Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, Angie Morrill, ‘Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy’, Feminist Formations 25, 1 (2013).

The article explores two intertwined ideas: that the United States is a settler colonial nation-state and that settler colonialism has been and continues to be a gendered process. The article engages Native feminist theories to excavate the deep connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy, highlighting five central challenges that Native feminist theories pose to gender and women’s studies. From problematizing settler colonialism and its intersections to questioning academic participation in Indigenous dispossession, responding to these challenges requires a significant departure from how gender and women’s studies is regularly understood and taught. Too often, the consideration of Indigenous peoples remains rooted in understanding colonialism as an historical point in time away from which our society has progressed. Centering settler colonialism within gender and women’s studies instead exposes the still-existing structure of settler colonialism and its powerful effects on Indigenous peoples and settlers. Taking as its audience practitioners of both “whitestream” and other feminisms and writing in conversation with a long history of Native feminist theorizing, the article offers critical suggestions for the meaningful engagement of Native feminisms. Overall, it aims to persuade readers that attending to the links between heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism is intellectually and politically imperative for all peoples living within settler colonial contexts.

Radha D’Souza, ‘Imperialism and Self-determination: Revisiting the Nexus in Lenin’, Economic & Political Weekly vol xlvIiI no 15 (2013).

This essay examines the nexus between self-determination, imperialism and the importance of Marxist theory in Lenin’s writings. It argues that the three strands were inseparably connected in Lenin’s thinking. The breakdown of the unity of the three strands of thought has impeded our understanding of contemporary imperialism.

Critics of Israeli pinkwashing in the United States and Canada have increasingly engaged in comparative critiques of settler colonialism. Queers Against Israeli Apartheid in Toronto has invoked this critique for many years. Pinkwatchers across Canada also draw ties between Palestinian and Indigenous solidarity that are heightened by the recent emergence in Canada of the Indigenous people’s movement Idle No More. Today, scholars and activists ask how homonationalism and pinkwashing perform settler colonialism in Palestine, Canada, and the United States, and how settler colonialism in each state impacts their work. I write this piece to encourage such questions, and to invite questioners to address their relationship to Indigenous solidarity. As a white queer critic of United States and Canadian settler colonialism, my experience with Indigenous solidarity in these states informs how I engage Palestinian solidarity. Queer / trans Indigenous critiques and allied work by non-Natives already model a critique of settler colonialism and sexualization in Canada and the United States. Their potential synergy with critiques of Israeli pinkwashing can explain the forms of power we face and can expand and deepen our alliances.

Scott Lauria Morgensen, ‘Settler Colonialism and Alliance: Comparative Challenges to Pinkwashing and Homonationalism’, Jadaliyya. 

Bain Attwood, ‘Returning to the Past: The South Australian Colonisation Commission, the Colonial Office and Aboriginal Title’, Journal of Legal History 34, 1 (2013).

In the closing decades of the twentieth century many scholars sought to both address and redress the ways in which indigenous people’s rights in land had been treated historically by colonisers in Anglophone settler societies. More recently, this work has been criticised by a new generation of legal historians who have sought to delineate more carefully the role that the law actually played in the treatment of aboriginal title in the past. In keeping with the latter approach, this article seeks to recover the manner in which the indigenous people’s interests in land were treated in the British colony of South Australia at the time it was founded in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. It emphasises the manner in which the colonisers, the South Australian Colonisation Commission, rather than the British Colonial Office, deployed a range of legal arguments, especially in the context of political negotiations between these two parties. It concludes that the imperial government’s treatment of indigenous interests in land was primarily determined by its perception of the relationships of power on the ground between the colonial state, the settlers and the Aboriginal people rather than by its application of any particular legal principle or norm.

Iyko Day, ‘Tseng Kwong Chi and the Eugenic Landscape’, American Quarterly 65, 1 (2013)

My essay examines Tseng Kwong Chi’s photographs of US and Canadian landscapes as a queer parody of the Western conventions associated with landscape art of the early twentieth century. Exploring the influence of Ansel Adams, Gutzon Borglum, and the Canadian Group of Seven landscape artists, I argue that Tseng’s photographs parody the eugenic ideals projected onto the settler colonial landscape.

