Settler Subjects Research Articles

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.

Meditations on Hungry Listening

This assemblage of thoughts from a white settler musicologist responds to a cluster of ideas in Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening—hunger, listening, settler subjectivity, extractivism—as they converge in both the long history of “Western” listening and the author’s first efforts to think through and away from her own extractive impulses.

Playing Africans

Africa Day was a practice of elementary school educational performances in kibbutzim, which featured mimetic impressions of Africans by children. As a mode of settler subject formation, Africa Day sustained imagined, “borrowed” indigeneity, while effectively obfuscating Palestinian indigenous existence. As a complex site of simultaneous reiteration and renegotiation of race and racism, the event’s reconstruction brings to the foreground the accumulation of whiteness particular to Zionism, which is not only the violence of racial supremacy, but also the violence of selfish disregard.

Hopeless Romantics: Australian Studies in Romanticism

ABSTRACT For most of the twentieth century, Romantic writers were largely ignored by serious Australian scholars even as they were celebrated and imitated outside the academy. This article tracks the belated emergence of Romanticism as a specialist field of study in Australia while providing what is often a counter-narrative about the broader reception of Romantic literature and ideology by the Australian public. In tracing these contrary yet entwined histories, the article shows how Romantic literature has been and remains implicated in the ongoing project of Australian colonization from 1788 to the present. It has been conscripted into the work of establishing a series of penal colonies on stolen Aboriginal land; of valorizing an English-speaking territorialization of that land; of shaping settler subjectivity; and of defining a national identity often vexed in its relationship to anglophone cultural centers. Exploring the ways in which the reception of Romantic culture is diffracted across various Australian sub-cultures, the essay arrives at the field as it exists today: at a critical Australian Romanticism that is, and needs to be, increasingly attentive to the history of the field and its investments in the settler-colonial state.

The Costs of Passing in the Transvaal

This essay anticipates twentieth-century arguments about the production of the ideal transgender subject as those who are harbingers of an extractive ethnonationalism and have a right to transnational mobility. In looking at Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), this essay frames the white English settler and landowner Gregory Rose as a proto-transwoman. Gregory’s seamless gender-passing, to the point that they can move across national boundaries with ease, without declaring their citizenship, while still maintaining private property elsewhere, throws into relief the mobility of whiteness and the immobility of Blackness and Brownness within the Transvaal, and South Africa more broadly. Such a narrative of white settler womanhood imbricates the prototranswoman in the exacting of colonial land dispossession. The proto-transgender settler subject’s privilege of passing, both in gender presentation and across geographical borders, is predicated on the dissolution of Native African customary land law and the exacerbated surveillance of indentured laborers of Asian descent under legislative acts called “pass laws.”

Affect, excess & settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel

ABSTRACT What happens when we pay attention to the sensations of our research? Based on an image and encounter during fieldwork in West Jerusalem, this article traces how a feeling of discomfort both confirms and challenges what we (think we) know about settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel. Rather than dismissing the moments when narratives, objects and exchanges generate unease, I suggest that exploring this ‘data’ attunes us to how settlers navigate the complex and contradictory conditions of coloniality – how they create resources for living. Structuralist accounts of settler colonialism are not fully capable of engaging this texture, even as they might invoke or attempt to harness emotion through mechanisms including the logic of elimination, settler indigenisation and heteropatriarchy. While thinking with this existing theory, I ask scholars and activists to consider what exceeds our dominant frames, following how affects spill over, attach and circulate among settler subjects in ways that have material consequences. This uneasy approach entails letting things play out, accepting our own implication in power and taking theorisation seriously as an ethical practice. At the same time, it is profoundly future-facing, enabling us to better identify what must be done as we work toward decolonial futures.

Ruin Gazing: Robert Frost and the Afterlives of Settler Environmentalism

This article considers a paradox that structures the internal logic of the ideology of improvement, a central justification for settler colonialism’s strategies of cultural and material dispossession. Far from establishing a limit to settler colonialism as predicted by the writings of John Locke, scenes of ruined, abandoned land are seen to extend settler sovereignty. Specifically, the article examines settler representations of, and encounters with, ruin in the poetry of Robert Frost to argue that irony’s “infinite absolute negativity,” as Søren Kierkegaard states, enables settler subjects to defend against the threat of settler dissolution and magnify settler subjectivity. In a contemporary moment in which damage and devastation have become dominant modes of settler presence on the land, Frost’s poetry prepares us to consider the settler histories of ruin gazing that remain sedimented within contemporary environmental discourse.

