settler colonial studies blog

On settler state formation: Daragh Grant, ‘”Civilizing” the Colonial Subject: The Co-Evolution of State and Slavery in South Carolina, 1670–1739’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 57, 3, 2015, pp. 606-636

02Jul15

Abstract: South Carolina was a staggeringly weak polity from its founding in 1670 until the 1730s. Nevertheless, in that time, and while facing significant opposition from powerful indigenous neighbors, the colony constructed a robust plantation system that boasted the highest slave-to-freeman ratio in mainland North America. Taking this fact as a point of departure, I examine the early management of unfree labor in South Carolina as an exemplary moment of settler-colonial state formation. Departing from the treatment of state formation as a process of centralizing “legitimate violence,” I investigate how the colonial state, and in particular the Commons House of Assembly, asserted an exclusive claim to authority by monopolizing the question of legitimacy itself. In managing unfree laborers, the colonial state extended its authority over supposedly private relations between master and slave and increasingly recast slavery in racial terms. This recasting of racial slavery rested, I argue, on a distinction, pervasive throughout English North America, which divided the world into spheres of savagery and civility. Beneath the racial reordering of colonial life, the institution of slavery was rooted in the same ideological distinction by which the colonial state’s claims to authority were justified, with the putative “savagery” of the slave or of the Indian being counterpoised to the supposed civility of English settlers. This article contributes to the literatures on Atlantic slavery and American colonial history, and invites comparison with accounts of state formation and settler colonialism beyond Anglo-America.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On indigenous ‘evanescence’: Stefanie Gänger, ‘Indigenous Evanescence and Salvage in the Conquest of Araucanía, 1850-1930’, in Fernando Vidal, Nélia Dias, Endangerment, Biodiversity and Culture, Routledge, 2015

02Jul15

A link to the book’s page.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Counting indigenous peoples and its politics: Torunn Pettersen, Magritt Brustad, ‘Same Sámi? A comparison of self-reported Sámi ethnicity measures in 1970 and 2003 in selected rural areas in northern Norway’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015

02Jul15

Abstract: In post-war Norway, only the 1970 national census has recorded ethnicity information about the indigenous Sámi, however restricted to those living in selected areas in the north. In this study, we combine replies about Sámi ethnicity given by the same individuals in Norway’s 1970 census and in the population-based SAMINOR study in 2003–04, to compare self-reported Sámi ethnicity at two points in time that encompass a period when the effects of a long-standing assimilation policy gradually lost ground in favour of upcoming Sámi revitalization. We found self-reported Sámi ethnicity – measured as (1) Sámi as home language in each of three generations and (2) the respondent’s self-identification as Sámi – to have remained generally stable, but some changes were observed. We argue that the results reflect interplays between societal and individual factors. We conclude that any statistical study involving an indigenous people, when clarifying the ethnicity measures, should also address the issue of ethnic mobility.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On spaces of indigenous autonomous action: Grant Arndt, ‘Voices and Votes in the Fields of Settler Society: American Indian Media and Electoral Politics in 1930s Wisconsin’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 57, 3, 2015, pp. 780-805

02Jul15

Abstract: In 1939, Wisconsin readers of a weekly newspaper column by Mitchell Redcloud, a member of the Ho-Chunk Indian community settled within the rural township of Komensky, were greeted with a set of headlines from the imaginary “Komensky News” about an actual local event. The headlines reported that despite opposition from local whites, Ho-Chunk people had successfully elected a Ho-Chunk candidate to the township board. This article draws on studies of Indigenous media and recent efforts to develop field-theoretic accounts of social action to understand the interdependence of Redcloud’s headlines and the Ho-Chunk vote as part of an incipient project of Indigenous political action. Using census records, I first describe the positions in the everyday field of race and class relations that Ho-Chunk people occupied in Komensky, based on their incomes, educations, and occupational statuses. I then draw on this description to understand Redcloud’s position-taking strategies before the election. I next examine Redcloud’s writing career in the newspaper to understand his strategy of self-positioning as a marked Indian voice within a print-based discursive field that denigrated other Ho-Chunk voices. I finish by examining new position-taking strategies manifest in the 1939 vote and in Redcloud’s turn to headline register. I argue that both media and electoral mechanisms offered relatively autonomous fields that made these experiments with Indigenous action possible despite the absence of tribal political institutions necessary to transform the positions Ho-Chunk people occupied in their everyday lives. Together, the headlines and the election suggest the interdependence of activism carried out in media and in governmental structures in the production of transformative acts of political self-representation.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On settler colonialism’s contemporary spatial strategies: Omar Jabary Salamanca, ‘When settler colonialism becomes “development”: ‘fabric of life’ roads and the spatialities of development in the Palestinian West Bank’, Center for Development Studies, Birzeit University, 2015

02Jul15

Excerpt: Three years ago the weekly magazine The Nation published an investigative piece by Nadia Hijab and Jesse Rosenfeld titled “Palestinian roads: Cementing Statehood, or Israeli annexation?” (2010) The text underscored the political nature of major road development projects in the West Bank. More specifically, the authors raised questions about the role that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) play in supporting the construction of a Palestinian road network that accommodates and facilitates Israel’s colonial policies. These USAID funded roads, the article argued, are part of an Israeli plan presented to and rejected by the donor community and the PA in 2004. In deed, following diplomatic pressures to relax the tight closure imposed on Palestinians after the second Intifada, the Government of Israel (GOI) sought funding from donors to build 500 km of what they branded as ‘fabric of life’ roads. That is, the GOI, in attempt to rebuild the indigenous ‘fabric of life’, proposed a separate Palestinian road network to sustain and consolidate rather than dismantle an entrenched closure regime consisting of physical infrastructure –such as checkpoints, road restrictions, checkpoints and the wall— and draconian mobility regulations –such as the permit system that impinges upon the Palestinian freedom of movement.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Following a crucial debate about the limits of indigeneity in a settler society (when compared to other impostures): on why Rachel Dolezal’s claim on Blackness was intolerable while similarly unfounded claims on Indigeneity are more acceptable (as the former challenges the ‘one drop rule’ and the latter confirms indigenous inherent replaceability, both reactions actually confirm settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination)

02Jul15

1) Tequila Sovereign’s astute questioning, 30/06/15.

2) The Daily Beast‘s ‘scoop‘, 30/06/15.

3) Moontime Warrior’s resonable response, 01/07/15.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On ethnic settler communities (yet another test case): Timothy S. Forest, ‘Defenders of Empire or Agents of Ruin? ‘Hebridean Scot Colonies In British Columbia in the 1920s’, Canadian Historical review, 96, 2, 2015

29Jun15

Abstract: In 1924, the government of British Columbia submitted to the British authorities a proposal that aimed to resettle what it hoped would be thousands of Scottish crofters from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland to work in its fisheries, taking advantage of funding made available by the recently passed Empire Settlement Act (ESA) of 1922. Ostensibly, the province endeavoured to provide a better life for a loyal, yet long-suffering, “British” population, to improve the filial imperial ties that were starting to fray following the First World War, to provide the fishing industry with “white” “British” workers to displace its largely Asian workforce, and to introduce a “martial race” to defend its shores. Yet, this scheme was abandoned in late 1925. In private, officials in Canada doubted that the Hebrideans could ever be rehabilitated, as the scheme and the ESA envisioned. Employers saw the Hebrideans as effete and lazy rather than as ready-made militiamen and continued to employ the Asians who they saw as superior workers. Labourers feared that the Hebrideans would undercut their wages and lower their elevated status as “white” and “British,” one that they and the province had carefully cultivated since its foundation. Lastly, the liminal status of the Hebridean Scots reflected and was part of the broader ambivalence of Canada’s place in the evolving British Empire/Commonwealth of the 1920s, one that embraced the imperial tie yet also oftentimes sought greater autonomy from it.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Surprisingly dealing with contemporary manifestations of settler colonialism: Amira Jarmakani, An Imperialist Love Story: Desert Romances and the War on Terror, New York University Press, 2015

29Jun15

Description: A curious figure stalks the pages of a distinct subset of mass-market romance novels, aptly called “desert romances.” Animalistic yet sensitive, dark and attractive, the desert prince or sheikh emanates manliness and raw, sexual power. In the years since September 11, 2001, the sheikh character has steadily risen in popularity in romance novels, even while depictions of Arab masculinity as backward and violent in nature have dominated the cultural landscape. An Imperialist Love Story contributes to the broader conversation about the legacy of orientalist representations of Arabs in Western popular culture. Combining close readings of novels, discursive analysis of blogs and forums, and interviews with authors, Jarmakani explores popular investments in the war on terror by examining the collisions between fantasy and reality in desert romances. Focusing on issues of security, freedom, and liberal multiculturalism, she foregrounds the role that desire plays in contemporary formations of U.S. imperialism. Drawing on transnational feminist theory and cultural studies, An Imperialist Love Story offers a radical reinterpretation of the war on terror, demonstrating romance to be a powerful framework for understanding how it works, and how it perseveres.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Representing settlers, representing settler art (the case of New Zealand): Christina Barton, ‘Rethinking “Headlands”‘, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 39, 2015, pp. 101-110

29Jun15

Abstract: Christina Barton revisits the exhibition ‘Headlands’, finding in it a model for transnational and critically local exhibition-making.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On the study of settler colonialism: Gabriel Piterberg, ‘Israeli Sociology’s Young Hegelian’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 44, 3, 2015, pp. 17-38

29Jun15

Abstract: In April 2014, the Center for Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) convened a conference titled “The Settler Colonial Paradigm: Debating Gershon Shafir’s Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict on Its 25th Anniversary.” This essay emanates from the conference. I first chart the dialectical emergence of Shafir’s thought out of Israeli sociology, and then gauge its impact on the growing presence of the settler-colonial framework in the study of Palestine/Israel. The analysis of Shafir’s book shows how a powerful hegemony has produced its disavowal. The examination of Palestine/Israel as a settler-colonial situation past and present underscores the benefit of studying this topic comparatively and as part of a global phenomenon.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute