Settler Colonialism and African Americans

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiffany King
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Native Studies ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
White Settler

Emerging from the ranks of white settler scholars in Australia and New Zealand in the mid-2000s, the discourse of settler colonialism has become the “official” idiolect with substantial influence in the social sciences and the humanities. The term settler colonialism circulated in Native studies, more specifically in Haunani K. Trask’s book From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993) before white settler scholars reintroduced and repackaged the term in the first decade of the 21st century (see the journal Settler Colonial Studies, edited by Lorenzo Veracini and Edward Cavanagh) and asserted it as an irreducible form of colonial power. The “new” settler colonialism focused on the ways that the conflict over land structured a violent antagonism between settlers and indigenous peoples. This paradigm shift calls attention to the distinction between colonial relations, in which the colonizer and settler displace the indigenous population through violence and remain on the land, as opposed to franchise colonialism, in which the colonizer remains (abroad) in the metropole and establishes control through an extensive and diffuse network of repressive and discursive measures of colonial power (sometimes including native elites as proxy). The theoretical preoccupation of settler colonial studies has been overwhelmingly concerned with the native-settler binary. The native-settler binary constructs the primary antagonism under settler colonial relations as one between European (and other) settlers and indigenous peoples of the Americas (racialized as Amerindians) and the Polynesian and Malayan peoples of Oceania. Due to the field’s emphasis on the native-settler binary, it has been critiqued for its lack of attention to Africans and people of African descent in the Americas. Fields that have traditionally theorized colonialism as a broad and capacious formation that included material and discursive (power) domination have been compelled to embrace the “settler colonial” turn in critical theory. For example, Chicana/o studies, Asian American studies, postcolonial studies, and even Native studies have had to readjust in order to respond to the field’s narrow focus on elaborating the native-settler binary and contestations over land as the paradigmatic frames for mapping power in North America, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Israel. Similarly, the fields of African American studies, African diaspora studies, and Black studies have only recently integrated the discourse of “settler colonialism” into their scholarly traditions. While, Black and African diaspora studies have historically been attentive to issues concerning indigenous people, colonialism, and the intersections of native and black life, these studies have largely deployed and relied on colonialism as a theoretical frame. As multiple disciplines adjust to the “settler colonial turn,” the use of the term remains uneven and inconsistent across disciplines and fields of study. Searching for scholarship that exists at the intersections of—or that pairs the terms—settler colonialism and African Americans can be challenging. To date, few texts exist with the explicit aim of addressing “settler colonialism and African Americans.” The texts included in this article cut across disciplinary boundaries and represent diverse sources that include historiographies, theoretical and philosophical texts, edited anthologies, special issues of journals, blog posts, activist writings and statements, and annual reports of organizations.

Re-presenting Genocide: The Canadian Museum of Human Rights and Settler Colonial Power

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Kaur Dhamoon
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
Forced Movement

AbstractIn settler societies like Canada, United States, and Australia, the bourgeoning discourse that frames colonial violence against Indigenous people as genocide has been controversial, specifically because there is much debate about the meaning and applicability of genocide. Through an analysis of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, this paper analyzes what is revealed about settler colonialism in the nexus of difficult knowledge, curatorial decisions, and political debates about the label of genocide. I specifically examine competing definitions of genocide, the primacy of the Holocaust, the regulatory role of the settler state, and the limits of a human rights framework. My argument is that genocide debates related to Indigenous experiences operationalize a range of governing techniques that extend settler colonialism, even as Indigenous peoples confront existing hegemonies. These techniques include: interpretative denial; promoting an Oppression Olympics and a politics of distancing; regulating difference through state-based recognition and interference; and depoliticizing claims that overshadow continuing practices of assimilation, extermination, criminalization, containment, and forced movement of Indigenous peoples. By pinpointing these techniques, this paper seeks to build on Indigenous critiques of colonialism, challenge settler national narratives of peaceful and lawful origins, and foster ways to build more just relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

A Provocation of The Modes of Black Indigeneity

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-50
Author(s):  
Kyle Mays
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Indigenous Land

This essay explores the meaning of the term Black Indigeneity (BI). Afro-Indigenous Studies scholar Kyle T. Mays asks, what is Black Indigeneity? How do scholars talk about it? What are its possibilities? Relying on a survey of recent scholarship, Mays argues that BI is largely understood as a form of Black Americans participating in settler colonial processes meant to erase and displace Indigenous peoples. He argues that we should look at BI as an analytic that African Americans have used to create belonging and continue to express cultures practiced throughout the African diaspora, adapted and transformed into a modern iteration of cultural expression. In this way, we should rethink how we view blackness and indigeneity as two separate entities, and explore how people of African descent create belonging on dispossessed Indigenous land.

