Settler Colonial Studies Research Articles

The settler homeland: racial violence, frontier colonialism, and Filipino repatriation

ABSTRACT On March 1938, representatives from the Philippine Commonwealth and Filipino American community organizations organized the First Official Filipino National Convention in Seattle. A committee proposed to send their less-educated kababayan (countrymen) to the Philippines to colonize Mindanao, the archipelago's Moro (Muslim) and Lumad (non-Muslim and non-Christian Indigenous) South. For Filipino American leaders, state expansion into the archipelago's south was a project of recuperating the utility and respectability of destitute Filipino migrant men, and thus, for the growth of the provisional nation itself. By following Filipino repatriation schemes within migrant communities, and their relationship with the Philippine state's aspirations to expand into the south, I argue that Filipino diasporic nationalism - the consolidation of migrants' affiliations not with their regions and hometowns, but with a bourgeois patriotism that lays claim to the entire Philippine archipelago - constitutively imagined the ‘home country' as a settler homeland, a simultaneous place of homeward return as well as economic development and conquest. Probing the intersections between Asian American history, Southeast Asian statecraft, and settler colonial studies, I critical reconsider two fundamental questions in Asian migrant life: Where exactly is the home country—and what does it mean to ‘go back to where you came from’?

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.

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FRENCH AND ZIONIST SETTLER COLONIALISM IN ALGERIA AND PALESTINE

The paper explores and analyzes similarities and differences between French settler colonialism in Algeria and Jewish Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. This study focuses on the history and historical development of French settler colonialism and Jewish Zionist settler colonialism by deploying the analytical framework of settler colonialism, and the comparative history of settler colonialism. Settler colonial studies and comparative settler colonialism allow for gaining insight into the genesis, and development of settler colonies. The intention behind the application of comparative settler colonialism, specifically in juxtaposing French settler colonialism in Algeria and Jewish Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine is to identify overlaps, similarities as well as differences between these settler polities. The results of this study have shown that French and Zionist settler colonialism share numerous similarities and features. The most important feature that these settler colonialisms adhere to is the logic of elimination, which is defined as policies and practices of settler colonial policies aimed at the dispossession, displacement, ethnic cleansing, genocide, as well as cultural assimilation of the indigenous populations. In this case, both French and Zionist settler colonialisms have subscribed and followed the logic of the elimination of the natives. Yet as opposed to French settler colonialism, Zionist settler colonialism has been less interested in cultural assimilation and integration of the indigenous people of Palestine into settler society. Another conspicuous difference between French and Zionist settler colonialism is that while French settler colonialism is already defunct, Zionist settler colonialism has managed to survive and persist. The current study contributes to settler colonial studies and the comparative history of settler colonialism. Moreover, our research can inform other studies in the field of settler colonialism, and we suggest that more research into comparative settler colonialism needs to be undertaken.

‘These ones will learn it too’: transforming relationships with Chelsea Vowel's ‘kitaskînaw 2350’

ABSTRACT Reading representations of relationships in Chelsea Vowel's story ‘kitaskînaw 2350’ from the graphic anthology This Place: 150 Years Retold, I consider how portrayals of expanded relationships are a call to action – a generative lens through which settler-colonial studies may engage with anticolonial teachings. I aim to demonstrate how reading Indigenous literatures can expand and transform the settler-colonial imagination that has been taught to understand the world through a lens of exclusive ideologies like white supremacy and, broadly, the linear and the binary in relation to gender, time, and ways of being. Looking to Vowel's story as an example, I contend that such work is of particular significance to the ongoing surge of Indigenous literary and creative production and to the dismantling of settler-colonial teachings in so-called Canada. This analysis of ‘kitaskînaw 2350’ underlines complex connections between settler-colonialism, knowledge creation, language, imagination, power, and Indigenous literatures. Joining many other scholars who are showing how Indigenous literatures generate new imaginaries that can transform colonial behaviors and systems, I read representations of Indigenous-led worlds and anticolonial teachings as an urgent call to action to heal.

