Settler Colonialism Research Articles

The Impact of White Supremacy on First-Generation Mixed-Race Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa

South African white supremacy has been shaped by over 400 years of settler colonialism and white minority apartheid rule to craft a pervasive and entrenched legacy of privilege and oppression in the post-apartheid context. This paper explores the constructions of white supremacy, specifically its role in shaping the perceptions of first-generation mixed-race identity in South Africa, through semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Through a critical race theory and an intersectional lens, this paper unpacks the personal, political, and social impact of white supremacist structures on the identity construction of first-generation mixed-race people in post-apartheid South Africa; specifically, societal- and self-perceptions of their identity within power structures with which they interact. Moreover, this paper aims to understand how first-generation mixed-race people understand their connections to white privilege. Ultimately this paper argues that although first-generation mixed-race people experience relative privilege, their access to white privilege and acceptance within structures of whiteness is always conditional.

Looping effects, settler colonialism, and the indigenous child removal system

ABSTRACT Between 1950 and 1985, a period now referred to as the “Sixties Scoop”, over 24,000 Indigenous and Inuit children were removed from their families and placed into primarily non-Indigenous foster and adoptive homes across Canada. Whereas the Residential school system was explicitly racist and genocidal in its orientation, the Sixties Scoop racism was cloaked in accusations of neglect and child-saving rhetoric. Drawing on Hacking’s concept of looping effects, we examine how social workers classify their work and the Indigenous children they removed from their homes. We analyse sixteen interviews with social workers working in child welfare during the Sixties Scoop who were involved with the removal of Indigenous children. This article links broader systems that are fraught with racism, to the rank-and-file individuals tasked with carrying out child protection policies, and it probes the interpretations and classifications used both then and now to understand Indigenous child removal.

Articulating water conservation as colonization: revisiting the “public interest” in Theodore Roosevelt’s First Annual Message

ABSTRACT As policymakers attempt to cope with climate chaos, traditions of water injustice persist. Meanwhile, water problems and solutions in the U.S. arid region have long been discussed through the discourse of conservation. This essay traces water conservation discourse back to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1901 First Annual Message to better understand its relationship to U.S. water colonizing ideologies in today’s context. Attuned to colonization as practices of extraction and ideological articulation, I argue that Roosevelt articulated water policies in the name of the progressive “public interest” with a set of moral, legal, and infrastructural water logics. These logics link the value of progressive water management to specific capacities that expand white settler ecologies in arid regions. Roosevelt's early-twentieth-century articulations are palpable in contemporary calls for water conservation, suggesting major implications for presidential and environmental rhetoric as well as water policymaking.

Call to Prayer

“Call to Prayer” is a poem that attempts to capture and portray the experience of standing in the malu (shade and protection) of the sacred. Whether that malu is cast by monument, an altar, or a mountain, the poem depicts the kuleana (responsibilities and privileges) of recognizing our pilina (intimacy and relationship) to that which is kapu (sacred). The poem travels through the knowledges of faith, courage, devotion, fear, and aloha via the perspective of a Kanaka Maoli wahine who lives in the malu of our kupuna (ancestors) while continuing to endure the ongoing wake of settler colonialism, displacement, and alienation.
 Call to Prayer stands in the malu of the Mihrab, Shangri La’s most sacred stolen artifact. And in her magnificent shadow we come face to face with the violence that resulted in her displacement to Hawai‘i. We cannot look away, not from her outstanding beauty, and certainly not from the generations of brutality that has allowed us to be in her company. The Mihrab powerfully calls us back to our own sacred places, and in that moment we are invited into a mutual recognition, an unexpected intimacy between peoples, ʻāina (lands, or that which feeds), and mo‘olelo (stories and histories).
 While this original poem was written in 2021, the most recent genocidal attacks on our Palestinian ‘Ohana in Gaza by the State of Israel have further deepened and expanded its meaning. While our loved ones face genocidal extermination, we stand, around the world, insisting on a critical truth: all life is sacred, all ‘āina are sacred. We condemn any oppressive regimes that would attempt to exterminate our peoples (whether kanaka or Palestinian) and contaminate, bombarded, and settle our lands. Any national project that requires wholesale extermination and displacement of Indigenous peoples is an affront not only to justice, but to life itself. Our commitment to each other will not allow us to be silent. Our duty to our shared histories, will not allow us to stand idly by. May all our akua (gods and elemental forces) and kūpuna (ancestors) gather around us, may they cast their malu of protection upon us, may they strengthen us in this lifelong pursuit of liberation, justice, and freedom for all occupied and oppressed peoples. Amamua noa.

