Call for papers: Over the past decade, settler colonial studies has made a broad intervention in the study of US history and culture by considering comparative frontier processes in settler societies around the globe. One arena where settler colonial studies has yet to make significant inroads, however, is in the interpretation of the Western, arguably the most important cultural vehicle through which US and global cultures have mythologized and critiqued the frontier.

On this panel, we will work to relate the genre that is the most globally recognized production of Western American culture to the theoretical conversation that works to contextualize Westward expansion in a comparative global context. In so doing, we hope not only to ask what settler colonial studies can teach us about the Western, but also what the Western can teach us about settler colonialism. Among the questions we hope to explore as we examine the Western in literature and film are:

• How does the claim, made by many settler colonial studies scholars, that the frontier is a transnational phenomenon rather than a category exclusive to American exceptionalism alter our reading of classic Westerns?
• What can “Spaghetti Westerns,” “Indo Westerns,” “Osterns” and other Westerns produced in non-settler societies reveal about the impact of settler colonial political forms in these locales?
• How can we relate the separate discussions regarding liberalism and violence now circulating in settler colonial studies and in scholarship on the Western?
• How can readings of Western literature and film enrich the ongoing discussions regarding neoliberalism and the history of settlerism?

Lorenzo Veracini, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Lorenzo’s research focuses on the comparative history of colonial systems and settler colonialism. He has authored Israel and Settler Society (2006) Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010), and The Settler Colonial Present (2015). Lorenzo is managing editor of Settler Colonial Studies. Contact Lorenzo at: lveracini@swin.edu.au

Alex Trimble Young, University of Southern California. Alex is a Preceptor in Dornsife College, where he teaches American literature. He is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Let Us Fake Out A Frontier: Dissent and The Settler Colonial Imaginary in US Literature After 1945. His most recent article, “The Settler Unchained: Constituent Power and Settler Violence,” is forthcoming in Social Text this May. Contact Alex at: alex.trimble@gmail.com

Abstract: Cartography, place-naming and state-sponsored explorations were central to the modern European conquest of the earth, empire building and settler-colonisation projects. Scholars often assume that place names provide clues to the historical and cultural heritage of places and regions. This article uses social memory theory to analyse the cultural politics of place-naming in Israel. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’ study of the construction of social memory by the Latin Crusaders and Christian medieval pilgrims, the article shows Zionists’ toponymic strategies in Palestine, their superimposition of Biblical and Talmudic toponyms was designed to erase the indigenous Palestinian and Arabo-Islamic heritage of the land. In the pre-Nakba period Zionist toponymic schemes utilised nineteenth century Western explorations of Biblical ‘names’ and ‘places’ and appropriated Palestinian toponyms. Following the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, the Israeli state, now in control of 78 percent of the land, accelerated its toponymic project and pursued methods whose main features were memoricide and erasure. Continuing into the post-1967 occupation, these colonial methods threaten the destruction of the diverse historical cultural heritage of the land.

Abstract: This article uses a new conceptual approach to the question of Palestine, namely the settler-colonialism paradigm. This paradigm enabled scholars to develop the depiction of Zionism as a settler-colonialist project. However new approaches which have focused on Zionism as a settler-colonialist movement have, in fact, neglected indigenous Palestinian perspectives. The article advocates further refinement to the discourse of anti-colonialism by revisiting early Palestinian perceptions of Zionism. The article also shows that in the early stages of Zionism the movement was clearly depicted as a settler-colonialist project by Palestinian journalists and press commentators of the newspaper Filastin. However the existential implications of such an analysis were ignored by the Palestinian political elite, an oversight which also contributed to the 1948 Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe).

Excerpt: This special issue focuses on some key features of settler-colonialism in Palestine from the late nineteenth century to present Israeli settle-colonisation policies in the West Bank.

Description: Colonized by the French in 1830, Algeria was an important French settler colony that, unlike its neighbors, endured a lengthy and brutal war for independence from 1954 to 1962. The nearly one million Pieds-Noirs (literally “black-feet”) were former French citizens of Algeria who suffered a traumatic departure from their homes and discrimination upon arrival in France. In response, the once heterogeneous group unified as a community as it struggled to maintain an identity and keep the memory of colonial Algeria alive.

Remembering French Algeria examines the written and visual re-creation of Algeria by the former French citizens of Algeria from 1962 to the present. By detailing the preservation and transmission of memory prompted by this traumatic experience, Amy L. Hubbell demonstrates how colonial identity is encountered, reworked, and sustained in Pied-Noir literature and film, with the device of repetition functioning in these literary and visual texts to create a unified and nostalgic version of the past. At the same time, however, the Pieds-Noirs’ compulsion to return compromises these efforts. Taking Albert Camus’s Le Mythe de Sisyphe and his subsequent essays on ruins as a metaphor for Pied-Noir identity, this book studies autobiographical accounts by Marie Cardinal, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Leïla Sebbar, as well as lesser-known Algerian-born French citizens, to analyze movement as a destabilizing and productive approach to the past.

