Settler Identity Research Articles

Flags, Stamps and Coats of Arms: Symbols and the Making of Identity in Southern Rhodesia

ABSTRACT The result of the 1922 referendum saw the white settlers in Southern Rhodesia vote for ‘responsible government’ rather than become the fifth province of the Union of South Africa. Prior to the granting of responsible government in September 1923, the territory had been governed by the British South Africa Company. It was the company’s arms and flag which were first used in the territory. These remained true to the prescripts of the company’s charter by reflecting its British origins and character. This nascent settler identity would evolve and consolidate around an essentially British character which highlighted allegiance to the Crown. This article shows how these, and the set of national symbols subsequently adopted by the colony, were a visible manifestation of the settlers’ ‘exceptional attachment’ to Britain and a reflection of their identity as being primarily British rather than Rhodesian.

Potential sites of transgression in Michael Crummey's The Innocents: Questioning theoretical and ethical boundaries

AbstractThe article offers a reading of Michael Crummey's The Innocents (2019) through the lens of potential transgressions, such as the crossing of moral boundaries, cultural appropriation, or the secondary colonization of the Indigene. It argues the validity of reading Canadian invader–settler stories in the light of postcolonial studies and discusses the hazards of literary representation of First Nations in historical fiction produced by non‐Native writers. Secondly, the critical analysis focuses on the subversive rewriting of the biblical tale of Adam and Eve as Crummey's strategy for negotiating his (island's) settler identity. Finally, the chapter problematizes the incestuous nature of Ada and Evered's relationship as a potential though highly disputable transgression.

"Odd but recognizable": Indigenous Epistemologies and Indo-Creole Belonging in Cyril Dabydeen's Dark Swirl

Abstract: Recent scholarship across postcolonial, settler colonial, and critical Indigenous studies has interrogated the ascription of a settler identity to racialized communities whose own presence on Indigenous land may have been the result of the violent processes of colonialism. Simultaneously, this body of work has attended to how even these communities can replicate settler modes of belonging that marginalize Indigenous Peoples. In the postcolonial Caribbean, a discourse of labor and land ownership arguably consolidated Indo- and Afro-Creole belonging in such a way. This article examines literary fiction's role in imagining other ways of belonging for East Indians in Guyana. It illuminates how Cyril Dabydeen's Dark Swirl (1988) circumvents the framework of labor, land ownership, and enclosure to articulate a mode of belonging that unfolds by engaging with Indigenous histories and epistemologies. The resultant rearrangement of the East Indian characters' understanding of the land they inhabit is key to the novel's articulation of creole belonging. Dark Swirl thus intervenes in scholarship on creolization in the Caribbean that has often either ignored East Indians or reproduced the discourse of Indigenous disappearance.

Embodying Ethnic and Settler Identities: An Analysis of the English-Language Korean Play Sim Cheong (1938) in Hawai'i

Abstract: In 1938, Koreans in Hawai'i premiered an English-language play, Sim Cheong ( Sim Chung ), at the Honolulu Academy of Arts to celebrate the Korean Spring Festival. Sim Cheong is an adaptation by a second-generation Korean of a cherished Korean folktale, The Story of Sim Cheong , emphasizing filial piety. This study uses Sim Cheong to examine the cultural milieu of 1930s Hawai'i and the complex identities interwoven within the Korean diaspora, revealing efforts by Koreans to preserve their ethnic pride while creating a sense of closeness with the white upper class. The adaptation signalled a dramaturgical shift from the original story, often framed in the context of Confucianism and Buddhism, to a theatrical production incorporating musical performances and revised storylines. This shift is encapsulated in the contrast between the play's downplaying of the boat scene, commonly regarded as pivotal in illustrating the protagonist's commitment to filial piety, and accentuation of the scene depicting the initial encounter between Sim Cheong and the King, presenting independent and diverse elements of Korean culture and conveying undertones of Christian belief. Through this analysis of local political, social, and cultural realms, this study identifies dual identities existing in the Korean diaspora surpassing the confines of a generic pan-ethnic Asian American identity, unraveling the intricate interplay between the preservation of ethnic pride and the imperative of assimilation within the broader sociocultural landscape.

Coyote Killing: Where Species and Identities Collide

Abstract Although predator killing is a global phenomenon, few studies interrogate the individual and societal drivers of choosing lethal versus non-lethal actions towards coyotes. Results here derive from 48 in situ, semi-structured interviews conducted during 2015–2017 with rural residential and agricultural landowners in the Foothills Parkland Region of Alberta, Canada. Interviews recorded landowner experiences with coyotes, and their perceptions, values, beliefs, animal husbandry practices, and actions towards coyotes. Invoking a critical geography perspective and grounded theory methods, we found the practice of coyote killing and anti-coyote sentiments to be deeply entangled with and mutually reconstituted by constructs of “masculinity,” “rurality,” and colonial settler identity. Coyote killing also appeared as a form of discursive power, arising from urban-rural tensions. Finally, geographies of local history, family, and community intersected with identity, gendered-labor, and power – placing coyotes in a vicious and ongoing cycle of oppression and violence.

