settler colonial studies blog

Managing the living and the dead: Shaira Vadasaria, ‘Necronationalism: managing race, death and the nation’s skeletons’, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2015

15Jun15

Abstract: This paper examines the construction of the Simon Wiesenthal Center ‘Museum of Tolerance (Jerusalem)’ over Mamilla Cemetery, one of the largest Muslim burial grounds in the region. Tracing the politics of death as exercised through the excavation of the cemetery, I consider how access to settler colonial memory is managed and renewed through the purging of Indigenous corporeality. Inspired by Achille Mbembe’s sobering account of necropower, this paper conceptualizes power as a system of domination inscribed through the colonial management of deceased racial subjects and asks how we might understand systems of settler colonial power arranged through dehumanization of the already dead. I contend that the capacity to govern life after death is still firmly rooted in the reach of colonial power, and that by attending to the excavation and erasure of Mamilla Cemetery’s deceased Palestinian subjects, we see a particular configuration of sovereignty defined through a calculus of absence. Identifying this practice of settler colonial nation building as ‘necronationalism’, I consider how power over life after death becomes the very terrain through which a nation is imagined.

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On indigenous and migrant struggles: Harsha Walia, ‘In Conversation with MM&D Editor Jo-Anne Lee’, Migration, Mobility, & Displacement, 1, 1, 2015, pp. 55-65

13Jun15

Excerpt: I think for all movements, but particularly the migrant justice movement, it is so imperative to understand our responsibilities to indigenous nations, to the lands on which we’ve come to reside, to not perpetuate settler-colonialism. And one of the ways in which settler-colonialism operates of course is to tell immigrants this story, this false story that we’re being accepted into and need to be grateful to the Canadian state and to whiteness, when again, in fact, whiteness is not indigenous to these lands. And so I think it is so important for us to know and to act in solidarity with the true stewards of these lands. And that’s an important gesture not just symbolically but because, it is also imperative to decolonize our own understanding of how we’re migrating and where we’re migrating to.

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Chinese settler colonialism? Linzhu Wang, ‘The Definition of Indigenous Peoples and its Applicability in China’, International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, 22, 2, 2015, pp. 232 – 258

10Jun15

Abstract: This article considers the applicability of the concept of indigenous peoples in China, in accordance with the definitions developed in international law. It examines different approaches to define indigenous peoples in international law, and explores how those definitions may relate to Chinese ethnic groups. In particular, the article looks at possibilities for Chinese minorities to claim indigenous status, based on the standards of ‘the priority of settlement’ and ‘distinctiveness arising from historical continuity and attachment to a specific land’. It argues that the uncertainty of the definition, the complexity of the ethnic situation, and the reluctance of the Chinese Government make the application of indigenous rights in China unclear at the present. The Chinese minority/indigenous argument, to a certain extent, depends on the elaboration of international norms on indigenous rights, as well as the clarification of Chinese terms in relation to ethnic minorities.

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On what is indigenous and what is not: Richard J. Martin, David Trigger, ‘Negotiating belonging: plants, people, and indigeneity in northern Australia’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21, 2, 2015, p. 276–295

10Jun15

Abstract: This article focuses on human-plant relations, drawing on ethnographic research from northern Australia’s Gulf Country to address the concept of indigeneity. Just as the identities of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non-Indigenous’ people in this region are contextual and at times contested according to the vernacular categories of ‘Blackfellas’, ‘Whitefellas’, and ‘Yellafellas’, so too the issue of what ‘belongs’ in the natural world is negotiated through ambiguities about whether species are useful, productive, and aesthetically pleasing to humans, as well as local understandings about how plants and animals came to be located in the Gulf region. At the same time, plants’ distinctive characteristics as plants shape their relations with humans in ways which affect their categorization as ‘native’ and ‘alien’ or ‘introduced’. Focusing our analysis on three specific trees, we argue that attention to the ‘plantiness’ of flora contributes significantly to debates about indigeneity in society and nature. At the same time, our focus on human-plant relations contributes important context and nuance to current debates about human and other-than-human relations in a more-than-human world.

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The First settler Atlantic: George Hambrecht, ‘The First European Colonization of the North Atlantic’, Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology, 2015, pp. 203-225

10Jun15

Abstract: Many centuries before Columbus, the Norse peoples of Scandinavia colonized parts of Western Europe as well as the Northern Atlantic islands: the Shetlands, the Orkneys, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, and for at least a few years, Newfoundland. This was part of a larger process whose eastern half effected what today is Russia and was at least in part a response to wider Eurasian phenomenon. This chapter will concentrate on the North Atlantic portion of this story with an emphasis on how the archaeology of the settlement period (c. 800–1000 CE), the medieval period (c. 1000–1500 CE), and the postmedieval period (c. 1500–1800) has altered older narratives that sought to explain this early medieval colonial effort as well as created new narratives. A number of key sites in each of the North Atlantic will be discussed and put into a larger archaeological and historical context. In terms of the content of this volume, this chapter will present an earlier colonial phenomenon that was driven by many of the same variables that affected the post-Columbian Americas such as the commodification of natural resources and long-range trade, elite sponsored colonization, and the maintenance of power in the face of novel and unfamiliar conditions. In conclusion, the chapter will discuss the archaeology of the influence of the post-Columbian world on these medieval North Atlantic colonies.

