Settler Colonial Studies and/as the Transnational Western

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-105
Author(s):  
Alex Trimble Young
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
High Water ◽  
The Political ◽  
Indigenous Australian ◽  
Indigenous Resistance ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Western Films ◽  
Gayatri Spivak ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
Detective Genre

Abstract The article explores contemporary debates regarding the representation of Indigenous resistance in the field of settler colonial studies by putting the work of Australian theorist Patrick Wolfe into conversation with the political allegories articulated in two contemporary Western films. Its first section, tracing what Wolfe called his “pharmacological indebtedness” to Gayatri Spivak, considers the methodological problems for settler colonial studies that have emerged from Wolfe’s critique of the settler intellectual’s representation of Indigenous resistance. The second section suggests an alternative direction for transnational settler colonial studies by undertaking a comparative reading of two films—Hell or High Water (2016) written by US settler filmmaker Taylor Sheridan, and Goldstone (2016) written and directed by Indigenous Australian (Gamilaroi) director Ivan Sen. Both films collapse the detective genre with settler colonialism’s most recognizable representational genre: the Western. In so doing, they articulate narratives about the ongoing crimes of settler colonialism that offer novel perspectives on the question of what is knowable—and by whom—under settler colonialism’s structure of violence.

The Palestine Question: From the Balfour Declaration to the Deal of the Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Honaida Ghanim
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Indigenous Resistance ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The One ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Palestinian Question

The colonial framework introduced a central perspective into Palestinian studies in the context of addressing Zionism, Zionist relations with the Palestinian entity, and the creation of the question of Palestine. This chapter explores the rise and shifts of the Palestinian question from the Balfour Declaration to the “deal of the century.” Informed by a sociohistorical approach, the chapter goes through historical shifts and analyzes the Palestine question within relations of interplay and entanglement with the Zionist project and, later, with the state of Israel. It focuses on the sociological dimensions of the Palestine question at the intersection of settler colonialism, theology, and state-making, on the one hand, and indigenous resistance, national struggle, and pragmatism, on the other.

Styles of Sovereignty: Parataxis, Settler–Indigenous Difference, and the Transnationalisms of the Great Basin

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Timothy Donahue
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Great Basin ◽  
North American ◽  
American West ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
North American West ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty

Abstract This essay shows how literary parataxis serves as an engine of transnational thought in the nineteenth-century North American West. I focus, in particular, on how Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) and Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes (1883) employ paratactic forms to present the Great Basin as a space where no single nation rules as sovereign. Amidst US settler colonialism, I argue, such paratactic aesthetics prove politically double-edged. While parataxis’ tendency to destabilize hierarchies allows the form to undermine US claims to sovereignty, the same deconstructive proclivity can occlude Indigenous political distinction and historical priority. Twain and Winnemucca respond to this aesthetic scenario differently, and their writing, consequently, presents competing conceptions of transnationalism. Twain’s unchecked embrace of paratactic forms yields a transnational vision whose emphasis on social movement and mixture proves antithetical to Indigenous sovereignty. Winnemucca, by contrast, employs a modulated parataxis in order to locate the transnational in collisions of countervailing polities and thereby better represents the political standing and agency of the Paiute people. Winnemucca’s accounts of her work as a translator, I further argue, suggest that amidst such collisions, political sovereignty takes a distinctive shape, as a relational and comparative project.

The Biopolitical Logics of Settler Colonialism and Disruptive Relationality

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
René Dietrich
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Way

This essay argues that the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism function according to a naturalization in Western thought of politics as a project of hierarchically ordering life in relation to the sphere of politics. Significantly, such a mode of thinking discredits socio-political orders that operate on the basis of a non-hierarchical place-based relationality of all life forms including the land. Through a reading of Foucault and Agamben in their use of Aristotle, I want to show how hierarchy as a principle of the political is already implemented in the premise they draw upon for analyzing the biopolitical. In the same way it remains unrecognized in their analysis of biopolitics, this principle also becomes operative within settler colonial logics of life and land. Recently, however, Indigenous scholars and writers have mobilized relationality in its formative characteristic for Indigenous polities and politics as strategy to disrupt biopolitical logics and denaturalize settler colonial rule, which I want to show through engaging Daniel Heath Justice’s Indigenous fantasy trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles as a site of disruptive relationality and political knowledge production.

scholarly journals Clean development or the development of dispossession? The political economy of wind parks in Southern Mexico

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862199176
Author(s):  
Chris Hesketh
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The Political ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Southern Mexico ◽  
Alternative Pathways ◽  
Indigenous Resistance ◽  
Wind Park

Through an investigation of the political economy of wind park development in Oaxaca, southern Mexico, I explore the contested meaning of environmental justice. I contend that, despite their seemingly benign image, wind parks in Oaxaca operate within a spatially abstracted, colonial epistemology of capital-centred development. This involves a remaking of space and an appropriation of nature on behalf of capital. Concomitantly, it also involves a process of dispossession for Indigenous communities, foreclosing alternative pathways of development. I contrast this project of place-making with a subaltern-centred conception of environmental justice informed by Indigenous resistance.

