Introduction: Making Space in Settler Colonies

“They Will Be Like a Swarm of Locusts”: Race, Rurality, and Settler Colonialism in American Prepping Culture*

“…While often framed as a long past historic event, in both popular culture and scholarly work, settler-colonialism is an enduring structure that provides the context for contemporary hierarchies, institutions, and culture (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013;Bacon 2019;Banivanua Mar and Edmonds 2010;Glenn 2015;Moreton-Robinson 2015;Norgaard 2019;Tuck and Yang 2012;Wolfe 2006). Both possession of and cultural entitlement to land are central to the functioning of settler-colonialism.…”

Cultivating Settler Colonial Space in Korea: Public Works and the Urban Environment under Japanese Rule

“…43 In this situation, where "there is no industrial advancement, no cultural progress, and national fortunes declined by the day," the report asserts, Japanese colonizers were left no choice but to initiate widescale public works programs around Korea, including road repairs, port construction, and river improvements starting in 1905. 44 Japanese planners especially exaggerated the disorder of Korea's "primitive" native cities. A 1922 Government-General report specifically called out Korea's "current low level of civilization (kaimei)" and the need for "comparatively rapid future development" as reasons for urban improvements.…”

The ‘Missing’ Politics of Whiteness and Rightful Presence in the Settler Colonial City

“…law.' 44 Yet terra nullius is not an actually existing condition but a process of 'emptying' the landscape before filling it up. 45 A vision of empty space is created literally through violent genocide; spatially through forced removals and segregations; temporally through placing Indigenous peoples in the past or out of time; and conceptually through strategies of racialized hierarchies and the spatial incompatible of 'races' at different hierarchical levels.…”

“…50 Thus, settler colonial cities become 'crucial transition sites where Indigenous lands were rapidly converted into European property.' 51 Further, the emplacement and ongoing development of settler colonial cities depends on practices of emptying that generate a marked absence of recognition for the place of Indigenous peoples in urban settings, including but not limited to spatial segregation as 'out of place' 52 and temporal segregation as 'out of time.' 53 The geopolitical production of a nation-state organized into urban and rural spaces is paralleled by the socio-spatial organization of bodies and communities who either could, or could not, be conceived of as present in these spaces.…”

“…51 Further, the emplacement and ongoing development of settler colonial cities depends on practices of emptying that generate a marked absence of recognition for the place of Indigenous peoples in urban settings, including but not limited to spatial segregation as 'out of place' 52 and temporal segregation as 'out of time.' 53 The geopolitical production of a nation-state organized into urban and rural spaces is paralleled by the socio-spatial organization of bodies and communities who either could, or could not, be conceived of as present in these spaces. Settler colonialism is therefore as intimate 54 as it is legal and political, enacting specific embodied practices of racialization 55 and aligning constructions of race with spatial distinctions between rural and urban, countryside and city.…”