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Anna Boswell, ‘The sensible order of the eel’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

18Feb15

Abstract: As an embodiment of the energy of the life-world and a lawmaker within the terms of a Maori world view, the longfin eel (or tuna) teaches how to live responsibly in place. This paper follows the shimmering trail of the eel, encountering environmental contradiction and catastrophe in its path. Revealing the death-world of settler colonial reconstruction and the bad faith that underpins latter-day conservation agendas in so-called new world places, the eel destabilises settler certainties and calls forth a set of problems – ecological, pedagogical and constitutional – that refuse to remain submerged.


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On the settler colonial present: Ghassan Hage, Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination, Melbourne University Press, 2015

18Feb15

With a chapter on ‘The Globalisation of the Late Colonial Settler Condition’.


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On settler sovereignties: Luise White, Unpopular Sovereignty Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization, University of Chicago Press, 2015

17Feb15

Description: In 1965 the white minority government of Rhodesia (after 1980 Zimbabwe) issued a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, rather than negotiate a transition to majority rule. In doing so, Rhodesia became the exception, if not anathema, to the policies and practices of the end of empire. In Unpopular Sovereignty, Luise White shows that the exception that was Rhodesian independence did not, in fact, make the state that different from new nations elsewhere in Africa: indeed, this history of Rhodesian political practices reveals some of the commonalities of mid-twentieth-century thinking about place and race and how much government should link the two.

White locates Rhodesia’s independence in the era of decolonization in Africa, a time of great intellectual ferment in ideas about race, citizenship, and freedom. She shows that racists and reactionaries were just as concerned with questions of sovereignty and legitimacy as African nationalists were and took special care to design voter qualifications that could preserve their version of legal statecraft. Examining how the Rhodesian state managed its own governance and electoral politics, she casts an oblique and revealing light by which to rethink the narratives of decolonization.


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On settler future pasts: Caroline Ford, ‘The Inheritance of Empire and the Ruins of Rome in French Colonial Algeria’, Past & Present, 226, 10, 2015 pp. 57-77

14Feb15

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On settler perception: Hannah Mayne, ‘Zooming-In on Terms and Spaces: Women’s Perspectives and Cognitive Mapping in a West Bank Settlement’, in The Changing World Religion Map, 2015, pp 3227-3247

11Feb15

Abstract: This chapter focuses on women in a West Bank settlement in the Occupied Territories, examining their imagination and perception of the contested area in which they live. Unlike previous studies that concentrate on extremist Jewish groups, their male members, and their fringe and illegal activities in this region, this research considers the subtler and more nuanced opinions and perspectives expressed by women in an established settlement town. Through ethnographic fieldwork in the community at large and cognitive mapping with three specific mothers, it is shown that women build busy social and religious lives, un-effected by, and often particularly unaware of, the dramatic political tensions a few dozen meters off, beyond the barbed wire fence that surrounds their settlement. Focusing on the immediacy of the settlement, the women stress the normal and pleasant aspects that attract them to this location, including cheaper housing prices, intimate community life, and good schools. Furthermore, women speak about the importance of the Biblical land more than the modern state, and Palestinian citizens become a theoretical blip on a predominantly religious and historical landscape. The surrounding Palestinian populations are referred to in vague, abstract terms that do not acknowledge their adverse living conditions and their lives under military occupation. Ultimately, what is shown through this research is the complex combination of political economy, religion, and history in defining the manner in which these women conceive and experience the landscape.


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Challenging settler colonialism: Hip hop and indigenous languages in the Americas: Jenell Navarro, ‘WORD: Hip-Hop, Language, and Indigeneity in the Americas’, Critical Sociology, 2015

11Feb15

Abstract: Indigenous hip-hop artists throughout the Americas are currently challenging cultural genocide and contemporary post-racial discourse by utilizing ancestral languages in hip-hop cultural production. While the effects of settler colonialism and white supremacy have been far-reaching genocidal projects throughout the Americas, one primary site of resistance has been language. Artists such as Tall Paul (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe), Tolteka (Mexica), and Los Nin (Quecha), who rap in Ojibwe, Nahuatl, and Kichwa respectively, trouble the pervasive structure of U.S. cultural imperialism that persists throughout the Americas. As a result, Indigenous hip-hop is a medium to engage the process of decolonization by 1) disseminating a conscious pan-indigeneity through lyricism and alliance building, 2) retaining and teaching Indigenous languages in their songs, and 3) implementing a radical orality in their verses that revitalizes both Indigenous oral traditions/storytelling and the early message rap of the 1970s and 1980s.


