« Older posts
Newer posts »

Canada Day, settler night: Daisy Raphael, Christine Funk, ‘Reconciling Canada Day? Canada Day Cancellation Statements in 2021’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2025

24Feb25

Abstract: This article examines statements issued by municipal governments, local organizations, and Indigenous communities that cancelled Canada Day celebrations in 2021, following news confirming physical evidence of unmarked graves at former residential schools. We argue that the statements reflect political logics of the past, present, and future, including dominant national narratives of liberal multiculturalism, residual logics of white nationalism, and emergent, transformative projects of Indigenous-defined reconciliation and resurgence. Through dominant narratives, the policy of cancelling Canada Day is presented as an expression of Canadian values, while settler-colonialism is obscured. Meanwhile, the residual white nationalism of the post-Confederation movement surfaces as statements tend to speak to an imagined normative Canadian subject who—only temporarily—suspends their celebration of the nation-state. Finally, the statements evidence emergent political forces, including Indigenous articulations of transformative reconciliation, resistance to settler-colonialism, and expressions of sovereignty, which signal the potential for major shifts in practices of national celebration in Canada.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonialism as crime fiction: Cyanne So-lo-li Topaum, ‘Violence and Vigilantism in Native American Crime Fiction: Settler Criminality in the Novels of LaFavor, Rendon, and Boulley’, Crime Fiction Studies, 6, 1, 2025

23Feb25

Abstract: In classic mystery fiction, criminality is represented at the level of the individual, with a heavy emphasis placed on the moral culpability and guilt of the singular criminal. These retributivist representations are often burdened by a neglect of institutional and structural causes for criminal behaviour. By emphasising individual ‘evil’ and guilt, they have the potential to be read as whitewashing carcerality and systemic inequality. In Native American crime fiction, on the other hand, the individualisation of criminality has a very different value: laying bare the history of settler vigilantism, unlawful violations of American criminal statutes and treaty law carried out by individual settlers against Native peoples. As Audra Simpson has noted, settler colonial states ‘do not always have to kill, its citizens can do that for it’. In the novels of Ojibwe writers Carole laFavor, Marcie R. Rendon, and Angeline Boulley, the conventions and tropes of crime fiction are utilised in order to indict settler vigilantism and the violence it inflicts on Native communities. These writers go on to demonstrate how settler vigilantes are often aided and abetted by the colonialist state, allowing them to produce a genre-based critique of settler colonialism with both individual and structural dimensions.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Touring settler colonialism: Sandro Carnicelli, Sarah Marroni Minasi, Vander Valduga, Alessandro Manzoni, ‘Settler colonialism and tourism routes in Southern Brazil’, Tourism Management Perspectives, 56, 2025, #101347

23Feb25

Abstract: Debates regarding the silencing of minorities and the marginalisation of those colonised is not new. The process of perpetuating colonialism is seen in the narratives regarding immigration of those from the global North who occupied places and spaces in the global South. To critically analyse the discursive reality of tourist routes in the three states forming the Southern region of Brazil, we conducted documentary research on the 50 tourism routes in Southern Brazil. The Critical Discourse Analysis reveals that colonial narratives used in the promotion of tourism routes are contributing to silencing non-European voices and perpetuating a systemic marginalisation of Indigenous and Quilombola groups.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonialism at the end of settler colonialism: Takuya Maeda, ‘The Closing of the Japanese Frontier: Settler Technocracy and Postwar Japanese Infrastructure’, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 11, 1, 2025, pp. 227-251

23Feb25

Abstract: For a cadre of influential figures in politics, business, urban planning, and architecture, the Japanese surrender in August 1945 marked the “closing of the Japanese frontier.” With overseas expansion no longer an option due to the loss of the colonies and global decolonization, political and business elites turned to investments in industrial technology and the intensification of land use. Techno-utopian discourses about the potential of postwar science and technology replaced settler colonial discourses about terra nullius as the engine of economic growth and as a leveling force in Japanese society. Through critical reappraisals of major development projects in postwar Japan, this article develops the concept of “settler technocracy” to capture how settler colonial epistemologies and technocratic governance were in dynamic interrelationship in postwar Japan.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Guilt or fury in the face of settler colonialism: Samuel Hayim Brody, ‘The Reality of Settler Colonialism’, Boston Review, 19/02/25

20Feb25

Excerpt: Settler colonialism falls into the category of concepts that may provoke guilt in a certain type of liberal and fury in a certain type of conservative

But even if “settler colonialism” goes the way of “critical race theory,” becoming the new pet hate of liberal pundits’ anti-academic screeds and conservative politicians’ draconian legislation, the phenomenon itself will remain. Getting rid of “settler colonialism” will not stop people from seeking to address the ongoing and enduring injustices of colonization, any more than getting rid of “critical race theory” will make everyone unaware of the vast differences in life outcomes across differently racialized populations.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Even more unhealthy settler colonialism: Sarah A. Whitt, Bad Medicine: Settler Colonialism and the Institutionalization of American Indians, Duke University Press, 2025

