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Alternative settlers (again, on gastro-settler colonialism): Angie Sassano, ‘Between gourds and saltbush: the politics of race, coloniality, and recognition in Australia’s alternative food movements’, Agriculture and Human Values, 43, 2026, #14

29Dec25

Abstract: Although there has been much attention paid to the racial dynamics of food movements across North America, there has been little attention paid to race and colonialism in Australia’s alternative food movements. I focus on the conflation of race and Indigeneity through cosmopolitan and multicultural food practices of recognition that comes to limit more radical possibilities for Indigenous sovereignties. Therefore, this paper asks how whiteness structures everyday alternative food relations and mediates efforts to disrupt settler logics. I draw on fieldwork conducted at urban market gardens in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, to explore how settler food actors come to understand whiteness and (de)colonization in food practices, and how such dynamics are both disrupted and (often unintentionally) reinscribed through liberal paradigms of recognition. The paper frames whiteness as a colonial construct which facilitates the political conditions of alternative food practices to organize and govern whose (and how) knowledges and practices are made to matter. I argue that while well-intentioned, participants recognize that such efforts of inclusion and recognition are bound by broader settler governmentalities which risk potentially undermining creative forms of resistance.


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Shopping settler colonialism: Steve Penfold, The Dominion of Shoppers: Canadian Consumption from Hudson’s Bay to eBay, University of Toronto Press, 2026

28Dec25

Description: The Dominion of Shoppers is a concise introduction to the long history of Canadian consumption. Building on the “four Ps” of consumer history – place, product, payment, and power – historian Steve Penfold traces the complex mix of business, economic, social, and cultural dynamics that shaped shopping and exchange from the bygone fur trade to contemporary online buying. Stretching from the 17th to the 21st century, The Dominion of Shoppers builds its narrative around several key moments in the history of the (now bankrupt) Hudson’s Bay Company, leading the reader through the exchanges of the fur trade, retail in settler colonialism, modern consumption, post-World War Two consumer boom, consumer nationalism, state regulation, and more recent technological and retail disruptions. Through the pages of this book, readers will visit fur trade posts, public markets, small rural shops, department stores, shopping malls, power centres, discount houses, and online markets. The Dominion of Shoppers is a valuable introduction to Canadian consumerism for historians, students, and anyone interested in Canada’s past and present.


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Alien monsters: Niamh Gallagher, ‘Indigenous monsters and the spectres of assimilation: Jon Bell’s The Moogai (2024) as Aboriginal Gothic’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, 2025

28Dec25

Abstract: John Bell’s recent feature film The Moogai (2024) marks the entry of Aboriginal Gothic and Horror into twenty-first century mainstream Australian and international cinema. Working alongside and beyond current frameworks of Aboriginal Gothic, monster studies, and haunting, I argue that the monsters and spectres within the film can be understood as emerging from different world-systems, troubling Western conceptions of monsters and ghosts as purely metaphorical sources of fear. I also argue for an archipelagic understanding of Aboriginal Gothic texts, in which texts engage in an expansive and dynamic set of articulations which foreground the localised nature of Aboriginal relationships to place and space. Monsters borne from Country, and Ancestral ghosts, are connective and reparative, as they signal practices of care and mutual responsibility embedded in systems of Kinship, Dreaming, Lore and Law. The past and ongoing violent impingements of the colonial nation, particularly the Stolen Generations and hyperincarceration of Aboriginal people within the prison system, haunt Aboriginal life through the imminent threat of disappearance, and gaping absences of those disappeared. Within the film, Bell explores the interface of these two worlds, creating a titular monster which is both deeply tied to Bundjalung Country, and respondent to the horrors of colonialism.


