Colonial Theory Research Articles

Reconciliation as a Threat or Structural Change? The Truth and Reconciliation Process and Settler Colonial Policy Making in Finland

The Sámi have long desired a public process to examine and expose the Nordic states’ colonial, assimilationist practices and policies, past and present, toward the Sámi people. This article considers the truth and reconciliation process in Finland, assessing it in light of recent legislative and other measures. Employing settler colonial theory, it argues that reconciliation, although seemingly progressive, signifies a continuation of colonialism unless the state terminates its current approach of overlooking Sámi rights. The article concludes with a discussion of structural reconciliation and justice and considers some concrete measures for structural change in order for the reconciliation process to be valid and successful in Finland.

Illegally Blonde: The Racialisation of Blondness and Visual Representations of Palestinian Activist Ahed Tamimi in American and Canadian Media

Informed by theories of media representation, Orientalism, and settler colonialism, this research endeavours to contribute to the discussion on the impact of media representation within a specific political context. It intends to reveal the power dimensions and ideological positions embedded in dominant media discourses in North America. Five news videos, three from Canadian, and two from American online daily media sources, are selected carefully during December 2017 and July 2018 when the Israeli army arrested Ahed Tamimi. In terms of methodologies, adopts Chouliaraki's (2011) multimodality model to analyse the visual and semiotic choices made by the news editors and draws on Fairclough's (1995) conception of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for its contextual analysis. The findings suggest that through different discursive and representational strategies, the media frame Tamimi and the Palestinians as violent initiators. Moreover, Tamimi's blondness and her ‘Western’ look are marked as ‘fake’ and ‘propaganda’, thus establishing the new norm of representing ‘Otherness’. These strategies echo accepted values in American and Canadian societies and their foreign policies in the past decade. The results also achieve the purpose of legitimising the use of state violence on colonised bodies, which ultimately reflects settler-colonial history in North America.

French-speaking Intellectuals and Culture in Some Key Works of Edward Said

Edward Said, who is a key intellectual figure in the theory and interpretation of western European colonization and decolonization, sees criticism as personal engagement and a matter of character and not simply scholarship. He is highly influential in the fields of colonialism, postcolonialism, representation and interpretation. Of the many influences Said in turn has undergone, those in French deserve specific exploration. This article explores some of these influences, but it also looks at some of Said’s own representations of French and French-speaking culture. To this end I will examine how Said in some of his key works addresses, among other things, the role of the intellectual, Orientalism, colonialism, and literary theory. My approach is chronological. I will first turn to the role the French-speaking world plays in Said’s first published book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), and then to a couple of Said’s most celebrated works: Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993).

Political geographical perspectives on settler colonialism

AbstractGiven the centrality of land, territory, and sovereignty to settler colonial formations, it is unsurprising that geographers and other scholars working on such topics are increasingly finding settler colonial studies fruitful in their research agendas. However, work on settler polities in political geography has historically been marked by the present absence of this framework, which has been consequential in terms of circumscribing the kinds of political analysis that geographers can offer. It also limits the nature, depth, and scope of radical critique of violent domination by skirting certain questions about the core drivers of dispossession and responsibility for them. This article examines political geographical engagement (or lack thereof) across each of four themes: population management/governance, territory/sovereignty, consciousness, and narrative, paying particular attention to works which challenge the present absence of settler colonial theory in political geography. We argue that analyzing settler colonial formations as such is essential to conceptualizing their workings and linkages or disjunctures with other forms of empire. Yet this focus also has broader political stakes related to geography's complicity with racialized state power, violence, and empire, as well as and efforts to decolonize the discipline.

The Ubiquity of State Fragility: Fault Lines in the Categorisation and Conceptualisation of Failed and Fragile States

In the last three decades, the categories of fragile and failed states have gained significant importance in the fields of law, development, political science and international relations. The wider discourse plays a key role in guiding the policies of international community and multilateral institutions and has also led to the emergence of a plethora of indices and rankings to measure and classify state fragility. A critical and theoretical analysis of these matrices brings to light three crucial aspects that the current study takes as its departure point. First, the formulas and conceptual paradigms show that fragility of states is far more ubiquitous than is generally recognised, and that the so-called successful and stable states are a historical, political and geographical anomaly. Second, in the absence of an agreed definition of a successful state or even that of a failed or fragile state, the indicators generally rely on negative definitions to delineate the failed and fragile state. They generally suggest that their reading is built on a Weberian ideal–typical state, which takes the idea of monopoly over legitimate violence as its starting point. The third and final point suggests that the indicators and rankings, misconstruing the Weberian ideal–typical state, actually end up comparing fragile states against an ideal–mythical state. The article argues that this notional state is not only ahistorical and apolitical, but it also carries the same undertones that have been the hallmark of theories of linear development, colonialism and imperialism.

