Settler Colonial Nations Research Articles

Genocide, Peripheral Fascisms, and Late Neocolonialism in Palestine/Israel and Brazil

The Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the Brazilian genocide against Black and Indigenous populations provide an opportunity to investigate the processes of elimination in settler-colonial nations. This article aims to examine the conditions under which settler states can exercise sovereign power against subaltern populations. It is argued that the escalation of structural genocide to expand settler colonization and govern surplus populations was facilitated by the rise of far-right governments. Nevertheless, the Brazilian state’s capacity to exercise sovereign power has been restricted by the transition to neocolonialism, which enabled Brazilians to contain the far right. The space for the promotion of the largest genocide in recent history in Gaza was created by the Israeli effort to abort any possibility of transition to neocolonialism in Palestine, resulting in the maintenance of direct settler colonialism, the far-right government, and its close alliance with the United States.

Race, sovereignty, and White settler colonial studies: placing settlers at the Cultural Interface

ABSTRACT White settler colonial studies has been widely criticised for representing settler colonialism as an impenetrable and inevitable structure. This article therefore turns to explore how race preconditions and limits the construction of settler subjects. We draw on Torres Strait Islander theorist Martin Nakata’s Cultural Interface theory to unsettle ‘common-sense’ theories of race, and reconceive of the place where European and Indigenous cultures meet as sovereign Indigenous land. We extend Cultural Interface theory to locate White settler standpoints within the intertwined histories of racial capitalism and European and US imperialism. We argue that these histories orient settlers towards White possessive sovereignty. This article then deploys this framework to provide a deeper understanding of the disciplinary limits of White settler colonial studies through two case studies. First, we analyse Liberia’s construction as a settler colonial nation to denaturalise and historicise White settler standpoints. Second, we analyse the White settler standpoint institutionalised in White settler colonial studies’ descriptions of the settler/Indigenous binary, the logic of elimination, and settler sovereignty. In both cases, White settler standpoints are shaped and limited by the racialised logics of White possessive sovereignty. We nevertheless conclude that settlers may reorient themselves towards Indigenous sovereignty.

From Jamestown to Bethlehem: Local connections of geopolitical violence

In this visual intervention, I demonstrate connections between Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and rural Jamestown, Pennsylvania, USA, through 14 photos of surrounding landscapes. This intervention demonstrates how local geopolitical landscapes between two settler colonial nations perpetuate violence in the occupied Palestinian Territory (oPT), specifically through photos of “less-lethal munitions” in the West Bank and the site near the Pennsylvania manufacturer. While many scholars have demonstrated how US media and broader geopolitical discourses shape violence in everyday, intimate ways on bodies and people, this photo essay demonstrates how geopolitical violence and rhetoric manifest in everyday, local landscapes. Photos in this essay come from Aida Camp in the occupied West Bank outside of Bethlehem and rural Ohio and Pennsylvania, USA, on the route to where Combined Systems, Inc. manufactures rubber bullets, tear gas canisters, and other “less-lethal munitions and launching systems” deployed by the Israeli Security Force (ISF) in Aida.

“A child isn’t born bitter”: (In)human Relations and Monstrous Affects in Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child

This article presents an intersectional reading of Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child (2001) through the lens of Affect Theory. Particularly, I draw from Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism to analyze the role these notions play in the novel. I focus on the economy of affects that circulates among the characters and the affective significance of their interactions as well as the novel’s engagement with Ahmed’s notion of the promise of happiness and Berlant’s cruel optimism, specifically in relation to female, racialized, and migrant subjects both at a personal level and in the context of the settler colonial nation. My main argument is that the affects and expectations presented in the novel are monstrous. I defend that the protagonist’s affective monstrosity is a direct consequence of her abusive childhood as a racialized migrant in the Canadian Prairies and that choosing to let go of her expectations leads to emotional healing and opens new possibilities towards happiness.

Roaming

There are significant disparities in mental health care between First Nations and non-Indigenous people in settler-colonial nations. This paper, authored by a crosscultural and interdisciplinary team, argues that settler-colonial legislation, the tools and technologies of architecture, and the clinical practice of psychiatry are all implicated. Taking inspiration from Tanganekald, Meintangk-Bunganditj legal scholar Irene Watson, who yearns for freedom to roam across Country and connect with the land of her ancestors, we propose tactics for ‘roaming’ from the conventions of architecture and psychiatry to decolonize our practices. These include yarning, walking Country, and representing these itinerant practices through wandering lines. The outcomes are processes for developing new therapeutic places and practices for mental health care.