Settler colonial studies: a historical analysis

ABSTRACT This text is a historical analysis of Settler Colonial Studies (SCS). Partly because most SCS scholars in principle only see those polities as settler colonies whose settlers eventually became a majority and gained independence—i.e. principally the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand—some historians have critiqued it. At the same time, historians have used it to revisit their research. Throughout, though, they have engaged SCS in area- and period-specific journals, without bundling their insights. This historical analysis of SCS addresses that issue. It has two parts. As shorter first part unpacks the historical-political background for SCS’s Anglo-bias: the similar and linked domestic political trajectories of Canada, the United States, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia’s indigenous peoples from the 1950s and their centrality in the internationalization of indigenous politics from the late 1960s to the 1990s. A longer second part analyzes three issues both central to SCS and relevant to historians: structuralism, colonialism versus settler colonialism, and the settler-native binary.

The endurance and expanse of settler colonial history

ABSTRACT This piece is a response to Cyrus Schayegh’s analysis of the political context behind the emergence and foci of Settler Colonial Studies. I explore questions of teleology and geography as they relate to Caribbean history and U.S. militarism.

Beyond the big tent: recontextualizing settler colonial studies

ABSTRACT This reflection on the field of Settler Colonial Studies uses the “big tent” metaphor to ask what is seen to be encompassed in the field; who is left out and how attached its practitioners are not just to teleology but to the dialectic logics of colonialism itself. Drawing on Burton's 30 years of work in the field of colonial and imperial history, it queries some of the premises of settler colonial studies' remit asks how attention to gender and sexuality impacts the direction of the field and posits the dialectic alongside telos as a site of critical tension for thinking about approaches to subject and method.

Defining settler colonialism: thinking with categories and concepts

ABSTRACT This essay critically analyzes a few key concepts central to the field of Settler Colonial Studies by responding to Cyrus Schayegh's article, ‘Settler Colonial Studies: A Historical Analysis.’ It aims to challenge a series of West-centered conventional assumptions and start the dialogue that would re-define the field and its significance in the years to come.

Canadian settler colonialism: Structure, event, relationship, or process?

AbstractGeography scholarship examining Canadian colonialism often draws upon concepts and categories from the field of Settler Colonial Studies, including Patrick Wolfe's definition of settler colonialism as a “structure rather than an event.” In this brief intervention, I argue that historical Marxist debates about structuralism and social class have important lessons for the way geographers characterize Canadian colonialism today. The definition of class as both relationship and process is especially relevant, because Indigenous intellectuals and activists tend to speak about (de)colonization in similar terms. By reframing Canadian colonialism as relationship and process rather than structure, we can better engage Indigenous criticisms of Settler Colonial Studies, understandings of (de)colonization, and epistemologies and ontologies.

Ho‘ailona

This article asks what it means for conservation scientists to label a member of an endangered, endemic species homeless. By considering the boundary-crossing figure of Ho‘ailona, a partially blind Hawaiian monk seal who was declared homeless and translocated six times between 2008 and 2009, the article argues that the language of home points to the ongoing operations of colonialism in Western conservation. Reading the discourse of homelessness offers a methodology for tracing the histories and manifestations of colonial logics as they circulate in conservation science. At the same time, the article considers how Kānaka Maoli articulated a contrapuntal claim to home that positioned Ho‘ailona as belonging in his natal waters and among a multispecies community of caregivers. Bringing together critical homelessness studies and settler colonial studies, the essay examines how settler societies and institutions use endangered marine species to make specific claims to home and, by extension, erase Indigenous claims to place.

The Settler Supernatural: Contemporary Taiwanese Popular Culture, the Environment, and the Nativisation of Han Taiwanese Legends

Abstract This article examines how Han Taiwanese myths and urban legends have been associated with the environment and native fauna in the best-selling popular non-fiction publication Monstrous Taiwan and the hit horror film The Tag-Along. This article also looks at how these works can be considered within the framework of settler colonial studies in East Asia. Both works are interested in intervening in popular culture and genre cinema while reframing the horror or supernatural genre as particularly Taiwanese, drawing on urban legends and traditional folk tales. However, the creators of these works persistently characterise Han Taiwanese legends as interchangeable with the native fauna of Taiwan. This move positions Han Taiwanese as inheritors of the natural environment of Taiwan while minimising or, in some cases, tokenising the presence of indigenous Taiwanese people.

