Settler Colonialism Research Articles

No such thing as peacetime: Notes on Gaza, Hannah Arendt and cultural studies

This comment piece, prompted by the ongoing conflict in Gaza and the terrible toll of lives of Gazan people following the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, argues that the field of cultural studies has its origins in a notion of post-war peacetime and that this has created a vocabulary deficit in regard to war, genocide and state violence. Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall have confronted patterns of violence in regard to the urban environment and the policing of Black youth as well as the escalation in day-to-day authoritarianism and the rise of the right. There is a strong case to be made however for the field of cultural studies to more fully draw on political philosophy including Middle East scholarship to engage more directly with the politics of occupation, settler colonialism, neo-nationalism and the far right.

Unsettling settler colonialism: anticolonialism with and against postcolonialism

Unsettling settler colonialism: anticolonialism with and against postcolonialism

Experiencing Negative Racial Stereotyping: The Case of Coloured People in Johannesburg, South Africa

Scholars examining racial stereotyping and prejudice in racially organised social systems have largely focused on how non-White ethnic and racial groups experience racial stereotyping in White-majority national contexts such as the US, Australia and European countries. There is only scant scholarship on experiences of ethno-racial communities in Black-majority countries such as South Africa, a country where Whites are a minority. Even though there is ample scholarly work on racial stereotyping of racial groups in South Africa such as Coloured people, much of it is focused on their experiences during colonial and Apartheid eras. Little is understood about how Coloured people experience racial stigmatisation in post-Apartheid South Africa. This paper addresses this gap. Based on interviews with fourteen Coloured participants from Westbury, Johannesburg, this study found that many interviewees claimed that Coloured South Africans were negatively racially stereotyped as people who use drugs, as aggressive and violent people, as alcoholics and as criminals. Many participants also resisted and countered the negative stereotypes by talking about Coloured people in positive ways, which shows their agency. The negative stereotyping of Coloured people which prevailed during colonial and Apartheid times is still deployed by society to describe Coloured people in post-Apartheid South Africa. To capture the continuity of negative stereotyping in South Africa about Coloured people, I developed the analytical term of ‘perpetual racial stereotyping’. Many decades after the end of the Apartheid system, negative racial stereotyping of Coloured South Africans still continues in everyday life, and Coloured people are still associated with racist prejudices, narratives, discourses and stereotypes that were invented many decades ago by settler colonialism and Apartheid.

Fire exclusion, pyrogenic carbon, and ecosystem function: What have we lost?

Settler colonialism and active fire exclusion greatly eliminated recurrent fire from forests and grasslands in the United States. Pyrogenic carbon (PyC), a key legacy of fire and a stable form of carbon (C) in soils, has inadvertently been lost with the cessation of biomass burning. Using a simple simulation, we estimate that fire exclusion from grasslands over the last 125 years has resulted in a loss of 963–1,028 Tg of PyC, approximately equivalent to a 12% - 22% decline in the soil PyC reservoir. This loss of PyC from grassland ecosystems and the lack of introduction of fresh PyC has likely had a significant impact on soil health in the Great Plains. To rebuild this lost stable C pool and the associated ecosystem function of PyC, we recommend combining Indigenous Knowledge and western science to restore historical fire regimes to forests and grasslands and reintroduce PyC via biochar application to agricultural fields.

Warring Emotions: Anger, Settler Colonialism and Racecraft in Sixteenth-Century Florida

Abstract This is an emotional history of an emotional alliance of French and Indigenous warriors who united to avenge the Spanish massacre of the Huguenot Fort Caroline in Florida in 1565. In this alliance, Indigenous fury was normalised when it served French Protestant interests. However, Protestant representations of Spanish and Indigenous rage used for the black legend presently came to found racist arguments for structural violence in settler colonialism and American white supremacy that are gendered and rooted in bodies. To explain, this essay sets this revenge story within the logics of the sixteenth-century French emotional regime.

Experiments with a Dark Pedagogy: Learning from/through Temporality, Climate Change and Species Extinction (…and Ghosts)

Abstract In this article, we experiment with a form of dark pedagogy, a pedagogy that confronts haunting pasts∼presents∼futures in environmental education. We offer a conceptualisation of ghosts that enables us to creatively explore the duration of things and consider the relationality of time. We examine this through two situated contexts, engaging with entangled, yet differentiated, socioecological issues. The first issue involves the cascading impacts of climate change on the Australian Alps, including intensifying bushfires and threats to the iconic snow gum. The second issue involves the reordering of human/animal relations through processes of settler colonialism that continue to transform land into a commodity, with a significant cultural and material consequence of such colonial harm resulting in the extermination of free-ranging bison herds in the Canadian prairies. Both are unique issues, but both involve impacts of colonisation, loss and natural-cultural hegemony. The dark elements of these Place-specific stories involve noticing and confronting loss and related injustices. In our case, we diffract such confrontations by thinking through these challenging issues and working towards ethical ways of living and learning. In this article, we (re)member ghosts and ponder practices for fostering anticolonial response-abilities and affirmative human/Earth futures.

