settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial genomes: Jessica Kolopenuk, ‘Rethinking the Genomic Diversity Problem: Rejecting Inclusion in Defense of Indigenous Sovereignty’, Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, 26, 2025

08Apr25

Abstract: Interpretations of the so-called genomic diversity problem in precision medicine research reflect an enduring colonial logic tied to liberal identity/difference politics, prioritizing representational equity, diversity, and inclusion over substantive engagement with Indigenous sovereignties on their own ontological terms. This review critically analyzes not the underrepresentation of diverse populations in genomics but rather how the diversity problem is framed within genomics. It argues that liberal renderings of the diversity problem perpetuate colonizing knowledge production by reconstituting indigeneity as an identity/difference category. This review calls for a rejection of this reductive philosophical foundation in defense of Indigenous sovereignties and relationalities to transform scientific knowledge production.

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Colonial or settler colonial? Minori Takahashi, ‘Articulation, disarticulation, and the creation of hybridity: Tracing state–Indigenous relations through the Denmark–Greenland Case’, Polar Science, 2025

07Apr25

Abstract: This study aims to contribute to a comprehensive project to elucidate Arctic political processes that comprise the sum of conflicts and adjustments arising among multiple stakeholders. Using Denmark and Greenland as case studies, this study examines the nature of the master–servant relationship inherent in the colonization of indigenous societies by the state. It also explores how this relationship has influenced and continues to shape real-world politics following the decolonization process that began in the mid-20th century.

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The Methodists of settler colonialism: Claire Blencowe, Spirits of extraction: Christianity, settler colonialism and the geology of race, Manchester University Press, 2025

07Apr25

Description: Spirits of Extraction explores the civilisational metaphysics of race, which emerged with the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century, and helped to secure (settler) colonial sovereignty especially in the nineteenth century. Following the Methodist movement, the book traces a route from the evangelical awakening in eighteenth-century Bristol through the Methodist revivals of the Cornish mining diaspora in the nineteenth-century British Empire, through to the contested lives and lands of Anishinaabewaki / Upper Canada wherein Methodist missions and other evangelicals helped to secure the colonial extraction of copper, as well as territorial control, not least through the inscription of abuse in residential Indian schools. The book contributes to biopolitical theory by developing an original and nuanced case study of Christian religious biopolitics and the civilisational metaphysics of race. Highlighting the theme of exorcism and the role of wounding in the pursuit of ‘truly Christian life’, it adds to understanding of how biopolitical care for life enables and encourages racialised abuse. Expanding on Kathryn Yusoff’s analysis of the geology of race, the book also contributes to planetary social theory and geophilosphy, arguing that Methodism became a resonance machine for the quasi-divine claims of extractive industries. The civilisational metaphysics of race secures the race hierarchies that are essential technologies for extractive industries. At the same time evangelical experiences of salvation, exorcism and the affirmative spiral or faith engendered in modern Christianity became enmeshed with geological consciousness and the culture of the extractive industries, helping to establish their claim to manifest quasi-divine redemptive power.

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The settler colonial unconscious too: Siavash Saffari, Azadeh Shabani, ‘Palestine, and the Colonial Unconscious of German Critical Theory’, Middle East Critique, 2025

07Apr25

Abstract: By centering the question of Palestine, this article contributes to a decolonial critique of German critical theory à la Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School. The article’s intervention is prompted by the November 2023 ‘Principles of Solidarity. A Statement’ (PoS), of which Habermas was a coauthor. Released amid a full-scale Israeli assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, which followed the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack in southern Israel, the PoS statement expressed unequivocal solidarity with Israel, and it defended the assault on Gaza as being ‘justified in principle’. Whereas some critics view the PoS statement’s conspicuous one-sidedness as a departure from Habermas’s universalist principles, this article argues that the statement’s neglect of Palestinian suffering aligns with the Eurocentric limitations and biases inherent in Habermas’s thought. These limitations and biases, the article contends, stem from a colonial unconscious running through successive generations of the Frankfurt School critical theory (FSCT). Recalling Edward Said’s warning that the FSCT’s silence on colonialism and imperialism undermines the tradition’s liberatory potential, the article identifies the PoS statement as marking the depletion of any such potential.

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Healing against settler colonialism: Devin G. Atallah, Yasser M. Abu-Jamei, ‘Rethinking Trauma Against a Genocidal World: Palestinian Healing Is a Sound of Our Victory’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2025

07Apr25

Abstract: In this essay, two Palestinian healers, mental health workers, and fathers offer reflections on trauma, healing, and love in the face of Israeli genocide and settler-colonial violence across Palestine. Recognizing that the trauma and healing processes will extend much further than any moment of ceasefire, the authors, one of whom survived the genocide in Gaza, offer insights into trauma and healing as integral parts of their own personal and professional experiences. In doing so, they reimagine the trauma that Indigenous communities face as a result of settler colonialism not as a “mental illness,” but as being connected to the silence and inability of the world to stop genocide in ways that protect collective Palestinian liberation. They conclude that Palestinian trauma is an intergenerational message to a genocidal world, requiring courageous listening in the face of the ongoing Nakba. Palestinian healing, they offer, is a sound of Palestinian victory.

