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Daniel Coleman, ‘Indigenous place and diaspora space: of literalism and abstraction’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2005

08Feb15

Abstract: Indigeneity and diaspora are deeply related but deeply divided. Although they share the hazards of displacement, usually through settler colonial and/or capitalist expropriation of ancestral lands, the differences between their histories of displacement have resulted in very different political and cultural projects. Rather than trying to bridge these differences, this article deploys a kind of strategic binarism by reading the poetry of Syilx author Jeannette Armstrong in contrast with that of Black Atlantic writer Dionne Brand in order to highlight the tensions between Indigenous commitments to literal places as compared to diasporic distrust of nativism and its reputed essentialism. By animating a dialogue between advocates of literal Indigenous place and of abstract diasporic space, this article seeks to open what Cree philosopher Willie Ermine calls an ‘ethical space of engagement’ where Indigenous and diasporic differences can mutually inform one another.


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Sam Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism, Oxford University Press, 2015.

06Feb15

Sam Haselby offers a new and persuasive account of the role of religion in the formation of American nationality, showing how a contest within Protestantism reshaped American political culture and led to the creation of an enduring religious nationalism.

Following U.S. independence, the new republic faced vital challenges, including a vast and unique continental colonization project undertaken without, in the centuries-old European senses of the terms, either “a church” or “a state.” Amid this crisis, two distinct Protestant movements arose: a popular and rambunctious frontier revivalism; and a nationalist, corporate missionary movement dominated by Northeastern elites. The former heralded the birth of popular American Protestantism, while the latter marked the advent of systematic Protestant missionary activity in the West.

The explosive economic and territorial growth in the early American republic, and the complexity of its political life, gave both movements opportunities for innovation and influence. This book explores the competition between them in relation to major contemporary developments-political democratization, large-scale immigration and unruly migration, fears of political disintegration, the rise of American capitalism and American slavery, and the need to nationalize the frontier. Haselby traces these developments from before the American Revolution to the rise of Andrew Jackson. His approach illuminates important changes in American history, including the decline of religious distinctions and the rise of racial ones, how and why “Indian removal” happened when it did, and with Andrew Jackson, the appearance of the first full-blown expression of American religious nationalism.


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Megan Davies, ‘Make-Believing White Civility: Historical Re-enactments at Fort Langley, British Columbia’, Canadian Theatre Review, 161, 2015, pp. 55-59

06Feb15
Abstract: In 1858 Governor James Douglas proclaimed British Columbia a colony at Fort Langley before an audience of Hudson’s Bay Company officials, workers, and Indigenous leaders. The Proclamation dissolved the Hudson’s Bay Company trading monopoly and, while claiming to protect Indigenous lands, actually asserted British ownership of their territory. In the present, Fort Langley National Historic Site holds regular re-enactments of the Proclamation through their educational programs targeting local schools. The script for these re-enactments, authored by Parks Canada staff, allows schoolchildren to role-play a scenario in which James Douglas proclaims British Columbia a colony to protect Indigenous lands, without explicitly staging the negative consequences for Indigenous peoples that the claiming of those lands caused.

I link these two events, the 1858 Proclamation and the present-day re-enactments, by comparing the script’s content to its historical and contemporary context. I conclude that the Proclamation re-enactments become performances of recolonization when Parks Canada deceptively presents its own wry civility (Daniel Coleman). The 1858 Proclamation’s embedded civility, and its repetition and reformation in the contemporary script, the production process, and the surrounding social structure, allows colonial ideology to be physicalized, invested, and passed on to and through children at the Fort Langley National Historic Site.


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Carla Melo: ‘Are We All in the Same Boat? Staging the “Invisible Majority” in the Streets of Toronto’, Canadian Theatre Review, 161, 2015, pp. 33-37

06Feb15

Abstract: Probing the ways in which activist performance practices may effectively generate public debate around pressing human rights issues, my article examines a Toronto-based hybrid project that brings together urban intervention, installation, and public discussion as a means of interrogating the interconnectedness of recent Canadian immigration policies, notions of belonging, colonial discourse, and racial identity. More specifically, the appropriately entitled Mass Arrival: The Intervention (2013) challenged the construction of whiteness vis-à-vis that of “boat people” refugees as it “celebrated” the third-year anniversary of the arrival of a ship carrying over four hundred Tamil asylum seekers to the coast of British Columbia—a contentious border occurrence that turned into a media spectacle, which subsequently triggered a number of regressive changes in refugee law. Inverting the colonial practice of exhibiting exotic others while carnivalizing the tradition of re-enactments, this urban intervention indeed staged a “mass arrival,” but this time the “boat people” were white-identified community participants. I consider the ways this performance of whiteness may trouble multiculturalist discourse, border politics, Toronto’s urban development, and the power dynamics of much community-based artistic work, ultimately suggesting that the piece not only performed a decolonial gesture but also relied on a decolonial creative process.


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Jeffrey S. Denis, ‘Contact Theory in a Small-Town Settler-Colonial Context The Reproduction of Laissez-Faire Racism in Indigenous-White Canadian Relations’, American Sociological Review, 80, 1, 2015, pp. 218-242

06Feb15

Abstract: This article builds on group position theory and the subcategorization model of intergroup contact by illustrating how, in a small-town settler-colonial context, contact tends to reproduce, rather than challenge, the inequitable racial structure. In Northwestern Ontario, Indigenous-settler relations are characterized by widespread intergroup marriage and friendship as well as pervasive prejudice and discrimination. Using 18 months of fieldwork and 160 interviews and surveys with First Nations, Métis, and non-Indigenous residents, I show that although contact is associated with less “old-fashioned” prejudice (i.e., overt categorical hostility), it does not necessarily eliminate whites’ superior sense of group position. Even white individuals who have close Indigenous friends or spouses often express laissez-faire racism. Three mutually reinforcing social processes—subtyping, ideology-based homophily, and political avoidance norms—interact to sustain whites’ sense of group superiority and justifications for racial inequity. These processes are facilitated by historical and structural conditions, in this case colonization and small-town dynamics.  