Political ecology and decolonial research: co-production with the Iñupiat in Utqiaġvik

Environmental social science research designs have shifted over the past several decades to include an increased commitment to multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary team-based work that have had dual but complementary foci. These address power and equity in the substantive aspects of research, and also to adopt more engaged forms of practice, including decolonial approaches. The fields of political ecology, human geography, and environmental anthropology have been especially open to converge with indigenous scholarship, particularly decolonial and settler colonial theories and research designs, within dominant human-environmental social science paradigms. Scholars at the forefront of this dialogue highlight the ontological (ways of knowing), epistemological (how we know), and institutional (institutions of higher education) transformations that need to occur in order for this to take place. In this article we contribute to this literature in two ways. First, we highlight the synergies between political ecology and decolonial scholarship, particularly focusing on the power dynamics in research programs and historical legacies of human-environmental relationships, including those of researchers. Second, we explore how decolonial research pushes political ecologists and other environmental social scientists to not only consider adopting international and local standards of working with, by and for Indigenous Peoples within research programs but how this work ultimately extends to research and education within their home institutions and organizations. Through integrating decolonized research practices in the environmental social sciences, we argue that synthesizing multiple knowledge practices and transforming institutional structures will enhance team-based environmental social science work to improve collaboration with Indigenous scientists, subsistence practitioners, agency representatives, and sovereign members of Indigenous communities.Keywords: Alaska; collaboration; co-production; decolonial; Indigenous Knowledges; Iñupiaq Peoples

Reconciliation as a Threat or Structural Change? The Truth and Reconciliation Process and Settler Colonial Policy Making in Finland

The Sami have long desired a public process to examine and expose the Nordic states’ colonial, assimilationist practices and policies, past and present, toward the Sami people. This article considers the truth and reconciliation process in Finland, assessing it in light of recent legislative and other measures. Employing settler colonial theory, it argues that reconciliation, although seemingly progressive, signifies a continuation of colonialism unless the state terminates its current approach of overlooking Sami rights. The article concludes with a discussion of structural reconciliation and justice and considers some concrete measures for structural change in order for the reconciliation process to be valid and successful in Finland.

Dangerous pipelines, dangerous people: colonial ecological violence and media framing of threat in the dakota access pipeline conflict

ABSTRACTDrawing on theories of settler colonialism, colonial ecological violence, and media framing this article considers how media framing contributes to the production of colonial ecological violence. Focusing on the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) I examine how local media deploys frames of risk and security in order to minimize or invalidate Indigenous responses to ecological harms as well as to legitimate violence against those who resist pipeline development.

Reconstrução dos eventos e documentos da institucionalização ambiental em Moçambique

o presente artigo apresenta a reconstrução histórica dos eventos e documentos que caracterizaram a institucionalização do ambiente em Moçambique, entre 1980 e 2014. Inicialmente, apresenta a metodologia que orientou o artigo e debates teóricos, estabelecendo diálogo entre a História Ambiental da América Latina, abordagens pós-coloniais e Sociologia do Conhecimento. Na sequência, apresenta os eventos que delimitaram a dimensão local dos riscos ambientais, e documentos que marcaram a visão global destes.

Representing Australia to the Commonwealth in 1965: Aborigiana and Indigenous Performance

AbstractIn 1965, the Australian government and Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT) debated which performing arts ensembles should represent Australia at the London Commonwealth Arts Festival. The AETT proposed the newly formed Aboriginal Theatre, comprising songmakers, musicians, and dancers from the Tiwi Islands, northeast Arnhem Land and the Daly River. The government declined, and instead sent the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performing works by John Antill and Peter Sculthorpe. In examining the historical context for these negotiations, I demonstrate the direct relationship between the historical promotion of ‘Australianist’ art music composition that claimed to represent Aboriginal culture, and the denial of the right of representation to Aboriginal performers as owners of their musical traditions. Within the framing of Wolfe's settler colonial theory and ‘logic of elimination’, I suggest that appropriative Australian art music has directly sought to replace performances of Aboriginal culture by Aboriginal people, even while Aboriginal people have resisted replacement.

