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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.


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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.


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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.


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Settling as reclaiming/reclamation; on settling the wetlands: Shannon Stunden Bower, Wet Prairie People, Land, and Water in Agricultural Manitoba, University of British Columbia Press, 2014

29Jun15

Description: The Canadian prairies are often envisioned as dry, windswept fields; however, much of southern Manitoba is not arid plain but wet prairie, poorly drained land subject to frequent flooding.
Wet Prairie brings to light the problems and complexities of surface water management in Manitoba, from early efforts to drain the landscape to late-twentieth-century attempts to establish watershed management. Irregular water-flow patterns challenged the checkerboard landscape of the 1872 federal Dominion Lands Act, and homesteaders found their agricultural ambitions at odds with local environmental realities. Thus, in keeping with liberal principles, the provincial government undertook substantial drainage efforts. Flooding and drainage became the subjects of intense and persistent debate among provincial officials, drainage experts, and Manitoba residents. New alliances and rivalries emerged amid shifting social, political, and environmental contexts, affecting how Manitobans related to each other and to the provincial state. All of this has had enduring consequences for both the landscapes and people of the wet prairie.
This account of an overlooked aspect of Prairie environmental history traces how the biophysical nature of southern Manitoba was an important factor in the formation of Manitoba society and the provincial state.


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A settler society’s exonegous alterity: Adrian A. Smith, ‘Troubling “Project Canada”: the Caribbean and the making of “unfree migrant labor”‘, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2015

24Jun15

Abstract: Despite persistent denials, Canada’s relationship to the Caribbean is fraught with concerns about imperialism and racism. While we have experienced a resurgence in “critical” theorizing on capitalist imperialism, including a focus on Canada’s place in global affairs, these interventions fail to meaningfully address labor migration. In taking seriously the racism–imperialism nexus in the context of Canadian–Caribbean relations, I argue that the Canadian state is an imperialist state which has sought to secure an empire abroad through its approach to agricultural labor migration from the Caribbean. Focused on the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, I show how migrant labor unfreedom is organized through the modern national state system and uneven development, understood in the racialized context of neoliberal capitalist globalization. The deployment of Caribbean seasonal agricultural labor in Canada functions through transnational regulation rooted in the socio-historico-legal development of the Caribbean and Canada as longstanding – yet unequal – sites of production of politico-legal authority and unfree labor.


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On the representation of settler privilege: Angela Failler, Peter Ives, Heather Milne (eds), ‘Caring for Difficult Knowledge: Prospects for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, Special Issue, 37, 2-3, 2015

21Jun15

Link to the Special issue’s ‘Introduction’.


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On Modrnism, and on the contribution of indigenous imaginaries to it: Allana Lindgren, Stephen Ross (eds), The Modernist World, Routledge 2015

21Jun15

Description: The Modernist World is an accessible yet cutting edge volume which redraws the boundaries and connections among interdisciplinary and transnational modernisms. The 61 new essays address literature, visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music, film, and intellectual currents. The book also examines modernist histories and practices around the globe, including East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the Arab World, as well as the United States and Canada. A detailed introduction provides an overview of the scholarly terrain, and highlights different themes and concerns that emerge in the volume.


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On settler colonialism in Palestine: Jamil Hilal, ‘Rethinking Palestine: settler-colonialism, neo-liberalism and individualism in the West Bank and Gaza Strip’, Contemporary Arab Affairs, 2015

21Jun15

Abstract: The 1967 occupied Palestinian territories have undergone three major types of development since the Oslo agreement between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel was signed in 1993 and the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994. These developments have brought far-reaching structural changes in Palestinian politics and society. They have rendered Palestinian communities – inside historic Palestine and outside – very vulnerable, and made collective action against collective colonial repression (including a third intifada) more difficult. The three developments are identified as: the emergence of a political discourse that evicts Palestinians from history and geography and denies them a national identity; the escalation of collective repression, and settler-colonization; and the localization of Palestinian politics and the atomization of Palestinian society (in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and probably elsewhere) under the impact of settler-colonialism and neo-liberalism.


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Bridging the gap one miscalculation at a time: Brenda Elias, Karen Busby, Pat Martens, ‘One little, too little: Counting Canada’s Indigenous people for improved health reporting’, Social Science & Medicine, 2015

21Jun15

Abstract: The way state governments, worldwide, count or do not count Indigenous peoples has contributed to inconsistent reporting of Indigenous health statistics. To address unreliable reporting in Canada, we reviewed laws on Indian status and the development of a national Indian Registration System (IRS) to track Indian status and eligibility. With this information as a guide, we linked the IRS to the Manitoba provincial health registry systems and were able to identify individuals with Indian status for health reporting. To improve reporting, we identified individuals often missed in this type of linkage. For instance, we identified children and adult children who were eligible for Indian status but not yet registered. Equally as important, we identified individuals not eligible for Indian status but have Indian heritage and/or represent potential individual Indian status eligibility cases before the courts to right a historic form of identity sex discrimination that has made them invisible in Canadian society and health reporting. A familial kinship approach was used to identify Indian children and adult children typically missed when a strict legal entitlement criteria is used for data linkage. Our reflective socio-legal data linkage approach expanded the number of Indian peoples for health reporting purposes and demonstrated a feasible, inclusive way to report on the health of Indians in Canada.


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Dealing with settler privilege: Carrie Mott, ‘The Activist Polis: Topologies of Conflict in Indigenous Solidarity Activism’, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 2015

21Jun15

Abstract: Interpersonal conflict poses a serious threat to social justice activism. In the context of indigenous solidarity activism in southern Arizona, conflicts are often born of the challenges accompanying differentials in social privilege due to differences in race and ethnicity relative to white supremacist settler colonialism. This paper examines activist collaboration between Tohono O’odham and non-Native anarchist activists in southern Arizona, arguing that a topological activist polis is a useful lens through which we can better understand the roots of conflict in social justice activism. Non-Native activists are often aware of the ways white supremacist settler colonial society privileges particular identities while marginalizing others. Nonetheless, settler and white privilege give rise to tensions which can be seen topologically through the very different relationships non-Native and indigenous activists have to ongoing processes of white supremacy and to histories of the genocide of indigenous peoples.


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