The Bison in the Room: Hunting, Settler Colonialism and Gender Performance on the American Frontier, 1865–1895

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between outdoor sports and the age of empire on the American frontier using the lens of gender performance. Focused on the years from the mid to the late nineteenth century, it provides an exploration of hunting as a vector of imperial masculine journey and a physical and imaginative pursuit where hunters stalked and shot the iconic animals of the western states on behalf of settler colonialism. In the first part of the paper, contemporary testimonies are used to plot the ways in which hunting desires to own the animal body fuelled a powerful homosocial culture grounded in ideas of primal pageantry. Sport and game in this context represented essential elements of a performative leisure economy in which pursuit and capture dictated the terms of human-animal engagement and refracted broader impositions of colonial political authority. From here, it turns to dynamics of community on the game trail where the primacy of the sporting hero was confirmed and recalibrated along racial, class and gender lines, before travelling indoors to examine how the afterlife of the hunt (expressed in taxidermy) allowed the authority of the victorious hunter to be performed in the ‘great indoors’ and for colonial claims over space to be materially and symbolically affirmed. Today, the stories of the imperial hunter elite and their taxidermy trophies represent traumatic historical artefacts. However, they also denote important remnants of empire whose complicated provenance helps to explain how mutually supportive mechanisms of masculinity and colonialism operated to sanction the killing and (later) the conservation of game species. Offering a closer look at ‘the bison in the room’ and its embodied story of pursuit and capture, this paper provides valuable insights into the dynamics of sport in colonial space and the value of performance as a useful category for contextualising human-environmental relations in the age of empire.

Destroying the “Human” for the Survival of the World: A Proposal for a Temporally Dense Psychoanalytic Subject

ABSTRACT Despite the pandemic upending in-person clinical treatments, psychoanalysis struggles to conceptualize a frame that is truly open to a world beyond the singular, human only dyad. This article challenges psychoanalysis to blowup the frame of practice by destroying the very subject of the work – the human. Integrating key concepts from anti-blackness and indigenous theories, the author contends that the category of the human is inherently and irreparably violent; the undergirding onto-epistemological system for the formation of white settler colonial, heteropatriarchal subjectivity and its co-created violences of enslavement, dispossession, genocide, mass extinctions, and ecological destruction. Because psychoanalysis has evolved around this Enlightenment subject that renders certain people “human,” and all others disposable, its frame and focus is designed to uphold, not resist, biopolitical and ecological violence. Thus, psychoanalysis is onto-epistemologically unfit and unable to effectively address social violences and the climate crisis while emanating from this exceptionalist “human.” Integrating anti-blackness and indigenous theories, the author, using examples from clinical work online, proposes a different form of subjectivity, one that is co-emergent with “dense temporalities” of the more-than-human. Only through such a temporally dense, transcorporeal subject can psychoanalysis hope to subvert the world of human destruction.

Minor Settler Grief: Korean Diaspora, Settler Colonialism, and the Pastoral Fantasy in Minari (2021)

Abstract: The critically acclaimed film Minari (2021), directed by Lee Isaac Chung, has been recognized for its emotionally moving on-screen representation of a rural Asian American experience. Building on transpacific scholarship, the present essay examines Minari as a narrative of "minor settler grief," an expression of grief by minor settlers that is closely tied to colonial and militarized aesthetics of earth across the Pacific. The article ties Minari's Korean American farming efforts in 1980s Arkansas to the intersecting histories of settler colonialism in the US and Japanese empires and South Korean authoritarian developmentalism. It considers the Korean nativist aesthetics of earth at work in Minari , an aesthetics of pastoral fantasy that had served imperialism and authoritarian developmentalism, as well as anticolonial imaginations in modern Korea and the diaspora. The essay argues that minor settler grief functions by obscuring relationalities, such as the histories of Native American removal in present-day Arkansas. Mining these histories and visual references enables a critique of certain expressions of grief that produce settler colonial recognition and forgetting.

“To Preserve Unimpaired”: The Presidency, National Parks, and the Preservation of the U.S. Settler Colonialist State

Abstract Control of time is critical to the maintenance of settler colonial states. In the United States, which relies on linear conceptions of time, time is treated as moving forward, which implies a specific view of the national past. It also moves backward, which proscribes a particular understanding of future possibilities. In both cases, time is mobilized to produce political stasis, rendering it very difficult to question settler colonialist ideologies and possession of land. Unsettling the U.S. settler colonial state requires a different conception of time and different temporalities.

