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On the settlers of Kenya: Brett L. Shadle, The souls of white folk: White settlers in Kenya, 1900s–1920s, Manchester University Press, 2015

12Apr15

Description: Kenya’s white settlers have been alternately celebrated and condemned, painted as romantic pioneers or hedonistic bed-hoppers or crude racists. The souls of white folk examines settlers not as caricatures, but as people inhabiting a unique historical moment. It takes seriously – though not uncritically – what settlers said, how they viewed themselves and their world. It argues that the settler soul was composed of a series of interlaced ideas: settlers equated civilisation with a (hard to define) whiteness; they were emotionally enriched through claims to paternalism and trusteeship over Africans; they felt themselves constantly threatened by Africans, by the state, and by the moral failures of other settlers; and they daily enacted their claims to supremacy through rituals of prestige, deference, humiliation and violence. The souls of white folk will appeal to those interested in the histories of Africa, colonialism, and race, and can be appreciated by scholars and students alike.


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On the transnational circulation of settler colonial imaginings: Patrick Bernhard, ‘Hitler’s Africa in the East: Italian Colonialism as a Model for German Planning in Eastern Europe’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2015

10Apr15

Abstract: Since Hannah Arendt’s essay on the ‘Origins of Totalitarianism’ in 1951, there has been a vivid scholarly debate about a nexus between Imperial Germany’s colonial endeavours in Africa and the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. Some historians have gone so far as to draw a direct line from the colonial massacres of Windhoek to those committed at Auschwitz. Yet my article suggests a different answer to the question of historical continuities: in its plans for Poland and the Soviet Union, the Third Reich did not draw upon its own colonial past but looked to the undertakings of Fascist Italy in Africa for inspiration. Italy’s huge settlement project, with which it sought to produce the racially superior Fascist New Man, served as a model for Nazi Germany particularly in one crucial regard: in the organization and regulation of a new Volksgemeinschaft at the edge of the empire. These findings are of far-reaching significance for our understanding of both Italian Fascism and National Socialism. The still dominant image of Mussolini’s regime as an insignificant appendage to the superior Nazi state is inaccurate. Rather, modern social engineering of Italian Fascism acted as an ‘inspirational’ force on Nazi Germany, catalysing the evolution of Hitler’s dictatorship.


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On settler worlds: Zoë Laidlaw, Alan Lester (eds), Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

08Apr15

Description: The new world created through Anglophone emigration in the nineteenth century has been much studied. But there have been few accounts of what this world meant for Indigenous communities facing invasion by those emigrants. While settlers in the British Empire and the USA have been seen as participants in newly globalized networks, the Indigenous peoples upon whose lands they settled tend to be seen as rooted, localized, and peripheral to the story of imperial and national expansion. This book weaves through trans-imperial, Indigenous, local and family histories, showing that Indigenous communities tenaciously held land in the midst of dispossession, whilst becoming interconnected through their struggles to do so. Moving between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and the USA, it highlights the enduring associations between race, place and behavior in settler societies from Indigenous perspectives.


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Climate improvement and settler colonialism: Harri Olavi Siiskonen, ‘The Concept of Climate Improvement: Colonialism and Environment in German South West Africa’, Environment and History, 21, 2, 2015, pp. 281-302

08Apr15

Abstract: The desiccation theories formulated in the eighteenth century pointed out the connection between deforestation, rainfall reduction and climate change. After the ‘Scramble for Africa’ the conservation philosophy of the European colonial powers was based on anti-desiccation forest policy. This article seeks to consider how the concepts of ‘desiccationism’ were taken into account by the German colonists in forest and land management of their new colony: South West Africa. The conservation policy carried out by the German colonial administration was very controversial because they were interested only in areas suitable for European settlement. The early twentieth century idea of improving the climate of South West Africa by greening the Central Highland and the Namib Desert was an excellent indication of a firm belief in science. The other side of the coin was that no environmental responsibility was taken for the African reserves.


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On settler colonial icons: C. S. Monaco, ‘Red Devil or Tragic Hero?: Osceola as Settler-Colonial Icon’, The American Indian Quarterly, 39, 2, 2015, pp. 180-212

08Apr15

Excerpt: The imprisonment and subsequent death of Osceola …


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On French settler imaginings (and practices): Margaret Cook Andersen, Regeneration Through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic, University of Nebraska Press, 2015

08Apr15

Excerpt (and link to sample chapter): French defeat in the Franco- Prussian War was swift; in less than two months of war, enemy troops had encircled Paris, captured the emperor Napoleon III, and left the government of the Second Empire discredited. This humiliating defeat in 1870 resulted in the unification of Germany, the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, the establishment of France’s Third Republic, and fears that France was on the brink of becoming a second- rate power in Europe. The crisis that gave birth to the Third Republic would influence its political history throughout its existence; in the immediate aftermath of the war, patriotic French men and women turned their attention to their empire, the declining birthrate in France, and the comparative demographic strengths of rival powers in Europe.


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Contesting projections of inauthenticity: Kendra McSweeney, Brad Jokisch, ‘Native Amazonians’ Strategic Urbanization: Shaping Territorial Possibilities through Cities’, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 20, 1, 2015, 13–33

06Apr15

Abstract: This article draws from disparate ethnographic sources to point to the ways in which the urbanization of Amazonia’s native populations is interconnected with their political struggle for rights to territory. This counterintuitive dynamic deserves greater attention, particularly because recent policy texts on indigenous urbanization obscure its possibility. Specifically, this work shows that, in Amazonia: (1) the migration chains linking remote cities to indigenous homelands have often been forged by indigenous leaders who make geographical leaps to sites of state power to pursue demands for territorial recognition; (2) urban living can serve to politicize indigenous urbanites in ways that have long-term consequences for their territorial struggles; and (3) the circulation of native peoples between cities and homelands can maintain and distribute these political effects across space and through time. By drawing attention to these dynamics, this article aims to resist the ways in which indigenous land dispossession could be justified by policy texts’ framing of indigenous urbanization as generic, inevitable, and ultimately disempowering to natives’ territorial positions.


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Comparing indigenous labour in contemporary settler societies: Rodney C. Haring, Māui Hudson, Louisa Erickson, Maile Taualii, Bonnie Freeman, ‘First Nations, Maori, American Indians, and Native Hawaiians as Sovereigns: EAP with Indigenous Nations Within Nations’, Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, 30, 1-2, 2015

06Apr15

Abstract: Indigenous workforces have existed across the world since the creation of Earth. What has changed is the evolution of multicultural societies, governments, and landscapes that have become part of, or sit parallel to, sovereign Indigenous nations and their workforces. An international response to Employee Assistance Programming (EAP) and workplace health will be shared from various Indigenous groups across the globe. These societies include the Maori of New Zealand, First Nations of Canada, American Indian groups from the U.S. mainland, and Native Hawaiians. Guidelines for EAP practice include the discussion of historical trauma, communication skills, confidentiality, and environmental issues. Theoretical underpinnings for health sovereignty are shared through ancient teachings of Indigenous philosophies and their relationships to contemporary EAP development and utilization.


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On old/new transfers (they live in the territory but not in specific sites, so we can take them); on the William case in BC: Joshua Nichols, ‘Claims of Sovereignty – Burdens of Occupation: William and the Future of Reconciliation’, 48 U.B.C. L. Rev. 221, 2015

06Apr15

Excerpt: The William case presented two very different jurisprudential tracjectories on the question of Aboriginal title.


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Settlers and dogs: ‘Dogs: A webcomic history of the [Canadian] North’, 2015

04Apr15

Check out the comic from Ad Astra Comix. Based on the Qikiqtani Truth Commission.


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