The ABC of history education: a comparison of Australian, British and Canadian approaches to teaching national and First Nations histories

PurposeThis essay engages with scholarship on history as a discipline, curriculum documents and academic and public commentary on the teaching of history in Australian, British and Canadian secondary contexts to better understand the influence of the tension between political pressure and disciplinary practice that drives the history wars in settler-colonial nations, how this plays out in secondary history classrooms and the ramifications this may have on students' democratic dispositions.Design/methodology/approachThis article aims to compare secondary history curricula and pedagogies in Australia, Britain and Canada to better articulate and conceptualise the influence of the “history wars” over the teaching of national histories upon the intended and enacted curriculum and how this contributes to the formation of democratic dispositions within students. A conceptual model, drawing on the curriculum assessment of Porter (2006) and Gross and Terra's definition of “difficult pasts” has been developed and used as the basis for this comparison. This model highlights the competing influences of political pressure upon curriculum creation and disciplinary change shaping pedagogy, and the impact these forces may have upon students' experience.FindingsThe debate around what content students learn, and why, is fraught because it is a conversation about what each nation values and how they construct their own national identity(ies). This is particularly timely when the democratic self-identification of many nations is being challenged. The seditious conspiracy to storm the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, Orban's “illiberal democracy” in Hungary and the neo-Nazis in Melbourne, Australia are examples of the rise of anti-democratic sentiment globally. Thus, new consideration of how we teach national histories and the impact this has on the formation of democratic dispositions and skills is pressing.Originality/valueThe new articulation of a conceptual model for the impact of the history wars on education is an innovative synthesis of wide-ranging research on: the impacts of neoliberalism and cultural restorationism upon the development of intended curriculum; discipline-informed inquiry pedagogies used to enact the curriculum; and the teaching of national narratives as a political act. This comprehensive comparison of the ways in which history education in settler-colonial nations has developed over time provides new insight into the common elements of national history education, and the role this education can play in developing democratic dispositions.

Memorialisation, Reconciliation and Truth-Speaking: The Role of Explorer and Massacre Memorials in Settler-Colonial Australia

ABSTRACT Memorialisation in settler-colonial nations such as Australia is intensely political. It creates public symbols of people and events those in authority consider important and worthy of remembrance. Counter-narratives of various marginalised others are silenced through processes of collective forgetting. In Australia, this forgetting has meant that colonial histories of exploration and discovery have been commemorated through ubiquitous explorer memorials. But these memorials represent a very selective account of settler-colonial history firmly based in the colonial fiction of terra nullius or empty land used to justify the British claim to Australia. This fiction is now being actively countered by social protests focused on memorials to explorers and colonial administrators. Furthermore, a trend to memorialise and commemorate the massacres of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as part of the colonisation process is overturning the myth that Australia was peacefully settled. In fact, truth-speaking is now recognised by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians as an integral part of the reconciliation process. However, the truths spoken as part of the shared memorialisation of Aboriginal massacre sites by the Australian reconciliation movement are only partial, and may serve to perpetuate rather than interrupt what has historically been a resounding silence about colonial dispossession and violence.

Racialization, colonialism, and imperialism: a critical autoethnography on the intersection of forced displacement and race in a settler colonial context.

Migration has been identified as a priority area for policy responses by both the federal and provincial/territorial governments yet, much of our knowledge about migration is not premised on addressing current xenophobic and racist narratives about migrants. The purpose of this research is an interrogation of Canada's colonialism, imperialism, and racialization, which produce specific oppressive policies and practices that have impacted my family. This research is premised on the understanding that in the space between what is known about migration in Canada and what is not, a great deal of narrative and interpretive work is done that makes assumptions about migrants, specifically forcibly displaced people from the Global South. Through a critical autoethnography focused on my lived experiences as a descendant of forcibly displaced Chinese-Vietnamese people living in a settler colonial nation state, this study critiques to what extent these assumptions are founded, and to what extent they represent a socio-political climate in which migration is set out as particular problems requiring a legal and policing solution. In particular, my analysis centers anti-colonialism and anti-racism, shifting to resistance to systemic violence and liberation, while considering the discursive and on-the-ground effects of racist, colonial, and imperial policies and practice. Set against the backdrop of the rise of white nationalism, xenophobia, and racism across all levels of government and academia, and the general public, the results of this study produce a counter-narrative focused on the intersection of forced displacement and race in a settler colonial context, which is both timely and urgent.