The Mennonite case for counter-sovereignty through Indigenous assimilation: Settler colonialism, self-determination and relation to place in religious identity

This essay analyses settler colonialism’s impact on religious settler identity through one community’s perceptions and interactions with Indigenous peoples. It combines a normative commitment to Indigenous self-determination with an empirical study of Mennonite settlement narratives by drawing on Indigenous sources to interpret Mennonite descriptions of Indigenous communities between 1880 and 1939. Specifically, using two central characteristics of Indigenous religion and politics to frame the analysis – relationality and self-determination – reveals how Mennonites narrated Indigenous presence to establish their own self-determination. The study identifies the evaluative categories that Mennonites used to narrate Indigenous communities and then uses those categories with a focus on relationality and self-determination to assess North American Mennonite religious history in the same period. It demonstrates how Mennonites’ arguments for Indigenous peoples’ assimilation to settler society were motivated not just by Christian conviction but also by their desire to secure their own sovereignty. Mennonites’ interest in assimilation has at least as much to do with their relation to place as it does with their religious claims.

Nordic Settler Identities in Colonial Kenya: Class, Nationality and Race in Bror and Karen Blixen’s Transimperial Lives

ABSTRACT The British East African Protectorate began enticing white settlement to the country in early twentieth century. This article focuses on the white settler identity and experience of a Nordic couple, Bror and Karen Blixen, in colonial East Africa in the 1910s, when they shared ownership of a coffee farm near the Ngong Hills. Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke was related to the Swedish royal family, his wife and future author Karen Blixen a member of a wealthy Danish family, whose money was used to purchase the coffee farm in 1913. This article examines how the Blixens as a Nordic couple fitted in the white settler colonial community and how they related to their African servants, farm workers and neighbours. Furthermore, it discusses the problems Bror Blixen’s Swedish nationality caused to the couple during World War I, when the protectorate’s Swedes were suspected of harbouring German sympathies.

Punishment in an Early Colonial Society: The Inglorious History of Wellington Gaol, 1844–1931

In 1844, a replica of the famous Pentonville Prison was built in Wellington, New Zealand, shortly after the commencement of British colonisation. It never matched the size and scope of the London original and was demolished in 1931. However, the existence of this incongruous New Zealand institution raises important sociological issues. First, it will be argued that it had symbolic importance in maintaining settler identity with the homeland. Second, it had a functional importance in terms of the way it represented the ability of the colonial government to subdue any recalcitrant who sought to challenge the authority of British imperial power. Third, its closure came about because of longstanding pressure from local citizens, for whom its presence had become an unwanted stain on the otherwise untainted local landscape, reflecting New Zealand’s transition from a frontier society to a modern society with the sensibilities associated with it.

The Saints and the State: The Mormon Troubles in Illinois

The Saints and the State: The Mormon Troubles in Illinois

“Black But Comely”

Constructing a coherent sense of communal identity was far from easy for early Americo-Liberian settlers. They felt the need (a) to distinguish themselves from a racist ‘white civilisation’ while nevertheless claiming to be among the ‘civilised’; (b) to set themselves apart from black Americans in the U.S. while remaining equally committed to anti-slavery and abolition; and (c) to emphasise their superiority over indigenous ‘heathens’ while at the same time staking their own claim to ‘true Africanness.’ From previous studies, we know a great deal about the material challenges of life on the shores of West Africa. But how did Americo-Liberians grapple with the ideological and psychological complexities of their contradictory position as black anti-slavery settler-colonists? This essay argues that mid-nineteenth-century narratives of exploration into the black republic’s hinterland are a particularly promising source for scholars interested in examining how Americo-Liberians sought to contain the conflicting push and pulls that threatened to unravel their attempts at self-definition. More specifically, the essay demonstrates that in one such travel narrative – J. L. Sims’s “Scenes in the Interior of Liberia” (1858) – intertextual references are not merely ornamental, but instead deployed strategically, in an attempt to stabilise the disconcerting volatility of Americo-Liberian settler identity. Keywords: travel writing; intertextuality; settler-colonialism; Liberian literature; collective identity

Living in and Leaving Paradise: Motherhood as an Explanation for Leaving the Settlements