Structural Racism and Sexism in Settler Societies: Families at the Confluence of Colonialism and Neoliberalism

Abstract: This study problematizes the intersections of settler colonialism and neoliberalism with heteropatriarchy/heteropaternalism when considering the vast overrepresentation of Indigenous children in the Canadian child welfare system and Indigenous women in prisons. Using the lens of historical institutionalism, we demonstrate how heteropatriarchy and heteropaternalism provide the normative social order for settler colonial governance, including its most recent iteration, neoliberal governance. We argue that the neoliberal rhetoric of individual rights and responsibilities to assess fitness of families (and more specifically mothers) against a western European neoliberal ideal underpins Canada’s social policy reproducing the structural racism and sexism imposed by colonization. In Canada, there is growing awareness of system dysfunction; it is Indigenous women who are providing the leadership to resist this oppressive model. Resisting neoliberal family policies pushes back against oppressive colonial structures that exacerbate growing systemic inequities thereby negatively impact all families.

Literature at the frontier of our commonwealth

Taking as its starting point the most recent, failed Australian referendum, this essay considers the efficacy of the Commonwealth of Nations — of the attendant ideological principles and values upon which the political association is based and to which its member states subscribe. Tracing the colonial histories and legacies of two current member states, Australia and South Africa — nations whose genesis in settler colonialism follow somewhat similar contours — the essay explores, in their canonical literature, the evolution of a kind of whitewashed nationalism that is not just racially exclusory but also registers, inversely, the anxieties of the self in relation to the “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) endorsed in ideologies of nationhood. In a comparative, transnational reading of Patrick White’s Voss and J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands, this essay probes how this settler-colonial literary tradition simultaneously underwrites and complicates (continued) white imperialism and black un-belonging in ways that both suggest and test the conceptual prospects and limits of a universal, egalitarian “commonwealth”.

Settler Colonialism and Harte’s Frontier Ecogothic in “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad”

The paper proposes to examine the tangled relationship between race and environment in the nineteenth-century American literary tradition by looking at the gothic representation of the three vagabond characters in relation to the Californian coastal landscape in Bret Harte’s “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad” (1900). Critically seen as a reworking of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Harte’s story continues the questioning of the civilization/wilderness dichotomy in Twain’s work, but the story complicates its racialecological dynamics by shifting the focus from a white boy and a black slave to a Chinese orphan, a Native American vagrant, and a dog, and relocating their tramping and foraging from the Mississippi river to the pine forest and marshland at the Pacific coast of a frontier town in California. Harte’s repositioning of racialized (as well as politicized) persecution at the western frontier articulates an ecogothic allegory on a transcontinental (as well as transglobal) scale, in which a seemingly ordinary western settlement is turned from what Leo Marx considers a pastoral-industrial “middle landscape” into a liminal haunting (as well as hunting) ground. 1 The paper examines how Harte’s account of Trinidad topographies reveals a multi-layered ecological space and a haunted Romantic landscape that unsettles environmental as well as social order, reflecting racialized political exclusions during the course of the nineteenth century through legalized policies, such as the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the 1855 Vagrancy Act, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act restricting the spatial mobilities of Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, and other minority groups. The paper will focus on the intersection of orientalism, settler colonialism, and environmentalism, rethinking how the enmeshed race-environment relationship in Harte’s writing, informed by the social and political practices of westward expansionism and racial segregation of his time, might reveal a subtler process of ecological othering, unveiling the parasitical relationship between racial exploitation and environmental destruction.

Anti-Chinese Racism and the Structure of White Supremacy: An Anti-essentialist Antiracist Perspective on Canadian History

Racisms are among the social structures that shaped Canada’s past and are shaping Canada’s present. Anti-essentialist antiracism accounts for these structures by recognizing that there are many different racisms, but all racisms meet conditions of racialization, of the organization of racializations into exclusions, and of the enactment of negative consequences on the excluded. These conditions lead to strategies for antiracist research, which are key to rebuilding the linkages between people that racisms destroy. This paper builds a theoretically informed argument while examining the historical and present-day experiences of Chinese Canadians. Engaging with present-day realities, moving beyond common-sense explanations that individualize racism, and building on the sources of the racialized and excluded make evident the structure of racism. Chinese language sources document the “apartheiding” of Canada and its effects. They also enable the dialogical re-reading of dominant sources to pinpoint moments of organizing this structure into the world. Today, historically produced cultural narratives and the cultural landscapes of modern cities mark those racialized as Chinese as people who either do not belong or whose presence needs explanation. These narratives and landscapes are the products of the anti-Chinese racism that was built into the settler colonialism that made Canada.

