Rethinking the urban through the lens of settler-colonialism
Call for papers
Special Issue of Settler Colonial Studies
Editors: Libby Porter and Oren Yiftachel
Urban settlement has always been a central pillar in the making of settler-colonial societies, constituting a critical contact point between settlers and indigenous groups. Yet, the rich tradition of critical urban studies has all but ignored the relations between urbanization and Indigeneity, and indeed between critical theories of urban process and the specificities the settler-colonial relationship presents.
The purpose of the special issue is to connect more explicitly the two fields of knowledge: critical urban studies with settler-colonial studies. In doing so, the special issue aims to rethink the urban in terms of its indigenous past and present as intertwining with the onset of late forms of capitalism and nationalism, and also rethink Indigeneity in the current wave of urbanization. In this endeavor we hope not only to contribute a settler-colonial perspective to the formulation of new critical urban theories but also to emphasise the importance of urban-focused work in settler-colonial studies.
To this end we call for submissions of original papers for a special issue of the journal Settler Colonial Studies, to be devoted to the relationship between cities, settler societies and indigeneity. The issue is planned for publication in late 2017.
Background
Historically, towns and cities have been one of the most widely-used strategies to realize the underlying colonial impulse for the control of a land base (Said 1993) and the displacement and extermination of Indigenous people (Wolfe 2006). Yet, as critical settler-colonial and postcolonial theories show (Coulthard 2014; Watson 2015; Spivak 1999), settler-colonialism as a phenomenon does not belong in the past, back ‘when cities were settled’, but is reconstituted every day through the ongoing structural relations of settler-colonialism.
Regardless however of such processes, their historical violences and profound injustices, every city in a settler-colonial society can be seen as an Indigenous place. The lands on which cities now stand are usually unceded Indigenous lands, and are replete with systems of law, governance, and daily practice regardless and often in spite of the challenges that urban development poses. There has been relatively little debate about the exact extent to which urbanization as a fundamental process needs to be reconsidered within a settler-colonial dynamic. An excellent example of such a dissonance or gap is the approach in critical urban studies towards gentrification and displacement studies. When applied in settler-colonial contexts the extent to which displacement constitutes an ongoing dynamic, linked to much more fundamental dispossessory tendencies is usually entirely obscured. It amounts to what Glen Coulthard has called an ‘urbs nullius’ – the tendency to see the urban as devoid of Indigeneity.
A New Focus
Precisely because urban settlements express a manifest colonial ordering of space that explicitly seeks the full displacement of Indigenous people, they have been difficult places to reconcile as co-existing with contemporary Indigenous society, governance and law. Cities thus represent a most thorny site for questions of Indigenous resurgence, sovereignty and justice. Moreover, in the field of urban studies, there is almost no articulation of the processes of urbanization and the theoretical lenses through which urban processes are grasped with settler-colonial realities and dynamics. Settler-colonialism, as a social structure with an ongoing dynamic of dispossession, repression and denial, barely features as an intrinsically important dynamic for understanding the urban today (for recent attempts at combining these perspectives, see Porter, 2014; Yiftachel 2011).
We seek papers that engage with these themes in a variety of ways such as how the urban can be thought and understood as Indigenous, and the ways that urban processes intersect with persistent settler-colonial dynamics of dispossession, denial, disavowal or the seductive politics of recognition. We are open to proposals from a wide range of locations, approaches, methodologies and conceptual angles.
Specifically, we seek papers that address one or more of the following aspects
Proposed titles and abstracts of no more than 500 words are due 13 May, 2016: email your abstract to [log in to unmask]
After selection, full papers will be due by 1 December 2016. We aim for publication after a full peer review process in late 2017.
References
Coulthard, G., 2014. Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Porter, L., 2014. Possessory politics and the conceit of procedure: Exposing the cost of rights under conditions of dispossession. Planning Theory, 13(4), pp.387–406.
Said, E.W., 1993. Culture and Imperialism, New York: Alfred A Knopf.
Spivak, G.C., 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Watson, I., 2015. Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism and International Law, London: Routledge.
Wolfe, P., 2006. Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), pp.387–409. Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14623520601056240.
Yiftachel, O. 2011. 'Critical Theory and Gray Space: Mobilization of the Colonized', in Brenner, N. Marcuse, P. and Mayer, M. (eds) Cities for People, not Profit: Critical Theory and the Right to the City, London: Routledge, pp. 94-112.