The indigene’s settler colonialist dilemma: Thilo van der Haegen, ‘The Vancouver socioecological fix: indigenous real-estate development as the city’s imagination of sustainability, affordability, and reconciliation’, Urban Geography, 2024

27May24

Abstract: In Vancouver, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations are constructing several large real-estate developments that will deeply impact the Nations and the city itself. Developments such as Sen̓ákw, Heather Lands, and Jericho Lands envision the construction of thousands of new apartments that will yield billions of Canadian dollars in profits from the Vancouver housing market. This paper is concerned with the enabling conditions for such developments found within the city of Vancouver’s planning policies and underlying geographical imaginations. Through the application of the “socioecological fix”, the paper describes how Vancouver’s planning policies aim at fixing problems of sustainability, housing affordability, and reconciliation based on specific geographical
imaginations. This results in the conceptualization of reconciliation as the profit-oriented construction of green and affordable realestate. In light of scholarship that highlights the intertwined nature of colonialism and capitalism, the paper raises the predicament that the reconciliatory approach conceptualized in city strategies and actively pursued by the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh is envisioning reconciliation as the reproduction of Vancouver realestate capitalism. How should scholarship contend with reconciliatory approaches that are both reproductive of settlercolonial capitalism, while also offering reconciliation in a concrete form?


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The communist’s settler colonial dilemma: Luccas Gissoni, Paulo Roberto de Macedo Soares Oliveira Pires, Leonardo Griz Carvalheira, ‘Development Paths in a Settler Society: The Challenges of the Communist Movement in Brazil’, Agrarian South, 2024

27May24

Abstract: This article addresses the challenges faced by the Communist movement in Brazil by revisiting the contradictions inherited from a colonial mode of accumulation. This was originally a class system based on slavery and composed of the metropolitan colonizer, the settler, and the colonized class. After independence in 1822, which entailed a settler rebellion against the metropolitan colonizer and the continuing exploitation of the colonized, the settlers reproduced the colonial mode of accumulation internally and oversaw the transition to a capitalist mode of production. An interclass, bourgeois–labor alliance occurred in the mid-twentieth century but was limited to the ranks of the settlers and underpinned by the myth of “racial democracy.” It included a degree of confrontation with imperialism coupled with industrial development but reproduced the colonial mode of accumulation internally. This article sheds light on the contradictions that followed, including the military regime installed in 1964 and the neo-colonial transition in the 1990s, under finance capital. In light of the bourgeoisie’s shifting alliances at the expense of the sovereign aspirations of the working people, an interclass alliance has become impossible. Only a truly popular political project is capable of liberating the nation and that is the only one the Communists should espouse.


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First, past the ‘post’: Shampa Biswas, ‘Unsettling settler colonialism: anticolonialism with and against postcolonialism’, International Politics, 2024

27May24

Excerpt: The term postcolonialism has a long and contested history. Indeed, there was at one time an active debate within the field of postcolonial studies on the insertion of a hyphen between the “post” and the “colonialism” of the term. Some argued that the absence of a hyphen mistakenly suggested the end of colonialism, thus making it more palatable in the West. Others suggested that that same absence foregrounded the continuity into the present of the relations and practices of classical colonialism, despite the latter’s formal demise. Thus, there is a sense in which hyphenating the two terms honors the contextual specificity of contemporary states trying to carve out a post-independence national identity after the formal dissolution of European empires, while removing the hyphen may erase the ways that formal independence can mask the colonial continuities that continue to shape the present. Implicit in this debate is the question of how much and what kind of rupture the formal departure of colonial rulers provides in the liberation of the colonized. But also implicit are two much less scrutinized assumptions: First, that the post of colonialism can only occur after the departure of the colonizers, which, second, is also the point at which anticolonialism, whose aim is to evict the colonizer, ceases. Rejecting both these assumptions, Somdeep Sen’s Decolonizing Palestine takes up as its subject of study the complicated relationship between the “post” and the “anti” of colonialism in the context of ongoing settler colonialism. What if postcolonialism and anticolonialism remain deeply imbricated, before and after the departure of the colonizers? How does that relationship manifest itself in the conditions of ongoing settler colonialism? What, in such conditions, does real liberation from colonialism look like? 


