The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism
Abstract
In 1761 and again in 1769, European scientists raced around the world to observe the transit of Venus, a rare astronomical event in which the planet Venus passes in front of the sun. This book explores how indigeneity functions as transit, a trajectory of movement that serves as precedent within U.S. imperial history. The book argues that contemporary U.S. empire expands itself through a transferable “Indianness” that facilitates acquisitions of lands, territories, and resources. Examining an array of literary texts, historical moments, and pending legislations-from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma’s vote in 2007 to expel Cherokee Freedmen to the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization bill—the book demonstrates that inclusion into the multicultural cosmopole does not end colonialism as it is purported to do. Rather, that inclusion is the very site of the colonization that feeds U.S. empire. The book contends that the colonization of American Indian and indigenous nations is the necessary ground from which to reimagine a future where the losses of indigenous peoples are not only visible and, in turn, grieveable, but where indigenous peoples have agency to transform life on their own lands and on their own terms.
... People at the workshop articulated a strategy to move forward by considering how to include tribal groups by honoring tribal connections to land beyond an "access" paradigm that, as Byrd (2011) has argued, often sidesteps how "colonization of indigenous lands […] cannot be ended by further inclusion or more participation" (xxvi). This is particularly important given the concern that tribal consultation can devolve into the appropriation of tribal time, resources, and intellectual labor for the land grant university, landowners, and developers, who, by allowing the LRGCE to operate on Loma Ridge, gain political and economic forms of social capital that deepen settler land occupation. ...
... There is a liberal humanist devaluation of racialized and gendered workthe work necessary for their functioningthat is forced into erasure. Labor as a liberal humanist category is not only predicated on the existence of unfreedom (slavery and indentureship, free vs. unfree) (Glenn, 2004;Lowe, 2015) but foundationally requires, as Byrd (2011) argues, the continued genocide of native societies and the extinguishing of their connections to land (p. xxv). ...
This article explores the politics of producing knowledge about drought in a suburban region of southern California: Orange County. Based on nine months of ethnographic research with the assistant specialists that keep the Loma Ridge Global Change Experiment (LRGCE) station running, the article demonstrates how the station, which studies microbial communities and wildfire effects on the local ecology, simply cannot produce the necessary data without these workers' and specialists' expertise and efforts. More than an examination of how drought research happens, this article interrogates how the LRGCE, situated on the Santa Ana mountains and on the ancestral land of the Acjachemen and Tongva peoples, is part of a regime of scientific knowledge production tied to land-use claims. Rather than focus on the science that is produced into valued research products through occupation of Loma Ridge, this article focuses on the forms of repair, tinkering, and maintenance that are near-daily necessities for maintaining the conditions necessary to pull drought knowledge from Loma Ridge and that reveal the various openings where science and land occupation is anything but natural, exposing the relations of settler colonial occupation. Centered on a theory of "mending," this article provides a window into drought's political economy; in particular, it foregrounds the complex relationships between drought and the settler colonial mode of domination that structures southern California's suburbs and the production of scientific knowledge on native lands.
... Western technologies of language have forcefully separated Land and thought through modes of reading and writing nevertheless mediated by Land relations-whether through lithium or even inks extracted from the plants or the earth. Language in written form was, and is still deeply, a part of colonial expansion that informs a progression narrative of the world, and so the process of empire-building has expanded and overwritten connections between ourselves and the Land (Byrd, 2011). Ultimately, this obscuring of Land relations silences deeper connections to how we understand the world. ...
... As a conduit, lithium gives birth to the possibility of sharing Data by housing the link between our wireless Data kinships. This view is in opposition to the naturalization of our wireless world as an inanimate, extractible entity, which is part of the very same cacophony that rendered Indigenous peoples silent within the structures of settler colonialism (Byrd, 2011). This relational approach undoes the palimpsest over Land's agency that radiated from settler-colonial expansion. ...
This paper examines the relationship between digital spaces and the Land, proposing a framework that maps the origins of digital space to contextualize our relationships with lithium. Lithium, in the form of batteries, enables us to work remotely and online, birthing the possibility of different technologies while also tying said technologies to mining and extraction. Through this lens of layered relationships, the paper interrogates the metaphors and technological languages used to disconnect digital spaces from the Land and obscure the settler-colonial practices of extraction underpinning them. By tracing my own relationships to the Lands and waters destroyed to produce the batteries in my computer, I aim to reimagine these connections and offer an alternative perspective. Rather than presenting a definitive solution, this paper advocates for using metaphors against colonial structures to envision other worlds where digital spaces are recognized as rooted in both Land and kinship relations. The conclusions are that Data is sacred and kin; Data is born from the Land; Land connects multiple worlds; and digital spaces are Land. These conclusions aim to re-think settler-colonial extraction by recognizing the sacred interconnections between Land, digital spaces, and the materials that power our technologies.
