settler colonial studies blog

On indigenous inhabitance of space under settler colonialism: Magid Shihade, ‘Not Just a Picnic: Settler Colonialism, Mobility, and Identity among Palestinians in Israel’, Biography, 37, 2, 2014, pp. 451-473

19Mar15

Abstract: Through the lens of picnics, this article narrates the social and political history of a village in Galilee and its residents since 1948, which serves as a picture for the larger Palestinian experience and the consequences of the rupture created by the Zionist colonization of Palestine.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On settler wars, the celebrated and the repressed ones: Penny Edmonds, ‘A breastplate reveals the story of an Australian frontier massacre’, The Conversation, 2014

19Mar15

Extract: The flood of coverage of the centenary of Gallipoli and the first world war profoundly shapes the way we think of Australia’s history; but we suppress other violent events in our own country that also shaped us.

On Australian colonial frontiers, violence and conciliation went hand-in-hand. Acts of aggression, retribution, and pacification were linked in complex ways — ways that were not always recorded in archival accounts. We come to our history often through the written word, or television, and objects too often are left as mere footnotes to our history.

So can historical objects from our frontier past gives us fresh perspectives in rethinking and writing colonial history, and give us a window on such violence and troubled diplomacy?

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On indigenous space-making under settler colonialism: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Sarah Ihmoud, ‘Exiled at Home: Writing Return and the Palestinian Home’, Biography, 37, 2, 2014, 377-397

19Mar15

Abstract: Drawing on our personal histories navigating the violence of Israeli settler colonialism and militarization, we theorize the Palestinian home space as not only a physical, but also a psychological and epistemological space of yearning, of belonging, and of radical thinking and becoming. In light of the colonial state’s continued attempts to further fragment and dislocate indigenous Palestinians from their homeland, we posit an analytics of returning to our home/land as a space of reconstructing Palestinian socialities and identities, of re-rooting through a radical praxis of love that can give birth to new forms of resistance.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On gold, settler colonial expansion, and exogenous alterities: Mae M. Ngai, ‘Chinese Gold Miners and the “Chinese Question” in Nineteenth-Century California and Victoria’, Journal of American History, 101, 4, 2015, pp. 1082-1105

19Mar15

Extract: During the second half of the nineteenth century the largest gold deposits yet known in the world were discovered in the American West, Australasia, South Africa, and western Canada. From 1848 to 1891 a series of gold rushes—quick, short-term bonanzas (or failures) for individual miners—swept those regions, drawing hundreds of thousands of gold seekers from around the world. In fewer than fifty years miners and mining companies extracted from the earth some 435 million ounces of gold—more than the total that had been mined in the previous three thousand years. The sudden increase in world gold production in the late nineteenth century was produced by Anglo-American settler colonialism and capitalist development. Since ancient times gold has been valued for its beauty and purity. Indigenous populations on the settler-colonial frontiers were long aware of alluvial gold deposits in their midst, but they did not value gold as a money commodity. Thus, gold rushes furthered the dispossession of native peoples and transformed the Pacific worlds where gold was discovered, as well as the global economy. Sustained exploration and extraction required capital investment, deep-mining technology, mass labor migration, and long-distance transportation. Such activity accelerated the economic development of the gold-mining regions and strengthened the international financial power of Great Britain and the United States as creditor and investor nations.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On settler affective geographies: Kate Cairns, Deborah McPhail, Claudyne Chevrier, Jill Bucklaschuk, ‘The Family Behind the Farm: Race and the Affective Geographies of Manitoba Pork Production’, Antipode, 2015

19Mar15

Abstract: As increasing toxicity of Manitoba lakes garners public concern, the environmental impacts of pork producers have come under scrutiny. In this context, the Manitoba Pork Council launched The Family Behind the Farm, a series of advertisements and testimonials featuring pork producers and their families. We examine how this campaign operates affectively to distance the family farm from industrial pork production. Building upon geographical literature theorizing the relationship between race and affect, we argue that the campaign mobilizes pride in the family farm through heteronormative and racialized affects of intimacy, tradition, and intergenerational continuity. In the process, not only is pork production made innocent, but the family farm, and rural Manitoba itself, is reproduced as a white, heteronormative space with an innocent past and secure future. By analyzing this specific case, the paper demonstrates the role of the heteronormative family in reproducing affective geographies of whiteness.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On Zionism and settler colonialism: Nora Scholtes, ‘”Bulwark against Asia”: Zionist Exclusivism and Palestinian Responses’, PhD Dissertation, Universiy of Kent, 2015