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Settler women get to vote: Deborah Jordan, Australian Women’s Justice: Settler Colonisation and the Queensland Vote, Routledge, 2024

27May24

Description: This book explores how women spearheaded the democratic suffrage campaign in colonial Queensland engaging with international debates on women’s activism, leadership, advocacy, print culture, and social movements. Australian Women’s Justice provides a nuanced reading of the diversity and differences of the women’s movement in Queensland, from the time of first white colonisation, federation to World War 1 by new research on key women’s organisations: notably the Women’s Equal Franchise Association and the Women’s Peace Army. Framed through the lives of women suffrage participants, including their encounters with First Nations women, it also looks beyond microhistory to explore broader themes of the intersection of race, gender, property, war, and empire in the colonial context. Campaigns for enfranchisement and property rights and against conscription connect this story with larger international movements for women and labour, and organisations such as the League of Nations. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of Australian feminism and suffragism, as well as historians of feminist, labour, and peace movements both in Australia and internationally.


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Canada and settler colonialism: Jim Reynolds, Canada and Colonialism: An Unfinished History, University of British Columbia Press, 2024

26May24

Description: Canada and Colonialism presents the history Canadians must reckon with before decolonization is possible, from the nation’s establishment as a settler colony to the discriminatory legacies still at work in our institutions and culture.


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Incandesecent settler colonialism: Maxine Matheson-Lieber, An environmental analysis approach to understanding the effects of the legal use of white phosphorous munitions: slow violence, settler-colonialism, and Western hegemony, Senior dissertation, Claremont, 2024

26May24

Abstract: This paper aims to critically examine the interplay between environmental degradation, settler-colonialism, and the neo-imperialist biases embedded within our international law institutions due to their Eurocentric origins and interest centers. It seeks to demonstrate how these biases contribute to a system that disproportionately empowers certain nations, particularly the United States and other great powers, at the expense of widespread injustices unto humans and their environments globally. This paper will use theory, frameworks, and scholarship rooted in environmental analysis and justice, intersectional analytics, Indigenous, and post-colonial theories. Ultimately, it will argue that we must examine and correct international institutions and rulings that work against the well-being of innocent civilians and close these loopholes left to naturalize and legally enforce Western hegemony. This paper will focus on the loopholes in international law allowing the highly problematic, indiscriminate, and deadly use of WP munitions in conflicts due to its “dual” use. In short, the dual-use clause provides for a hazardous and sometimes fatal weapon to be wielded by the world’s most powerful military forces, no matter the embedded humanitarian and ecological harm involved in dispersing any amount of WP into the environment. This interconnected system around the legal right to wield power and violence is entrenched with other systems of power, including colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, which will be explored in this paper through the case study of WP use by the Israeli military in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.


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Gendered settler colonialism: Myra J. Tait , Lorna Stefanick, ‘Structural Racism and Sexism in Settler Societies: Families at the Confluence of Colonialism and Neoliberalism’, Feminist Formations, 36, 1, 2024, pp. 57-82

26May24

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.


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The settler doesn’t care: Nicole Ineese-Nash, Kathryn Underwood, Arlene Hache, Patty Douglas, ‘The Commodification of Care: Precarious Custodial Relationships, Disability, and Settler-Colonialism’, in Gabriele Ciciurkaite, Robyn Lewis Brown (eds), Disability and the Changing Contexts of Family and Personal Relationships, Emerald, 2024

25May24

Abstract: In this chapter, we explore the intricate relationships between young disabled children, their families, institutional settings, and disability services in Canada, with an emphasis on the challenges stemming from unstable custodial dynamics and governmental interference. Drawing on data from a 9-year longitudinal Institutional Ethnography across three provinces and one territory, we analyze the experiences of 41 families who have interacted with the child welfare system, foster care, adoption processes, family courts, or other custodial procedures – many of them are Indigenous or live with low income. The historic and ongoing state control and institutionalization of disabled children in Canada are interrogated through the lens of settler-colonialism (Awj, 2017; Disability Rights International, 2021). This chapter scrutinizes constructs framed by colonial narratives, including disabled childhoods, notions of disability, the “best interest of the child,” the archetype of the “good parent,” and the designation of custodial “status.” We present Institutional Ethnography as a method of de-constructing these systems and identifying care principles in the changing context of family.


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Indigenous incarceration and the logic of elimination: Danielle Bird, ‘Indigenous Incarceration and Settler Colonial Genocides’, Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, 33, 2, 2024

25May24

Abstract: The article examines the intersection of Indigenous incarceration and settler colonial genocides in Canada. Topics discussed include the systemic oppression of Indigenous peoples within the criminal justice system, the definition and recognition of genocide within settler colonial contexts, and the role of settler colonial laws and institutions in perpetuating genocidal policies targeting Indigenous communities.


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Supersitious settlers: Clara Iwasaki, ‘The Settler Supernatural: Contemporary Taiwanese Popular Culture, the Environment, and the Nativisation of Han Taiwanese Legends’, International Journal of Taiwan Studies, 2024

25May24

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


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