New Directions in Settler Colonial Studies

Karl Jacoby is the Allan Nevins Professor of American History at Columbia University. He is the author of Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History, and The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire.Magdalena Naum is an Associate Professor of historical archaeology at Lund University. She is the co-editor of Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity and an editor of the journal, Settler Colonial Studies.

This important collection of ethnographic essays is a sophisticated intervention in the study of the South Asian geobody. It offers a critical rethinking of borders and borderlands that takes us beyond the confinements of geographical location and narrowly defined citizenship. The essays deal with a great number of empirical cases, ranging from the troubles in Jammu and Kashmir to the conflicts in Assam, highlighting the long-term effects of Partition on mobility, family, and marriage.It is a must-read for those interested in the politics of migration in South Asia.Peter van der Veer, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, GöttingenThis book showcases a truly outstanding collection of conceptually subtle and fine-grained ethnographic studies at the intersection of migration and refugee studies, postcolonial history, the geopolitics of borders and border zones, and the contemporary politics of citizenship in India. Excavating the fiercely contested struggles over citizenship, the vagaries of national identity, and the lived textures and complexities of belonging in several South Asian borderlands, the contributions to this volume illuminate vital concerns and debates of global scope and significance.Nicholas De Genova, Professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of HoustonThis is a rich collection of historical, literary, and ethnographic texts about ordinary life as it unfolds in borderlands of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Focusing on pivotal moments when borders are reconfigured through political conflict, the arrival of new infrastructure or the implementation of new governance technologies, the essays illustrate how state action frames the spectrum of possible mobilities and demonstrate how frequently these conditions change. The rich case studies are a powerful reminder that borders are not merely spatial markings; rather, they are spatio-temporal regimes that evolve dynamically in line with historical ruptures as well as the flows and disruptions that play out in everyday life.Ursula Rao, Director of the Department 'Anthropology of Politics and Governance', Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in HalleThis is a timely and outstanding contribution to the field of migration and borderlands in south Asia. The essays by young scholars bring fresh insights drawing on in-depth ethnographic research from diverse field sites in the region. Together, they animate borderland lives and experiences of migration, focusing on the everyday, the situated and the contingent. The collection offers a fresh new perspective on both borderland lives and migration experiences that mark a shift from state and legal discourses to more embodied and fluid negotiations around borderland lives that emerge through narratives on kinship and marriage, citizenship and bureaucracy, militarization and conflict.Farhana Ibrahim, Professor Sociology & Social Anthropology, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

• Introduction: new directions in settler colonial studies in a time of crisis 1. ‘Their beneficial effect upon a people’: settlers, songbirds and civilisation in nineteenth-century Victoria 2. Salmon propagation and settler colonialism in California: the United States Fish Commission, the McCloud River Hatchery, and the dispossession of the Winnemem Wintu 3. ‘Making friends with lyre-birds’: Alice Manfield and settler belonging in Mount Buffalo National Park 4. Following the yellowcake road: exploring the colonial roots and routes of Australian radioactive minerals, 1900s–1950s 5. Retheorizing environmental in/justice from the margins: toxicity, dispossession, and resistance in the Palestinian Bedouin village of Wadi An-Naam 6. The settler homeland: racial violence, frontier colonialism, and Filipino repatriation 7. Questioning Russian settler colonialism: resettlement strategies and indigenous agency in the post-imperial Sakha (Yakut) region 8. Childhoods under military occupation: everyday experiences and ‘insistence on existence’ as resistance in Kashmir 9. Considerations on settler colonialism theory for the study of the Gran Chaco 10. ‘Other’ black peoples: rethinking race and settler colonialism in Australia’s northern tropic 11. Rock art at the Iziko Museums of South Africa and its settler colonial imprint 12. Settler colonial sin-eaters: disavowal of atrocity and its uses, in and beyond the late 1800s American Pacific Northwest 13. A Punahou moʻolelo: the creation of institutional memory and myth 14. The Spectre of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) in the Indigenous Voice to Parliament Referendum 15. Riding on the ‘City of New Orleans’: cosmos and cataclysm on settler colonialism’s dual-rail groove