Sam Moyo & Walter Chambati (ed.), Land and Agrarian Reform in Zimbabwe: Beyond White-Settler Capitalism (Dakar, CODESRIA & AIAS, 2013).

This book is a product of CODESRIA National Working Group on Zimbabwe

The Fast Track Land Reform Programme implemented during the 2000s in Zimbabwe represents the only instance of radical redistributive land reforms since the end of the Cold War. It reversed the racially-skewed agrarian structure and discriminatory land tenures inherited from colonial rule. The land reform also radicalised the state towards a nationalist, introverted accumulation strategy, against a broad array of unilateral Western sanctions. Indeed, Zimbabwe’s land reform, in its social and political dynamics, must be compared to the leading land reforms of the twentieth century, which include those of Mexico, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Cuba and Mozambique.

The fact that the Zimbabwe case has not been recognised as vanguard nationalism has much to do with the ‘intellectual structural adjustment’ which has accompanied neoliberalism and a hostile media campaign. This has entailed dubious theories of ‘neopatrimonialism’, which reduce African politics and the state to endemic ‘corruption’, ‘patronage’, and ‘tribalism’ while overstating the virtues of neoliberal good governance. Under this racist repertoire, it has been impossible to see class politics, mass mobilisation and resistance, let alone believe that something progressive can occur in Africa.

This book comes to a conclusion that the Zimbabwe land reform represents a new form of resistance with distinct and innovative characteristics when compared to other cases of radicalisation, reform and resistance. The process of reform and resistance has entailed the deliberate creation of a tri-modal agrarian structure to accommodate and balance the interests of various domestic classes, the progressive restructuring of labour relations and agrarian markets, the continuing pressures for radical reforms (through the indigenisation of mining and other sectors), and the rise of extensive, albeit relatively weak, producer cooperative structures.

The book also highlights some of the resonances between the Zimbabwean land struggles and those on the continent, as well as in the South in general, arguing that there are some convergences and divergences worthy of intellectual attention. The book thus calls for greater endogenous empirical research which overcomes the pre-occupation with failed interpretations of the nature of the state and agency in Africa.

Chris Cunneen, ‘Colonial Processes, Indigenous Peoples, and Criminal Justice Systems’, in M. Tonry and S. Bucerius (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Ethnicity, Crime, and Immigration (New York: Oxford University Press, Forthcoming).

This chapter considers the interaction between colonial processes, Indigenous peoples and criminal justice systems. The commonalities in the experiences of Indigenous peoples in white settler societies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US) provide the focus for an exploration of the implications of the colonial process for understanding Indigenous contact with western criminal justice systems across a number of domains. A fundamental point derived from this exploration is that the politics and outcomes of colonization are not simply of historical interest. Rather, the contemporary relationship between Indigenous people and crime, punishment, and justice is structured by these longer term relationships.

Kathryn Fort, ‘The Vanishing Indian Returns: Tribes, Popular Originalism, and the Supreme Court’, St. Louis University Law Journal 57, 297 (2013).

Writing history is perilously tricky, weighing narratives, presenting facts, and making stories. This is particularly true when the history directly affects the legal rights of a present-day community. When the Supreme Court of the United States writes history, it imbibes the narrative with both cultural and legal authority, and the story the Court creates needs to be both persuasive and perceived as factual. The Court is not a body of historians, obligated to write nuanced history. However, the Court’s opinions and factual reiterations legitimize those facts and history. Once the Court releases an opinion, the history in it achieves a high level of popular authority. 

As the nation faces cultural divides over the meaning of the “Founding,” the Constitution, and who owns these meanings, the Court’s embrace of originalism is one strand that feeds the divide. The Court’s valuing of the original interpretation of the Constitution has reinforced the Founder fetishism also found in popular culture, specifically within the politics of those identified as the Tea Party. As addressed elsewhere, their strict worship of the Founders has historical implications for both women and African Americans, groups both marginalized and viewed as property in the Constitution. No one, however, has written about how the Court’s cobbled historical narrative and their veneration for the Founders has affected American Indian tribes. Tribes barely exist in the Constitution, and the Founders “original” understanding of tribes was that they would inevitably disappear. 