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On settler alternative worlds: Mimi Dwyer, ‘The Brazilian Town Where the American Confederacy Lives On’, Vice, 05/02/15

06Feb15

One day last spring, near an old rural cemetery in southern Brazil, a black man named Marcelo Gomes held up the corners of a Confederate flag to pose for a cell-phone photo. After the picture was taken, Gomes said he saw no problem with a black man paying homage to the history of the Confederate States of America. “American culture is a beautiful culture,” he said. Some of his friends had Confederate blood.

Gomes had joined some 2,000 Brazilians at the annual festa of the Fraternidade Descendência Americana, the brotherhood of Confederate descendants in Brazil, on a plot near the town of Americana, which was settled by Southern defectors 150 years ago. The graveyard is usually empty save for its caretaker or the odd worshipper drawn to its little brick chapel. On the April morning of the festa, a public-address system blaring the Confederate battle song “Stonewall Jackson’s Way” had interrupted the cemetery’s silence. Brazilians in ten-gallon hats and leather jackets called out greetings.

For miles around the graveyard, unfiltered sun beat down on sugarcane fields planted by the thousands of Confederates who had rejected Reconstruction and fled the United States in the wake of the Civil War—a voluntary exile that American history has more or less erased. Their scattered diaspora has gathered annually for the past 25 years. The party they throw, which receives funding from the local government, is the family reunion of the Confederados, one of the last remaining enclaves of the children of the unreconstructed South.

(With thanks to Alex Young)


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Pekka Pitkänen, ‘Reading Genesis–Joshua as a Unified Document from an Early Date: A Settler Colonial Perspective’, Biblical Theology Bulletin, 45, 1, 2015, pp. 3–31

04Feb15

Abstract: This essay proposes based on literary-compositional considerations how two authors working together could
have composed Genesis–Joshua. After this, it suggests that Genesis–Joshua can be seen to reflect a sociopolitical
transformation of ancient Canaanite societies into an Israelite one(s) through a process that can be labeled as
ancient settler colonialism, and that the document could have been written concomitantly. Subsequently, relevant
ancient Near Eastern and archaeological evidence will be considered, suggesting compatibility with the idea that
Genesis–Joshua has reused and readapted existing traditions together with creative narrative retelling for its sociopolitical
purposes, and that this could have already taken place from the late second millennium bce on. The essay
concludes by drawing out some explicit contemporary implications of such a reading of Genesis–Joshua.


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Emma Kowal, ‘Time, indigeneity and white anti-racism in Australia’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2015

04Feb15

Abstract: Time is one mechanism through which Indigenous-modern dichotomies are created and maintained and an enduring trope of difference in the settler-colonial imaginary. This article explores the strange temporality of indigeneity within ‘progressive’ discourses in Australia. Taking Johannes Fabian’s concept of ‘allochronism’ as a point of departure, and drawing on ethnography of non-Indigenous people working in Indigenous health in the Northern Territory, I show how there is a kind of cultural Lamarckianism in operation. ‘Western’ individuals are seen to inherit the cumulative cultural knowledge, acquired over centuries, of germ theory and responsible alcohol consumption. By contrast, Indigenous people are seen to struggle with banking and infectious diseases because they have not had sufficient time to develop the appropriate cultural knowledge. Through the anthropomorphising of culture and the culturalisation of individuals, the Indigenous person/culture becomes the 40,000-year history of human occupation of the continent. I point to the limits of this settler-colonial imaginary and potential alternatives.


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Alexander Page, Theresa Petray, ‘Agency and structural constraints: Indigenous peoples and the Australian settler-state in North Queensland’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

04Feb15

Abstract: In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have long been subjected to attempts at extermination, exclusion, and assimilation, but continually resist these efforts. This history is woven through the social fabric of Australia. This paper is a single case study which looks at contemporary race relations in Townsville, Queensland, and describes current settler-colonial settings in terms of structure and agency. We focus primarily on agency as a strengths-based approach, but recognise the structural constraints Indigenous people face. Based on in-depth interviews and extensive fieldwork, we explore Indigenous perceptions of agency and constraints. Indigenous people have many ways to exercise agency, and our focus is on those who identify as activists and advocates. Participants expressed their capacity to undertake social action as high and varied in method, articulating agency as activism or advocacy. These agents view the state as both an enabler and a constraint, largely exclusionary of indigeneity. The settler-state only increases the capability for social action when it chooses to do so and has been and continues to be largely exclusionary of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Significant to agents is the local context of Townsville as a racist city distant from political decision-making. Participants describe experiences of continuing covert or implicit racism and ‘active apathy’ held by the wider non-Indigenous community of Townsville. Despite these constraints, Indigenous agents creatively adapt such structures in order to exercise their agency.


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Craig Fortier, ‘Stealing home: decolonizing baseball’s origin stories and their relations to settler colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015.

04Feb15

Abstract: The sport of baseball has played an integral role in constructing a national identity in the American settler state. This essay analyses baseball’s popularization as America’s national pastime and its interconnections with the formation of a settler colonial identity that seeks to erase Indigenous presence on Turtle Island. It does so by tracing the roots of baseball’s origin stories and their relationship to the creation of an American national identity. By examining the processes of colonialism, displacement, genocide, and xenophobia that characterized the game’s early history in North America and delving into baseball’s role in governing the boundaries of insiders and outsiders in the national imagination, this essay provokes questions with regard to the possibility of re-imagining the game of baseball in a decolonial context.


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