Decolonial, intersectional pedagogies in Canadian Nursing and Medical Education.

Our intention is to contribute to the development of Canadian Nursing and Medical Education (NursMed) and efforts to redress deepening, intersecting health and social inequities. This paper addresses the following two research questions: (1) What are the ways in which Decolonial, Intersectional Pedagogies can inform Canadian NursMed Education with a focus on critically examining settler-colonialism, health equity, and social justice? (2) What are the potential struggles and adaptations required to integrate Decolonial, Intersectional Pedagogies within Canadian NursMed Education in service of redressing intersecting health and social inequities? Briefly, Decolonial, Intersectional Pedagogies are philosophies of learning that encourage teachers and students to reflect on health through the lenses of settler-colonialism, health equity, and social justice. Drawing on critical ethnographic research methods, we conducted in-depth interviews with 25 faculty members and engaged in participant observation of classrooms in university-based Canadian NursMed Education. The research findings are organized into three major themes, beginning with common institutional features influencing pedagogical approaches. The next set of findings addresses the complex strategies participants apply to integrate Decolonial, Intersectional Pedagogies. Lastly, the findings illustrate the emotional and spiritual toll some faculty members face when attempting to deliver Decolonial, Intersectional Pedagogies. We conclude that through the application of Decolonial, Intersectional Pedagogies teachers and students can support movements towards health equity, social justice, and unlearning/undoing settler-colonialism. This study contributes new knowledge to stimulate dialog and action regarding the role of health professions education, specifically Nursing and Medicine as an upstream determinant of health in settler-colonial nations such as Canada, United States, Australia, and New Zealand.

Garihma (to Care for)

Garihma (to Care for)

Language and Race: Settler Colonial Consequences and Epistemic Disruptions

This article reviews anthropological paradigms that link language and race with a focus on the United States and other settler colonial nations that continue to use language as a tool of racialization to bolster White supremacy. Enduring colonial ideologies, along with Boas's “salvage anthropology,” which separated race and language, have enshrined White racism in anthropological studies of language as well as in the field of linguistic anthropology. Contemporary studies frame linguistic racialization through markedness theory and use paradigms of language ideology, language materiality, and semiotics to forward discursive and ontological analyses that span communities and institutional spaces. I offer “disruption” as a way to consider the impact of epistemologies that inform academic research agendas as well as institutional power dynamics between BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) scholars and White practitioners in linguistic anthropology and discuss how these disruptions could form the basis from which to decolonize aspects of linguistic anthropology.

Revealing Story and Healing Rifts: The Potential of Post-Colonial Placemaking

ABSTRACT Placemaking has become a popular means of imbuing the public realm with vibrancy. Despite placemaking gaining prominence in settler-colonial nations, settler-colonial planning’s approach to place largely remains extractive and exclusionary, while little consideration has been given to the potential of placemaking as a post-colonial endeavour. This article explores the potential for a post-colonial conception of placemaking, developed through investigating three interventions on unceded Kulin Nations land in the south-east of so-called Australia. The findings illustrate how practice grounded in reciprocity, revealing story and, fostering connectedness open portals to placemaking as a post-colonial practice of care and emergent possibility.

Remembering cafecito and other practices for resiliency and survival in the academy

In this article we explore pláticas as a method of refusal for educational practice that embodies a type of Indigenous cosmopolitics that undergird communities we come from. Such an understanding of pláticas generates working towards praxis informed by a refusal that avoids recognition by the university, much like we learn through pláticas the intimate ways our caretakers resist sovereign state power. Such an understanding of pláticas demands a realist practice where we recognize the limits of the work in the university, our capacity as faculty to affect change in a racial capitalist, settler colonial nation. Consequently, pláticas as a method specifically require refusal of the modes of the academy and the neoliberal model of productivity that captures minoritized experiences for the benefit of white, settler society and the university. We describe how these actions inform our academic practice, demonstrating how our research and teaching are not in isolation from the humble communities that birthed us.