This article examines the ways in which National Religious women who grew up in settlements in Judea and Samaria during the 1980s and 1990s discuss living in these settlements and then leaving as adults to raise their families within the Green Line. It is based on two theoretical fields: the shaping of settler identity based on masculine religious and military ideologies; and theories of motherhood and domesticity. Women’s daily activities in the place are considered to have normalizing power that helps convey the message that life in the area is a virtuous choice. The article is based on 14 semi-structured, in-depth interviews (conducted in 2016–2018). The interviews were analyzed to examine the explanations for leaving. These explanations have little to do with demography, security, or gender. Instead, the women use the same messages on which they were educated, including their emotional, maternal, and feminine roles and an emphasis on the establishment of settlements. Their reasoning enables women to declare their connection to the settlements and the messages underlying them while presenting their unique stories in which the political-ideological component is secondary to the maternal one.

"Is a Nation to Be Sold like the Skin of a Beaver!": James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie and the Dilemma of Countersovereignty

James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking series is often characterized as a literary staging ground, on which Cooper deploys, tests, and evaluates various political principles and representative figures. The Prairie, set on what Charles Adams refers to as the "blank slate" of the newly purchased Louisiana Territories, is exemplary of this sort of function, as demonstrated through the conflicting modes of proprietorship and legal authority represented by Ishmael Bush, Mahtoree, and Duncan Uncas Middleton. Yet while in most recent scholarship what is staged in the Leatherstocking novels is either an arrangement of competing political theories or the duality of settler identity formation, this essay argues that The Prairie engages a more foundational, and explicitly geopolitical, concern. The fundamental tension of the novel, between its historically deterministic opening and closing and its highly convoluted and contested middle, is suggestive of a powerful anxiety, exacerbated by the Louisiana Purchase, over the basis of American sovereignty as it takes shape in response to Indigenous forms of territoriality. Read this way, the depiction of conflicting modes of property law, framed by the novel's narrative tension, appear as symptoms of the dilemma of what Manu Karuka has termed countersovereignty, made apparent as the Bush family are forced to acknowledge that the "empty empire" of the Louisiana Territories is not so empty after all.

Transatlantic Letters and Settler Identities: Jane White Writes to Ireland, 1849–1865

This article reads one side of a transatlantic correspondence, that of Irish emigrant Jane White, who relocated to Canada in 1849, during a time of high migration from Ireland to Canada. The point of reading her one-sided correspondence is because it challenges scholars in both material and theoretical ways. Jane’s letters are a richly complicated source for such an undertaking, allowing readers to assess the impact of material circumstances and the “mechanics of colonization” as they shape and inform the epistolary platform upon which Jane White rehearses Protestant and middle-class identities. These identity affiliations—which act as connective tissue to the land of her birth, and which she reinforces in letter writing—are concretely tied to the processes of colonization and settlement, but complicated by being Irish. Despite the relative comfort of her family, Jane’s letters to Eleanor Wallace reveal a young Irish woman struggling to maintain her identity in the face of prejudice. The following examination of her letters suggests ways of situating the personal letter in settler histories by focusing on Jane White’s engagement with questions of identity, social status, and colonial relations within the epistolarium, the discursive world that is shaped by and created within the dialogic field of the letter and the material factors of its creation.

Mateship with Brumbies: Horses, Defiance and Indigeneity in the Australian Alps

ABSTRACTThe feral horses of the Australian Alps—“brumbies”, as they are usually called—have occupied considerable space in settler-Australian culture since the 1890 publication of “The Man from Snowy River”. From the 1980s onwards, brumbies have been culled periodically to preserve “native” alpine ecosystems, which have not evolved to support hoofed animals. Such culls, however, are often highly controversial. This article uses Sara Ahmed's concept of affective economies to explain why the culling of brumbies generates such heated debate and intense public outpourings of emotion. I relate the hyperaffective public performances of brumby supporters to a crisis in settler identity in Australia: as Indigenous activism has undermined the legitimacy of settler claims to belonging, some settlers have begun to use brumbies to assert their own kind of indigeneity.

“The lissome lady from Spain”: building Canadian modernism and flamenco dance in performance archives

ABSTRACT This article recovers the training and early career of Barbara Mary Beck “Conchita Triana” (1912–2006), the first professional flamenco dancer in Canada, whose professional career spanned from 1938 into the late 1950s. This recovery entails an exploration of archival records, analysis of the role of Spain for modernist Canadian artists across disciplines, performance histories of Canadian, American, and Spanish artists, and close reading of archival dance notation. Together, these contexts allow us to analyze the construction and emergence of a Canadian settler identity in the 1930s alongside a home-grown Canadian flamenco dance. Performance of an ostensible exotic import – on the stage and through the appropriation of Spanish identity – reinforces the legitimacy of white settler identity through the “mosaic” metaphor that dominates 1920s and 1930s conceptualization of Canada, positioning itself for the first time as a nation distinct from Britain. Spanish cultural performance as a tool to explore Canadian settler identity remains relevant today, as Canadian flamenco artists continue to interrogate their own national identities through the artform.