Denaturalizing Dispossession in the Political Ecology of the American West: Reassessing the History of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and Its Implications for Indigenous Land and Water Rights

Indigenous dispossession has been left out or relegated to the historical background of much of the political ecology of the American West, naturalized as a precursor to natural resource policy rather than as a direct and ongoing consequence of it. This article offers a framework for denaturalizing dispossession, drawing on Indigenous and settler colonial studies to examine the specific legal, political, and territorial processes by which dispossession is produced and contested over time. This framework is used to examine the long-overlooked history of Indigenous dispossession wrought by the Los Angeles Aqueduct in the early twentieth century. In-depth archival, legal, and ethnographic research reveals how, in the 1930s, this history became obscured by naturalizing discourses that continue to be invoked in disputes over tribal land and water rights today. The study underscores the complex intersections of law, history, and justice in struggles over dispossession and highlights the need for more engagement on these issues from political ecologists of the American West.

Of Mothers and Mutants

This essay brings counterhumanist and queer feminist approaches to bear on issues of maternity, intimacy, loss, cartography, and affect. I turn to Mario Acevedo Torero’s mural The Rage of La Raza (1974) to consider lost histories, lost subjects, and—extending Sylvia Wynter—a genre of loss. I contend that Torero memorializes Mexican Indigenous and Asian American mothers who, rendered absent by the violences of US legislation and court rulings, continue to haunt the legal and extralegal systems of classification that have “queered” their Chicanx and mixed-race Asian American children as mutants and outsiders. By conjuring these ghost mothers, this artist resists the erasure of unruly intimacies between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and related genealogies of knowledge, that has enabled racial, settler, and imperial regimes of liberal humanist governance. Furthermore, in using the mural as a map, Torero expands the borderlands into Asian waters, allowing the viewer to feel and think beyond the strictures of dominant nationalisms. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates the valuable interventions that Chicanx aesthetic practices can make within multiple subfields of critical ethnic studies, settler colonial studies, and Chicanx feminist studies.

Cultural Robbery, the Carceral System and the Settler Coloniality of Multiculturalism in Moroccan-Occupied Western Sahara

Cultural appropriation or exploitation in settler colonial studies occurs when a settler group adopts the cultural practices of the Indigenous group. Appropriation often compounds the marginalization and silencing of the Indigenous group, and therefore overlaps with, and facilitates, the settler colonial tactic of cultural domination. The latter seeks to eliminate the Indigenous group by way of forced assimilation into the dominant settler culture. In this article, I focus on the purpose and intended effect of the parallel pursuit of cultural exploitation and cultural domination. I argue that the side-by-side enactment of such settler colonial strategies amounts to cultural robbery: the settler state ensures exclusive use or possession of Indigenous cultural practices, markers and heritage. It adopts the latter as its own whilst simultaneously prohibiting—through the carceral system—the use and practice of the culture by the Indigenous community. Using the case of Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, I focus on the evolution of Morocco’s settler colonial strategies in the cultural realm from its 1975 invasion of Western Sahara until today. I argue that Morocco’s policy of cultural domination over the Indigenous Saharawi population, initially enacted alongside other settler colonial genocidal policies, has made way for cultural appropriation alongside domination. This is, I argue, part of a wider Moroccan regime effort to mobilize “multiculturalism” to quell political opposition.

The search for a promised land: three settlement plans, three agents, and three handbooks for Icelandic migrant-settlers from 1875

ABSTRACT The nineteenth century was a time of mass migration from Europe to North America, and in the last quarter of the century, Icelanders joined the flow of European settlers. Icelanders were one of the last European peoples in this period to start sailing west, between 1870 and 1914; but, one in every five Icelanders moved to North America. This article looks at three handbooks for prospective Icelandic migrant-settlers – all published in 1875 – and the settlement plans they promoted (in Nova Scotia, today’s Manitoba, and Alaska), to analyse the information presented to prospective settlers, especially depictions of land and its inhabitants. While the texts, written or translated by three Icelandic immigration agents, vary greatly in their scope and tone, all perceive Icelanders as desirable settlers, suitable for advancing the goals of settler colonialism, and portray the areas as terra nullius, minimizing perceived Indigenous presence in the places marked for European settlement. The texts show that prospective Icelandic emigrants reading these booklets were aware that they contributed to and benefited from Indigenous dispossession, and that Icelanders and other ‘ethnic’ migrant-settlers in British settler colonies should be considered in settler colonial studies, as settler colonialism and migration policy are intimately linked.