Tongan coloniality: contesting the ‘never colonized’ narrative

ABSTRACT The Kingdom of Tonga is a modern nation-state monarchy with a dominant discourse and popular narrative that claims it was ‘never colonized’ or ‘not formally colonized’ by modern foreign powers. In this article the authors argue otherwise, that Tonga was and is colonized, albeit more appropriately expressed through the concepts of coloniality within western modernity’s global paradigm. This is evident through global hegemonic forces that are animated through a local gendered and capitalist Christian nationalism. Tonga’s status is obscured, however, because Tongans are not ‘dispossessed of their land’, and Tonga is a nation that is not dominantly occupied by foreign European invaders, which are central points of contention for globally visible Indigenous peoples within settler-colonial nations. The paper draws upon critical Tongan scholarship that challenges European cultural hegemony and heteropatriarchy in national Tongan sociality to support these claims. We contend that contrary to a popular sentiment of ‘never being colonized’, Tonga’s national formation is made possible and founded within a global context of coloniality that is enacted through locals. This contestation re-interprets Tonga through and beyond coloniality’s world system, which invites radical analyses with global implications, such as re-envisioning Indigeneity.

To Live and Die in El Valle by Oscar Mancinas

Reviewed by: To Live and Die in El Valle by Oscar Mancinas Sophia Martinez-Abbud Oscar Mancinas. To Live and Die in El Valle. Houston: Arte Público P, 2020. 156 pp. Paper, $18.95. Oscar Mancinas’s collection of short stories is as heartbreaking as it is comforting to those of us who grew up around the US–Mexico border. Set in what is called the Arizona desert, To Live and Die in El Valle exposes the complex relationships that border-dwellers build with their landscape, as well as the illegibility of the borderlands experience in other parts of the US and Mexico. The characters in the collection, swept by promises of financial mobility and sociocultural integration, modify their relationships to the border accordingly: [End Page 327] some leave, others arrive, others yet return, and some even refuse to be anywhere else. Mancinas’s collection calls attention to the different and adaptable interpersonal relationships around settler-colonial landscapes to highlight how the needs, wants, and desires of border-dwellers are always stunted by far-reaching, de-placed bordering regimes. The characters in this novel are hardly ever self-identified Chicanes or Mexican American; instead of ethno-national affiliations, characters are marked by their relationship to the desert heat and the historical trauma that the border landscape signifies, complicating any legible categorization of identity. Thus, when characters refer to the “pinches gringos,” it is not only Anglo America that is being indicted but also those beneficiaries of “Don Porfirio’s war to exterminate the Yaquis” (“Melissa Gets Out,” 103). Characters live in the Salt River Pima–Maricopa reservation and have no intention of leaving Arizona to chase dreams of social mobility— particularly not if it means being someone’s “lil’ Indian sidekick on the East Coast” (“Arizona Boy,” 122). Indeed, Kino, a self-hating queer Pima youth uses the lived experience of the reservation to navigate the settler-colonial world: “he said he took the rez everywhere he went, like a rag he could use to wipe away any mess life gave him” (109). This racialized geography— at the borders of not only the US and Mexico but also multiple Indigenous nations like the Maricopa-Pima, Yaqui, and Tohono O’odham lands—is represented in its full complexity through the characters’ interactions with each other and with the world beyond the border. Yet, the collection also challenges the idea that there is a “beyond”— the border is everywhere for these characters. Many of them leave the borderlands to pursue higher education elsewhere, but assumptions of racialization, class affiliations, and cultural prejudice always follow them. In “Tourista,” the narrator, who is a student at a New England college, is summoned to give a tour of the school to a visiting Mexican family; once the father learns that the narrator is not only of Mexican descent but Raramuri as well, any sense of familiarity and levity between the two parties is replaced by the affect of historical trauma and the realities of class-and race-based stratification in settler-colonial nations like Mexico and the [End Page 328] US. In the final story, “The Survivor’s Guide to What’s Next,” a suicidal creative writing professor joins a trauma support group in Boston, but when the narrator shares his own difficulties being a writer of color in the northeast, group members are skeptical about his racialized problems: “What about writing got you stressed? And what’s color got to do with any of this?” (143). Whether it is explicit or implicit, the border structures how these characters are perceived by others, and how they perceive themselves in relation to others. From the first story Mancinas gives readers a framework with which to engage with the collection. “Comenzamos: Falsas Promesas” establishes the noncathartic affect that pervades in each story as characters modify their relations to either side of the border: “It’s been the same darkness their whole lives, even now— even en el otro lado . . . the darkness overflows from the cups, the cans and the bottles, and we try to drink it” (2). El otro lado beckons with its multiple implications: the other side of Mexico, the other side of the rez...

