Jens-Uwe Guettel, ”The US frontier as rationale for the Nazi east? Settler colonialism and genocide in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and the American West, Journal of Genocide Research 15, 4 (2013).

Many scholars of German and Native American history and the field of genocide studies argue that during World War II the Nazis’ genocidal attempt to turn vast portions of Eastern Europe into Lebensraum [living space] for Aryan settlers was connected to the near-extinction of America’s Native Peoples during the ‘conquest’ of the American west by the United States. In their view, there exist direct historical continuities between settler colonialism and genocide in the American west and Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945. This article denies the actuality of straight links between American west and Nazi Germany’s eastward expansion and argues that the Nazis did not use the settlement of western North America as a model for their occupation, colonization and extermination policies. In addition, this study shows that at least on the ground in the Soviet Union, German soldiers were not under the impression that they were carrying out a colonialist land-grab exercise. As a result, this article also challenges the notion of the existence of straight links between Western colonialism and Nazi eastward expansion. By looking at both official documents and the writings of German soldiers, the following analysis shows how and why it was by and large impossible for the Nazis to utilize the American west as a concrete model for their regime’s colonial plans in Eastern Europe.

Peter Minter, ‘Archipelagos of sense: Thinking about a decolonised Australian poetics’, Southerly 73, 1 (2013).

Even before the invention of travel, there was a breeze, salt water, littoral sand and the bush. The wood was ten thousand miles away, or perhaps just there over the range if, like Henry Kendall, you could “set your face toward the darkness … [to see where] unshaken woods are huddled, and low, languid waters glide.” It’s often the case that Australian tropes of “the Land”, especially those of terrestrial travel, are associated with the idea of water. The void of travel is like a taut opacity, a hollowing of the senses by any number of drawn and overlapping distensions and displacements. One of the most foundational voids is the emptying out of space, a spatial negativity. When an object physically displaces sufficient water or air as a result of its passage, like a ship’s hull dis – placing water or the wings of a jetliner displacing air, the object will float or fly. The cabins of the ship and the aircraft appear suspended in a bubble formed by a pushing against and evacuation of the medium of suspension. The void is then occupied by figures of departure and destination, ideal places whose absence is magnified by a doubling transfer of recursive and anticipatory dis placements. Hope and regret, expectation and memory, sensation and reverie.

Jimmy Casas Klausen, Jeremy Waldron’s Partial Kant: Indigenous Proximity, Colonial Injustice, Cultural Particularism’, Polity (2013).

Over the past two decades, liberal political theorist Jeremy Waldron has frequently cited Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals in order to claim that unavoidable proximity normatively demands that persons from different cultural backgrounds abide by and actively participate in a common legal framework. For Waldron, cosmopolitanism requires engaging with others instead of pressing for any degree of political separatism. He applies his interpretation of Kant to relations between Māori and Anglo New Zealanders. This essay takes a more comprehensive view of Kant’s writings on international and cosmopolitan right. It argues that Waldron misleadingly presents Kant as opposed to cultural particularism, and offers an alternative Kantian interpretation of Māori resistance to unitary sovereignty, one based on distant mutual respect between communities.

Andrea Smith, ‘Settler Sites of Memory and the Work of Mourning’, French Politics, Culture & Society 31, 3 (2013).

Since their arrival in France in the early 1960s, former settlers of Algeria have developed an array of private and public “sites of memory” projects that have remained unnoticed in wider French society or have been interpreted uncharitably. This article offers a new perspective on these projects. Informed by Maurice Halbwachs’ concern with the material supports for collective memory and Sigmund Freud’s insights on loss, I reinterpret them as stages in a work of mourning, and offer new insights on the wider question of France’s relationship to its colonial past.

Lorenzo Veracini, ‘What’s Unsettling about On Settling: Discussing the Settler Colonial Present’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (2013).

This article considers the current relevance of settler colonial tropes, narratives and idioms by discussing the opening section of On Settling (2012), a recently published book authored by respected political scientist Robert E. Goodin. While Goodin argues that ‘settling’ should be considered a ‘normatively defensible practice’, my critique focuses on his assumed link between ‘settling’ in general and settler colonialism in particular. The first section of this article follows the narrative of settlement that underpins Goodin’s book. The second section discusses this narrative’s inherently exclusionary character, a characteristic that undermines claims to universal normative validity; while the third section appraises the language that supports it. In the fourth, conclusive, section On Settling’s apology of settler colonialism is used as a starting point for an analysis of the settler colonial present in an ‘age of unsettlement’.

Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Understanding Colonialism and Settler Colonialism as Distinct Formations’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2013).

A growing body of literature has characterized settler colonial phenomena as ‘distinct’, and called for the establishment of dedicated interpretative tools. ‘Distinct’, however, begs the question: distinct relative to what? This essay reflects on this distinctiveness, and heuristically suggests that reference to the diverse operation of viral and bacterial phenomena can help an understanding of the distinct functioning of colonial and settler colonial systems. While both viruses and bacteria are exogenous elements that often dominate their destination locales, viruses need living cells to operate, while bacteria attach to surfaces and may or may not rely on the organisms they encounter. Similarly, while both colonizers and settler colonizers are exogenous elements that assert their dominance over their destination locales, a colonial system of relationships, unlike a settler colonial one, is premised on the presence and subjugation of exploitable ‘Others’. This essay also suggests that this metaphorical conceptualization can facilitate reflection on the decolonization of settler colonial forms.

Jonathan Hyslop, ‘An “Eventful” History of Hind Swaraj: Gandhi between the Battle of Tsushima and the Union of South Africa’, Public Culture 23 2 (2012).

extract:

[…] Gandhi enters into a reinterpretation of the process of state recon- struction that was occurring within the empire. The second half of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth had seen the emergence of a constellation of new self-governing states in the white-settler-dominated parts of the empire. Canada (especially British Columbia), New Zealand, and, above all, Australia had strongly identified their democracy with their racial identity as white-settler states and the exclusion of Asian labor. These states could draw a sense of strength from the support of the right wing of the British Conservatives, who were advancing the idea of a superstate of the United Kingdom and the white-ruled colonies, based on common defense and imperial tariff protection, with the other colonies in a subordinate role. And of course Hind Swaraj was written in the context of the creation of a South African state on a nearly all-white franchise, which was actually inaugurated on May 31, 1910, just more than two months after the work went to press.

What Gandhi sought to do was to destabilize the connection between self- government and white identity. Boldly, he reconfigured the change in South Africa as a sign of self-rule within the empire, rather than of the rise of racial polities, and inserted India, as a claimant to self-rule, into constitutional debate. In Hind Swaraj, the sensible Editor, although bracketing the question of whether Canadian-style self-government is desirable, finds it positive that the moderates have brought people together around “self-government, similar to what the Canadians and South Africans have” (Gandhi 2006: 27). Paradoxically, Gandhi actually uses the South African Union as a possible model for India, disrupting the discourse of a clear distinction between white-settler-ruled colonies and colonies directly administered from London. And in using the term home rule for the goal of the nationalist movement, Gandhi could only be read as referring to the example of the British Liberal program for self-government in Ireland. Irish home rule was once again on the political agenda in Britain, after a long break since William Ewart Gladstone’s failed attempts to implement it late in the nineteenth century. It implied self-government within the British state, not any departure from the empire. And because color was not an issue in Ireland, as it was in the constitutional formation of the settler colonies, it could be taken as a constitutional model for India in a direct way.

Daniel Rosenblatt, ‘Art and Biculturalism: Innovative Maori Meeting Houses and the Settler Nation’, Visual Anthropology Review 29, 2 (2013).

 Two recent carved Maori meeting houses, one in a museum and the other on a polytech campus, manage to break down the boundaries between “contemporary” and “traditional” Maori art. Both houses also attempt to represent the whole of the institutions of which they are a part rather than only the Maori members of those institutions. This article argues that these innovations are connected, and that they reflect and help propagate a larger refiguring of the meaning of “biculturalism” in the settler state of New Zealand. As part of looking at the significance and effects of these houses, the article draws on ideas about genre and artistic practice to make an argument about how cultural and political change happens.

Yanna Yannakakis, ‘Indigenous People and Legal Culture in Spanish America’, History Compass 11, 11 (2013).

This article reviews recent literature on indigenous people and the legal systems in colonial Mexico and the Andes, with special emphasis on legal engagement as a form of politics and the making of legal culture. Through mastery of alphabetic writing systems, literacy, and Spanish language, native peoples used colonial courts as an arena in which to resolve conflict within and among Indian municipalities, and with Spanish officials, both civil and ecclesiastical. In this way, the legal system facilitated the negotiation of colonial rule, including the growth and transformation of legal institutions and practices, and the relationship between Indian and Spanish jurisdictions. The legal system also provided an arena for cultural encounter in which Spanish and native forms of law and knowledge were circulated and constructed. Scholarship on these topics is growing fast, putting ethnohistory into an exciting dialogue with comparative studies of law and empire.

Ever since its colonial project was set in motion, Zionism has insisted that it seeks to colonise Palestine “peacefully”, indeed that its colonisation of the country will not only not harm the native population, but that it would be of benefit to them.

The movement’s founder, Theodor Herzl himself, provided two visions of this future: A fictional, public vision, advertised in his futurist novel Altneuland, where Palestine would become a Jewish state allowing coexistence with the native Arabs who would be happy and grateful for being colonised and civilised by European Jews; and a secret, logistical and practical strategy to evict the Arab population out of the country, which he spelled out in his Diaries.

Joseph Massad, ‘Peace is war: Israeli settler-colonialism and the Palestinians’, Al Jazeera.