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On indigenous sovereignties, energy infrastructures, and settler colonialism: Dana E. Powell, ‘The rainbow is our sovereignty: Rethinking the politics of energy on the Navajo Nation’

11Feb15
Abstract: This article offers a political-ecological reflection on Navajo (Diné) sovereignty, emphasizing lived and territorial interpretations of sovereignty, expanding our standard, juridical-legal notions of sovereignty that dominate public discourse on tribal economic and energy development. Operating from a critical analysis of settler colonialism, I suggest that alternative understandings of sovereignty – as expressed by Diné tribal members in a range of expressive practices – open new possibilities for thinking about how sovereign futures might be literally constructed through specific energy infrastructures. The article follows the controversy surrounding a proposed coal fired power plant known as Desert Rock, placing the phantom project in a longer, enduring history of struggle over energy extraction on Navajo land in order to illuminate this contested future. Broadly, these re-significations of sovereignty point toward a distinct modality of environmental action that suggests other kinds of relationships are at stake, challenging assumptions made by adversaries and allies alike that the politics of protesting (in this case) coal technologies is a practice with self-evident ethics. To intervene in these broad debates, I propose that there are multiple landscapes of power shaping Navajo territory, which must be brought into the ongoing, urgent debates over how the Navajo Nation might develop a more sustainable energy policy for the future.

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Alan Lester, ‘Empire and the Place of Panic’, in Robert Peckham (ed.), Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, Hong Kong University Press, 2015

08Feb15

On panic being ‘an intrinsic accompaniment to the very establishment of imperialism, especially on settler frontiers‘ (p. 23).


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David McCallum, ‘Criminal neglect: tracing the category of the Aboriginal “neglected child”‘, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

08Feb15

Abstract: There were times in Australian history when the singular, awesome power of ‘the Crown’ was wielded over colonial subjects of the British Empire, including citizen settlers occupying new lands and subject populations whose territories were claimed on behalf of the sovereign. This article presupposes that many consequences of invasion under eighteenth century conventions of conquest and rule are still evident in present-day Australian liberal forms of governing, including powers to restrict and control the basic life conditions of Aboriginal peoples, their occupation of lands and life sustenance, and their close interactions with State authorities. The paper considers one aspect of the sociology and politics of liberal modes of governing: the function of specialist knowledges that inform modes of governing Aboriginal peoples, in this case the exercise of powers concerned to know and manage the Aboriginal ‘neglected’ child and their effects on the criminalising of Aboriginal children into the present.


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Peter Burdon, Georgina Drew, Matthew Stubbs, Adam Webster, Marcus Barber, ‘Decolonising Indigenous water “rights” in Australia: flow, difference, and the limits of law’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

08Feb15

Abstract: This article addresses Indigenous Australian claims to water resources and how they inform and relate to current Australian law and contemporary legal thinking about future possibilities. It adopts a multidisciplinary approach, drawing from historical records, previous ethnographic investigation with Indigenous Australians, current legal scholarship, and social anthropological theory. In doing so, it analyses Indigenous dependencies on water, the history of settler colonial orientations to water bodies, the evolution of settler colonial–Indigenous relations to natural resources, and the development of the Australian legal system’s regulation of water. This provides foundations for a discussion of the limitations of settler colonial notions of property and the failure of settler colonial law to understand and incorporate the dynamism of Indigenous relationships to water, particularly the meaning and productive capacity of water flows within Indigenous cosmologies and sociocultural and ecological systems. Calling for a decolonial turn in legal approaches to Indigenous access and water resource determination, the authors explore the ways in which Australian law may need to ‘unthink’ settler colonial notions of resource ownership as a prerequisite for reformulating future water policy and planning. This reformulation relies on a more extensive legal philosophical engagement with the concept of ‘flow’, a concept that already exists in both water law and planning, but which has not been adequately theorised and enacted. A more comprehensive legal understanding of flow in the context of Indigenous understandings of, and claims to, water provides more sustainable and equitable legal and analytical foundations for managing future water resources issues. The article creates the space for a more culturally relevant notion of ‘Indigenous water rights’ and for new ways of honouring the interrelationship between water flows, meaning-making practices, and cultural continuity.


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