settler colonial studies blog

The erosion of settler colonialism: Alyson Favilla, ‘Leave No Trace: A Review of Gina Caison’s Erosion: American Environments and the Anxiety of Disappearance’, Journal of Modern Literature, 49, 4, 2026, pp. 171-174

05Oct26

Abstract: Erosion explores the operations of the white settler-colonial imagination on the physical soils and landscapes of American literature. While Caison’s archive is capacious and rejects strict periodization, her reevaluation of canonical early-twentieth-century texts from an Indigenous Studies perspective will be of interest to scholars working within ecocritical and regional studies frameworks, particularly those whose work engages US environmental history. Erosionrecuperates the Native American histories obscured by popular narratives of environmental degradation and counterposes these texts with the literary and photographic accounts of contemporary Indigenous artists.

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Settler elegy: Anna Olovsdotter Lööv, Angelika Sjöstedt, ‘Telling Settler Stories: Heteronormativity and Settler Time in the Media Narrative of a Project Responding to the “Death of the Countryside”‘, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 2026

05Oct26

Abstract: This paper aims to contribute to critical studies of rurality, coloniality, and gender by analysing a media narrative of an initiative for “saving the dying countryside.” The initiative we are focusing on is aimed at making families with children move to a rural village in the north of Sweden. We problematize how the media narrative about the initiative constructed particular tropes of rural life that are normative of settler time. The material consists of newspaper articles about a housing project in a rural village initiated in 2019 in response to the threat of closing down the village school in a sparsely populated region in Sweden. Sweden is a settler colonial nation-state, and settler colonialism is a gendered process. We therefore use queer and decolonial theories to critically address the media narrative. The story-telling of the housing project is guided by a child-centred reproductive futurism of white, middle-class, heteronormative straight lifelines that are intertwined with rural futurity set against a backdrop of settler common sense.

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Desert settler empire: Philip Wade, Cracks in the Desert Hegemonic Space and Indigenous Resistance in the Borderlands of Northern Patagonia, PhD dissertation, University of Gothenburg, 2026

05Oct26

Abstract: The 1878 arrival of the Argentine settler state as conqueror in northern Patagonia produced a singular problem for the state: the desert. A colonial imaginary of the absolute outside was now incorporated into Argentina, sparking a long-running territorial conflict that endures to this day. This thesis examines how enduring settler colonial processes shape territorial relations in northern Patagonia and how Indigenous Mapuche and allied actors enact diverse practices of resistance. Bringing settler colonial studies into conversation with political ontology, theories of space and relational approaches to resistance, it conceptualises contemporary territorial conflicts as part of the longue durée of settler colonialism. The research employs a qualitative, ethnographically oriented methodology, drawing on participant observation and partial life-history interviews, as well as documentary sources and urban artistic interventions. It is argued that settler colonialism operates through the application of a hegemonic spatial regime that has rendered Indigenous territory available for transformation into extractive and conservation frontiers. These spatial relations are continually reproduced through processes of bordering, extractivism and exclusive conservation which are presented by hegemonic power as natural and inevitable, while practices of partial recognition and derecognition attempt to absence Indigenous peoples, both in time and in space. Hegemony, however, remains incomplete. Insistent Mapuche presence and resistance expose persistent cracks within settler colonial spatialities and temporalities. Through these cracks emerge diverse practices of resistance. These practices contest narratives of Indigenous absence, build alliances and articulate alternative relationships to territory. The thesis therefore conceptualises resistance not solely as opposition to particular territorial projects, but as productive and ontological. This resistance is world-making, challenging the spatial and temporal assumptions through which hegemonic settler colonial power is continually reproduced.

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Inland settler empire: Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Inland Empire: Settler Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Southern California, Duke University Press, 2026

05Oct26

Decsription: In Inland Empire, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió examines how modernist architecture and urban design structured US settler colonialism and capitalist hegemony in the twentieth century. Focusing on Palm Springs’s settlement upon the Agua Caliente Reservation and other reservations in inland Southern California, he shows how architecture became a key technology for governing empire at the height of the state’s drive to terminate Native American sovereignty. Through extensive archival research and dialogue with Cahuilla, Kumeyaay, and other Tribal community members, Shvartzberg Carrió offers a new architectural history of modernism. Carefully placing the work of seminal California architects within the genealogy of manifest destiny, he demonstrates how their designs over settler and Native housing, prefabrication technologies, the logistics of migrant construction labor, community development plans, and environmental infrastructures offered new ways of managing Indigenous resistance—a spatial turn in Native American administration that constituted a veritable workshop for neoliberalization policies later sponsored globally by the United States. Charting Indigenous nations’ responses to these momentous challenges, Inland Empire details how they deployed novel modes of resistance grounded in Native architectural histories, spatial practices, and epistemologies of land.

