settler colonial studies blog

Taxation with elimination: Anas Iqtait, ‘Taxation and Settler Colonialism: The Palestinian Case’, Forum for Development Studies, 2025

27May25

Abstract: In the context of settler colonialism, taxation and public revenue systems are integral to the political narratives surrounding indigenous nations and peoples. The fiscal arrangements established within these settings often manifest as asymmetrical budgetary structures and tax collection mechanisms. This paper critically examines the typology of public revenues in Palestine to elucidate the complexities of taxation and fiscal management under a settler colonial framework. Employing the theoretical lenses of critical fiscal sociology this analysis provides a nuanced understanding of the dynamics governing taxation, public revenue generation, and service provision in the occupied Palestinian territories. The study contends that external dependencies, Israeli tax control measures, and a fragmented network of service providers collectively undermine efforts to forge a socio-fiscal contract. This situation is exacerbated by declining international aid, necessitating a heightened reliance on domestic tax mobilization. The paper argues that these challenges reflect broader issues inherent in public revenue mobilization within a settler colonial setting. Furthermore, Israel’s settler colonial project is facilitated by the enforced taxation policies in the oPt, which not only impede development and economic liberation but also serve as sophisticated instruments for domination that advance the hegemon’s political objectives. Ultimately, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of fiscal operations within Israeli settler colonial structures and offers critical insights into the politics of taxation and revenue mobilization.

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Planning the settler unplanning: Janice Barry, ‘The ongoing unsettlement of planning thought: The difference that settler-colonial and critical Indigenous theory make’, in Philip Allmendinger, Mark Tewdwr-Jones, Matthew Wargent, Critical Planning Futures New Directions in Planning Theory, Routledge, 2025

27May25

Abstract: This chapter builds on recent calls to ‘unsettle’ planning theory by looking quite directly at what this project of critical reflection and charting of possible ways forward might mean in contexts that are powerfully shaped by the ongoing structures of settler colonialism. Despite its limitations, settler-colonial theory offers a way for non-Indigenous planners to critically interrogate how settler-colonial structures of Indigenous erasure, assimilation, and dispossession are embodied in their actions and ways of thinking. On the other hand, critical Indigenous theory provides a framework for envisioning the possibilities for decolonial planning futures. The concepts of Indigenous resurgence, futurity, and flourishing are particularly instructive in terms of centring Indigenous sovereignty and knowledge systems, while also complementing and extending ideas of insurgent and pluriversal planning as well as planners’ engagements with land and the more-than-human world.

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Interstellar colonialism starts here: Luis Hernan, ‘Reaching for the Stars: Boca Chica and Interstellar Colonialism’, in Gihan Karunaratne (ed.), Displaced Urbanism, Routledge, 2025

27May25

Abstract: In this article, I ask whose bodies are disciplined, silenced and displaced to make way for the interplanetary utopia of Starbase, the launchpad of SpaceX in Boca Chica, Texas. Its location in the borderlands speaks of a troubled legacy which mobilises the home as a symbolic ordering of bodies that excludes the racial other. Against the mythologising of Starbase, and its symbolic and material destruction of the past of the site, I write Boca Chica through a description of Elon Musk’s home at the site, suggesting its interior as a performance of geek cultures and hegemonic masculinities. It is this performance, I argue, that shows the continuities of a historical settler-colonial project on the site, starting with the establishment of Clarkesville shortly after the Mexican-American war, with modern colonialism embedded in the techno-utopias of Silicon Valley.