... 39 Biopolitics within settler contexts substantiate and is organised through a 'logic of elimination' 40 through which the nation's territoriality is defined through the control of Indigenous populations and the 'whittling away' of Indigenous sovereignty. 41 However, from this standpoint, settler colonialism 'is a structure, not an event'. 42 Foucault states that biopolitics, or the 'political ordering of life' 43 , is organised around two axes: an anatomy-politics of the human body and a biopolitics of the population. ...
... SCT provides a complementary vantage point for examining legal mobilization, highlighting that many elements of modern political-legal argumentation are rooted in and reproduce settler colonialism. While law and society scholars highlight "rights" as a core American legal value that groups draw on to legitimize legal claims, Indigenous studies scholars note that the very idea of individual rights -like the ideal of equality -is an ideology that emerged through the practices of settler colonialism, colonialism, and slavery (Byrd 2011;Moreton-Robinson 2015). As Lowe (2015:16) explains, "Modern notions of rights … did not contravene colonial rule; rather they precisely permitted expanded Anglo-American rule by adopting settler means of appropriation and removal." ...
Bringing critical race theory and settler colonial theory to bear on legal mobilization scholarship, this article examines the ongoing campaign to strike down the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). ICWA sought to end the forced removal of American Indian children from their tribes. If successful, the challenges to ICWA’s constitutionality stand to undermine tribal sovereignty writ large. Drawing on a content analysis of documents from 17 major court cases (2013–2023) and a unique dataset of public-facing documents from the leading ICWA challengers, I interrogate the argumentative architecture of this legal mobilization. I find that the campaign to strike down ICWA is structured around three ideological maneuvers: erasure, settler normativity, and reclassification. These maneuvers scaffold a fourth – colorblindness – and the claim that ICWA is an unconstitutional race-based statute. I show how ICWA adversaries use these ideological maneuvers to legitimate white possession of Indigenous children and delegitimize tribal sovereignty. While existing work tends to treat colorblind racism and settler colonialism as analytically distinct, these findings shed light on the linkages between the two. They also marshal empirical analysis to illustrate how the embeddedness of settler colonialism and racism in the law enables broad claims to and defense of whiteness as property.
... Like many others, we have come to understand the interdependent relationship between modernity and coloniality. In this dynamic, the shiny promises of modernity are subsidized by the violent underside of coloniality, and this colonial violence persists even in contexts where formal political colonization has ceased (Andreotti, 2011;Byrd, 2011;Coulthard, 2014;Mignolo, 2011;Silva, 2014;Spivak, 1988). However, we have also found that, while having this intellectual analysis is indispensable to our decolonizing work, the awareness of this analysis does not necessarily lead us somewhere diff erent. ...
... I interpret Martí's crónicas on US-Indigenous peoples as coinciding with the increasing dissemination and coverage of the plight of Native peoples by the US government in newspapers and periodicals beginning around the 1880s. Moreover, my analysis of Martí's crónicas on these groups draws from Indigenous studies and Indigeneity scholarship (Simpson 2007;Byrd 2011;Coulthard 2014;Saldaña-Portillo 2016;Rifkin 2017), particularly current interpretations of the consequences of settler colonialism and notions of Indigenous sovereignty, to interpret Martí's evolving views on US-Indigenous peoples. I begin this essay by contextualizing Martí's views on US-Native peoples in relation to some of his previous writings on Indigenous populations in Latin America, where he lived and shared anti-Indigenous views with some of his Latin American counterparts. ...
This essay argues for the centrality and increasing influence of late nineteenth-century US print culture, in the form of printed books, mass-circulation newspapers, and literary magazines, on José Martí’s US-based crónicas (chronicles) that reflect his gradual critical interpretation related to the violence and land dispossession of Indigenous people in the US and their lack of basic rights. Martí’s interest in and writings about US-Indigenous people are connected to the increased advocacy for Native peoples’ rights in US print culture by white reformers, particularly Helen Hunt Jackson. My analysis builds on the works of scholars who have studied Martí’s writings on US-Indigenous people, including his 1887 translation of Jackson’s reform novel, Ramona (2002 [1884]), and draws from Indigenous and Indigeneity scholars’ emphasis on settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty. While Martí initially concurred with reformers who advocated for the passing of the Dawes Act of 1887, which offered US citizenship to Native groups who accepted allotment, he came to question US jurisdiction over US-Indigenous populations in part through his realization that Indigenous people and Black people in the South have shared a history of racialization, violence, and disenfranchisement within the confines of the US nation-state.
... 385). The second concern is that the philosophies associated with the term have been used in a manner that reinscribes settler colonialism and Indigenous cultural genocide either by uncritically celebrating colonialist expansion, extraction, and abstraction (Byrd, 2011;King, 2017;Todd, 2016), by ignoring the way Indigenous thinkers have long presumed the existence and significance of a variety of forms of non-human agency (Rosiek et al., 2020;Watts, 2013), or by insisting on the ideal of subjectless social analysis that disallows arguments grounded in the experience of identity-based oppression (King, 2017;Weheliye, 2014). We are aware of these critiques and find them valid yet, like many, still find the term useful (Honeyford & Watts, 2020;Nxumalo, 2021;Weheliye, 2014) and explicitly use it in a manner that critiques colonialism, acknowledges Indigenous theories of non-human agency, and explicitly grounds our analysis in an Indigenous teacher's experience of systemic silencing. ...
This essay examines an episode of teaching in which the inclusion of content about Indigenous history, contemporary presence, and culture triggered protean social and material resistance. This leads to an inference that the curricula of settler colonialism cannot be thought of only in terms of textbooks, state standards, and lesson plans. It also includes agentic assemblages involving communities, habits of thought and feeling, career anxieties, and more. These shape-shifting assemblages of material and discursive forces actively erase Indigenous truths, lives, and futurities. Learning to teach against the grain of settler colonialism, therefore, requires preparing teachers to engage with the whole of this dynamic, not just the ideas that are left out of mandated school curricula. Drawing on the personal experiences of the lead author and a variety of conceptual resources, this essay offers both an illustration and a theorization of what substantively teaching against the grain of settler futurities entails.
... Methodologically, my goal is not to deny health inequity, but to model a unique way of representing it by offering critical Indigenous theory to guide future health research and inform policy-making and clinical practice. 11 After all, if colonialism is an ongoing and violent process which re/orders relations between Indigenous peoples, governance, and health, then analysing the conditions that produce Indigenous health requires attention to harm. ...
By foregrounding the embodiment of colonial dispossession–how the body feels colonialism–this article theorises violence against Indigenous peoples in Canada, positioning it firmly within the purview of healthcare. The article critically questions the discourse of reconciliation currently shaping Indigenisation policies and Indigenous health research in the country’s public institutions. It contends that a narrow application of “closing the Indigenous health gap,” described more robustly by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, falls short of addressing the root problem: “ending colonial violence.” Aligning with critical Indigenous studies scholarship, I redirect representations of Indigenous health away from the presumption of deficit. I argue that health care in Canada is responsible for recognising and confronting colonial violence as a matter of public health. As a starting point, this responsibility involves implementing the relevant Calls for Justice outlined in Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
... Modernity is fuelled by teleological linear thinking and temporality, which supported the rise of capitalism and continues to fuel it along with nation-state formation, and current notions of fixed hierarchical superiority along the lines of race, class, gender, ability and indigeneity. This paradigm simultaneously creates, then demonises and romanticises, a frozen and orientalised past for the coloured exotic indigene (Byrd 2011;Calderón 2016;Fanon 2008;Maldonado-Torres 2008;Mills 2007;Rifkin 2017;Said 2016;Tuck and Yang 2012). ...
This paper is a theoretical exploration that works through a global Indigenous consciousness. As a critically reflexive story work and auto-ethnographic contemplation it begins by confronting a presumed genealogy in a post-apocalyptic world of coloniality through a global Indigenous lens. Extending beyond racially legalised genealogical ancestry, the metaphysics of indigeneity in the context of Western modernity can be re-positioned as a metaphor of past future human-being-ness or person/people-hood. Global Indigeneity and Indigenous metaphysics are framed as a portal and entry beyond coloniality through fugitive sociality and subversive relationality. Confronting the tensions of colonially purist and racially essentialist categories of indigenous identity, lineages of the post-post-apocalyptic world are forming in the enduring social connections embodied in an Indigenous genealogical consciousness of the present.
... 5 Attention to such emergences can also guard against the risks of "damage-centered research" (Tuck, 2009). 6 For accounts that explore property through colonial histories of racialized dispossession and slavery, see Bhandar (2018); Byrd (2011); Nichols (2020); Rifkin (2017); Winchell (2022). 7 Just as Black bodies were brutally enslaved as commodified objects, liberal mechanisms for superseding such exploitation has likewise relied on an assimilative process of whitening (see also Harris 1993;Hartman, 1997). ...
Drawing inspiration from new work across the fields of political ecology, plantation and abolition studies, critical Indigenous studies, and racial capitalism, this Introduction to a special issue of The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology locates extraction within an account of property as a system of racialized exploitation. Aware of the risks of a cosmopolitics that romanticizes non‐Western value systems as largely untouched by extractivism, in this Introduction and in the articles themselves, we center the question of how Indigenous communities and others navigate extractivism in places and landscapes that have been deeply impacted and partly transformed by resource mining, agrarian monoculture, and deforestation. In voicing demands not subordinated by a materialist and secular language of resource exploitation, these accounts invite a less deterministic account of “our” late capitalist present. We contend that just as extraction is not monolithic, neither are its refusals, resistances, and alternatives.
Although Indigenous and postcolonial studies are often treated as distinct fields, this article argues for their interconnection through a focus on relational ways of being. By juxtaposing contemporary Indigenous North American and postcolonial Ghanaian novels, this essay explores the concept of relationality as a form of Indigenous resurgence. With Nanabush’s teaching of relationality as a framework, the study examines how characters in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach (2000), Diane Wilson’s The Seed Keeper (2021), and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers (1979) navigate and sustain reciprocal relationships with human and non-human kin. The article’s primary contribution is a cross-cultural comparative method called reading resurgence that highlights shared commitments to decolonial futures. By reading resurgence, this work illuminates some of the ways in which Indigenous and postcolonial literatures reject colonial separations and insist on interconnected, place-based ways of knowing. Illuminating what can only be seen in the context of relationships, these novels tell a wider story about the urgent importance of sharing place-based knowledges inter- and intragenerationally to strengthen reciprocal connections between humans and the land. Ultimately, this study affirms the value of cross-cultural literary analysis in understanding how Indigenous and postcolonial narratives contribute to broader global decolonial movements.
In the past several years, a new generation of feminist and queer theorists has helped to cultivate renewed attention to the work of 1970s lesbian theory and activism. This renewed attention requires careful engagement with contested archives, particularly when navigating racisms and biological essentialisms of the past that continue to haunt feminisms in the present. In this article, I ask what it means to inherit and care for the contested archive of the womyn's land movement and the potentialities it preserves for future feminist theorising while remaining committed to trans inclusion and antiracist and anticolonial praxis. Drawing from the papers of womyn's land culturemakers Ruth and Jean Mountaingrove, I argue for a more complex understanding of what it means to ‘inherit’ this work for feminists interested in lineages of land-based feminist thought. By more fulsomely accounting for the possibilities that emerge from non-biological and queer forms of intergenerational exchange at play on the land, I argue for the vitality of the ‘messiness’ of this archive as a source of its own feminist pedagogy, proposing a process of ‘thinking-with’ these archives as part of a web of engagements rather than a linear genealogy.
Scholarship increasingly examines international social movements advocating for the abolition of the prison‐industrial complex. Within this landscape, Abolition Ecologies has emerged as a generative intellectual space for examining the intersections of carceral power, environmental exploitation, and racial‐capitalist violence. However, there are opportunities to address the material dynamics of settler coloniality and Indigenous dispossession in this literature. Amid debates concerning the compatibility between abolition and anti‐colonialism, this article asks: What insights emerge when we centre Indigenous dispossession and settler coloniality in Abolition Ecologies? How might these insights complicate how solidarity is conceptualised and activated in the literature? This article identifies three under‐explored frictions that arise in centring Indigenous dispossession and settler colonialism in Abolition Ecologies. These frictions reveal complex challenges for the field. However, this article ultimately argues that Abolition Ecologies offers creative analytical and methodological tools to engage with these frictions. Rather than foreclosing solidarity, these frictions spark new opportunities for analysis.
The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics addresses the political contexts in which nineteenth-century American literature was conceived, consumed, and criticized. Individual chapters examine how US literature from this period engaged with broad political concepts and urgent political issues, such as liberalism, conservatism, radicalism, nationalism, communitarianism, sovereignty, religious liberty, partisanship and factionalism, slavery, segregation, immigration, territorial disputes, voting rights, gendered spheres, and urban/rural tensions. Chapters on literary genres and forms show how poetry, drama, fiction, oratory, and nonfiction participated in political debate. The volume's introduction situates these chapters in relation to two larger disciplines, the history of political thought and literary history. This Companion provides a valuable resource for students and instructors interested in Nineteenth-Century American literature and politics.
Claudia Salazar Jiménez’s (Lima, 1976) approach to writing fiction about a period of violence in Peru (1980–2000) is creative and disruptive, examining and contesting the partisanship and censorship that has shaped and silenced retellings of this history. Her 2013 novel, La sangre de la aurora, features three women characters who become targets of the sexual violence that characterised the actions of all the actors in the conflict. Salazar Jiménez’s contestatory retelling is boldly experimental with form. Stories are polyphonic and fractured, representing K’echwa in Spanish translation as well as including the languages of Shining Path, the Catholic Church, the security forces, popular song and journalism. This chapter examines how Salazar Jiménez frames feminist versions of the conflict through these experiments which are read as a variation on the genre of testimonio as a mode of historical writing. Recent work has questioned the distinction between ‘creative’ and ‘objective’ testimony, linking that deconstruction to a more progressive politics of memory. The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR, 2001–2003) and the testimonies it featured has been a particularly rich source for this kind of study in Peru, and Salazar Jiménez significantly engages with the work of the CVR. Parts of her novel can be interpreted as a narrative translation of one of the key pieces of evidence presented by it—the transmedial, itinerant photographic exhibition Yuyanapaq. Salazar Jiménez’s approach to historical fiction through testimony can then also be read as an activist intervention aimed at building collective memory and advancing transitional justice.
Avowing settler status positions settler scholars to join in storying less harmful futures for the discipline. The author’s journey toward avowing settler status through the Northern Shoshoni word daiboo’ helps clear a path for this world-making.
This article presents that decolonizing cannot happen without acknowledging the role of land relations in constituting data and radically reconstituting what we are governing when we claim to govern ‘data.’ To this end, it reflects upon how the juxtaposition of the ‘data colonialism’ and the ‘Anthropocene’ discourses can be productive by highlighting their common settler colonial impulses in understanding the categories of the ‘material’ and the ‘epistemological’ as distinctive. Next, the article draws upon the Place-Thought framework proposed by Anishinaabe-Haudenosaunee scholar Vanessa Watts and others to argue that in addition to being a demand for giving land titles to Indigenous peoples, #LandBack movements should be understood as a decolonizing call for realizing the seamless coherence of the material-epistemological, both outside and within Europe. The last section proposes earthy data as decolonizing tactics against the settler understandings of data.
The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies takes stock of critical developments over the past twenty years, offering a fresh examination of key interpretative issues in this field. In eclectic fashion, it presents a wide range of new approaches in such areas as print and material culture, Black studies, Latinx studies, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, postsecular studies, and Indigenous studies. This volume also maps out new directions for the future of the field. The evidence and examples discussed by the contributors are compelling, grounded in case studies of key literary texts, both familiar and understudied, that help to bring critical debate into focus and model fresh interpretive perspectives. Essays provide new readings and framings of such figures as Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, Charles Chesnutt, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and Zitkála-Šá.
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between class conflict and the Nigerian labour
movement, focusing on the role of strikes, protests, and the subsequent policy changes. The
primary objective is to explore how economic inequalities and class divisions fuel labour
activism in Nigeria, particularly through the actions of the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC)
and various trade unions. The study is grounded in conflict theory, which posits that class
struggles and economic disparities are key drivers of social and political change. A qualitative
approach is employed, utilizing historical records, government reports, and scholarly literature
to analyse the evolution of labour movements and their impact on policy development. The
findings indicate that labour strikes and protests are pivotal in challenging class disparities and
advocating for improved working conditions, fair wages, and social justice. These movements
lead to significant policy changes, including reforms in labour laws and wage policies, though
the responses from the government and employers are often reactive rather than proactive. The
discussion emphasizes the enduring nature of class conflict in shaping labour relations and
policy in Nigeria, concluding that continued advocacy is essential to address ongoing
inequalities and ensure lasting socio-economic progress. The article underscores the
importance of understanding of class conflict as a driving force behind labour activism and its
influence on policy reforms in Nigeria.
Keywords: class, conflict, inequalities, labour, policy introduction
Volume 7 Issue 2 Conflicts of the Wor(l)d: Writing Justice and Peace 2 UNIVERSITY of the WESTERN CAPE 3 Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, It is with immense pleasure and pride that I present to you the second issue of Volume 7 of WritingThreeSixty with the theme: Conflicts of the Wor(l)d: Writing Justice and Peace. This marks a significant milestone in our collective efforts to revive this graduate journal and invite authors from far and wide to captivate us with their academic and creative voices. WritingThreeSixty aims to foster interdisciplinary research essays and creative texts, with publications ranging from poetry and short stories to art and photo essays, alongside 'traditional' research essays. We are committed to publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed articles that contribute significantly to the existing body of knowledge. This issue showcases scholarly contributions, addressing injustices around the world, from genocide to gender-based violence. Responses from the call for papers features creative non-fiction and research articles as media used to respond to the theme of current issue. We believe these articles signify a fraction of the research being conducted in the field of social injustices today.
This study explores the centrality of the Black Continental African Soccer Club (BCASC) as a “diasporic resource” for members of the new African diaspora who play in an over-35 men's recreational soccer league in a Western Canadian city. Drawing from a multiyear ethnography, we critically examine how the BCASC serves as a crucial Black sporting institution for its members to collectively navigate anti-Black racism and the set of limits and pressures that come with being typecast as model minorities—the dominant representational figure for multiculturalism in the Canadian political economy—as they aspire to be, and live, as their fully fledged, and culturally authentic Black selves. Like other historic Black and ethnic sporting institutions, the BCASC and its related practices of fraternal sociality and solidarity serve as identity-affirming and redemptive, sanctuary sites where team members confront dominant and exclusionary forms of whiteness and its subordinating customs, all while palliating “homing desire” through nostalgic expressions of home.
Thanksgiving-themed episodes of cooking television open up questions about the interrelations of food, history, power, and culture. This study addresses such questions through textual and thematic analysis of 46 Thanksgiving-themed episodes of reality cooking competition programmes on US cable TV, exploring how the Thanksgiving episode operates as a site for the deployment of the culinary as a category by which the past is re/created. I argue that the Thanksgiving episode represents history through two frames: “tradition” and “reenactment.” Reading the Thanksgiving episode as a site of history's reconstruction illuminates popular media's involvement in the socio-historical-political machinery of contemporary life.
This article explores Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West (2017) combining principles pertaining to social geography, affect theory, and (post)migration studies with postcolonial theory. It aims to highlight how Hamid’s use of magical realism triggers political, philosophical, and socio-emotional reflections by condensing in the story arc the intercultural and intersubjective processes that characterise the migratory experience and the postmigrant condition. Firstly, it investigates how Exit West incorporates magical realism to represent the psychoemotional dynamics of migration and to problematize the concept of cosmopolitanism; secondly, it discusses how the novel promotes a re-thinking of migration identities and experiences in terms of affective transnationality; thirdly, it points out how the refugee communities represented in the novel are manifestations of a chaos-world in which identity formation is shaped by sociocultural encounters, multilingualism, media use, and processes of affiliation.
This paper focuses on what critics have charged were false and duplicitous appeals to Indigeneity on the part of elected officials in twenty-first century Bolivia, a narrative confirmed by President Evo Morales’s continued support for neo-extractivist nationalism. Although such critiques gained sway among far-right critics of Morales in the months preceding his 2019 ousting, scholarly efforts to account for his removal also often approach Indigeneity either as a resilient anti-extractivist plurality or as a manipulated instrument emptied of content. Building from fieldwork and historiographical studies, this article shifts away from such charges of falsity or innocence to instead examine the relational workings of Indigeneity in a setting long defined by Quechua and Aymara skepticism toward programs of government-based uplift and historical redemption. Beyond providing a framework for authorizing and “knowing” Indigeneity, I examine how introduced notions of racialized difference have been key to popular Quechua and Aymara efforts to contest political, religious, and labor incursions. Among rural supporters in the decade preceding Morales’s ousting, shared appeals to Indigenous belonging and historical rootedness allowed new channels of claim-making. Rather than being neutralized, politicized invocations of shared Indigeneity contributed to a relational terrain by which supporters demanded elected officials’ responsiveness given what they perceived as the failures of institutional decolonization and the tragedies of state abandonment.
Oral histories of Latina domestic workers in the United States feature hybrid narratives combining accounts of illness and “toxic discourse”. We approach domestic workers’ illnesses and disabilities in a capacious, extra-medical context that registers multiple axes of precarity (economic, racial, and migratory). We are naming this context “settler maintenance”. Riffing on the specific and general valences of “maintenance” (i.e., as a synonym for cleaning work, and as a term for the practices and ideologies involved in a structure’s upkeep), this term has multiple meanings. First, it describes U.S. domestic workers’ often-compulsory use of hazardous chemical agents that promise to remove dirt speedily, yet that imperil domestic workers’ health. The use of these chemicals perpetuates two other, more abstract kinds of settler maintenance: (1) the continuation of socioeconomic hierarchies between immigrant domestic workers and settler employers, and (2) the continuation of (white) settlers’ extractive relationship to the land qua private property. To challenge this logic of settler maintenance, which is predicated on a lack of care for care workers, Latina domestic workers have developed alternative forms of care via lateral networks and political activism.
Caroline Dodds Pennock, Ned Blackhawk, and Esteban Mira Caballos published three paradigm-shifting works in 2023 that flip deeply ingrained narratives of Indigenous Americans’ presence at home in the hemispheric Americas and abroad in Europe. Pennock's book introduces scholarly shifts towards a global Indigenous presence and reframes Europe On Savage Shores where Indigenous travellers arrived on their own accord in largely forgotten encounters; Blackhawk reimagines official United States history which often omits Indigenous peoples by making them its moving force in The Rediscovery of America ; and Mira Caballos conversely breaks down stereotypical attitudes toward Indigenous travellers in Spain by evincing their transatlantic journeys to Iberia in El Descubrimiento de Europa ( The Discovery of Europe ). All three works are mutually reinforcing in their mission to dismantle popular beliefs rooted in imaginative, racist, and antiquated narratives rather than historically verified reality. They are critical for both the academic and public transformation of the history of Indigenous peoples in Northern Europe, Iberia, and the United States. They propose a necessary and well-founded revision of their respective historiographic traditions, all originating from models predicated upon the paradigm of European discovery which these authors successfully turn on its head.
Jodi A. Byrd and Joseph M. Pierce discuss the Supreme Court decisions Dobbs v. Jackson and Haaland v. Brackeen, which upheld the legality of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act. In this wide-ranging conversation, the authors reflect on “what Indigenous studies and queer studies can bring together,” considering Indigenous dispossession, kinship, settler colonialism, sovereignty, and reciprocity, among many other subjects.
This paper explores a series of recent works of speculative fiction and poetry by queer First Nations writers—including Ellen van Neerven, Laniyuk, Alison Whittaker, SJ Norman, and Jazz Money—to touch on the depth and breadth of Blak Queer embodiment, erotics, joy, and imagination. The focus is on reading these texts vulnerably, with an ethic of companion-thinking in respect to Indigenous Standpoint Theory, attentive to my relationality and responsibilities as a queer white colonial-settler situated on stolen Aboriginal Land. Thinking in company with queer First Nations creative writing and erotics in this way redefines the horizon of possibility in imagining a world beyond what Wiradjuri transgender/non-binary scholar and artist Sandy O’Sullivan (2021 p.1) calls “the colonial project of gender (and everything else).”
In 2016, Kennan Ferguson published “Why Does Political Science Hate American Indians?” Ferguson described structural features of contemporary political science to explain the exclusion of Indigenous peoples and knowledges from the discipline. Today, there is a different context. In universities, Indigenous knowledges are no longer ignored or disqualified, rather there are aims to diversify and deparochialize the curriculum, while opening space for Indigenous scholarship. Despite good intentions, however, there are still structural obstacles to taking up Indigenous knowledges in the university generally and political science specifically. We evoke a stylized Reviewer 2 to describe dynamics within the peer review process that tend to limit or exclude interventions that engage with Indigenous knowledges: 1) the disciplining effects of disciplines; (2) the reproduction of eurocentrism; (3) the demand for essentialism or romanticization – or the challenge to both; and (4) the unfair politicization of the “good” argument. We identify a fifth (5) dynamic related to the continued underrepresentation of Indigenous scholars. We conclude by indicating ways that reviewers and editors committed to pluralism can rigorously carry out peer review while opening up political science to Indigenous knowledges.
En 2016, Kennan Ferguson a publié « Why Does Political Science Hate American Indians ? » (« Pourquoi la science politique déteste-t-elle les Amérindiens ? »). Ferguson y décrivait les caractéristiques structurelles de la science politique contemporaine pour expliquer l’exclusion des peuples et des savoirs autochtones de la discipline. Aujourd’hui, le contexte est différent. Dans les universités, les savoirs autochtones ne sont plus ignorés ou disqualifiés, mais on cherche plutôt à diversifier et à déparochialiser les programmes d’études, tout en ouvrant un espace à l’érudition autochtone. Cependant, malgré ces bonnes intentions, il existe toujours des obstacles structurels à la prise en compte des savoirs autochtones dans l’Université en général et dans les sciences politiques en particulier. Nous évoquons un évaluateur n°2 stylisé pour décrire les dynamiques au sein du processus d’évaluation par les pairs qui tendent à limiter ou à exclure les interventions qui s’engagent dans les savoirs autochtones : 1) les effets disciplinaires des disciplines ; 2) la reproduction de l’eurocentrisme ; 3) la demande d’essentialisme ou de romantisme - ou la remise en question des deux ; et 4) la politisation abusive du « bon » argument. Nous identifions une cinquième dynamique liée à (5) la sous-représentation persistante des chercheurs autochtones. Nous concluons en indiquant comment les évaluateurs et les rédacteurs en chef attachés au pluralisme peuvent procéder rigoureusement à l’évaluation par les pairs tout en ouvrant la science politique aux savoirs autochtones.
This article theorises the relationship between empire and Israeli settler colonialism through the interplay between violence and capital accumulation in colonial racial capitalism. It argues that Israel's genocidal violences of land theft is the means and grounds for Israeli and US imperial capital accumulation. This can be observed in the genocidal operation in the Gaza Strip. The first section contextualizes the genocide in the Gaza Strip within a larger structure of genocide. The section highlights the centrality of the conquest of land in the Zionist settler colonial project and how that appealed to the British empire in the early parts of the twentieth century. The second section examines why the US empire has actively participated in the genocide. States in the US imperial bloc essentially reduce the whole question of Palestine to a simple equation where Palestinian liberation does not equate with their own economic interests, while Israeli settler colonialism does. Though there exists a tension between imperial and settler colonial interests around the question of what kind of violence is preferable for capital accumulation, the article concludes by arguing that a transformation of the logics and systems of colonial racial capitalism cannot arise without activism and pressure from below on states and capitalist structures.
Taking as a starting point the desire of many to locate the unfolding genocide in Gaza in the irrationality of its perpetrators — the Israeli state and/or its imperial backers — this article proposes instead to understand it as an extreme expression of the continuous violence necessary to maintain not only local settler colonial rule, but the global capitalist system as a whole. Building on the existing literature on settler colonialism and racial capitalism, and insisting on the ways that both should be understood not as discrete, self-contained objects of study, but as co-constitutive elements of the global order, this article attempts to illuminate the structural logics at play in Israel’s latest and most brutal assault on Palestinian life. In doing so, the article emphasises Zionism’s role in maintaining western imperialism at a crucial nodal point of the world economy and, in turn, the latter’s commitment to guaranteeing its stability and dominance. The article resists, however, the urge to move from explaining current structures of domination to declaring them as final or unshakable. It therefore ends by proposing possible different tomorrows, through an engagement with the Palestinian revolutionary tradition.
For too long, questions of racism and colonialism have not been part of historical sociology’s understanding of modernity. Yet, a new generation of scholars has begun to address this, placing racism and empire at the center of their inquiries. This new generation looks to previously marginalized scholars for guidelines and inspiration. In line with this shift in historical sociology, this paper brings the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and other writers in the Black Radical Tradition to bear on longer-standing analytic and methodological debates: How do these authors allow us to think about theory-building and comparison? What is the goal of explanation? How should we approach archives and sources? Building on these insights, this paper explains how the work of Du Bois and the Black Radical Tradition provides a model for a new historical sociology, and a framework that allows us to see the connections between racism, colonialism, and modernity.
This article considers Indigenous refusal to state-imposed US citizenship through a reading of Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman (2020). The novel follows the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa’s struggle to remain a federally recognized tribe during the US government’s move toward tribal termination in the 1950s. While the characters’ appeal to the US government could be construed simply as a plea for state recognition, the novel’s insistence on Chippewa kinship structures as a simultaneous and legitimate expression of the characters’ political identities suggests otherwise. Taking up conversations in Indigenous studies pertaining to the limits of state recognition and the possibilities of generative forms of refusal, the article expands upon Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson’s (2014) model of refusal with an emphasis on irresolution. This irresolution is manifested in the novel’s narrative form—which refuses closure. The article uses the term border positionalities to describe the unresolved and unsettled tension between the characters’ Indigenous and settler political identities. It contends that the incommensurability of these social and political identities makes Erdrich’s novel an important text for reading citizenship as an ongoing site of struggle for Indigenous people.
This paper is a methodological reflection on my time as a graduate student studying Indian Residential Schools through archival sources. I broadly survey relevant secondary studies to access the current state of the field and to chart prospective avenues for future scholarly engagement. I suggest that, for religionists, the frameworks of church history and mission history can be selectively utilized to examine the history of residential schooling. I argue that the ‘Indian Residential School’ (or IRS) terminology creates a narrowed understanding of colonialism and assimilative education by disregarding other modes of schooling deployed in Indigenous communities: the day schools and mission schools, but also hospitals, convents, and other church-operated institutions. Largely dating to the pre-Confederation period, mission schools especially fade from view when studies focus on the national model of the IRS launched in 1879 and expanded in 1884. In many regional contexts, mission schools of the colonial era laid the literal and conceptual groundwork for the later launching of the IRS system. By studying the works and the records of specific church bodies, religionists might elucidate with greater clarity the evolving differences, synchronicities, or collaborations of ideologies, policies, and practices among members of church and state over several centuries. Attending to pre-Confederation, colonial history also lends a transnational scope to a topic that is often framed in the context of national history, i.e., ‘Canada’s residential school system’. A global perspective on colonial education could assist historians of religion to assess the legacies of church, empire, and imperialism on Canada’s national model of residential schooling.
Composed of diptych photographs stitched together in a poetic travelogue through nuclear-infused (Indigenous) lands, annie ross's Pots and Other Living Beings reenvisions social and ecological relations, value structures, and knowledge frameworks in its encounter with violated landscapes of the American Southwest. In its embrace of the blighted remainders of nuclear testing, industry, and consumerism, Pots and Other Living Beings is not a typical “environmental” text. Like ross's weaving and visual installations, this work is alive to relations of reciprocity and kinship with more-than-human worlds in what one could best describe as a spiritual engagement with the abandoned, unremarked leavings of nuclearization, industrial capitalism, and waste cultures.
In political science, federalism is often treated as an “antithesis” to empire. While Canadian Politics has recently become more attentive to the importance of ongoing settler colonialism as conditioning Canadian political life writ large, this has yet to induce a paradigm shift in understanding how the institutional logics of the state were established by, and in order to advance, colonial and imperial ends. This article contributes to this broader understanding by exploring how, in Canada, the federal arrangement congeals a constitutionalized whiteness that facilitates both the internal coherence of a settler class and its subsequent continental expansion. Attentive to the importance of this constitutional development within a world-spanning imperial context, this article also suggests that the simultaneous innovation of Dominion status contoured the early twentieth-century's global colour line, as self-determination was increasingly devolved to other white settler polities. The contradictory realities of these processes are also noted.
If psychometrics has long concerned itself with validity, reliability, and fairness, then what could psychometrics learn from the cybernetic theories of AI? Through engagement with Burstein’s (2023) Responsible AI Standards, this paper unpacks some paradigmatic differences between psychometrics and cybernetics, points to how recursivity and contingency are both a challenge and opportunity for psychometrics, and how this matters epistemologically, ethically and politically. Following these epistemological differences, the paper raises ethico-political concerns with the promise of the “human-in-the-loop”.
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