The Israeli elephant in the settler-colonial room

ABSTRACT This article presents a rationale to expand settler-colonial studies so as to conceptually fuse in the same proposition the question of settler-colonial permanence with that of the settler subject. Arguments are elaborated based on one particular case study, Palestine. This gap in the research in relation to Palestine not only has left unresolved the problem of how to explain the continuation of the Israeli settler regime beyond its unequivocal overt and superior mechanisms of legal and brute power but has also kept the concrete perpetrators in the shadows, away from public accountability. The article also lays out a number of potential dimensions to lead research into the conceptual nexus suggested here, for the specific case of Palestine. These dimensions, which I suggest form the emotional economy of Israeli settler-colonial subjectivity, comprise (1) the compensatory distributions of settler-colonial capture, (2) the historical formation of strata of subjectivation, (3) the avenues of socialization that cement the commitment to a militarized society, and (4) the ways by which settler learning and settler practice are conjoined in everyday training.

Reparative interpellation: public art’s Indigenous and non-human publics

This article considers the multiple ways in which public art interpellates viewers as settlers, Indigenous and non-human subjects. It could be argued that much public artwork in the late 20th and early 21st century has a ‘reparative’ function through its socially-engaged, community-specific and consciousness-raising aspects. To do so, however, would be to conflate the reparative with the recognition of injustice rather than understand it as the action of repair. The author asserts that for public art to engage in reparative work necessitates interrupting the normative forms and materialities of public art that interpellate the ‘public’ as settler subjects. How, he asks, might the reparative potential of public art be re-envisioned through a consideration of Indigenous and non-human publics?

Introduction to the special issue: mobilizing Indigeneity and race within and against settler colonialism

ABSTRACT Carpio, Barnd, and Barraclough introduce the concepts of ‘settler anchoring’ and ‘mobility sovereignty.’ They argue that settler colonial spaces are structures of mobility injustice, and that securing Indigenous mobility must account for the ability of Indigenous peoples to choose when, where, how, and for what purposes to engage in movement (or not). They illustrate how the practice of mobility underlies the fiction of ‘settling,’ offer examples for understanding Indigenous mobility principles and practices, and examine the potential incommensurabilities between mobility justice and mobility sovereignties that reject settler colonialism. The authors argue for the urgency of integrating the ‘mobilities paradigm’ with Indigenous studies and ethnic studies analyses of settler colonialism, Indigeneity, and race. The article also serves as introduction to the special issue of Mobilities, ‘Mobilizing Indigeneity and Race Within and Against Settler Colonialism.’ The authors preview how the special issue offers new insights into settler colonialism’s mobile architectures, competing technologies of maritime mobility, decolonial forms of landscape conservation on travel corridors, how ‘voluntourism’ enables the crafting of White settler subjectivity, the roles of digital media for displaced peoples, and what it means to move as a sovereign Indigenous nation.

Enacting settler responsibilities towards decolonisation

This special issue showcases research exploring the work of settler individuals and groups in support of projects of decolonisation in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Israel. The papers gathered here were developed from presentations at an international symposium held in Auckland, New Zealand and online in February 2021. As symposium organisers and editors of this collection, we speak and write as settler subjects ourselves, and this collection is situated within the field of Settler Colonial Studies (SCS). This editorial provides an opening framing of the field into which these papers speak, and a survey of some of the key themes within the wider literature. We aim firstly to locate this work within the wider field of scholarship and activism on decolonisation and decoloniality, delimiting the particular focus of decolonisation within settler-dominated contexts. We then discuss the critiques that have been mounted against SCS and some important defences of the field. We argue that while settler colonialism persists, work in SCS has a contribution to make – in highlighting and critiquing settler logics and in identifying changes that it is within the power of settler peoples themselves to make as a contribution towards Indigenous-led decolonisation. Further, we argue that decolonising settler societies must involve settlers learning to be ‘in relation’ with Indigenous worlds and people outside of deeply habituated logics and practices of domination. The papers gathered here provide examples of settler subjects at various points on the path of decolonising themselves and learning the work of ‘being in relation’.

Travels and Travails of Settler Colonialism in Queer Natal

Travels and Travails of Settler Colonialism in Queer Natal

Unsettling Australia: Disturbing White Settler Homemaking in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang

Proceeding from Australia’s specific situation as a settler colony, this article discusses how the ambivalences and fissures of settler subjectivity shape processes of homemaking. Settler homemaking depends on the disturbance of Indigenous Australians’ homelands via dispossession, exclusion, and genocide, but it equally depends upon the creation of a white settler subject as innocent, entitled, and belonging to what has been called ‘white indigeneity’. The article traces this double disturbance in Peter Carey’s novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). Carey’s rewriting of the iconic Kelly legend uncovers the dangers of a possessive, male, white indigeneity based on effacement and exclusion. The novel’s critical staging of Ned Kelly’s construction of Australia as a home for a new class of ‘natives’ challenges an essentialist white Australianness and its narratives of embattled settlement, independence, mateship, and the Bush. The novel shows that the creation of this national character is based on the denial of Aboriginal ownership and agency. Ned’s narrative of Irish victimhood and his formation of a new sense of Australianness is therefore doomed to repeat the violence, discrimination, and exclusion of colonialism that he seems to decry.