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On settlement and home: Ken Gelder, ‘Thirty Years On: Reading the Country and Indigenous Homeliness’, Australian Humanities Review, 58, 2015

10Jun15

Excerpt: The recent reprinting by re.press of Stephen Muecke, Krim Benterrak and Paddy Roe’s Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (1984) is a useful reminder, thirty years on, of just how contemporary this remarkable book still is.¹ Although it isn’t ‘anthropological’ (and speaks in fact about the ‘death of anthropology’, a discipline from which it distances itself), Reading the Country nevertheless embarks on a journey with which anthropologists would be only too familiar: with Muecke getting into the car, driving out to a remote community in north-west Western Australia to encounter a Moroccan artist and a senior Aboriginal man, Paddy Roe, and talking and listening, transcribing, and then reflecting on what has been transcribed. The book is also an expression of male companionship—if we think of the meaning of ‘companion’, with bread—where three men (and, sometimes, others) come to know each other by sitting down together, and making spaces for each other, although in very different ways, with very different outcomes: stories and narratives, paintings, and various intellectual meditations on all this that drew extensively and specifically on Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term nomadology.

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On native vs arrivant narratives: Mishuana Goeman, ‘Flirtations at the Foundations: Unsettling Liberal Multiculturalism in Helen Lee’s Prey’, Critical Ethnic Studies, 1, 1, 2015, pp. 117-144

10Jun15

Abstract: This essay examines the intersections of Native and Immigrant narratives formed by liberal multiculturalism in Helen Lee’s film Prey (1995). By examining the intersections and proximity of the historic subjectivity of the lead characters in a settler nation-state, I provide a spatial critique of Canada’s colonial and multicultural policies that sustain settler heteropatriarchy. The historic racialization and sexualization involved in producing Canadian citizenship is disrupted upon examination of moments that erupt national discourses of immigration and settler colonialism through the everyday and volatile experiences of arrivants and Natives in Toronto.

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On playing indigene: Maile Arvin, ‘Acting Like a White Person Acting Like a Native: Ghostly Performances of Global Indigeneity’, Critical Ethnic Studies, 1, 1, 2015, pp. 103-116

10Jun15

Abstract: This essay analyzes multiple, diverse performances of indigeneity, by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people globally, in order to understand how various forms of playing “Indian” persist today and how Indigenous peoples must innovate ways to counter settler appropriations of Indigenous identities. It argues that extending the privilege of “acting like a white person acting like a native” unfortunately often describes the ethos of mainstream liberal projects that celebrate multiculturalism. Juxtaposing such settler performances of indigeneity against more disruptive and radical performances by Indigenous peoples, the essay aims to provoke critical understandings of global indigeneity that do not fall into Western universalisms. Overall, the essay suggests that Indigenous peoples globally have creative responses to settler colonial performances that reveal the violence of mainstream liberal projects that pretend concern for Indigenous inclusion.

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The labour question and settler colonialism: Jutta Bolt, Erik Green, ‘Was the wage burden too heavy? Settler farming, profitability, and wage shares of settler agriculture in Nyasaland, c. 1900-60’, Journal of African History, 56, 2, pp.1-22

10Jun15

Abstract: The historical role of European farming in southern and central Africa has received a great deal of attention among scholars over the years. A striking consensus emerges in the scholarly literature, namely that the success or failure of European farming in southern Africa was to a large extent dependent upon the colonizers’ access to and control over cheap labour, which they in turn could only access through strong support of the colonial state. Yet, these propositions have so far not been systematically and empirically tested. This paper is a first attempt to do that by analysing the ‘wage-burden’ European settler farmers faced. The wage-burden is identified by measuring wage shares (total amount paid in the form of wages as a share of total profits) on European farms in colonial Africa. Based on archival documents, we construct time-series for value of output, transportation costs, investments in agriculture, and wages paid for the European tobacco and tea sector in colonial Malawi. Our results contradict both previous research on settler colonialism in Africa and the historiography of Nyasaland. Our estimates show that settler farming did not collapse in the 1930s as commonly assumed. On the contrary, the value of production on both tobacco and tea farms increased significantly. And so did the settler farmers’ capacity to capture the profits, which was manifest in a declining wage share over time. In contrast with previous research we argue that the declining wage share cannot be explained by domestic colonial policies but rather through changes in regional migration patterns, and global commodity markets. Migration patterns had a significant impact on the supply of farm labour and global commodity markets influenced value of production. Market forces rather than colonial policies shaped the development trajectory of settler farming in Nyasaland.

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Exploring indigenous secession: Alexander Keller Hirsch, ‘Articulating secession: self-determination, decolonization and stateless independence amongst the Kanaka Maoli’, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2015

27May15

Abstract: Two assumptions reign supreme in the secession literature. The first is that separatist groups seeking autonomy necessarily fall into one of two camps, one that stresses essentialist criteria for social membership, the other emphasizing instead a socially constructed collective identity. The second assumption is that secession can only be defined as taking place in the context of a separatist group whose claim to independence hinges on the attempt to galvanize a new state. This article challenges both assumptions by looking to a provocative counter-site. Amongst the Kanaka Maoli of Hawai’i secession is increasingly framed precisely as a rejection of those Western idioms that have historically undergirded colonial expropriation and racial subjection. As such, secession is being framed not as a struggle for new statehood, but rather as a reinvigoration of indigenous lifeworlds. In so doing, the Kanaka Maoli are asserting community boundaries in ways that contest the idea that indigenous identity is solely about biological criteria such as blood quantum, but also challenge the notion that indigenous self-determination can be reduced to postmodern identity politics. The argument I defend suggests that articulation theory can offer us orienting power in situating some of the stakes of Kanaka Maoli stateless secession. Articulation theory expresses the idea that identities are volatile collective self-assertions that take place at discrepant scales of interactive exchange. This article argues that we can detect some important emergent practices of articulation at play in the Kanaka Maoli’s experimental revisioning of what secession can mean today.

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