The “vanishing Indian” stereotype, promulgated in the early Republic, reaching an apex in the 1820’s, continues to influence fundamentally how the Court views tribes. Compressing history from the Founding through the Jacksonian era undermines tribal authority and sovereignty within the Court. In its federal Indian law cases, the Court relies on racial stereotypes, and popular conceptions of American history. As a result of these shortcuts, the Court folds all tribes into one large group, empties the American landscape of tribal peoples, and forces tribes into a past where they only exist to disappear.

Edward Cavanagh, Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa: Possession and Dispossession on the Orange River (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Layers of dispossession and disruption are definitive of South African history. Bouncing from Griqua Philippolis (1824–1862) to Afrikaner Orania (1990–2013), this book shows how land rights are prioritised in pre-apartheid and post-apartheid contexts. The result is a new way of looking at the country’s history – different to the version of history that guided transformation and inspired an idiosyncratic system of land restitution.

‘[A] highly innovative study of substantial contemporary relevance. Cavanagh compares the Griqua Philippolis and Afrikaner Orania polities in a compelling analysis, foregrounding issues of dispossession, land rights, sovereignty, indigeneity, and restitution. Insightful and accessible, this is a book that will appeal to both academic and lay readers.’ — Mohamed Adhikari, University of Cape Town

‘An intensely brilliant gem […] The conundrums and contradictions of land dispossession and restitution in South Africa are here presented both factually and analytically in a powerful argument for an, until now, politically submerged subterranean view of land rights and group identity. This study will surely renew much needed institutional as well as scholarly debate.’ — David B. Coplan, University of the Witwatersrand

‘Cavanagh makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies, in a very original and persuasive way: applying this paradigm to the past and the present, and investigating very different sociopolitical collectives in very different historical circumstances. This book convincingly reintroduces settler colonialism to South African history.’ — Lorenzo Veracini, Swinburne Institute for Social Research

Martin J. Wiener, ‘The Idea of “Colonial Legacy” and the Historiography of Empire’, Journal of The Historical Society 13, 1 (2013).

bit in lieu of abstract:

During the last half-century of the British Empire, few historians outside the political Left expressed concern about how British rule would be judged by future generations. To most scholars, at least through World War II, the empire appeared to be building a solid legacy of progressive political and economic institutions, which were gradually rooting both the “rule of law” and commercial, agricultural, and industrial development in native soil. As the Cambridge historian Eric Walker summed up in his wartime work, The British Empire: Its Structure and Spirit, the empire was “a great human achievement.” As historiography, this view had a number of basic flaws. It was morally and empirically one-sided, taking little account of the complaints coming from the governed or the criticisms from British scholars of the Left; it exaggerated not just the empire’s beneficence but its power and influence upon the colonized; it had no place for the agency of these colonized people themselves; and it treated the long centuries before British arrival as unimportant and irrelevant.

Nowadays, this view of empire and its influence has been widely and justly rejected; but, more problematically, it has been inverted. The idea of a strong “colonial legacy” remains pervasive, but now in highly negative terms. If one googles the phrase, one finds over twelvemillion entries, the great majority of them pejorative. Most of the problems new states have encountered have been attributed at some point to the legacy left by former European colonial rulers. Not surprisingly, criticism of European empires has been widespread in these states, but it has also been widespread in the West. Films representing heroic colonial battles, once very popular, have gone completely out of fashion. In the 1960s films like Zulu (1964) and Khartoum (1966) were great successes in both Britain and America, but nowadays only disillusioned or straightforwardly anticolonial films are made—one might cite Gandhi, A Passage to India, Breaker Morant, Gallipoli, Empire of the Sun, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and a good many others. In 2003, Channel Four’s documentary series, “Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World,” was far more balanced than the almost purely positive approach of previous generations, but nonetheless drew sharp criticism from journalists and historians for sugar-coating imperial history.