Rewilding on slow sabbatical: Revisiting Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic”

The human rewilding movement seeks to regain balance between humans and the more-than-human world through particular ways of knowing and doing. During a sabbatical, I engaged in rewilding practices and employed Terrapsychological Inquiry to understand my relationship with the more-than-human world. I sought to learn how this might support my work as a scholar, educator, and change maker in the face of managerialist neoliberal strains in higher education. While the problems of institutions require structural transformations, the professoriate itself must also access its own power. The authors of The Slow Professor suggest the possibilites of mindfulness, pleasure, and relationality. Audre Lorde’s ideas are supportive as she connects agency to the epistemic ground of erotic knowing. Through conversation between my field notes and literature, from the perspective of a white settler, I explore themes of the holding environment, reciprocity/relationality, sensorial attention, and wildness as decolonial pathways to re-existence.

Characterizing Future Authoritarian Governance in the Space Domain

Traditionally, discussions of governance beyond Earth have largely been held to the purview of debates about space law and global governance regimes. Yet, the priority of space exploration among ambitious, tech-industry associated billionaires and its continued potential for militarization suggest that a more dynamic approach may be needed, given that state-sponsorship of extraterrestrial colonial projects may be more akin to partnerships between private and public actors rather than nation-states assuming traditional roles as sole sources of decision-making. Permanent settlements in space will require forms of localized government that may look distinct from contemporary models of political order. This article thus asks a provocative question associated with the empirical record of human colonization and settlement in prior eras: What sort of authoritarian governance is most likely to form in human space settlements during the medium term? Reviewing variations on political order in small-scale colonial settlements in light of recent conceptual work on authoritarian rule, the article identifies three theoretical models of governance that may emerge once beyond Earth settlements become permanent fixtures of human society.

Bordered welfare in Australia: Income management as a bordering technology of neoliberal and colonial governance

In this article we investigate the imposition of compulsory income management on racialised categories of welfare recipient in Australia, identify the contribution made by neoliberalism and settler colonialism in shaping that policy, and characterise income management as a form of ‘bordered welfare’. We begin by acknowledging that key features of neoliberal governance include an ideological aversion to the provision of welfare and the shifting of responsibility onto individuals to promote their own financial security and wellbeing. This has been accompanied by punitive approaches to welfare provision for those perceived to be deficient neoliberal citizens and a commitment to using financial levers, including the welfare system, to shape all manner of human behaviour. We trace the contours of the income management system and report the views of Aboriginal organisations and community leaders about their differential treatment as welfare recipients, noting that restrictions on financial autonomy are a well-documented form of surveillance and control historically directed towards Aboriginal Peoples in Australia. We conclude that this system operates as a form of bordered welfare that classifies certain categories of Aboriginal people as deficient citizens, subjecting them to differential, and detrimental, treatment driven by the ideologies and technologies of both neoliberalism and settler colonialism.

Possessory stratigraphy: land title, dispossession and housing crisis

The myth that Indigenous sovereignty lives in the past is central to the lore of settler colonial societies. Sustaining that myth entails significant material and symbolic work, particularly organised around the recursive placement of the ‘original moment’ of dispossession and colonisation in the past to make the settler sovereignty that has been imposed appear legitimate and complete. This paper presents an analysis of the story of one public housing estate in inner Melbourne, Walker Street, that has been the subject of recursive dispossession and multiple enactments of displacement. We examine the history of title documents at Walker Street, tracing back and forward through time to consider how those land titles have come to be and the work they do to constitute questions of belonging and housing inequality on stolen land. The methodology we develop seeks to understand land title as a literal register of the ongoingness of settler colonialism to reveal how title documents affectively and materially underscore the myth of a thickening settler claim to territory whilst distancing Indigenous sovereignty: we call this a possessory stratigraphy.

Maps, Apps and Race: The Market as a Theoretical Machine

AbstractMy commentary situates Desiree Fields' lecture within a long‐standing movement that, paying attention to real estate data and techniques of property, turned the housing market into a theoretical machine. I understand her intervention as a fourth and pivotal conceptual moment in the study of housing markets and inequalities for the discipline of geography, for it brings racial capitalism and settler colonialism as theoretical starting points to analyse the political economy of housing in the era of digital property technologies. As such, her lecture opens up a welcome, ambitious, yet also uncertain terrain to advance global urban theory under platform capitalism and stimulate relational approaches in housing studies. Discussing the regularities through which race, technology and property shape housing and wealth inequalities across variegated sites of market‐making provides a conceptual horizontality that acknowledges the United States as a testing ground, rather than a ground truth, for the production of geographical knowledge.