Māori, Pākehā, Critical Theory and Relationality: A Talk by Te Kawehau Hoskins and Alison Jones

Te Kawehau Hoskins (Ngati Hau) is an associate professor in Te Puna Wānanga—School of Māori and Indigenous Education, and Associate Dean Māori for the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland. Alison Jones (Pākehā) is a professor in Te Puna Wānanga. In this talk, Te Kawehau and Alison Jones discuss their entangled trajectories as writers and thinkers. Te Kawehau and Alison each bring a critical view to their relationship and the possibilities for productive engagements between indigenous and settler subjects here in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Feeling Property: Settler Violence in the Time of Reconciliation

Two key tenets of Sherene Razack’s scholarship are that racialized violence is always an identity-making practice and that settler violence against Indigenous people, in particular, is a violence that reassures white settler subjects that they rightly occupy Indigenous lands. With reference to Razack’s idea of the “spatiality” of racialized violence, I argue that regimes and ideologies of private property remain central to the psychic life of colonial power, settler emplaced subjectivity, and the violence committed by settlers against Indigenous peoples. I also contend that the broader context of reconciliation within Canada is significant for analyzing settler subjectivity and settler violence. To illustrate my theoretical claims, I draw from three recent homicides committed by white male settlers, where settler misrecognition of Indigenous persons as trespassing upon (or stealing) settler private property seems central to the violence.

Settler colonial inversions: Israel's ‘disengagement’ and the Gush Katif ‘Museum of Expulsion’ in Jerusalem

ABSTRACTIn this article, I analyze the emergence of a new discourse among Jewish settlers during the 2005–2006 Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the West Bank. I define this new discourse as settler colonial inversions – the mimic transformation of the settler subject into the indigene, and of the Palestinian indigene into the settler. After reconstructing the context of the 2005–2006 disengagement and the emergence of new settler colonial actors and discourses, I turn to analyze an interview I carried out with one of the settlers involved in the disengagement, an art therapist who also took part in the creation of the Gush Katif Museum. Next, I reconstruct the narrative structure of the museum and its crucial discursive operations, analyzing the settler inversions appearing in the museum. I conclude by comparing Jewish settler inversions with other forms of settler colonial mimicry.

Designing in Real-Time: An Introduction to Weapons Design in the Settler-Colonial Present of Palestine

Israel is one of the world’s ten biggest exporters of weapons. Its military industry promotes rapid iterative design and real-time testing in the occupied territories as national capabilities ensuring the survival of the state and its status as a laboratory for innovating cutting-edge, battle-proven weapons for the future battlefield. This essay shows how weapons design is deployed in the theaters of military occupation in Palestine. It traces how design practices, national narratives, and ideology are entwined to produce and sustain the world of permanent war in which the Israeli military industry operates. In the process, I show how Israeli designers and design practices inhabit Zionism’s universe of reference and draw on its folk ontologies to produce individual and collective settler subjectivity. My aim is to provide an introductory map to weapons design as a feature of the settler-colonial present of Palestine and emphasize the role of design practice in organizing and shaping the ongoing nature of settler colonization in the age of neoliberal globalization.

‘From the closet into the Knesset’: Zionist sexual politics and the formation of settler subjectivity

ABSTRACTThis article examines Zionist sexual politics as a particular modality of settler colonial subject making. It analyses the inclusion of Israeli LGBTs into the state, by examining the cultural archive of Zionism, in which the colonisation of Palestine and Palestinians is constitutively inscribed and obscured. Tracing the itinerary of Israel’s LGBT movement, it looks at how the Zionist project becomes articulated on novel terms. Focusing on the specific formation of an Israeli gay identity in tandem with Israel’s shifting settler colonial discourse and sexual politics, this article suggests that the itinerary of Israel’s LGBT movement forms the condition of possibility for Israel’s pinkwashing campaign to take shape. Following Palestinian anticolonial queer interventions that see pinkwashing as part of the Zionist project, it intervenes in analytical practices that frame pinkwashing as a manifestation that arises from the global conditions of homonationalism. It asks: how does Zionist settler colonialism form the conditions of possibility for an Israeli gay subjectivity and pinkwashing to emerge? In doing so, it complements contemporary conversations on the formation of sexual subjectivities within settler colonial contexts by suggesting that these not only define modern sexual politics, but simultaneously re-shuffle the foundations of the Zionist settler colonial project itself.

Writing as righting: Truth and reconciliation, poetics, and new geo‐graphing in colonial Canada

This paper is anchored in two recent and concurrent openings, openings that offer opportunities for geographers to consider new modes of engaging colonial violence. The first opening is the release, in Canada, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report and calls to action. By demanding new types of settler‐subject attention to Indigenous peoples and places, it opens new spaces for extending reflection about anti‐Indigenous racism and colonial violence in Canadian consciousness. The second opening is geography's growing uptake of creative and humanities‐informed theories and practices. These manifest in new knowledges and practices with consequent possibilities for addressing colonial violence. I consider these two openings first by proposing changes to conversations about settler‐normalized violences lived by Indigenous peoples, and, second by engaging poets working to radically re/configure language and written expression. Specifically, the paper ends with a call for geographers—particularly non‐Indigenous settler geographers—to rethink ways (and forms) by which we produce knowledge, especially about colonialism and Indigenous geographies and especially in and through writing practices. The paper is experimental in form, meant to disrupt easy uptake or digestion of ideas that must remain—for settler subjects—fundamentally ragged, upsetting, and always beyond conclusion, coherence, or closure.

Solomon D. Butcher: Photographing the American Dream ed. by John E. Carter

Reviewed by: Solomon D. Butcher: Photographing the American Dream ed. by John E. Carter Audrey Goodman John E. Carter, ed., Solomon D. Butcher: Photographing the American Dream. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1916. 152 pp. Paper, $29.95. Solomon D. Butcher chronicled a critical moment in the settlement and transformation of the Great Plains with precision and imagination. Best known for his portraits of Nebraska pioneer families in front of their sod houses, taken in the late 1880s and 1890s, Butcher shared the history of his settler subjects (having come to Custer County, Nebraska, in two wagons with his family in 1882) and sought to create a new kind of collaborative photographic record in these pivotal decades. Despite repeated catastrophic losses of fortune and materials, he largely succeeded with the publication of The Pioneer History of Custer County, and Short Sketches of Early [End Page 227] Days in Nebraska in 1901, thanks to the patronage of wealthy neighbor Ephraim Finch. This large-format paper edition reprints editor John Carter's preface and the photographs he selected for the original cloth edition published in 1985 by the University of Nebraska Press. New to the 2016 edition is Carter's afterword, which describes the circulation of Butcher's photographs through many venues and media, from the Museum of Modern Art exhibit curated by Edward Steichen (1949) to an episode of Ken Burns's PBS documentary The West (1996). Current viewers can now access Butcher's work online, notably through the Nebraska State Historical Society and the American Memory website created by the Library of Congress (2000). Carter reveals the new visual information and oral histories that emerged through the digitization process and argues persuasively for the revived relevance of Butcher's archive. The 2016 version of Solomon D. Butcher: Photographing the American Dream continues to showcase the photographer's distinctive achievement, even if the critical apparatus lacks engagement with contemporary scholarship. The judiciously selected portraits remain striking for the evidence they provide of common opportunity, hardship, and hard work, as well as for the quirkiness and individuality of each family and structure on view. They mix worlds and degrees of documentary truth in striking ways, and because Carter chose to print full images rather than the cropped versions Butcher often preferred, viewers can now appraise the photographer's eye for arrangement, unabashed mechanical interventions, and astonishing juxtapositions: a family holding porcelain cups for tea while taking a break from baling hay on the M. C. Eckstrom ranch (1904) or the pump organ displayed in front of the livestock at the David Hilton homestead (1887). Important historical information is visible too, from the presence of freed slaves to conflicts between cowboys, ranchers, and homesteaders. Through the arrangement of Butcher's images and the strategic insertion of quotes from writers like Willa Cather and Wright Morris, the book communicates the energy and imaginative power of the homesteaders' dreams, as well as a historic transformation of the natural and built environment that couldn't be faked. [End Page 228] Many readers will contest Carter's explanation for the appeal of Butcher's photographs (he states that "we would all like to be descended" from such "pioneer stock") and note the absence of Native Americans in Carter's history of Custer County; he provides no accounting of the county's name, for example, and insists throughout that the settler culture stands for a singular American experience. Readers seeking a scholarly history should consult the fine chapter on Butcher's photographic albums in Rachel Sailor's Meaningful Places (2014) and Martha Sandweiss's Print the Legend (2002). But readers and viewers seeking a rich and detailed visual record of the individual and collective process of settlement in central Nebraska will want to study, remember, and return to Butcher's photographs, so effectively displayed in this book. Audrey Goodman Georgia State University Copyright © 2017 Western Literature Association