La influencia del poscolonialismo en el estudio de Israel/Palestina: de la perspectiva anticolonial al marco decolonial, pasando por el colonialismo de asentamiento

Aunque la presentación del denominado “conflicto palestino-israelí” o “árabe-israelí” como consecuencia del fenómeno sionista como una ideología colonialista se remonta a principios del siglo XX, con una mayor relevancia y profundidad intelectual en los años 1960-1970 gracias en particular al apoyo de estudios al respecto por parte de la Organización para la Liberación de Palestina, no es menos cierto que estos últimos años el estudio del conflicto ha sido testigo de un resurgimiento del marco conceptual del colonialismo. Este resurgimiento se inscribe dentro de la cada vez más concienzuda aplicación del marco de los estudios postcoloniales tanto en las relaciones internacionales en general como en Oriente Próximo en particular, para lo cual las aportaciones de Edward Said representaron un punto de inflexión clave, y muy particularmente dentro de una nueva subdisciplina como es la teoría del colonialismo de asentamientos. La utilización de este último marco epistemológico arroja sin embargo luz sobre varias de las diferencias en el estudio de la situación en la Palestina histórica a lo largo de las últimas décadas, como son la relevancia del elemento etnonacional, el peso cada vez mayor de los estudios indígenas y la importancia de las redes transnacionales y la interseccionalidad, además de un peso cada vez mayor de la perspectiva decolonial.

Edmonton,Amiskwaciy Wâskahikan, and a Papaschase suburb for settlers

The Papaschase Indian Reservation outside Edmonton, Alberta was established as part of Treaty 6 in 1877, but annulled in 1888. A significant portion of the land was later assembled in Canada's first land bank and sold at below‐market prices to create “Mill Woods,” an idealistic vision for a planned mixed‐use suburb. Settler Colonial Theory is introduced to explore the history of the Papaschase Cree and the Reservation. This testifies to the process of dispossession, settler colonial occupation, and respatialization of the Canadian landscape. Canadian suburbia is not placeless. Methods for examining such “erased spaces” and layers of previous occupation are discussed. Canadian urban historical geography and suburban research have not sufficiently examined settler colonial dispossession. This is an opportunity for geographers to contribute to Canadian reconciliation between Settler and Indigenous cultures.

Advocating Dialogue or Monological Advocacy? Settler Colonial Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies and the Authentic “Pro-Indigenous” Position

ABSTRACTThis article problematises settler colonial theory and critical whiteness studies and their role in supporting advocacy scholarship, or scholarship purporting to uphold Indigenous political aspirations. It examines the conceptual reliance of these paradigms on binarised, orthodox representations of Indigeneity and the role of these representations in supporting particular “pro-Indigenous” political priorities, such as decolonisation. By way of example, a retrospective engagement with Sarah Maddison’s Beyond White Guilt: The Real Challenge for Black–White Relations in Australia is offered. I argue that this text’s representation of all non-Indigenous people as “white” and “guilty” perpetrators constructs Indigenous people as “black” and (by implication) “innocent” victims. The circumscription of Indigeneity delimits the terms by which Indigenous people can articulate their interests in the dialogue proffered as evidence of decolonisation, thus rendering the dialogue a monologue. Underscoring the power of this monologue, a Métis critique of Indigenous cultural-nationalist anti-colonial movements is called upon to argue that those who employ orthodox representations of Indigeneity put their commitment to an ideological position above a negotiation of alternatives. Consequently, the task of theorising decolonisation is diminished, and those we seek to support in our scholarship remain marginalised in our representations of them.

Strategies for Settler Decolonization: Decolonial Pedagogies in a Popular Music Analysis Course

Canadian institutions of higher education are grappling with decolonization, particularly with how to move beyond decolonial and settler colonial theory and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action to practical and specific strategies for meaningful change in the classroom. To that end, this paper offers a case study of a settler instructor’s process of decolonization in a popular music analysis course and describes a variety of methods for decolonizing course design and classroom activities. A discussion of how to apply and adapt the author’s methods for different courses, programs, and local contexts leads to critical reflection on the impact of these changes on student learning and their efficacy in terms of decolonization itself.

Introduction: Rethinking Blackness and Indigeneity in the Light of Settler Colonial Theory

Racial analytics in the field, particularly those associated with theories of sovereignty and settler colonialism, have tended to obscure the common ground of Afro-descendant and Indigenous experience, such as land dispossession, political marginalization, and a shared desire for sovereignty and self-determination. In the wake of this analytic divide, even less attention is given to how blackness specifically structures or delimits Indigenous life, as blackness and indigeneity are often taken to be competing identities that cannot exist within the same individuals and communities without friction. This volume seeks to take the next step in pushing forward our theoretical conversations about blackness and indigeneity. Rather than assuming that anti-Black racism, as well as that directed against Indigenous people, are problems of the past or irrelevant to contemporary Indigenous political status, this volume engages with both critical race theory and settler colonial theory to explore how blackness intersects with Indigenous sovereignty, authority, identity, and lived experience.

Settler Unfreedoms

This essay troubles the theoretical impasses wrought by overdetermined framings of settler colonial theory in order to understand the relationship between blackness and indigeneity. While the framework disrupts Native erasure, the language of “incommensurability” that is increasingly deployed to make sense of the particularity of blackness and indigeneity extends settler logics, or what I refer to as “settler unfreedoms.” Drawing on Black and Indigenous feminist praxis of embodied truth telling, this essay examines how the unknowable and illegible terrains of Black political subjectivities constitutes a space that disrupts settler paradigms of freedom and moves forward to an alternate conceptualization of mutual liberation and decolonization.

Strategies for Settler Decolonization: Decolonial Pedagogies in a Popular Music Analysis Course

Canadian institutions of higher education are grappling with decolonization, particularly with how to move beyond decolonial and settler colonial theory and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action to practical and specific strategies for meaningful change in the classroom. To that end, this paper offers a case study of a settler instructor’s process of decolonization in a popular music analysis course and describes a variety of methods for decolonizing course design and classroom activities. A discussion of how to apply and adapt the author’s methods for different courses, programs, and local contexts leads to critical reflection on the impact of these changes on student learning and their efficacy in terms of decolonization itself.

Pacification, Capital Accumulation, and Resistance in Settler Colonial Cities: The Cases of Jerusalem and Rio de Janeiro

Approaching urban social conflicts in Brazil and in Palestine/Israel in terms of settler colonial theory allows the identification of the historical racist structures involved in the violent pacification of racialized native populations. Settler colonialism does not end with the declaration of independence but persists in the postcolonial context through the constant expropriation, extermination, confinement, and assimilation of racialized populations in the service of capitalist accumulation by settler elites. The cases of Jerusalem and Rio de Janeiro exemplify this process. Analisando conflitos urbanos sociais no Brasil e na Palestina com respeito à teoria de colonização permite a identificação das estruturas racistas históricas envolvidas na pacificação violenta de populações nativas. O colonialismo não termina com a declaração de independência. Ele persiste no contexto pós-colonial por meio de constantes expropriações, extermínio, encarceramento e assimilação das populações nativas. Tudo a serviço da acumulação capitalista das elites colonizadoras. Os casos de Jerusalém e Rio de Janeiro ilustram esse processo.

Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo and Rachel de Queiroz’s The Year Fifteen: a settler colonial reading

Settler Colonial Studies is a theoretical approach being developed in Australia by Lorenzo Veracini (2010, 2015, 2016), inspired by Patrick Wolfe’s (1999, 2016) precursor theories. It proposes a differentiation between “colonialism” and “settler colonialism” based on the premise that the latter involves land dispossession and the literal or metaphorical disappearance of Indigenous Others, while the former is mainly concerned with the exploitation of Indigenous labour and resources. The fact that settlers “come to stay” is a crucial element in positing settler colonialism as “a structure”, whereas colonialism would be “an event” in the lives of the colonised Others. This paper adopts settler colonial theories to propose a comparative study of two modernist “social” novels by women writers in Australia and Brazil: Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo (1929) and Rachel de Queiroz’s The Year Fifteen (1930). Both novels deal with exploitation, discrimination, racism and the dispossession of the Indigenous Other and their miscegenated descendants, from a non-Indigenous, i.e. “settler”, perspective. Elements that are crucial for settler colonialism, such as ambivalence, indigenisation and mechanisms of disavowal and transfer in several of their guises, are examined, compared and contrasted.