‘100 large fruit trees cut down by ISAF’: land, infrastructure and military violence

This article examines the military violence of land use and infrastructure. The analysis discusses the case of the British Army’s Royal Corps of Engineers in 1860s British Columbia and in Helmand, Afghanistan following the post-2001 invasion. It charts how across British colonial and liberal military projects, military infrastructure activities have mobilised towards the goal of capitalist development. Drawing analytic lines between the Royal Engineers’ activities establishing the settler colony and colonial capitalism in British Columbia and their role in imposing liberal social, political and economic norms in Helmand, the article puts forward an account of why, how and with what effect military violence can include things such as the felling of trees, the issuing of private land title, the use of topsoil for road fill or prohibiting local farmers from growing tall crops near a roadway. The central argument of this article is that we should conceptualise and understand military activities such as these as violence. This analysis develops understandings of violence within scholarship addressing coloniality, liberal war, settler colonialism; and land, territory and infrastructure. Beyond the immediate analysis of specifically military violence, this discussion has broader implications for understanding the nexus of infrastructure, land and violence.

Conservation and conviviality in the American West

The emerging field of convivial conservation (CC) draws on the tradition of political ecology (PE) to present a “radical” alternative to contemporary environmentalisms, speaking to the challenges of conservation in the Anthropocene as well as the global ascent of reactionary populism. Building on previous work arguing for the ongoing value of dialogue between PE and the American West, I here develop a conversation between CC and another radical intervention, the collaborative conservation of the West’s so-called “radical center” (RC). Using the nexus of wolf–livestock conflict and public lands grazing, I first trace a genealogical history of western environmental politics before turning to CC as critical corrective to the shortcomings of the RC. Scholarship on the commons and commoning provides an analytical bridge and political toolkit for linking the empirics of place with the aspirational aims of conviviality, and naming and navigating on-the-ground obstacles to collaborative conservation efforts in the region. This dialogue in turn highlights deeply rooted tensions of capitalist political economy and questions of non/belonging rooted in settler colonialism—necessary regional engagements for building from polarized antagonism toward an alternative environmental politics of coexistence and conviviality.

Racial capitalism and women’s horticultural labour in Senegal: neo-housewifisation and the micro-politics of paternalism

ABSTRACT The article addresses the social relations of labour in Senegal a decade after the land rush. Based on an intersectional feminist analysis of three firms, the study found that workers’ subjugation to patriarchal control in their households and workplace capitalists indicate the emergence of labour control associated with settler colonies of Africa. I argue that strategic alliances between patriarchy and racial capitalism influence the mobilisation and control of labour classes: i) through the subordination of women and younger male workers to farm management through the micropolitics of paternalism; and ii) through new spatial fixation forms of previously mobile footloose labour of women and junior workers staying close to their families for work such that they become a compliant and tied labour force. This occurs simultaneously with an urban exodus to the rural and peri-urban areas where the commercial horticultural farms are located. Class consciousness is stymied so resistance is circumscribed, taking limited, individualised forms.

Ozark matters: implications about Black lives

By referring to the White settler post-racial imaginary of the USA, this article examines the slippage, transferability, and political interplay of racial representations into an analysis of the character of Ruth Langmore, a White adolescent woman portrayed in the Netflix series Ozark (2017–2022). Establishing the history of popular culture in the USA as emergent from Blackface, I argue that Ruth is coded, through an eschatological association, fashion styling, and ambient sound, as Black at various points throughout the series. I analyse screengrabs from pop culture and quotes from the showrunner, executive directors, and musical director to demonstrate that the destruction of the Black body is inherited, restricting the survival of Black and Indigenous peoples. Readers are advised that this article contains spoilers about the series Ozark (2017–2022).

Martial(ling) peace at the war museum: Emotion, desires and representations of the war-peace dichotomy

This article investigates the role of emotions and the conceptual use of peace to justify martial violence. Drawing upon empirical evidence collected at the Canadian War Museum, the article explores how representations of war history present militarized violence as both a threat to, and the solution for, global peace. Building on scholarship in IR and Peace Studies that theorizes the relationship between war and peace, this article puts forward a novel analytical concept – martial peace – to investigate this paradox. It theorizes that manoeuvring peace as a justification for military activities not only results in depoliticizing the contexts of conflicts and war, but also serves to euphemize the violence that occurs in the name of peace and within so-called peaceful societies. Using Canada as a case study, the article explores how martial peace obscures settler colonialism and generates affective militarism as key components of nationalist projects.