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Ritual settler colonialism: Joshua Zentner-Barrett, ‘With Orca, Goose, and Bear: Expanding Canada’s Ritual Body’, Toronto Journal of Theology, 41, 2, 2025

28Dec25

Abstract: The publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2015 was a significant moment in both the story of Canadian-Indigenous relations and church-Indigenous relations. Churches across Canada have been wrestling not only with their complicity in the operation of residential schools but with their wider role in European colonialism. Many of the churches have initiated significant strategies for learning and education, and have explored ritual responses to residential schools and colonialism, such as land acknowledgements, art installations, and the reading of parts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. This paper is not quite about these ritual practices. Instead, it takes a wider lens, asking about the context in which these practices take place: what does it mean to “do” liturgy—to practice Christian ritual, to ritualize—in Canada today? More broadly, however, it asks how settler colonialism—particular practices of violence and domination—impact ritualization in contexts across the world—and how this is all rooted in the land. This paper proceeds in three parts. First, it discusses the concepts of the body, ritualization, and contextualization in Catherine Bell’s Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Second, it examines settler colonialism using my own context of Canada as a particular example. Third, it draws on Cláudio Carvalhaes’ concept of lex naturae to expand Bell’s concept of the “body”: all (liturgical) practice must be seen through the lens of creation. Through a brief case study, it then demonstrates one way in which a Christian community has attempted to bring the voice of the land into liturgical practice and thus expand the ritualization of “bodies” in Christian ritual. Because of the way that settler colonialism functions in its global contexts, ritualization should understand the “body” as including the land and the interrelationship of all created things.


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Against Mestizo settler colonialism: Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga, ‘Against Mestizaje: Articulations Towards a Black/Indigenous Sense of Place in Mexico’, Antipode, 2025

26Dec25

Abstract: In this paper, I sit with the different modes of relation that Black, Indigenous, and Black/Indigenous/Afro-Indigenous women have to community, to each other, and to land and sea. In particular, I demonstrate the ways in which Black, Indigenous, and Black/Indigenous women contend, refuse, and negotiate racialised identifiers on their own terms, extending beyond Mexico’s rubrics of inclusion and exclusion. I ask: How does one insist on existence, and do so on your and your community’s own terms? What does it mean to be inseparable from the land and water that your community inhabits? I weave together Black and Indigenous feminist thought, with an analysis of language use, to unsettle hegemonic mestizo understandings of place, racial and state formation in the land known as Mexico and beyond.


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Policing the settler order in French Algeria: Samuel Kalman, Law, Order, and Empire: Policing and Crime in Colonial Algeria, 1870–1954, Cornell University Press, 2024

26Dec25

Description: While much attention has focused on society, culture, and the military during the Algerian War of Independence, Law, Order, and Empire addresses a vital component of the empire that has been overlooked: policing. Samuel Kalman examines a critical component of the construction and maintenance of a racial state by settlers in Algeria from 1870 onward, in which Arabs and Berbers were subjected to an ongoing campaign of symbolic, structural, and physical violence. The French administration encouraged this construct by expropriating resources and territory, exploiting cheap labor, and monopolizing government, all through the use of force. Kalman provides a comprehensive overview of policing and crime in French Algeria, including the organizational challenges encountered by officers. Unlike the metropolitan variant, imperial policing was never a simple matter of law enforcement but instead engaged in the defense of racial hegemony and empire. Officers and gendarmes waged a constant struggle against escalating banditry, the assault and murder of settlers, and nationalist politics—anticolonial violence that rejected French rule. Thus, policing became synonymous with repression, and its brutal tactics foreshadowed the torture and murder used during the War of Independence. To understand the mechanics of empire, Kalman argues that it was the first line of defense for imperial hegemony. Law, Order, and Empire outlines not only how failings in policing were responsible for decolonization in Algeria but also how torture, massacres, and quotidian colonial violence—introduced from the very beginning of French policing in Algeria—created state-directed aggression from 1870 onward.