Pioneers, progress and the sublime: Blue Mountains tourist promotion, 1885–1894

This paper explores the representation of the Blue Mountains portrayed in a handful of tourist guidebooks (published 1885–1894) for the region. It argues that tourist promoters continued to depict the area in terms of the romantic sublime, not only because they believed tourists sought a transcendental experience, but also to accentuate the heroic achievements of the colonial explorers who had first attempted to cross the mountains. Finally, it suggests that tourist literature was an important medium for the dissemination of myths relating to a collective search for a settler identity, and therefore presented a one-dimensional vision of the past that did not properly account for the problematic history of settler-Indigenous relations.

Excess aspirations: Migration and urban futures in post-earthquake Christchurch

Migration and urbanisation are characterised by multiple temporalities: arrival, durations of migration, daily rhythms, migration regulation, aspirations for urban futures and the impacts of changing social, economic or environmental fortunes. In this paper, we address the temporalities of migration and urbanisation by focusing on the post-disaster context of Christchurch, New Zealand, which suffered destructive earthquakes in 2011 and 2012. While the immediate post-quake context was characterised by outward migration, rebuilding has occurred through the migration of thousands of workers and their families, particularly from Asia, Europe and the Pacific. The presence of new migrants has led to unexpected migrant-driven diversification that has potential to reconfigure Christchurch’s image as a city that privileges whiteness over Indigenous and non-white settler identities. The migration of rebuild workers, however, also occurs in a national context of increasingly stratified migration management with few opportunities for migrants to settle long-term. Drawing on interviews with stakeholders in central government, local organisations and migrants themselves we examine countervailing aspirations and responses that emerged within the earthquake rebuild: attempts by local organisations to reconfigure Christchurch as a diverse future-oriented city, migrant aspirations and tactics for long-term settlement and family stability and national government efforts to contain aspirations for a diverse future-oriented city that exceed the intent of migration management. Through this analysis our paper examines the discrepant temporalities of migration and urban futures involved in the rebuilding of post-quake Christchurch, as well as the multiple forces that impinge on the very possibility of migrant-led diversification of cities.

William of Tyre, Translatio Imperii and the Genesis of the First Crusade: Or, the Challenges of Writing History

The article offers a contribution to wider dialogues on history creation and the analytical superstructures that influence how authors use the past to construct and legitimise identities tied to conquest and settlement. It takes as its case study the twelfth-century Chronicon of the Jerusalemite writer William of Tyre, and his crafting of an account of the First Crusade that demonstrated the legal validity of the new Latin polities created in the Levant and Syria (the so-called crusader states). It demonstrates his use of translatio imperii (translation of empire) to frame settlement as a continuation of Christian authority in the East. This work also marks the changing purpose of his writing away from a solely Eastern Latin audience towards promoting crusading from Europe. In paying attention to this shift, this article demonstrates how subsequent edits he made to his work(s) led to narrative dilemmas and discontinuities that spoke to the fragmented social and political value of crusading between the Latin East and Latin West. In other words, this article offers an important window onto not only the historians’ craft, but also the value of incorporating premodern works into modern historiographical debates, especially those surrounding notions of European settler identities.

Debating San provenance and disappearance: Frontier violence and the assimilationist impulse of humanitarian imperialism

This article examines how ideals of humanitarian imperialism informed debate over the provenance and future of Cape San following the Second British Occupation of the Cape Colony. The discussion explores the plight of San along the Cape frontier and how their demise became a focal point in a trans-colonial exchange over the desirability of the incorporation of indigenes as British colonial subjects. Prominent humanitarian protagonists, such as John Philip, called for the integration of San as colonial subjects, owing to the supposed protection this would afford them. The humanitarian campaign for the extension of subjecthood over Cape San was argued on the grounds that it would fend off the devastating consequences of settler colonialism. The principle also applied to indigenous peoples in settler colonies across the expanding empire. This view was not without its detractors, who opposed humanitarian representations of settlers as rapacious and responsible for frontier conflicts. The article argues that the fate of Cape San held a more prominent place in early nineteenth-century contestations over settler identity, frontier relations, and the effectiveness of missions to 'civilise' indigenes than has been recognised.

Conscience and Controversy

Conscience and Controversy