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The race of settlers: Nancy Huayan Carranza, ‘Problematizing the Multiracial Promised Land: Multiracial Settler Belonging in Hawaiʻi in the Asian American Literary Imagination’, MELUS, 2025, #mlaf012

27May25

Excerpt: Puanani Burgess’s poem “Choosing My Name” (1998) articulates the fraught positioning of multiracial Asian-Native Hawaiians under the conditions of settler colonialism and the tenacity of Indigenous genealogy to persist under what Patrick Wolfe calls the “logic of elimination” (“Settler” 387), as the poet-speaker demands recognition and refuses erasure of her Kanaka Maoli heritage by both the settler state and her own Japanese American family. This “logic of elimination” operates not only through state institutions that uphold the poet-speaker’s English name “Christabelle” as the “real” and “safe” name but also in settler colonialism’s assimilative demands on Asian migrant-settlers, as seen in her “home name,” “Yoshie,” which “made [her] acceptable” to her Japanese American family (Burgess 278), signaling the disavowal of Indigeneity as a precondition for belonging. Burgess’s poem also highlights the way that racial and ethnic identification via naming becomes linked to specific spatial imaginaries: “Christabelle” operates in state institutions such as the school; “Yoshie” offers conditional acceptance in the migrant-settler home; and the “chosen” name “Puanani” tethers the poet-speaker to the land (āina) and the sea (kai) as an umbilical cord (piko) to her Indigenous genealogy.

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Talking about your colonial ex: Simone Bignall, ‘Deleuzian Concepts for Ex-colonialism’, in Henry Somers-Hall, Jeffrey A. Bell (eds), The Deleuzian Mind, Routledge, 2025

25May25

Abstract: This essay elaborates how a Deleuzian mind conceives the becoming of history in terms of ‘end’ or ‘exit’. A novel focus on ‘exiting’ from histories of colonialism offers an important paradigm shift away from the prevailing models of ‘post-colonial reconciliation’ and ‘de-colonisation’ that provide the concepts and language most often used for thinking about transforming colonialism. Such models have a limited application in settler-colonial nations, where the colonial imposition on Indigenous peoples is not in any way ‘post’, but rather is ongoing. Here, I articulate the idea of a discontinuous process of ‘exit-from-colonisation’ – or ‘ex-colonialism’ – that builds from Deleuzian understandings of temporality, existence, politics and philosophical activity. I argue that ‘ex-colonialism’ addresses three key problems in settler-colonisation: the need to disrupt historical progression from a troubled origin; the issue of co-constitution in contexts where unhappy relationships prevail; and the systemic or structural nature of the reforms required to accommodate political and legal pluralism in jurisdictions characterised by a post-colonial imposition of legal, political and cultural uniformity in the form of the settler-colonial nation-state. We will see how Deleuzian concepts for ex-colonialism align with First Nations’ aspirations for self-determination and release a line of flight from colonial power formations, distinct from – and resistant to – continuous (post-)colonialism.

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Make settler colonialism history: Janna Martin, ‘Unsettling public history: a promising methodology for settler decolonization’ Settler Colonal Studies, 2025

25May25

Abstract: Facilitating settler decolonization is multi-faceted and non-linear. Based on existing scholarship, the key components that facilitate settler decolonization encompass taking responsibility for one’s own learning and unlearning, self-examining that leads to a decolonial practice, building relationships with Indigenous people and place, and revising settler narratives to acknowledge the settler problem and Indigenous sovereignty. While this theoretical framework provides principles for settler decolonization, there is a research gap in applying settler decolonization theory in particular places and cases. Employing theories of whiteness in this framework, I explore an approach for settler decolonization through re-storying public history. To enrich the methodology, I utilize a case study of early Indigenous-Mennonite relations in what is now the Waterloo Region. I argue that through the braiding of Indigenous and Western historiography, a decolonial public history would centre Indigenous sovereignty, recognize the settler problem, acknowledge complicity, deepen relationships with place, renew treaty relationships, disrupt affect and embrace uncertainty, and foster settler responsibility.

