settler colonial studies blog

On settler colonial imaginings: Joanne Findon, Seeking Our Eden The Dreams and Migrations of Sarah Jameson Craig, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015

19Feb15

Description: One woman’s dreams of establishing a utopian colony and her fight for women’s equality.

Although few nineteenth-century rural Canadian women could read and write well, Sarah Jameson Craig (1840-1919) was not only literate but eloquent. Unlike many women writers of her time, Craig lived at the bottom of the economic ladder. Nevertheless, she dared to dream the utopian dreams more commonly associated with educated women from the middle and upper classes. Craig vividly documented her attempt to run away at age fifteen, her plans to found a utopian colony based on alternative medicine and women’s dress reform, and her lifelong crusade for women’s equality.

Quoting liberally from Sarah Craig’s unpublished diaries and memoir, Seeking Our Eden sets Craig’s life writing within the context of her early days in New Brunswick, her later migrations to New Jersey and then westward to Saskatchewan and British Columbia, and the American-based reform and utopian movements that stirred her imagination. Convinced that the tight corsets and long skirts demanded by conventional fashion undermined the fight for women’s equality, Craig wore the “reform dress” – a short dress over trousers – despite society’s disapproval, and rejected opiate- and alcohol-based medicines in favour of the water cure.

Even today, when the way women dress remains an issue, and skepticism about conventional medicine still fuels alternative health movements, Sarah Craig’s early feminist voice from the margins of Canada continues to be relevant and compelling.

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On the ‘settler photographer’: Rachel McLean Sailor, Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West, University of New Mexico Press, 2014

18Feb15

Description: The early history of photography in America coincided with the Euro-American settlement of the West. This thoughtful book argues that the rich history of western photography cannot be understood by focusing solely on the handful of well-known photographers whose work has come to define the era. Art historian Rachel Sailor points out that most photographers in the West were engaged in producing images for their local communities. These pictures didn’t just entertain the settlers but gave them a way to understand their new home. Photographs could help the settlers adjust to their new circumstances by recording the development of a place—revealing domestication, alteration, and improvement.

The book explores the cultural complexity of regional landscape photography, western places, and local sociopolitical concerns. Photographic imagery, like western paintings from the same era, enabled Euro-Americans to see the new landscape through their own cultural lenses, shaping the idea of the frontier for the people who lived there.

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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

Excerpt: In 1912 Albert Ballu, chief architect of the Service des Monuments Historiques de L’Alge’rie, described the ‘triple task’ of the Service, which had been established in 1880—fifty years after the beginning of France’s conquest of Algeria—as that of not only excavating the ‘secrets’ that the ground contained, but also of ‘making them presentable to the public’ and

of ‘preserving them from destruction.’ France was not alone in embarking on this archaeological project that sought to explore an antique and more particularly a Roman past in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but Algeria came to occupy a special place in the French historical imagination. […] What made the French archaeological forays in Algeria unique, however, was their focus first on Algeria’s Roman and Christian antiquities, which came to be appropriated as both a French and Mediterranean patrimoine, and which in turn shaped the identity of the growing settler population, before they later turned their attention to a patrimoine mauresque (pp. 57-58).

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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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On settler colonial imaginings: Joanne Findon, Seeking Our Eden The Dreams and Migrations of Sarah Jameson Craig, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015

On the ‘settler photographer’: Rachel McLean Sailor, Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West, University of New Mexico Press, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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’

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

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