Unavoidable Slips: Settler Colonialism and Terra Nullius in the Wake of Climate Adaptation

Unavoidable Slips: Settler Colonialism and Terra Nullius in the Wake of Climate Adaptation

Decolonizing allegory and anti-imperialist critique in the longue durée of extractivism

A re-thinking of the critical vocation of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature is long overdue. The British Commonwealth of Nations that was first established in 1949 has continued to provide a neo-colonial framework for Britain and its former dominions (particularly Australia and Canada) to extract raw materials, capital, and labour from former British colonies and commodity frontiers within settler colonies. For this reason, the British Commonwealth of Nations may be understood as a zombie-like system of extractivism, in which a moribund imperial power stumbles on by draining the postcolonial world of its lifeblood. Against the obfuscation of this system by the term “Commonwealth literature”, I suggest that one of the critical tasks of anti-imperialist critique in future issues of Literature, Critique, and Empire Today is to examine how a dynamic relationship between allegory and counter-allegory in decolonial world literatures works to foreground and contest the neo-colonial dynamics of extractivism, in order to imagine the conditions of possibility for bringing about the abolition of that system. At the core of the article is a consideration of how allegory and counter-allegory form part of the intricate allegorical machinery of two rather different cultural texts: M. NourbeSe Philip’s experimental poem Zong! (2008) and William Kentridge’s animated film Mine (1991). By giving form and meaning to the history and legacy of anti-systemic movements against racial extractivism, decolonizing allegories such as Zong! and Mine also demand a rethinking of predominant materialist approaches to modern allegory.

“If Earth Were Freed From Those Who Buy and Sell”: Albery Allson Whitman’s Abolition Agriculture

Abstract: This article examines three major works by nineteenth-century Black Appalachian poet Albery Allson Whitman, focusing on georgic scenes of agricultural labor to highlight the most radical of his agrarian visions. I show how Whitman imagines ecological thriving, decolonial cohabitation, and racial justice in terrains charted outside the political, economic, and geographic bounds of the expanding United States. On one hand, Whitman’s poetic reflections on the interface of land and labor in Black historical experience yield transformative visions that offer abolitionist alternatives to the violently extractive paradigms of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, industrial agriculture, and United States imperialism. On the other, Whitman’s rhetoric of racial uplift tends to uphold some of those extractive paradigms, precisely to the extent that it buys into the ideology of American exceptionalism. While acknowledging Whitman’s occasional lapses into the belief that labor contributing to national growth is the key to both individual and collective thriving, I reveal how Whitman’s works ultimately privilege local, subsistence, and regenerative forms of Afro-Indigenous agriculture as world-making enterprises that contest the racial and colonial order of the plantation form, as well as the United States settler state that upholds it.

A Monstrous Growth: The Experimentation and Afterlives of Caragana Arborescens

This paper traces the history of Caragana arborescens, a shrub which has flourished for a hundred years in the polluted industrial landscape of Mill Creek Ravine, Edmonton. While now considered an invasive plant, caragana was once viewed as a vitally important species in the colonial settlement and transformation of the Canadian prairies. Arguing against the view of caragana as simply an extension of settler colonialism, or as an embodiment of industrial abandonment, I posit that caragana can be better thought of as a monstrous disturbance: a dense node of bodies and historical relations which emerged out of an experimental colonial project and thrives in the degraded landscapes that industrial capitalism has wrought. As a monstrous disturbance, caragana’s growth recollects, extends, and troubles the experimental colonial project that brought it to Mill Creek Ravine.

The historical-ideological roots of the Zionist-Israeli settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing of Palestine

The historical-ideological roots of the Zionist-Israeli settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing of Palestine

Plundering the North: A History of Settler Colonialism, Corporate Welfare, and Food Insecurity. Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay

<i>Plundering the North: A History of Settler Colonialism, Corporate Welfare, and Food Insecurity</i>. Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay

Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism by Travis Hay (review)

Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism by Travis Hay (review)

Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770–1842 by Elizabeth Elbourne (review)

Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770–1842 by Elizabeth Elbourne (review)