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Market settler colonialism: Joseph Whitson, Marketing the Wilderness: Outdoor Recreation, Indigenous Activism, and the Battle over Public Lands, University of Minnesota Press, 2025

25May25

Description: Marketing the Wilderness analyzes the relationship between the outdoor recreation industry, public lands in the United States, and Indigenous sovereignty and representation in recreational spaces. Combining social media analysis, digital ethnography, and historical research, Joseph Whitson offers nuanced insights into more than a century of the outdoor recreation industry’s marketing strategies, unraveling its complicity in settler colonialism. Complicating the narrative of outdoor recreation as a universal good, Whitson introduces the concept of “wildernessing” to describe the physical, legal, and rhetorical production of pristine, empty lands that undergirds the outdoor recreation industry, a process that further disenfranchises Indigenous people from whom these lands were stolen. He demonstrates how companies such as Patagonia and REI align with the mining and drilling industries in their need to remove Indigenous peoples and histories from valuable lands. And he describes the ways Indigenous and decolonial activists are subverting and resisting corporate marketing strategies to introduce new narratives of place. Through the lens of environmental justice activism, Marketing the Wilderness reconsiders the ethics of recreational land use, advocating for engagement with issues of cultural representation and appropriation informed by Indigenous perspectives. As he discusses contemporary public land advocacy around places such as Bears Ears National Monument, Whitson focuses on the deeply fraught relationship between the outdoor recreation industry and Indigenous communities. Emphasizing the power of the corporate system and its treatment of land as a commodity under capitalism, he shows how these tensions shape the American idea of “wilderness” and what it means to fight for its preservation.

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Picture settler colonialism: Peter H. Hoffenberg, Brian C. Black, Libby MacDonald Bischof, Jarrod Hore, ‘Review Forum: Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism’, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, 4, 1, 2025

25May25

Abstract: For this review forum, Peter H. Hoffenberg, Brian C. Black, and Libby MacDonald Bischof were invited to explore issues raised in Jarrod Hore’s Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism.

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Settler fantasies and their sympathies: Leila Ben Abdallah, ‘On Sympathies and the work of Public Things: Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s Challenge to Lorado Taft’s Eternal Indian Statue and Settler Fantasy’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2025

25May25

Abstract: Focusing on recent community efforts to repair Lorado Taft’s Eternal Indian statue, this article reads the statue as a public thing. In doing so, I argue that sympathy active at the 1911 unveiling of Taft’s Indian statue and 2020 restoration capture what I call settler sympathy. Instead of granting the ability to see from the other’s perspective, I illustrate how settler sympathy relies on image and myth fundamental to sustaining the settler nation. I turn to the thought of Oneida activist-intellectual Laura Cornelius Kellogg to locate settler sympathy as well as another sympathy, what I call fraternal sympathy. Where settler sympathy takes fiction to make things public for settler gain, I argue that fraternal sympathy finds in fiction a means to make alternative places where publics thrive through things that do not annihilate but rather affirm self-determination.

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Settler colonial propaganda: Yiwen Xia, ‘Man’ei film in China 1937–1945: The Ideological Weapon of Japanese Settler Colonialism’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2025

23May25

Abstract: Man’ei, established in 1937 by Japan’s Kwantung Army in the occupied northeast region of China, was Japan’s core cultural propaganda institution overseas during World War II. This study systematically examines the origins and developmental background of Man’ei, with a particular focus on the colonial policies promoted by the Kwantung Army, such as the ‘Twenty-Year Million-Household Sending Plan’ and the ‘Essentials of the Japanese Language Popularisation Policy’. It then investigates Man’ei’s production methods and, through a textual analysis of Winter Jasmine (1942), explores how the Kwantung Army employed entertainment films to further its expansive colonial propaganda agenda. Unlike colonial films from other imperial powers, Man’ei’s productions idealize the colony, Manchukuo, as part of a positive response to the Kwantung Army’s immigration and related policies, reflecting Japan’s broader strategic ambitions in China. This research draws on archival materials from the Northeast China Martyrs Memorial Hall and online digital repositories, combined with a historical literature review and film textual analysis, thereby revealing Japan’s overlooked colonial practices and contributing to discussions on imperial colonialism as well as the interplay between cinema, power, and national identity formation.

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