17Mar15

Abstract: This thesis offers a consideration of how the ideological foundations of Zionism determine the movement’s exclusive relationship with an outside world that is posited at large and the native Palestinian population specifically. Contesting Israel’s exceptionalist security narrative, it identifies, through an extensive examination of the writings of Theodor Herzl, the overlapping settler colonialist and ethno-nationalist roots of Zionism. In doing so, it contextualises Herzl’s movement as a hegemonic political force that embraced the dominant European discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including anti-Semitism. The thesis is also concerned with the ways in which these ideological foundations came to bear on the Palestinian and broader Ottoman contexts. A closer consideration of Ottoman Palestine reveals a hidden history of imperial inclusivity that stands in stark contrast to the Zionist settler colonial model. The thesis explores the effects of the Zionist project on Palestine’s native population, highlighting early reactions to the marginalisation and exclusion suffered, as well as emerging strategies of resistance that locate an alternative, non-nationalist vision for the future of the region in the collective reappropriation of a pre-colonial past. The question is broached about the role that Palestinian literature can play within the context of such reclaiming efforts. More precisely, it debates whether Palestinian life writing emanating from the occupied territories contributes, in its recording of personal history, to the project of re-writing national history in opposition to the attempted Israeli erasure. Finally, by drawing a direct line from original Zionist thought to the politics and policies of the state of Israel today, the thesis suggests an on-going settler colonial structure that has become increasingly visible through the state’s use of spatially restrictive measures in order to finally conclude its settlement project. Israel’s obsessive ‘walling’ is discussed in that context as the physical escalation of Zionism’s founding ideological tenets.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On imperial connections: Adele Perry, Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World, Cambridge University Press, 2015

17Mar15

Description: A study of the lived history of nineteenth-century British imperialism through the lives of one extended family in North America, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. The prominent colonial governor James Douglas was born in 1803 in what is now Guyana, probably to a free woman of colour and an itinerant Scottish father. In the North American fur-trade, he married Amelia Connolly, the daughter of a Cree mother and an Irish-Canadian father. Adele Perry traces their family and friends over the course of the ‘long’ nineteenth-century, using careful archival research to offer an analysis of the imperial world that is at once intimate and critical, wide-ranging and sharply focused. Perry engages feminist scholarship on gender and intimacy, critical analyses about colonial archives, transnational and postcolonial history and the ‘new imperial history’ to suggest how this period might be rethought through one powerful family located at the British Empire’s margins.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Comparing cultural competency in settler societies: Anton Clifford, Janya McCalman, Roxanne Bainbridge Komla Tsey, ‘Interventions to improve cultural competency in health care for Indigenous peoples of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA: a systematic review’, International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 2015

17Mar15

Abstract: Purpose: This article describes the characteristics and reviews the methodological quality of interventions designed to improve cultural competency in health care for Indigenous peoples of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA. Data sources: A total of 17 electronic databases and 13 websites for the period of 2002–13. Study selection: Studies were included if they evaluated an intervention strategy designed to improve cultural competency in health care for Indigenous peoples of Australia, New Zealand, the USA or Canada. Data extraction: Information on the characteristics and methodological quality of included studies was extracted using standardized assessment tools. Results of data synthesis: Sixteen published evaluations of interventions to improve cultural competency in health care for Indigenous peoples were identified: 11 for Indigenous peoples of the USA and 5 for Indigenous Australians. The main types of intervention strategies were education and training of the health workforce, culturally specific health programs and recruitment of an Indigenous health workforce. Main positive outcomes reported were improvements in health professionals’ confidence, and patients’ satisfaction with and access to health care. The methodological quality of evaluations and the reporting of key methodological criteria were variable. Particular problems included weak study designs, low or no reporting of consent rates, confounding and non-validated measurement instruments. Conclusion: There is a lack of evidence from rigorous evaluations on the effectiveness of interventions for improving cultural competency in health care for Indigenous peoples. Future evaluations should employ more rigorous study designs and extend their measurement of outcomes beyond those relating to health professionals, to those relating to the health of Indigenous peoples.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

On old and new resettlements: Jane McAdam, ‘Relocation and resettlement from colonisation to climate change: the perennial solution to “danger zones”‘, London Review of International Law, 3, 1, 2015, pp. 93-130

17Mar15

Abstract: Planned relocation has gained recent prominence as a tool for reducing vulnerable communities’ exposure to the impacts of climate change and disasters. This article situates the phenomenon of cross-border relocation within a history spanning the 18th century to the present, connecting resettlement programmes with legally-sanctioned population transfers and exchanges.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Reflecting on researching indigensous issues: Vanessa Castejon, Anna Cole, Oliver Haag, Karen Hughes (eds), Ngapartji Ngapartji In turn, in turn: Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia, ANU Press, 2015

14Mar15

Description: In this innovative collection, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars from Australia and Europe reflect on how their life histories have impacted on their research in Indigenous Australian Studies. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s concept of ego-histoire as an analytical tool to ask historians to apply their methods to themselves, contributors lay open their paths, personal commitments and passion involved in their research. Why are we researching in Indigenous Studies, what has driven our motivations? How have our biographical experiences influenced our research? And how has our research influenced us in our political and individual understanding as scholars and human beings? This collection tries to answer many of these complex questions, seeing them not as merely personal issues but highly relevant to the practice of Indigenous Studies.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute