settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism and Palestine studies: Ilan Pappe, Nur Masalha, ‘Introducing the Journal’s New Name’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 14, 1, 2015, pp. 1-2

25Apr15

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.

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Remembering and returning to the settler polity: Amy L. Hubbell, Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity, and Exile, University of Nebraska Press, 2015

25Apr15

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.

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On the expansion of settler colonial orders: Courtney Buchkoski, Philanthropy and The New England Emigrant Aid Company, 1854-1900, MA Dissertation, University of Nebraska, 2015

25Apr15

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.

It argues that the Company’s vision was simultaneously capitalistic and moralistic, for it served both as an imposition of “proper” society upon the West and South, but also had the potential to benefit the donors financially and politically. Using a settler colonial framework, it examines how domestic colonization project created hierarchical relationships between white men, Native Americans, women, and freed slaves. This includes an examination of how the seemingly liberal idea of philanthropy resulted in the removal of Native Americans from Kansas in the 1850s and discouraged the entry of freed slaves into the territory, despite the Company’s moral claims. It also studies the NEEAC’s expansion into Florida, Oregon, Texas, and Virginia, both before and after the Civil War. Finally, this project examines the public memorialization of the NEEAC and Bleeding Kansas.

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A comparative analysis of contemporary settler heritage managment practices: Paulette Jane Wallace, Approaching cultural landscapes in post-settler societies: ideas, policies, practices, PhD Thesis, Deakin University, 2015

22Apr15

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.

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On settler and children: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, ‘Stolen childhood: Palestinian children and the structure of genocidal dispossession’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

22Apr15

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.

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On indigenous disappearances and their different meaning: Geoffrey Gray, ‘”We Know the Aborigines are Dying Out”: Aboriginal People and the Quest to Ensure their Survival, Wave Hill Station, 1944’, Health and History, 16, 1, 2014, pp. 1-24

21Apr15

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?

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On settler colonialism and geography: Magid Shihade, ‘The place of Israel in Asia: settler colonialism, mobility, memory, and identity among Palestinians in Israel’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

19Apr15

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.

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Imagining indigenous disappearance durimng the global ‘settler revolution’: Sarah Thomas, ‘Allegorizing extinction: Humboldt, Darwin and the valedictory image’, in Fae Brauer, Serena Keshavjee (eds), Picturing Evolution and Extinction, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015

19Apr15

Abstract: In the first half of the nineteenth century the writings of the great naturalist Alexander von Humboldt began to propel European artists to travel to all corners of the globe. Humboldt would also inspire another young traveller, Charles Darwin, whose revolutionary theory of evolution would come to overturn the concept of a divine universal order devised by his mentor. This essay focuses on a group of mid-nineteenth-century paintings poised between the Humboldtian and Darwinian world views which allegorised the extinction of indigenous peoples, those by the itinerant Germanic artists Eugene von Guérard in Australia, and Albert Bierstadt in North America. Elegiac and melancholic, the paintings represented their indigenous subjects in deep shadow, set against the dying light of sunset: their foreboding message was one of inexorable decline. As such they actively participated in the pervasive—and profoundly flawed—extinction discourse which throughout the nineteenth century held that all ‘savage’ races were doomed ineluctably to perish. I argue that the paintings engaged in what James Clifford has termed ‘salvage ethnography’, yet ultimately—if unwittingly—their message contributed to the unparalleled global decimation of indigenous peoples which scarred the imperial age.

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Looking at a settler society from another: Elizabeth Rechniewski, ‘The Perils of Proximity: The Geopolitical Underpinnings of Australian Views Of New Caledonia In The Nineteenth Century’, Portal, 12, 1, 2015,

15Apr15

Excerpt: The close relationship that once existed between these far-flung outposts of European empire has largely been forgotten, yet in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries New Caledonia loomed large in Australian preoccupations and imagination. The links between these two imperial colonies were much stronger than we might realise today: a web of interdependent commercial and personal relations underpinned a complex relationship that oscillated between rivalry, suspicion and the recognition of interests held in common by European settlers who were each other’s closest neighbours.

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On the prospected closure of remote indigenous communities in Australia: Ruth DeSouza, ‘The closure of remote Aboriginal communities: What is the role of nurses in Indigenous disadvantage?’, 2015

15Apr15

Excerpt: The view expressed by Tony Abbott (Prime Minister and the Minister for Indigenous Affairs), that taxpayers shouldn’t be expected to fund the “lifestyle choices” of Aboriginal people living in remote regions in support of Colin Barnett’s (West Australian Premier) decision to close 150 remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia reflects the repetition of the colonial project and Aboriginal dispossession. One of the mythologies of a white settler society is that white people are the first to arrive and develop the land, with colonisation a benign force (rather than one enacted through the processes of conquest and genocide and displacing the indigenous (Razack, 2002)). Closing the community draws attention away from governmental failures to ‘Close the Gap’ and instead displaces the blame on the supposed inadequacies and problems of Aboriginal communities (Amy McQuire) thereby individualising socio-political inequalities rather than revealing them as historic and structural.

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