems can be created in places that will be inherently isolated? These are just a few of the major questions that bear on the topic of extra-terrestrial liberty. During the last forty years an increasing number of nations have developed the capability of launching people into space. The USA, Europe, Russia, China and soon India have human space exploration programs. These developments raise the fundamental question of how are humans to be governed in space.

This book follows from a previous volume published in this series which looked at the Meaning of Liberty Beyond the Earth and explored what sort of freedoms could exist in space in a very general way. This new volume focuses on systems of governance and how they will influence which of these sorts of freedoms will become dominant in extra-terrestrial society. The book targets a wide readership covers many groups including:


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On the settler cultural dynamics of the Crusader states: Julian Jay Theodore Yolles, Latin Literature and Frankish Culture in the Crusader States (1098–1187), PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2015

24Jul15

Abstract: The so-called Crusader States established by European settlers in the Levant at the end of the eleventh century gave rise to a variety of Latin literary works, including historiography, sermons, pilgrim guides, monastic literature, and poetry. The first part of this study (Chapter 1) critically reevaluates the Latin literary texts and combines the evidence, including unpublished materials, to chart the development of genres over the course of the twelfth century. The second half of the study (Chapters 2–4) subjects this evidence to a cultural-rhetorical analysis, and asks how Latin literary works, as products by and for a cultural elite, appropriated preexisting materials and developed strategies of their own to construct a Frankish cultural identity of the Levant. Proceeding on three thematically different, but closely interrelated, lines of inquiry, it is argued that authors in the Latin East made cultural claims by drawing on the classical tradition, on the Bible, and on ideas of a Carolingian golden age. Chapter 2 demonstrates that Latin historians drew upon classical traditions to fit the Latin East within established frameworks of history and geography, in which the figures Vespasian and Titus are particularly prevalent. Chapter 3 traces the development of the conception of the Franks in the East as a “People of God” and the use of biblical texts to support this claim, especially the Books of the Maccabees. Chapter 4 explores the extent to which authors drew on the legend of Charlemagne as a bridge between East and West. Although the appearance of similar motifs signals a degree of cultural unity among the authors writing in the Latin East, there is an abundant variety in the way they are utilized, inasmuch as they are dynamic rhetorical strategies open to adaptation to differing exigencies. New monastic and ecclesiastical institutions produced Latin writings that demonstrate an urge to establish political and religious authority. While these struggles for power resemble to some extent those between secular and ecclesiastical authorities and institutions in Western Europe, the literary topoi the authors draw upon are specific to their new locale, and represent the creation of a new cultural-literary tradition.


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On settler narratives of construction and destruction in the nineteenth century: Grace Moore, ‘Home Was Where the Hearth Is: Fire, Destruction, and Displacement in Nineteenth-Century Settler Narratives’, Antipodes, 29, 1, 2015, pp. 29-42

22Jul15

No abstract available; check the preview.


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On extinction discourse and settler colonialism: Rohan Wilson, ‘Extinction Discourse in Wanting and Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World’, Antipodes, 29, 1, 2015, pp. 5-17

22Jul15

No abstract available: check the preview.


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Settler cities on the move: Owen Toews, Resettling the city? Settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and urban land in Winnipeg, Canada, PhD Dissertation, City University of New York, 2015

22Jul15

Abstract: This dissertation considers the making of a single twenty-first century city – Winnipeg, Canada – and how the current dominant development vision conserves longstanding power relations that have shaped Canada’s Prairie West for over one hundred and fifty years. It situates a neoliberal city-center redevelopment authority within a much longer regional history of encounter between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, to produce an extended historical materialist geography of settler colonialism in the Prairie West. In doing so, it goes against dominant accounts that break apart imperial conquest from urban history or contemporary urban processes. It demonstrates how neoliberal restructuring of Native urban space both extends settler-colonial dispossession and derives tangible economic value from the disappearance of Native life.