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Orange settlers: Tiago Saraiva, The Orchard in the Ruins: Cloning Oranges and Cultivating Whiteness in America and the Global South, University of Chicago Press, 2026

05Oct26

Description: Ingeniously connects the history of citrus cultivation to the production and maintenance of whiteness in sites around the world. In The Orchard in the Ruins, acclaimed historian Tiago Saraiva illuminates the global impact of cloning Californian oranges, a practice that emerged in the aftermath of the great depression of the 1890s. Cloning promised control, uniformity, and resistance to an array of environmental and economic threats. But Californian orchards—white-owned but tended by workers of Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, or Indigenous origin—were also places where plantations and race intertwined. Agricultural anxieties about strains of oranges and their value, Saraiva shows, formed a continuum with anxieties about vanishing whiteness. The Orchard in the Ruins connects Californian history to other sites of citrus cultivation: South Africa, where concerns about white poverty grew during the early twentieth century; Mandatory Palestine, where orchards were key to Zionist undertakings; colonial Algeria, where French settlers transformed the landscape with European farming techniques; and Brazil, where orchards were cultivated post-abolition. Drawing on local histories as well as the works of John Dewey, J. M. Coetzee, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and artist Tarsila do Amaral, Saraiva shows that in each place, orchards grew in the wake of specific historical crises. Orange cultivation was a transnational project in cultivating whiteness, one in which studies of fruits, buds, rootstocks, fungi, and viruses became race-making experiments. A must-read for anyone interested in the history of science, technology, agriculture, and race, The Orchard in the Ruins reveals a troubled account of science-led attempts to remedy crumbling worlds.

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Three knights of the settler apocalypse: Jan H. Pranger, Christianity, Settler Colonialism, and Extractivism, Bloomsbury, 2026

05Oct26

Description: Informed by field research in the Bakken oilfields of North Dakota, this book discusses how hydraulic fracking impacts Christian congregations and Native American communities. Jan Pranger discusses Christian congregations’ responses to the social, economic, and environmental changes extractive industries impose on local Indigenous and settler communities. Revisiting the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline and the histories of colonization of local Indigenous peoples, this book provides a Christian theological and ethical perspective on resource extraction through the lens of settler colonialism. In essence, Pranger queries how Christianity contributes to and is shaped by the structures, cultures, and spiritualities which enable the extraction of resources from Indigenous peoples and the Earth.

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Belabouring the labour of Palestinian labour: Anonymous, ‘Superfluous Labor: The Settler Colonial “Turn” in the Study of Palestine’, Qui Parle (2026) 35, 1, 2026, pp. 121-163

03Oct26

Abstract: No one following the critical academic study of Palestine and Israel over the past decade and a half could fail to observe the dramatic proliferation of the category of settler colonialism. This article examines the intellectual historical conceit of one prominent strand, those studies taking after Patrick Wolfe’s influential theorization. Where many scholars observe a renewal or return to an earlier tradition of studying Zionism, the author argues that recent developments represent a paradigmatic turn. This is, moreover, often a highly “motivated” interpretation that aims for the history to adhere to the preferred theoretical schema (specifically, the superfluity of native labor to the settler economy), rather than striving to incorporate the unfolding of a dynamic struggle and its contemporary analysis. To demonstrate this shortcoming, the article then samples a selection of English- and Arabic-language sources from the apparent interim in the theorization of Zionist settler colonialism. These works, responsive to their conjuncture between the June War and the First Intifada, not only deploy many concepts and theories that are illegible in the Wolfean paradigm but also demonstrate a concerted recovery of the history and struggles of the Palestinian working class and their relevance to the struggle for national liberation.