Reflections on Settler Colonialism, the Hemispheric Americas, and Chattel Slavery

Reflections on Settler Colonialism, the Hemispheric Americas, and Chattel Slavery Stephanie E. Smallwood (bio) Attention to "settler-driven" colonies as a distinct form first emerged in the context of the long nineteenth century of modern British imperial expansion.1 It was in that context that geographer A. Grenfell Price extolled the vision of British colonialist Edward Gibbon Wakefield, to whom "credit" was to be given for "evolving an economic, social and political theory of colonisation, calculated to be of equal benefit both to England and her colonies," that prioritized emigrant settlement.2 More precisely, what Price valorized in his analysis of colonizing was racial differentiation and its enduring reproduction across time. Measured against a standard that valued "permanent colonization" of European emigrants and their reproduction as exogamous and racially exclusive settler communities, Price figured the long history of "white" colonial settlement (by which term he meant to designate a plurality of [End Page 407] "white races of European ancestry," inclusive of both "northern whites" and "Mediterranean whites") as an extended litany of failures reflecting what he characterized as "the problem of white settlement in the tropics."3 Amid growing British metropolitan anxiety and debate about the management of imperial rule, the settler colony merited analysis and praise, then, as an exemplar that modeled lessons learned from the past and portended a stable and enduring means to the end of British global hegemony.4 The critical theorization of settler colonialism that has emerged in the wake of anticolonial mobilizations of the 1960s and 1970s turns this imperialist romanticism on its head.5 In its most widely cited iteration, settler colonial critique posits that settler colonizing turns specifically on an expropriation of Native land that rejects, rather than exploits, Native labor. "Settler colonialism," writes anthropologist Patrick Wolfe, "seeks to replace the natives on their land rather than extract surplus value by mixing their labor with a colony's natural resources."6 Instead, Wolfe elaborates, settler colonialism "brings its own labor."7 The result is a colonialism that seeks to eliminate Native societies. Indeed, this "logic of elimination" is the "organizing principle" of the settler colonial form.8 What Wolfe calls "franchise colonialism" is the correlate against which the particular features of the settler colonial form are posited. Offering British India and Dutch Indonesia as examples of the former, he defines the "franchise" colonial phenomenon as "a situation where Whites oversaw a system in which natives worked for them." If settler colonists seek to [End Page 408] eliminate and replace Indigenous peoples whom they regard as superfluous and in the way of their own arrogation of territorial dominion, then in the franchise colonial setting, colonists "sit on top of native society and set it to work for them on their own land," making the Indigenous "indispensable to the project of extracting surplus value."9 The difference between settler and franchise colonialisms manifests itself most clearly in the outcome of nationalist mobilizations for independence. In the franchise setting, postcolonial independence results in white colonists being "throw[n] . . . out," according to Wolfe.10 Having only ever been a demographic minority, "the Whites turn out not to have been established in the same way that settler colonizers have been established."11 But the opposite is the case in the settler context. Regarding Australia, for instance, Wolfe explains that white colonists "went to Australia to replace Aborigines and themselves become Australians, so their children would be Australians and Australia would then go on forever."12 Given that, what settler colonial critique problematizes most directly is the enduring continuity of colonial relations of power that imperialists such as Price celebrated and romanticized. As the claim most readily associated with settler colonial critique asserts, "settler colonizers come to stay," with the result that the invasion at the heart of settler colonialism "is a structure not an event."13 Settler colonial theory's problem space, then, is the as-yet-unfinished project of decolonization, and the principal work the settler colonialism concept does is to account for the process of supersession whereby the settler colony is replaced by the "settler-colonial state"—the independent polity born of (white) colonizing settlers turned sovereigns and the eliminatory logic that authorizes the...