Memory Lands

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. DeLucia
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
New England ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Early America ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
Indigenous Resistance ◽  
Intercultural Interactions ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
Resistance Movement

This book reassesses the nature and meanings of King Philip’s War (1675-1678), a major Indigenous resistance movement and colonial conflict that pervasively reshaped the American Northeast and has reverberated among regional communities for centuries. It focuses on specific places that have been meaningful to Native American (Algonquian) peoples over long spans of time, as well as to colonial New England residents more recently, and how the waging and remembrance of violence at these locales has affected communities’ senses of past, place, and collective purpose. Its case studies reinterpret intercultural interactions and settler colonialism in early America, the importance of place and environment in the production of history, and the myriad ways in which memory has been mobilized to shape the present and future. It emphasizes that American history continues to be contested, in highly local and sometimes hard-to-perceive ways that require careful interdisciplinary methods to access, as well as in more prominent arenas.

Euroscepticism and the culture of the discipline of history

2006 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
OLIVER J. DADDOW
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Study ◽  
The Political ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Daily Mail ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Tabloid Press ◽  
Essentially Contested Concept

This article explores the uses of history in contemporary Eurosceptic discourse in Britain. It does so in the knowledge that studying an essentially contested concept such as Euroscepticism poses severe methodological problems, and in the first section I situate my article in the emerging scholarly literature on the subject. Having explained why I limit my research to popular Euroscepticism in the tabloid press, in the second section I critically analyse the rhetorical strategies employed by the Sun and the Daily Mail to garner support for their line on Europe, suggesting that the appeal of their discourse resides in its recourse to national history of the school textbook variety. In the third part I use this finding to argue that the discipline of history has been an unwitting accomplice in making Euroscepticism so popular amongst the British public, press and politicians. This has considerable ramifications both for the theoretical study of Euroscepticism and the political efforts to counter its popularity, and I consider all of these in the conclusion.

Tackling Organisational Stress within Trade Unions

1990 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 8-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Miller
Keyword(s):  
Stress Management ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Methodological Problems

Stress management programmes for trade union officials still remain underdeveloped. This article seeks to highlight some of the methodological problems in trying to mount such programmes within the political context of contemporary trade unionism. The author argues that a much more “holistic” approach towards the “management of discontent” is necessary.

The Political Consequences of Indigenous Resentment

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Edana Beauvais
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
Using Data ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Original Survey

Abstract Understanding the legacy of settler colonialism requires understanding the nature and scope of anti-Indigenous attitudes. But what, exactly, are the political consequences of anti-Indigenous attitudes? Answering this question requires recognizing that attitudes toward Indigenous peoples are distinct from White racial attitudes toward other disempowered groups. In this paper, I introduce a novel measure of Indigenous resentment. I then show that Indigenous resentment is an important predictor of policy attitudes using data collected from an original survey of White settlers. I estimate the effect of both Indigenous resentment and negative affect on policy attitudes—opposition to welfare and support for pipeline developments—to make the case that Indigenous resentment is a better measure of anti-Indigenous attitudes than affective prejudice, and that Indigenous resentment is an important omitted variable in the study of public opinion in settler societies.

Solar Infrastructure as Media of Resistance, or, Indigenous Solarities against Settler Colonialism

2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-76
Author(s):  
Jordan B. Kinder
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Community Health Center ◽  
Energy Futures ◽  
Indigenous Resistance ◽  
Infrastructural Development ◽  
Indigenous Feminism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pipeline Project ◽  
Energy Justice ◽  
Scaling Out

The ongoing history of setter colonialism is inextricable from the infrastructures of energy and extraction that provide its material foundation. Addressing this inextricable relationship, this article explores how Indigenous solarities in Canada resist extractivism and generate conditions for just energy futures beyond settler colonialism through emergent solar infrastructures. Developing a preliminary theory of Indigenous solarities, this article anchors the author’s observations to Lubicon Cree energy justice activist Melina Laboucan-Massimo’s Sacred Earth Solar initiative and its two completed projects: the Piitapan Solar Project in Laboucan-Massimo’s home community of Little Buffalo, Alberta, Canada, which powers a community health center, and a partnership with the Tiny House Warriors. The Tiny House Warriors is a Secwepemcled movement to construct mobile tiny houses along the path of the Trans Mountain Expansion Pipeline Project. This article’s approach is methodologically informed by recent infrastructural thinking from theorists such as Lauren Berlant and Deborah Cowen who offer an expansive, relational understanding of infrastructure. It is also informed by thinkers such as Myles Lennon and Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer, who respectively see in solar energy infrastructures the possibilities to decolonize energy and to generate a feminist techno-ecological ethos. This article offers a brief account of the historical and contemporary relationship between settler colonialism and infrastructural development in Canada, before providing an overview of three mutually informing frameworks for preliminarily thinking through the materialization of Indigenous solarities: as media of resistance; as expressions of Indigenous feminism; and as expressions of Indigenous futurisms. The article concludes by scaling out from the context of Sacred Earth Solar’s emergent infrastructures of Indigenous solarities, connecting these efforts with larger movements of Indigenous resistance and renewable energy infrastructure initiatives. Ultimately, this article argues that Indigenous solarities signify myriad potentialities for reorienting our collective energy imaginaries from scarcity to abundance in ways that foreground Indigenous self-determination against and beyond extractivism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document