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Biopolitical settler colonialism: Dawit Tesfay Haile, ‘Settler colonial biopolitics at the border: a transnational entanglement of law, medical sciences, and migration control at Ellis Island’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

02Oct26

Abstract: Migration from Europe to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is known for its confrontation with racialized and gendered migration control. In line with this, this paper aims to analytically extend the migration control of that period to the biopolitics of settler colonialism. By patchworking transnational archives (in the United States and the Netherlands), it investigates how medical and immigration control infrastructures were established at Ellis Island (US) and how they operated to identify ‘undesirable immigrants’. Using the lens of biopolitics of settler colonialism, it pays attention to (1) the dominant racialized and medicalized imaginaries behind migration control, (2) the particular socio-spatial arrangement of migration inspection at Ellis Island, and (3) the transnational biopolitical entanglements at play, in the sense that administrative practices at Ellis Island informed practices of commercialized services (Holland America Line) and local authorities in the Netherlands. By empirically and analytically foregrounding the biopolitical formations inherent to settler colonialism in general, and the transnationalized medicalization of border control in particular, this paper shows how the construction of the ‘undesirable migrant’ simultaneously (re)produced the settler colonial imaginary of ‘whiteness’ as well as the imaginary of physical and mental fitness of the nation.

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At this point we should not ‘care’: Girish Daswani, ‘How Anthropology Can Harm Students During a Genocide’, American Anthropologist, 2026

30Sep26

Abstract: This essay is about the harm that is committed in the name of care. More specifically, it is about student requests for support during the ongoing genocide in Palestine and an anthropology department’s use and weaponization of the language of “care” to do the exact opposite: to cause harm. I examine how the language of care for students and the exception of Palestine are weaponized by administrators—including anthropologists—to silence and shut down conversations about, and support for, Palestine. I demonstrate how the “permission to narrate” stems from certain methods of attention that speak to the university’s alignment with settler colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, and anti-Palestinian racism, even as the university officially acknowledges settler land relations and shares statements about “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” (DEI). Indeed, such acts of care are often based on the condition that settler-colonial and capitalist relations remain unchanged—that colonial whiteness remains unchanged—and any attempts to unsettle these liberal, institutional-settler relations will be met with purposeful occlusion and harm.

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What settler colonialism therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers: Janna Lynell Martin Rogers, Human Categorization: A History of Race Science and Trafficking Indigenous Remains’, MA dissertation, Oklahoma State University, 2027

30Sep26

Abstract: This dissertation explores the history of graverobbing in the United States and influence of Race Science on the demand for Indigenous specimens. The original contribution of this research to the historiography modernizes language to redefine graverobbing as posthumous violence in an international necro – economy of trafficking Native cadavers. Through necro – capitalism white elite men commodified decedents and built institutional legacies that continue. Academics, scientists, physicians, Christian ministers, museum professionals, private and federally funded repositories stole, mutilated, sold, and hoarded the dead in exchange for wealth, fame, and power. In the terms of international law, the posthumous violence experienced by Indigenous decedents are genocidal crimes against humanity. Through contrapuntal examination and interdisciplinary methodologies of sociology, psychology, and forensic medicine graverobbing is understood as a patriarchal structure of discursive authority by white educated men and absolute power over bodies of the dead. This dissertation resolves race science and graverobbing as science gone mad. The minds, ethics, and unchallenged claims of scientists are plagued with a fetishistic disorder akin to necrophilism. Unabashed capitalist greed targeted subjugated demographics, terrorized living communities, debased graves, and defiled freshly buried bodies. Key findings demonstrate that broader society became complicit in despoiling the dead. The phenomenon of graverobbing was normalized in a complacent society where the dead had no rights. Racialized science, racialized language of eugenics, and blood quantum pseudoscience influenced federal policy that continues to assault Indigenous identity and Indian Country in the twenty – first century. This dissertation argues that academe, historical institutions, repositories, and medical sciences still prey on nonwhite and subjugated communities. As growing numbers of Indigenous and Black scholars enter fields of museology, medicine, and the human sciences a collaborative approach is reshaping conferences, methodologies, and bioethics. The Indigenous Archaeology Collective and Society of Black Archaeologists are impacting repatriation, exalting cultural and ethnic perspectives while exercising sovereignty and human rights of living communities and the deceased. Decedents have human rights, cultural rights, sovereignty rights, repatriation rights, and the right to remain interred. All decedents should have the right to remain safe from the institutional abuse historically enforced through ideologies of ethno – supremacism.

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