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Landscaping as decolonial practice? Hannah Hopewell, ‘Landscape collective entanglements and the landscapes-to-come in Aotearoa New Zealand’, in Anushka Athique, Duncan Goodwin, Ed Wall (eds), Collective Landscape Futures, Routledge, 2026

14Dec25

Abstract: This chapter critically speculates on landscape collectives in Aotearoa New Zealand in relation to Māori sovereignty in the context of setter-colonialism. It explores how landscape design, when informed by Māori relations and worldview can shift the whiteness of settler-colonial socio-spatial epistemologies that govern landscape architectural practice. Drawing on material occasions, the chapter discusses how landscape design intersects with hyperlocal Māori ways of being and knowing through drawing and mapping practices to effect renewed inscriptions upon colonised lands. The inquiry demonstrates how landscape architects can navigate the complex entanglement of Māori and Pākehā ontologies, asserting that landscape is a vehicle for renewed collective relationality. Ultimately the chapter envisions “landscapes-to-come” in Aotearoa NZ as becoming more Māori, rooted in the principles of whakapapa and reciprocity. However, at stake in such a future is the demand for non-indigenous landscape architects to divest of landscape imaginations aligned to the hegemonies of whiteness.


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It is a RELATION (of domination); ambivalence is inevitable: Britt Alexandra Baillie, ‘Settler and Sūmūd interpretation: the reimagining of the boundaries of Jerusalem/al-Quds’, in UNESCO, Thematic Research on Heritage Interpretation and Presentation, 2025, pp. 86-106

13Dec25

Abstract: As a cultural landscape inhabited by different agricultural cultures over time, the World Heritage listing of Battir recognises its potential to be simultaneously interpreted as both as a biblical landscape, and an historic Palestinian village (without negating other actors and periods). The interpretation of the site’s environmental and aesthetic values have already succeeded in bringing Israeli and Palestinian activists together to call for its preservation. International experts working for UNESCO were crucial in bringing the landscape to the world’s attention. UNESCO’s designation of the site shepherded both Israeli and Palestinian experts to recognise the site’s value. In short, Battir has many of the elements which serve as prerequisites for localised conflict transformation, and potentially ‘reconciliation’ to take place. However, the withdrawal of Israel and the USA from UNESCO has once more put such aims at risk. Regular demolitions of structures continue to take place in and around the village under the auspices of the Israeli authorities, incursions by potential settlers are on the rise, and the difficulties of the legal quagmires of the ‘area systems’ of the Oslo Accords make Battir’s continued efforts a barometer of the impact that heritage interpretation is having in the area.


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Settler going bananas: Nicole Khayat, Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat, ‘Bananas and the imaginary of progress: Eco-nationalism and agro-capitalism in Mandate-era Palestine’, EPE Nature and Space, 2025

13Dec25

Abstract: This article examines the role of banana plantations in the settler-colonial, capitalist transformation of Mandate-era Palestine. A microcosm of Zionist settlement and Indigenous Palestinian resistance, the cultivation of bananas reveals competing visions of development and national legitimacy, rooted in the cultural politics of ecological and economic nationalism. Framing banana cultivation in Palestine as a site of eco-nationalist struggle, the article details the convergence of capitalism, agriculture and ecology at the heart of the Zionist-Arab conflict. While bananas were not new to Palestine, efforts to significantly expand production under the British Mandate were constrained by the region’s poorly suited soil and climate, giving rise to competing discourses of scientific knowledge and cultural rootedness. Neither native to Palestine nor grounded in biblical tradition, bananas evoked in the settlers an ersatz ‘secular’ imagination of their inherent capability and expertise, which clashed with the lived reality of the Indigenous people’s deep familiarity with the local ecology and comparative agricultural success. Drawing on extensive primary sources, the article traces scientific discourses and cultural representations of banana cultivation in the districts of Beisan and Jericho, shedding new light on the ways in which agriculture shaped the Zionist-Arab conflict, including the role of the Palestinian capitalist class in resisting settler-colonial dispossession. The article thus explicates the role of bananas in uneven regional development and the struggle for control over land, demonstrating the usefulness of eco-nationalism as a lens to better understand economy and ecology as tools of capital accumulation and control.