Addressing the elephant in the room: Ethics as an organizing concept in history education

Ethics is the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ in history education in settler-colonial nations. It is foundational to teaching and learning history and engaging with the ongoing effects of the past in the present. Yet its place in history curricula and teaching continues to be ignored, understated, confused, and challenged. This article illustrates how ethical judgment is central to four commonly identified rationales for teaching history in schools: citizenship education, historical consciousness, historical thinking, and difficult histories. The article urges more explicit attention to ethics as an organizing concept in history education to enable students to appreciate the complex lived realities that constitute history and to explore the diverse perspectives that have contributed to sometimes-difficult decisions. We argue that ethics can humanize history, enrich students’ historical understandings, and offer a usable past. However, given the varied approaches to ethical judgment across the four orientations to teaching history, we stress the need for the mindful deployment of ethical judgment in curriculum design. Using an example from the 2021 draft Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories curriculum, we demonstrate what “ethical judgment” could be called upon to do, and the impoverished approach to history education that would exist without it.

‘A day that unites the nation': contesting historical narratives in national day discussions

ABSTRACT National days often represent unifying narratives about nation-states. Recent calls for historical redress within settler-colonial nations, however, have been based on redefinitions of triumphalist historical narratives, incorporating darker histories of colonialisation’s ongoing effects. This has resulted in controversy about national days, especially in Australia (celebrated on the anniversary of British colonisation). Discussions about Australia's national day may show us if, and how, these competing historical narratives can be integrated into a unified national story. A critical discursive examination of Australian news media articles demonstrated the ways historical narratives were deployed to construct competing understandings of the national day’s meaning. Analysis showed how the narrative of colonisation as a force for cultural advancement was used to justify celebrating the current date. In contrast, acknowledging and reckoning with the past was positioned as crucial to moving forward, and, correspondingly, that changing the date was necessary. Respecifying the historical narrative in this way brought together a more complex, nation-building story unifying Indigenous peoples, settlers, and newer migrants in celebrating the (new?) national day. Such reimagined national stories offer potential ‘golden futures’, but risk allowing nations to continue to avoid reckoning with their dark histories, and, especially, the connection of these to present-day inequalities.

Tracing understanding of sovereignty and settler-colonial violence in the Quebec’s Viens Commission (2016–2019)

ABSTRACT The Val d'Or crisis began in 2015 with local Indigenous women naming the violence they faced at the hands of police officers in a news report, which culminated in 37 documented cases yet no criminal charges. In response to the outcry, the provincial ‘Viens Commission: Listening, Reconciliation and Progress' was launched in 2016. The mandate of the commission was to determine if Indigenous people faced discrimination in Quebec's public services. This paper reviews the terms and limits of this commission when it is understood as a discursive production of modern liberal settler-colonial nations. My analysis proposes that the commission, unwittingly or not, is bound by the conditions of existence of ongoing settler-colonization, that is the imperative of land access. The issue of discrimination against Indigenous people can then be discussed and ‘resolved' as disconnected from issues of land sovereignty. As per Goeman’s conception of scales of spatial injustices, it mostly leaves the alienation between the interconnected scales targeted by settler-colonial violence (such as body and land) unchanged. By paying attention to the way violence is presented and managed, I discuss how the commission may be oriented by larger conditions interested in re-settling the present and in veiling land sovereignty questions.

Stringing, Reconnecting, and Breaking the Colonial “Daisy Chain”: From Botanic Garden to Seed Bank

Transported through colonial technologies such as Wardian cases and imperial ships, or simply popped in envelopes and sent via the postal service, the reproductive bodies of plants have been extracted, commodified, reproduced, and proliferated to satisfy human needs and desires. The ongoing and historical movement of plants and their reproductive capacity—known now through the disembodied clinical term germplasm—for economic, social, political, and agricultural purposes provides a lens through which global fertility chains can be studied. I study one such fertility chain: the movement of seeds of plants into frozen vaults known as “seed banks.” While colonial plant movements are associated with exploitative control, newer plant extractions for seed banking are shielded from rebuke because they embody the unquestionably positive valence of “biodiversity conservation.” The view from Australia captures the awkwardness of seed banking as a reproductive technology because the ongoing tensions between Indigenous struggles and settler-colonial nation building, and the urgency around climate change, are far from resolved. The politics of the Anthropocene are particularly poignant in Australia because anthropogenic destruction looks very different when viewed from the perspective of either Indigenous people or settlers.

Do the Lives of Tangata Whenua/First Peoples, Migrants and Refugees Matter in the Systems of the Settler-Colonial Nation State?

Do the Lives of Tangata Whenua/First Peoples, Migrants and Refugees Matter in the Systems of the Settler-Colonial Nation State?