Sport and Transnational Indigenous Solidarity From Turtle Island to Palestine? Examining Iroquois Nationals’ 2018 Trip to Israel

The Iroquois Nationals’ participation in the 2018 World Lacrosse Championship was welcomed by the hosting Israeli state despite the call for boycott from the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and pro-Palestinian groups’ appeal for Indigenous solidarity. This paper discusses the historical/geopolitical contexts of this event and examines the responses from multiple parties, including the team representatives, pro-Israel groups, and Indigenous media/activists. By bringing together literature in Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, Palestinian studies, and critical sport studies, it highlights the challenges for transnational solidarity in the sport industry as well as the urgency for deepening an internationalist anticolonial/anti-imperialist political consciousness among athletes and sport organizations, Indigenous or non-Indigenous alike.

Indigeneity, Subalternity and Lakota Territorial Resurgence: Disrupting Urban Settler Colonial Order in a US Bordertown

At first glance, the concept of the subaltern seems to perfectly describe the position of Native Americans within contemporary US society, yet, until recently, it was not commonly used by Indigenous studies scholars. This has changed partly due to the emergence of the field of settler colonial studies, born of the dialogue between postcolonial and Indigenous studies. In particular, scholars have looked at the historical and contemporary role cities are playing in highlighting patterns of dispossession and resistance. In the article, we look at the contributions of this new theoretical framework, then focus on the case of Rapid City, SD, presenting its history of dispossession and violence, and showing how Indigenous resurgence challenges that history.

A call to reshape our desires: contesting the “inevitable answer” of inclusion within empire

ABSTRACTWhile increased college access is widely celebrated for racialized peoples, the end goal of inclusion maintains engagement with and desires for wellbeing within the U.S. white supremacist settler state. This paper examines a culturally relevant college preparation program designed primarily for Mexican-origin youth in California to consider the college-going competencies and desires the program socializes youth through and to. Drawing from educator and youth pláticas embedded within an ethnography of the Bridge Program, this scholarship argues that the competencies youth were socialized into for college-going purposes simultaneously prepared them to uphold the settler colonial state. Engaging language socialization and settler colonial studies perspectives, this paper finds that Bridge Program youth were socialized into understandings of better lives as only possible within U.S. empire by framing college as an almost singular pathway to wellbeing. This work calls for anticolonial desires, visions of and pathways to better lives beyond empire’s boundaries.

Extractive Labor: A Lethal Legacy of Racialized Colonial Rule

How and why does colonial domination kill off the very labor it depends on? While settler colonial studies provide one of the only theorizations of the systemic elimination of populations, they see it as antithetical to labor exploitation, and thus cannot answer this question. I therefore build on recent critiques of settler colonial studies to develop the concept of racialized extractive labor regimes: race marking labor as disposable, as realizing value through expending workers’ lives. I then articulate these dynamics through a comparison of the highly divergent cases of early colonialism in Peru and what is now the United States, first across initial settlement and then as they shifted to racialization decades later. While settler colonial studies emphasize land acquisition as colonialism’s defining feature, my comparison reveals that elites’ drive for indelible inequality actually shapes colonial projects. And in order to maintain their vaunted positions, elites ultimately construct racialized extractive labor regimes that predicate their domination on the regularized elimination of racialized Others. This analysis therein provides new insights into the elitist nature of colonialism and the logics of elimination and racialization through which it runs.

Slowness as warfare: Towards a relational approach to political violence in the West Bank

AbstractEngaging with recent applications of the concept of slow violence to the ongoing political developments in the West Bank, this review article argues that the relational approach offered by feminist geopolitics facilitates the conception of slow violence and warfare as part of a single complex of violence. The article traces feminist geopolitics' contribution to research on geographies of slow violence on the one hand, and to the analyses produced within the fields of critical geopolitics and critical war studies on the other, exposing that scholarly work exploiting the relational approach generated within and across these areas of research enables a broader understanding of political violence's tangled operations. Based on the analysis of the recent scholarly engagement with slow violence in the West Bank, the article proposes that thinking of slowness as a form of warfare captures the complex entanglement of different modalities of violence as they materialize in specific spatio‐temporal circumstances. Moreover, such an approach contributes to the further reinvigoration of feminist geopolitics with insights generated within (settler) colonial studies.