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Care against settler colonialism: Nina De Bettin Padolin, ‘Care as Resistance: Indigenous Feminist and Queer Survivance in The Marrow Thieves’, Postcolonial Text, 20, 3-4, 2025

24Dec25

Excerpt: “And I understood just what we would do for each other, just what we would do for the ebb and pull of the dream, the bigger dream that held us all. Anything. Everything.” In this way, Cherie Dimaline (Métis Nation of Ontario) ends the 2017 novel The Marrow Thieves. This article argues that the novel reimagines resistance to settler colonialism through an Indigenous feminist and queer ethic of intergenerational care. Dimaline centers Elders and queer kinship as the primary agents of survivance (Vizenor), showing how practices of teaching, tending, ceremony, and story constitute counter-violence. Methodologically, I draw on Indigenous feminist theory and resurgence (Simpson), refusal (Audra Simpson), and decolonial critique (Mignolo and Walsh) to read the novel’s aesthetic, narrative, and epistemic interventions. I show how The Marrow Thieves relocates sovereignty from the state to landbased kin-structures. I examine how chosen, non-biological family reorders value beyond heteropatriarchal nuclear logics and how Minerva’s and Miig’s teachings help their kin and ultimately the nation to actively practice resurgence. Finally, I argue that the text revises colonial temporality by insisting that time is non-linear, meaning that ancestors, present kin, and future beings co-occur. The sections that follow map (1) colonial extractivism; (2) care as counter-violence; (3) queer/Elder kinship as epistemic sovereignty; (4) story and language as insurgent and resurgent; and (5) Indigenous Futurisms.


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Settler bodies: Lisa Guenther, ‘Unsettling Perception: A Critical Phenomenology of Settler Colonial Body Schemas’, in Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Délia Popa (eds), Doing a Phenomenology of Political Life: Social Critique, Sense-Institution, and Political Emancipation, Springer, 2026, pp. 255-268

23Dec25

Abstract: Historian Patrick Wolfe argues that colonial invasion “is a structure, not an event.” The violence of colonialism is not confined to an isolated moment with a definite beginning and end; it is an ongoing process that organizes the political, economic, social, and interpersonal life of both settlers and Indigenous peoples. This chapter reflects critically on the way colonial structures are lived and experienced—or ignored and disavowed—at the level of the settler body schema. Are there specific forms of perception, cognition, and action that colonialism engenders and reproduces in those who benefit from colonial power? And if so, how do we disrupt and transform these structures, such that they no longer appear as simple pathways to objective knowledge but as contingent schemas that have sedimented over time and remain open to revision, perhaps even to abolition? I engage with these questions through a reading of Susanna Moodie’s 1852 colonial narrative, Roughing it in the Bush, and Margaret Atwood’s 1970 poems, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s 1953 course notes, The Sensible World and the World of Expression.


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Settler subjects: Mérédith Laferté-Coutu, ‘A Generative Phenomenology of Settler Homeworlds in Canada and the United States’, in Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Délia Popa (eds), Doing a Phenomenology of Political Life: Social Critique, Sense-Institution, and Political Emancipation, Springer, 2026, pp. 269-288

23Dec25

Abstract: This paper is about the relationship between intergenerational and subjective dimensions of settler colonial power. I mobilize both generative phenomenology and settler studies to analyze how settler affects toward land have maintained logics of dispossession and elimination of Indigenous people in Canada and the U.S. in past decades. I do so through Eva Mackey’s ethnographic study of settler feelings of surprise and anxiety in the context of 1990s land disputes in Southern Ontario and Upstate New York. Through a critical uptake of the phenomenological distinction between homeworld and alienworld, I propose the notion of settler homeworlds, where senses of home are generated not in co-relation to the “alien,” but through the intent to replace entire peoples on foreign land and erase that ongoing history of elimination. My approach challenges the absence of the land in the general structure of lifeworlds and offers an account of the term “settler subjectivity.”


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Yeah nah (still a settler colony): James D. Sidaway, ‘Locating Israel as “settler colony”‘, Dialogues in Human Geography, 2025

23Dec25

Abstract: This commentary engages with Mikko Joronen’s ‘Polluting Appropriations: Malevolent Weathering of Settler Colonisation in Palestine’ through two tracks. Firstly, I delve into the lineage of the term ‘settler colony’ as a designation of Israel, considering some of its political framings and impacts. Secondly, I consider wider literature on environmental transformations and impacts of settler colonialism. Both tracks yield questions on Israel’s commonalities with other military-colonizing powers.


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