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Stealing the land and the law: Thomas W. Murphy, ‘White is an Ite: The Book of Mormon’s Misappropriation of the Iroquois Great Law of Peace’, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 58, 4, 2025, pp. 47–72

13Dec25

Abstract: The Book of Mormon’s portrayal of a great peace that followed the climatic appearance of Jesus Christ in ancient America presents a conundrum. The people of Nephi reportedly became especially “white,” a label that is described simultaneously as not an “ite.” On the one hand, the narrator Mormon represented the “people of Nephi” as “fair and delightsome.”2 Yet, a few verses later he declared that there were no longer “any manner of ites.” The paradox in this portrayal is that Nephites, even if they absorbed whitened Lamanites and renamed themselves the people of Nephi, remained rather literally (wh)ites. Put more bluntly, the label “white”—just like “Lamanite” and “Nephite”—remains an ite. In his 2017 book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, historian Max Perry Mueller confronts the same troubling passage from Fourth Nephi, noting that “Lamanites and Nephites unified to become one raceless (white) Christian people.” Mueller recognizes an unseemly paradox: “whiteness is the racial category that is, ironically, empty of race.” White is presented as “the original and universal racial category” as well as a mutable one: “within the Book of Mormon hermeneutic of restoration whiteness becomes an aspirational identity, which even those cursed with blackness can achieve.”3 In his 2024 book, The Testimony of Two Nations, Michael Austin, provost of Snow College, applauds the mutability of curses and races in the Book of Mormon. Austin asserts that in contrast to curses in biblical texts, “The curse in the Book of Mormon is reversible and tied clearly to continuing behavior.” He suggests that despite “the overt racism in some of its passages concerning race and skin color, it [the Book of Mormon] injected something genuinely new in to the divine-curse-as-racial-etiology genre of scripture.”4 I seek to unsettle this applause by highlighting Indigenous readings of the Book of Mormon that expose its broader colonial implications. Is the narrator Mormon’s suggestion of racial mutability actually something novel to be praised or might it be, instead, a rather common but disguised instrument of settler colonial erasure?


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Visual sovereignty in and against settler colonialism: Nicolas G. Rosenthal, Painting Native America: Indigenous Artists in the Twentieth Century, University of Nebraska Press, 2026

11Dec25

Description: Generations of Indigenous artists have sought to make a place for Native art in North American culture and society as well as the broader art world. Written at the intersection of history and art history, Painting Native America tells the social history of Indigenous artists and their experiences as they negotiate such questions as how to use art for social and political goals, what constitutes “Indian art,” and how to make a living as an artist, showing how each generation’s approach to these issues in the twentieth century was shaped by previous struggles. Nicolas G. Rosenthal demonstrates that by exhibiting their paintings in museums, galleries, and public spaces, Native American artists rewrote dominant narratives of North American history, foregrounding Native perspectives while indigenizing the art world. Featuring seventy color illustrations, Painting Native America examines generations of American Indian and First Nations painters, including Oscar Howe, Pablita Velarde, Allan Houser, Woody Crumbo, T. C. Cannon, Fritz Scholder, Frank LaPena, Jean LaMarr and others. Rosenthal situates Indigenous artists in twentieth-century modernity, attesting to the dynamism of survivance and the cultural and visual sovereignty practiced by these artists. Rosenthal also provides one of the first social and urban histories of Indigenous artists and art scenes in the North American West and examines the origins of the regional art scenes these artists created in Oklahoma, New Mexico, California, and British Columbia.


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Stressed, very stressed settlers: Carly E. Nichols, ‘Stressor Source as a New Dimension of Emotional Political Ecologies: The Case of Corn Belt Farm Stress in the United States’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2025

11Dec25

Abstract: Emotional political ecology is a subfield that unpacks the ways power is negotiated via emotions in struggles around the environment. Although scholars have influentially outlined critical “dimensions” of emotion in environmental conflict, they pointedly leave their framework open to further theorization. This article thus proposes greater attention to the forces (i.e., stressors) that propel emotional responses in struggles over the environment, and the role of material or emotional coping tools that can disarm otherwise mobilizing emotions. I take the example of farm stress in the U.S. Midwest as a case to advance this point and focus on an underresearched group—Iowan conventional row-crop farmers. Conceptualizing stress as an affective and emotional bodily disposition, I demonstrate how stressors emanate from political economic structures, representational and discursive politics, and the materiality of everyday human–environment relations. I argue that although the materiality of weather causes in-the-moment anxiety, and discursive critiques of industrial agriculture cause frustration and anger, commodity farmers have established emotional and economic tools to cope with these stressors. These stressors are concomitant to more private feelings of grief, sadness, and confusion about how to navigate the changing political economy of agriculture, however, which respondents have less idea how to address. I conclude by drawing out how stressor–emotion–action responses can yield insights on how to grapple with farm stress and struggles over the environment more broadly.