17Feb25

Description: In Bad Medicine, Sarah A. Whitt exposes how Native American boarding schools and other settler institutions like asylums, factories, and hospitals during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked together as a part of an interconnected system of settler domination. In so doing, Whitt centers the experiences of Indigenous youth and adults alike at the Carlisle Indian School, Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, Ford Motor Company Factory, House of the Good Shepherd, and other Progressive Era facilities. She demonstrates that in the administration of these institutions, which involved moving Indigenous people from one location to another, everyday white Americans became deputized as agents of the settler order. Bringing together Native American history, settler colonial studies, and the history of medicine, Whitt breaks new ground by showing how the confinement of Indigenous people across interlocking institutional sites helped concretize networks of white racial power—a regime that Native nations and communities continue to negotiate and actively resist today.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Unhealthy settler colonialism: Darrel Manitowabi, ‘Colonialism and Indigenous peoples’, in Toba Bryant (ed.), Handbook on the Social Determinants of Health, Elgar Online, 2025

17Feb25

Abstract: Indigenous peoples worldwide face significant health disparities rooted in colonial legacies, including displacement, socioeconomic marginalization, and discrimination. The focus of this chapter is colonialism as a determinant of Indigenous health, emphasizing its structural impact on social, cultural, and economic well-being. It compares global case studies to demonstrate how colonialism continues to impact Indigenous health outcomes, including high rates of chronic diseases, mental health issues, infant mortality, and overall lower life expectancy. There is attention to the importance of understanding Indigenous conceptions of health and strengths-based analyses that emphasize holistic well-being and community harmony. While recent studies emphasize decolonization and reconciliation as pathways to address Indigenous health disparities, it is critical to recognize that a failure to address structural injustices is ultimately colonialism in disguise. This chapter highlights a requirement to recognize rights to land, culture, and sovereignty to address colonialism as a determinant of Indigenous peoples’ health.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

A debate on the question of settler colonialism: Zahi Zalloua, ‘The Problem with Empathy: A Reply to Martin Jay’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2025

17Feb25

Excerpt: It is hard to be critical of Martin Jay’s desire to recentre Jewish empathy amidst the ongoing genocide, and I sympathize with his impulse to focus on this. But I think Jay’s argument for empathy needs to reckon with Israel’s settler colonialism, and the state terrorism that upholds it. 


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler extraction: María Belén Noroña, Marcia Aguinda,’Settler extractive governmentality, Kichwa storytelling, and Indigenous environmental justice in the Ecuadorian Amazon’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2025

15Feb25

Abstract: This study brings Kichwa epistemology into conversation with extractive governmentality, settler colonialism, and Indigenous environmental justice to demonstrate that extractive governmental frameworks in the Ecuadorian Amazon engage with settler colonial logic. Settler logics found in territorial legal frameworks are intended to displace and destroy practices of Indigenous-forest relations and replace them with “productivity” at the service of extractive enclaves and larger markets. Indigenous-forest relationships are reproduced through interaction with the forest and storytelling, a form of embodied textuality. The settler logic seeks to dismiss, marginalize, and displace storytelling and relational thinking, as the presence of the state and corporate power rearranges the region’s territory, people, and livelihoods. By documenting female Kichwa storytelling in the communities of Pañacocha and Tzawata, we illustrate how Kichwa epistemology based on Indigenous-forest relations becomes a tool of environmental justice. Women insist on upholding human forest relations, storytelling, and dreaming as legitimate avenues for understanding mining conflicts, for informing grassroots organizing, and for suggesting adequate Amazonian territorial governance.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler Rocks: Sophia Olivia Sanan, ‘Rock art at the Iziko Museums of South Africa and its settler colonial imprint’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

15Feb25

Abstract: Rock art, as it was framed by formal South African cultural institutions, held an enduring appeal to the white publics of the apartheid era. In the post-apartheid era, this category of art occupies a prominent and contested space in South African museological discourse. Drawn from the authors’ doctoral research, this article examines some of the ways in which the Iziko South African Museums engaged the category of rock art over a 70- year timespan. It locates a tension between the institution’s need to acknowledge the deep roots of settler coloniality imprinted in the category of rock art, and the need to reframe the category in a way that makes space for indigenous ways of knowing. The latter concern is a project that extends far beyond the institution itself, as it requires a re- configuration of knowledge hierarchies to make space for new interpretive possibilities, and processes of dis-entanglement from problematic inheritances (cultural, political, governmental, epistemic). This paper makes a case for ongoing attentiveness the reproduction of settler colonial logics in contemporary cultural contexts and their role in shaping cultural institutions in order to continue working towards possibilities of unlearning and dismantling of such logics.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »