Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies

Abstract

In this editorial, we consider what is at work in a turn toward analyzing settler colonialism, and what this turn makes available in cultural studies and discussions of cultural production. Recent theorizations of settler colonialism reveal how cultural productions remain complicit with ongoing settlement, both in everyday practices and intellectual projects like queer studies, feminist studies, and critical race studies. This special issue considers the political stakes of the complicity of cultural studies in settler colonialism, Indigenous erasure, and anti-Blackness, and expands, revises, and repurposes the scope of the field's inquiry, politics, and archive.

An Arkansas Parable for the Anthropocene

“…By looking beyond labor as the overriding analytical focus of the plantation system, other ecological dimensions to settler colonialism come into view (see King 2016King , 2018. Indeed, the conceptual apparatus of "settler colonialism" itself has become a field of wider contestation (see Rowe and Tuck 2017;King 2019). By elaborating on the concept of Black fungibility we can delineate alternate other-thanhuman constellations within the Delta interior that would have coexisted with more familiar manifestations of the plantation landscape.…”

Whiteout and the reproduction of (fat) white normativity :a critical discourse analysis of the presence of whiteness in fat studies literature

“…The colonial relationship includes three parties according to Tuck and Yang (2014): the white settlers with a mastery over the land and the people on it, the erasure (both ideological and physical) of Indigenous people, and the "chattel slaves" that were both exploitable and expendable (p. 224). Rowe and Tuck (2017) write that Canada's history and presence of colonialism rest on the continuous restatement of this relationship -that Indigenous people, as well as other 'non-white subjects', are fundamentally unable to exist as rational, "modern" subjects. By simultaneously establishing (white) epistemic authority and devaluing Black, Indigenous, and Racialized people's ways of knowing (and very existence), whiteness and white supremacy are allowed to maintain their dominance.…”

Settler-colonialism, nationalism and geopolitical politics: An overview of the mobilisation of race in South Africa in the context of lost turning points

“…In the United States and other slave estates, it has also meant the theft of people from their homelands (in Africa) to become property of settlers to labour on stolen land. (Rowe & Tuck, 2016) However, the term settler-colonialism encompasses many embedded ideas that are not synonymous. Settler-colonialism is at first sight a tautology, because any colony is, by definition, a settler establishment, but it is important to view these people as economic colonialists, not settler-colonialists.…”