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Collecting specimen, displaying settlers: Conall Petroc Treen, ‘Specimens of settler colonialism: collecting and displaying natural history at the University of St Andrews, 1838-1917’, PhD dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2025

07Apr25

Abstract: This thesis investigates the history of the natural science collection of the University of St Andrews to examine the relationship between natural history and empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the foundation of the collection, during the years of the Literary and Philosophical Society of St Andrews (1838-1917), this thesis analyses the acquisition and movement of human and non-human remains from colonial Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand to the imperial rhetoric of display and education in Scotland. Natural science collections can provide insights into how the natural world was interwoven with imperial ideologies and the settler-colonial processes of violence, displacement, dispossession, and assimilation that irreparably harmed Indigenous communities. In recovering the histories of extant and non-extant objects, this examination highlights the contributions and experiences of naturalists, settlers, and Indigenous peoples in the history of science. By centring Indigenous agency, survival, and autonomy within moments of cross-cultural exchange, this thesis argues that collections have the potential to reconstruct invisible Indigenous histories that continue to be absent from museum displays. Employing a critical lens to the methodological approach of ‘object biographies’, this study illustrates the advantages and limitations of recovering Indigenous and colonial histories through objects and archival sources. Divided into two, the first part of this thesis examines the practices of naturalists in nineteenth-century colonial Australia, charting their reliance upon systems of power, colonial infrastructures, and the labour and knowledge of Aboriginal Australian peoples. The second part of this thesis explores the ‘afterlives’ of objects, both human and non-human remains, once they entered the museums at St Andrews, examining their changing roles in displays, scientific theories, and university education. This thesis provokes future discussions about the imperial and colonial legacies within university collections and offers new approaches for museum professionals and historians to examine natural science collections.

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Borrowing settlers: Christian Pinnen, Charles Weeks, Colonial Mississippi: A Borrowed Land, University Press of Mississippi, 2023

05Apr25

Description: Colonial Mississippi: A Borrowed Land offers the first composite of histories from the entire colonial period in the land now called Mississippi. Christian Pinnen and Charles Weeks reveal stories spanning over three hundred years and featuring a diverse array of individuals and peoples from America, Europe, and Africa. The authors focus on the encounters among these peoples, good and bad, and the lasting impacts on the region. The eighteenth century receives much-deserved attention from Pinnen and Weeks as they focus on the trials and tribulations of Mississippi as a colony, especially along the Gulf Coast and in the Natchez country. The authors tell the story of a land borrowed from its original inhabitants and never returned. They make clear how a remarkable diversity characterized the state throughout its early history. Early encounters and initial contacts involved primarily Native Americans and Spaniards in the first half of the sixteenth century following the expeditions of Columbus and others to the large region of the Gulf of Mexico. More sustained interaction began with the arrival of the French to the region and the establishment of a French post on Biloxi Bay at the end of the seventeenth century. Such exchanges continued through the eighteenth century with the British, and then again the Spanish until the creation of the territory of Mississippi in 1798 and then two states, Mississippi in 1817 and Alabama in 1819. Though readers may know the bare bones of this history, the dates, and names, this is the first book to reveal the complexity of the story in full, to dig deep into a varied and complicated tale.

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Toxic settlers: Matthew C. Ward, Making the Frontier Man: Violence, White Manhood, and Authority in the Early Western Backcountry, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023

05Apr25

Description: For western colonists in the early American backcountry, disputes often ended in bloodshed and death. Making the Frontier Man examines early life and the origins of lawless behavior in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio from 1750 to 1815. It provides a key to understanding why the trans-Appalachian West was prone to violent struggles, especially between white men. Traumatic experiences of the Revolution and the Forty Years War legitimized killing as a means of self-defense—of property, reputation, and rights—transferring power from the county courts to the ordinary citizen. Backcountry men waged war against American Indians in state-sponsored militias as they worked to establish farms and seize property in the West. And white neighbors declared war on each other, often taking extreme measures to resolve petty disputes that ended with infamous family feuds.
Making the Frontier Man focuses on these experiences of western expansion and how they influenced American culture and society, specifically the nature of western manhood, which radically transformed in the North American environment. In search of independence and improvement, the new American man was also destitute, frustrated by the economic and political power of his elite counterparts, and undermined by failure. He was aggressive, misogynistic, racist, and violent, and looked to reclaim his dominance and masculinity by any means necessary.

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Settler colonial multiculturalism: Daniel R. Meister'”One of the Cultural Minorities”? Indigenous Peoples and the Creation of Official Multiculturalism’, Canadian Historical Review, 106, 1, 2025

05Apr25

Abstract: Examining advocacy for multiculturalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this article challenges the idea that Indigenous peoples were not part of the discussions that led to the policy of multiculturalism. Instead, it demonstrates that their activism directly led to some inclusion in the early years of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism and that ethnic minorities took some tentative steps towards building political alliances with them. However, the possibility of a less colonial, more inclusive “syncretic multiculturalism” was dashed by the White Paper’s assault on Indigenous identities, which diverted Indigenous leaders’ engagement with multicultural activists, and by the passive revolutionary outcome of a policy of “multiculturalism within a bilingual framework,” which originally excluded, but then was quickly extended to include, Indigenous peoples.

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‘Colonized’ settler colonialism: Franka Vaughan, Sarah Maddison, ‘Thinking through the history of Liberia’s formation with settler colonial theory’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

05Apr25

Abstract: The formation of Liberia in the nineteenth century as a resettlement for freed and formerly enslaved Black Americans represents an intriguing puzzle in the articulation of the distinction between postcolonialism and settler colonialism. The small West African country is sometimes lumped together with the now postcolonial African countries that underwent structural decolonisation in the twentieth century. In many narratives, Liberia is even heralded as one of two African countries whose formation as a modern state is not defined by colonialism. By contrast, we reject both narratives through a re-theorisation of Liberia’s history as a settler society established by freed and formerly enslaved Black Americans who, we argue, acted as settler colonists even though they had themselves once been enslaved as Black people in the United States. This article argues that analysing Liberia’s formation through the lens of settler colonial theory sheds new light on the structures of inequality that continue to shape the lives of Liberians today. Understanding Liberia as a unique settler colonial project pushes the boundaries of settler colonial theory and provides the framework with a more transnational and transcultural lens.

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