Black Representations of Settlement on Film

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-59
Author(s):  
Beenash Jafri
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Popular Film ◽  
White Settler ◽  
The Law

This article develops a method for analyzing Indigenous erasure in popular film that focuses not on the representations (or lack thereof) of Indigenous peoples but on representations of settlement. Whereas much of the scholarship on Native representations in film has been concerned with Hollywood’s promulgation of the “mythical Indian,” I argue that a focus on settlement—rather than on bodies—is significant in the context of the ongoing, unfinished processes of colonialism, which continue to structure life in white settler states. Cultural representations that reconfigure colonial-occupied life as settled life naturalize settler colonialism while erasing and displacing Indigenous claims to land. I illuminate this method by analyzing how the 1974 “blaxploitation Western” Thomasine and Bushrod imagines settlement. The film features a pair of lovers who are on the run from the law in America’s Southwest from 1911 to 1915. Because it is a film that speaks back to historical constructions of Blackness and Indigeneity, Thomasine and Bushrod productively illuminates how representations of Indigenous erasure work in often ambiguous and contradictory ways.

Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’: From Interpretation to Decolonization

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Busbridge
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New World ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
White Settler ◽  
Structural Account ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
Interpretive Framework

In recent years there has been a powerful resurgence of settler colonialism as an interpretive framework through which to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Attached to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies, this so-called ‘turn’ to settler colonialism has seen Israel-Palestine increasingly compared alongside New World white settler societies like Australia, Canada and the United States. In seeking to undercut the lens of exceptionalism through which the conflict has conventionally been viewed, the settler colonial paradigm has some important counter-hegemonic implications for reframing Israel-Palestine, not least of which is its prescription for decolonization. However, it is paradoxically in the context of decolonization that the limits of the settler colonial paradigm become most apparent. I argue that these limitations are connected to the dominance of Patrick Wolfe’s structural account of settler colonialism, which leaves very little room for transformation, and to the particular connotations settler colonial studies has acquired from the New World contexts in which it is most often articulated. This is particularly the case in Israel-Palestine, where these connotations preclude engagement with the national aspects of the conflict and leave under-examined the unique resonances of the settler/native distinction, which need reckoning with in any serious account of decolonization.

scholarly journals Disability’s Circularity: Presence, Absence and Erasure in Australian Settler Colonial Biopolitical Population Regimes

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 306-320
Author(s):  
Karen Soldatic
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
Population Management ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
White Settler ◽  
State Mobilization

In this paper, I explore the ways in which settler-colonial states utilize the category of disability in immigration and Indigenous population regimes to redress settler-colonial anxieties of white fragility. As well documented within the literature, settler-colonial governance operates a particular logic of population management that aims to replace longstanding Indigenous peoples with settler populations of a particular kind. Focusing on the case of Australia and drawing on a range of historical and current empirical sources, the paper examines the central importance of the category of disability to this settler-colonial political intent. The paper identifies the breadth of techniques of governance to embed, normalize and naturalize white settler-colonial rule. The paper concludes with the suggestion that the state mobilization of the category of disability provides us with a unique way to identify, understand and analyse settler-colonial power and the interrelationship of disability, settler-colonial immigration regimes and Indigenous people under its enterprise.

Decolonizing Refugee Studies, Standing up for Indigenous Justice: Challenges and Possibilities of a Politics of Place

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 371-390
Author(s):  
Sedef Arat-Koc
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Third World ◽  
Refugee Studies ◽  
Politics Of Place ◽  
White Settler ◽  
Standing Up ◽  
Global North ◽  
Analytical Step ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Political Solidarity

This paper interrogates the challenges and potentials for solidarity between refugees and Indigenous peoples by bringing decolonial, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist critiques in different parts of the world, including in white settler colonies and in the Third World, into conversation with each other and with Refugee Studies. The first section of the paper offers two analytical steps towards decolonizing mainstream Refugee Studies. The first step involves identifying, analyzing and problematizing what we may call “an elephant in the room,” a parallax gap between Refugee Studies and studies of International Politics. The second analytical step is problematizing and challenging the popular discourses of charity and gratitude that dominate refugee discourses and narratives in the Global North. The second section of the paper engages in a more direct and detailed discussion about challenges to and possibilities for solidarity between refugees and Indigenous peoples. Articulating historical and contemporary parallels between refugee displacement from land and Indigenous dispossession of land, this section demonstrates that there are nevertheless no guarantees for political solidarity. It argues that potentials for solidarity are contingent on a politics of place, as articulated by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars; and also possibly on a reconceptualization and reorientation of refugee identity different from the ways it has been constituted in colonial discourses.

Indigenous Planning: From Forced Assimilation to Self-determination

2021 ◽  
pp. 088541222110266
Author(s):  
Michael Hibbard
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Indigenous Cultures ◽  
Indigenous Planning ◽  
Indigenous Land Rights ◽  
Indigenous Land

Interest in Indigenous planning has blossomed in recent years, particularly as it relates to the Indigenous response to settler colonialism. Driven by land and resource hunger, settler states strove to extinguish Indigenous land rights and ultimately to destroy Indigenous cultures. However, Indigenous peoples have persisted. This article draws on the literature to examine the resistance of Indigenous peoples to settler colonialism, their resilience, and the resurgence of Indigenous planning as a vehicle for Indigenous peoples to determine their own fate and to enact their own conceptions of self-determination and self-governance.

Jeremy Bentham: Pauperism, Colonialism, and Imperialism

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
BARBARA ARNEIL
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Theoretical Contribution ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Poor ◽  
First Contact

Using two recently published folios by Jeremy Bentham, I draw out a fundamental but little-analyzed connection between pauperism and both domestic and settler colonialism in opposition to imperialism in his thought. The core theoretical contribution of this article is to draw a distinction between a colonial, internal, and productive form of power that claims to improve people and land from within, which Bentham defends, and an imperial, external, and repressive form of power that dominates or rules over people from above and afar, that he rejects. Inherent in colonialism and the power unleashed by it are specific and profoundly negative implications in practice for the poor and disabled of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries subject to domestic colonialism and indigenous peoples subject to settler colonialism from first contact until today. I conclude Bentham is best understood as a pro-colonialist and anti-imperialist thinker.

scholarly journals Origins: Colonies and Statistics

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 735-754
Author(s):  
Barbara Arneil
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Mentally Ill ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
English Language ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
State Policies ◽  
Mass Survey ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
History Of

AbstractIn this address, I examine the lexical, geographic, temporal and philosophical origins of two key concepts in modern political thought: colonies and statistics. Beginning with the Latin word colonia, I argue that the modern ideology of settler colonialism is anchored in the claim of “improvement” of both people and land via agrarian labour in John Locke's labour theory of property in seventeenth-century America, through which he sought to provide an ideological justification for both the assimilation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. This same ideology of colonialism was turned inward a century later by Sir John Sinclair to justify domestic colonies on “waste” land in Scotland—specifically Caithness (the county within which my own grandparents were tenant farmers). Domestic colonialism understood as “improvement” of people (the “idle” poor and mentally ill and disabled) through engagement in agrarian labour on waste land inside explicitly named colonies within the borders of one's own country was first championed not only by Sinclair but also his famous correspondent, Jeremy Bentham, in England. Sinclair simultaneously coined the word statistics and was the first to use it in the English language. He defined it as the scientific gathering of mass survey data to shape state policies. Bentham embraced statistics as well. In both cases, statistics were developed and deployed to support their domestic colony schemes by creating a benchmark and roadmap for the improvement of people and land as well as a tool to measure the colony's capacity to achieve both over time. I conclude that settler colonialism along with the intertwined origins of domestic colonies and statistics have important implications for the study of political science in Canada, the history of colonialism as distinct from imperialism in modern political thought and the role played by intersecting colonialisms in the Canadian polity.

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