Abstract: This project examines the New England Emigrant Aid Company colonization of Kansas in 1854 as a solution to the growing debate over popular sovereignty and slave labor. It uses the Company as a lens to reinterpret the intellectual history of philanthropy, tracing its roots from Puritan ideas of charity to the capitalistic giving of the nineteenth century.

Abstract: This thesis takes issue with the way that heritage is managed in New Zealand. It contends that New Zealand’s post-Treaty settlement environment, with its significant resource transfers and cultural redress for Māori, is exposing the need to move beyond the entrenched nature/settler/indigenous compartments that have so far dominated heritage management. It advocates that New Zealand needs to embrace a heritage management system that is open to networks that flow between natural and cultural heritage values.

‘Cultural landscapes’ is nominated as the conceptual tool to promote a more integrated heritage management approach. Yet, rather than seeing cultural landscapes as a way to shed light on a simplistic nature/culture binary, my analysis works to take the concept of cultural landscapes further than the heritage scholarship has done so far. Social systems theory is employed to interrogate how this concept is translated from a way of ‘thinking’ about heritage values, to how it is employed in the ‘doing’ of heritage practice. This body of theory allows me to frame a ‘cultural landscapes approach’ as a way of building a link between the realm of ideas around the concept of cultural landscapes, to its incorporation into the realms of policy and practice of heritage management. Thus this method of enquiry enables me to draw attention to how a visual focus on tangible forms and structures has dominated the way that the concept of cultural landscapes has w idely been considered, and how the ‘more-than-representational’ might open cultural landscapes up to the realities of the ‘contact zones’ of post-settler societies.

This thesis begins on a small island in New Zealand and journeys to Australia, the United States of America, and Canada, to investigate cultural landscapes approaches in action in these countries with similar colonial legacies. The research project follows a constructionist interpretive approach, with ethnographic methods, employing semi-structured interviews to learn from those who work in herit age management at each of the case study locations. The narrative returns to consider why New Zealand, the country where Tongariro National Park was listed as the first World Heritage associative landscape, has not disseminated a cultural landscapes approach for heritage management as widely as these other settler countries. From there the thesis recommends a cultural landscapes approach for heritage management in New Zealand.

Abstract: A recent article published by the Wadi-Hilweh Information Center of Silwan described the arrest of a four-year-old Palestinian child, Mohammad, from the Al-Sa’dyeh neighborhood of Occupied East Jerusalem. In the early hours of Thursday, 28 November, a large military force broke into the Al-Majed family home. Waking his parents from sleep, the soldiers demanded to see Mohammad. ‘Are you sure?’ his father asked one of them, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, ‘Mohammad is only four years old!’ The officer was not convinced and asked his father to wake the boy. Mohammad’s father led the soldiers to the room where the children were gathered. He pointed to Mohammad. ‘Do you want to arrest him? Should I send diapers and milk because he’s going to need them.’ After realizing that indeed, Mohammad was a mere four years old, and after asking his father a series of questions about the child and his friends, and inquiring into claims that he had injured an Israeli settler, the officer retreated on his arrest order. Leading the other soldiers out of the family home, he warned the family that if the boy was found guilty, he would return to call him for investigation.

Abstract: In 1939 an Australian anthropologist, W.E.H Stanner, believed that the nation needed to examine the question of biological and cultural preservation of the Aboriginal peoples. In an attempt to address the issue a range of proposals were suggested, most concentrating on the provision of adequate nutrition, proper medical supervision, good conditions of employment, appropriately trained field staff with sufficient financial resources, and the creation of inviolable reserves. This paper is a case study of a northwest Northern Territory cattle station, Wave Hill, where a survey conducted by two anthropologists aimed to reveal the causes of population decline on Vestey owned cattle stations. Could these anthropologists devise a way that would see an increase in station labour without having to seek new labour from marginal areas–‘bush’ people as they were called? Could they provide an answer to the wider challenge of stemming population decline through improving Aboriginal health?

Abstract: This research is part of an initiative by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) on ‘transregional inter-Asian connections and contexts that aims at recoceptualizing and rethinking Asia, in order to go beyond the territorial and conceptual fixities of area studies that divide the region into East, West, South, Southeast’, and which moreover exceptionalizes one part of Asia – The Middle East – with a name that has no connection to the geography of the region. This has also led some states to fall in the cracks between these regions and sub-regions, an issue that raises many questions I will explore in this research.