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On ‘competency’, indigenous agency, indigenous dealings with the Agency, and settler colonialism: Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘”A Little Home for Myself and Child”‘, Pacific Historical Review, 84, 3, 2015, pp. 307-332

22Jul15

Abstract: Scholarship on Native American economic activity in the assimilation period tells a story of unscrupulous whites, fraud, and failure, often identifying the policy of competency as the culprit. Judging from these accounts, one might assume that being declared competent was almost always bad news for Native Americans, but perhaps particularly for women—who were less likely to have exposure to the world of business. The records of the Quapaw Agency in Oklahoma from the 1910s and 1920s tell a different story. The impact of competency on Native American women was not always bleak. Competency sometimes gave women control over significant property. Some women of the Quapaw Agency were skilled in business practices, negotiated successfully with the agency, and controlled both their finances and their destinies.


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Boarding schools as settler colonialism: Andrew Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States, University of Nebraska Press, 2015

18Jul15

Description: At the end of the nineteenth century, Indigenous boarding schools were touted as the means for solving the “Indian problem” in both the United States and Canada. With the goal of permanently transforming Indigenous young people into Europeanized colonial subjects, the schools were ultimately a means for eliminating Indigenous communities as obstacles to land acquisition, resource extraction, and nation-building. Andrew Woolford analyzes the formulation of the “Indian problem” as a policy concern in the United States and Canada and examines how the “solution” of Indigenous boarding schools was implemented in Manitoba and New Mexico through complex chains that included multiple government offices with a variety of staffs, Indigenous peoples, and even nonhuman actors such as poverty, disease, and space. The genocidal project inherent in these boarding schools, however, did not unfold in either nation without diversion, resistance, and unintended consequences.   Inspired by the signing of the 2006 Residential School Settlement Agreement in Canada, which provided a truth and reconciliation commission and compensation for survivors of residential schools, This Benevolent Experiment offers a multilayered, comparative analysis of Indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada. Because of differing historical, political, and structural influences, the two countries have arrived at two very different responses to the harms caused by assimilative education.


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Coercive conservation and indigenous dispossession (ecoturism as settler colonialism): Conservation by racialized dispossession: Christopher Anthony Loperena, ‘The making of an eco-destination on Honduras’s North Coast’, Geoforum, 2015

18Jul15

Abstract: Within the context of neoliberal conservation and ecotourism development, the Honduran state has prioritized the desires of foreign tourists and private investors over the needs of indigenous and black coastal inhabitants, and increasingly this is leading to state-sanctioned violence against marginalized groups. I use Peluso’s analytic of coercive conservation (1993) to show how conservation practice furthers the expansionist policies of the state and elite investors while simultaneously dehumanizing the indigenous peoples that depend on natural resources for their livelihoods. While Garífuna culture is central to Honduras’s ecotourism ambitions, their livelihoods, in the eyes of many developers and conservation NGOs, are a potential threat to the viability of the emerging tourism imaginary. Black and indigenous coastal inhabitants are valued for the cultural cache they add to regional tourism plans, yet denigrated for their inherent “backwardness” and presumed inability to respect the delicate ecosystems they inhabit. This imaginary authorizes material practices of racialized dispossession, which were set in motion by neoliberal conservation regimes designed to exploit the natural and cultural resources upon which tourism development is premised.


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We have been pioneers too: Mariusz Kowalski, ‘Poles in the Dutch Cape Colony 1652-1814’, Werkwinkel, 10, 1, 2015, pp. 65-96

18Jul15

Abstract: The contribution of Poles to the colonisation and development of the Dutch Cape Colony is not commonly known. Yet, Poles have been appearing in this colony since its very inception (1652). During the entire period considered here the presence of Poles was the result of the strong economic ties between Poland and the Netherlands. At the end of this period there was an increase in their share, in connection with the presence of numerous alien military units on the territory of the Colony, because of Poles having served in these units. Numerous newcomers from Poland settled in South Africa for good, established families, and their progeny made up part of the local society. The evidence of this phenomenon is provided by the present-day Afrikaner families of, for instance, Drotsky, Kitshoff, Kolesky, Latsky, Masuriek, Troskie, Zowitsky, and others. A quite superficial estimation implies that the settlers coming from Poland could make up a bit over 1% of the ancestors of the present-day Afrikaners. Poles would also participate in the pioneering undertakings within the far-off fringes of the Colony, including the robbery-and-trade expedition of 1702.


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