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Build a statue and they will follow: Jennifer Sessions, ‘The Anxious Origins of a French Colonial Monument: The Duc d’Orléans in Algiers’, The Journal of the Western Society for French History’ 51, 8, 2025, pp. 72-79

10Dec25

Excerpt: The “civilian Population” addressed by the fundraisers, meaning the European settler population, was in an even shakier position as these threats intensified. The number of European colonists in Algeria had grown from a few thousand in the early 1830s to 44,500 by the end of 1842. But they continued to fall short of colonization advocates’ visions of a settler colony like British North America or Australia, where French families would replace the indigenous inhabitants and transform the territory into an extension of the mother country. Europeans remained vastly outnumbered by the Algerian majority, estimated at some three to four million in this period, and their demographic profile failed to meet colonialist ideals. Over half of the Europeans living in Algeria in 1842 were Spanish, Italian, or Maltese, rather than French. There were twice as many men as women. And most were not living on rural farms, but in towns and cities. Efforts to recruit French farming families to settle on confiscated Algerian land in 1841 largely attracted poor urban workers not the “families of small landowners, with excellent morality, including able-bodied, working-age children, able to bring at least 1,500 to 2,000 francs to the colony” administrators had hoped for. These disappointing results added fuel to bitter debates raging among political economists and policymakers about how to colonize Algeria and whether it was worth the financial and administrative costs to do so at all. Europeans already in the colony in the early 1840s lived in fear of losing the military protections and the investments in colonial development on which their physical and economic survival depended. Finally, to understand why the men of the monument commission wished to erect a statue of King Louis-Philippe’s eldest son in Algiers, we must understand the situation of the French monarchy in the 1840s.


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Demanding settlers: Chandra Murdoch, ‘Colonization Off-Reserve: Settler Petitions, Anishinaabe Capital Funds, and the Department of Indian Affairs in Ontario, 1854–1910’, Canadian Historical Review, 106, 4, 2025

09Dec25

Abstract: Following treaties in Saugeen Ojibwe Nation Territory (the Bruce Peninsula, 1854), the North Shore of Lake Huron (1859), and Mnidoo Mnising (Manitoulin Island, 1862), the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) controlled land sales and the conditions for white settlement. The DIA sold land to fulfill treaty obligations, administering new capital funds that generated annuity payments for treaty signatory communities. This article argues that petitions from settlers in these regions influenced how the DIA managed the capital funds they held in trust. Anishinaabe funds subsidized the development of nascent settler properties and economies through DIA decisions influenced by settler demands. The department invested in settler infrastructures and economies through surveys and road construction and lowered land prices and timber dues at the expense of capital funds. These decisions often went explicitly against Anishinaabe demands. Drawing on twenty-seven settler petitions, political correspondence of Anishinaabe leaders, and capital fund accounts through Orders in Council and DIA annual reports, this article shows how the DIA used money in Anishinaabe capital funds to support settler communities. By situating DIA administrative and financial involvements off-reserve, the article demonstrates their orientation towards expanding settler economies at the expense of Anishinaabe wealth in the context of the imperial withdrawal of support for the DIA.


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Parallel settler colonialisms: Alison Holland, ‘Sacrificing Indigenous interests: solving the ‘native question’ in Australia and Palestine on the eve of the Second World War’, Settler Colonial Stduies, 2025

09Dec25

Abstract: In 1937 administrators in Australia pronounced the fate of Aboriginal Australians as their eventual elimination, either through biological absorption or natural death. Historians have discussed this moment primarily through the prism of genocide. In this article I widen the interpretive lens to compare it to the contemporaneous resolution to eliminate Indigenous peoples from Palestine by British administrators. I show how the 1937 Aboriginal welfare conference and the 1937 Peel Commission on Palestine were symptomatic of an imperial humanitarian turn when the ‘native question’ was raised as an international concern for the first time. Widely understood to have been a failure, this humanitarian moment simultaneously recognised ‘native’ interests and retreated from (sacrificed) them. The outcomes for Indigenous people in Australia and Palestine bear this out and demonstrate how solutions about racialized ‘others’ that were playing out across Europe were refracted in policies targeting Indigenous peoples around the colonial periphery. The comparative frame places Australian developments in global context and draws out the settler colonial imperatives at work. Despite their differences the comparison highlights the salience of the structural effects of settler colonialism. It suggests that this moment was foundational, when the twentieth century settler colonial logic of elimination was set in train in both sites.


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The torus against settler colonialism? Alex Prong, ‘The Torus Chronotope: Spatial Motif as Anticolonial Resistance in The Night Watchman’, Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 42, 2, 2025

09Dec25

Abstract: Torus spatiality offers a unique form of geographic resistance to the asymmetrical power dynamics of settler colonialism that remains sensitive to the infinite complexity of spacio-temporal relationships in fiction and in reality. In this essay I argue for the torus as a literary artistic chronotope that disrupts the domination/resistance binary in which resistance must parallel that which it disrupts, denaturalizes space’s subordination to time under capitalism, and enables the polyvocal ensemble cast of Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman.


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