Manifest Destiny in Southeast Asia: Archaeology of American Colonial Industry in the Philippines, 1898–1987

Abstract At the turn of the twentieth century, American logging companies backed by the US colonial regime initiated extensive extraction in Bikol, Philippines. Industrial infrastructure and the involvement of a newly assembled Bikolano workforce left a profound imprint on the region's landscape. This article discusses a collaborative archaeological project that used archival materials, place-name analysis, ethnographic interviews, discussions with local scholars, satellite mapping, and drone-mounted lidar scans of former industrial sites. Findings shed light on the enduring ramifications of American logging in the early 1900s on settlement patterns, the infrastructure of routes and mobility, the state of industries from Philippine independence in 1946 through the 1980s, and ongoing environmental hazards. These findings emphasize the legacy of American empire, reveal the role of Filipino logging workers in shaping the landscape through settlement decisions, and uncover intricate connections across a pan-Pacific American colonial frontier that was shaped by both extractive and settler colonialism. This article adds to an emerging trend in Americanist archaeology in which archaeology investigates recent historical and even contemporary events.

Resisting and Reclaiming: Squatting as Contentious Urban Politics in the U.S.

Abstract Squatting as contentious politics has been well studied globally, expanding knowledge of how everyday people resist injustices, strive to remake cities, and respond to local/regional conditions. These histories and contemporary struggles have largely been overlooked in the U.S. This article uses qualitative data to compare three recent cases of organized housing occupations in Detroit (2011), Oakland (2019), and Philadelphia (2020) by mothers of color with their children, to better understand how this form of global urban politics manifests in the U.S. Using this comparison, we identify important dimensions that have shaped these three cases of contentious politics and their outcomes, including differences in goals, tactics, and socio-spatial context. We also uncover the diagnostic and prognostic frames reflected in each case: despite common legal violations, each case purposefully diagnoses locally-rooted housing problems and suggests different property-relations as solutions. We find that each case varies in terms of what kind of property squatters target, how these spaces reflect broader structural problems in the U.S. housing market, and what kind of property-relations they envision with these occupations. In turn, our findings also advance understanding of this global urban politics by showing how squatting efforts may dovetail with place-based legacies, such as racial segregation and settler colonialism in the U.S. Researchers have long attended to organized housing struggles in their varied manifestations, but by foregrounding resistance to and reclaiming of property by squatters, we draw out understudied problems and possibilities related to land and housing occupations that are subverted within broader housing studies.

Aboriginal plant foods policy in Australia: a critical discourse analysis

ABSTRACT The Australian continent has over 6500 edible endemic plant species, fourteen of which have been certified for commercial consumption. This paper seeks to critically analyze select Australian Commonwealth Government policy relating to these Aboriginal plant foods. The aim is to purposefully examine the positioning of non-Indigenous people in Aboriginal plant foods policy discourse and reveal tacit settler colonial power relations. This is in response to a call to action from Indigenous scholars to examine how settler colonialism manifests in regulatory mechanisms, such as government policy. This paper offers a theoretically informed critical discourse analysis methodology for examining Australian Commonwealth Government policy relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs. Analysis comprised an explanation of the socio-political context of Aboriginal policymaking in Australia, textual analysis of policy texts related to Aboriginal plant foods and an interpretation of discourse practice to reveal how policy discourse tacitly promotes ideological agendas. This analysis revealed that Australian Commonwealth Government Aboriginal plant foods policy is framed according to settler terms and upholds neoliberal interests. Considerable rethinking is required about how power is exercised in Commonwealth Government policy relating to Aboriginal plant foods to ensure it does not replicate and perpetuate unjust settler colonial power relations.

Temporalities of emergency: the experiences of Indigenous women with traumatic brain injury from violence waiting for healthcare and service support in Australia

ABSTRACT Globally, traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been recognised as a serious health issue not only because of the immediate impacts at the time the injury occurs but even more so due to the longstanding impacts. Even though TBI is a globally recognised condition, the research is disproportionately focused on its incidence in, and immediate and long-term effects on men. A growing body of research suggests that generally, women who experience family violence are at high risk of TBI and suffer its impacts in ways that reflect gendered differences in the patterns and frequency of violence. In Australia, the social and physical costs of TBI are multiplied for Indigenous women, whose experience of disability and access to healthcare lies at the intersection of gender and race in the historical context of settler colonialism. The present study addresses the need for research into the sociodemographic inequalities that affect access to culturally appropriate hospital care, timely response systems, and flexible, safe and engaged social services. This paper draws on data from interviews and focus groups with Indigenous women, hospital staff and community-based service providers and suggests potential pathways for further research in settler-colonial settings elsewhere in the world.