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This chapter is an overview of the “state of the art” in scholarship dealing with Negev (Naqab) Bedouins. It sets the book within relevant scholarly frameworks as a foundation for the empirical investigations of the chapters that follow. This chapter defines key concepts such as “Ethnocracy,” “settling society”, “gray space” and “hegemony;” and discusses the emergence and nature of critical legal geography. The chapter then reviews literature dealing with the dispossession of indigenous peoples, focusing on the evolution and nature of the terra nullius concept and its Israeli version —the “Dead Negev Doctrine” (DND).

This chapter demonstrates how Charles Dickens’s novels embrace ‘reactionary reform’: a vision of the future that is actually a return to an anachronistic past. Reactionary reform restores origins that institutions erase in their drive towards futurity, whether those origins are Sissy Jupe’s life with her father in Hard Times, Esther Summerson’s parentage in Bleak House or the humble home that Pip mistakenly disavows in Great Expectations. Reactivating origins allows a different stance towards institutions: instead of settling down and accepting their established rhythms, characters inhabit institutions, dwelling temporarily in them without acceding to their terms. But Dickens’s vision of reform does not extend to everyone. He reinforces settler colonialism by representing particular groups of people as outside of history and futurity altogether. Validating anachronisms and criticising them in turn, Dickens imagines progressive change that rejects modern institutionalism but, in the process, shores up the racialised abstractions upon which settler colonial institutions depend.

The Introduction argues that studying the colonial home and the relationships within it provides crucial insight into the colonial project. The colonial home was a contact zone in which European colonists, non-white migrants and Indigenous populations came together, most often through the domestic service relationship. Rather than a case of unquestioned mastery and devoted servitude, relationships between masters and servants had the potential not only to affirm but also destabilise colonial power relations. The introduction outlines how the book reinvigorates the study of colonial intimacy by drawing attention to issues which have been neglected in the literature including; the significance of non-European homes, the importance of masculinities, colonial anxieties about interracial homosexual encounters and, the ways in which colonial homes changed over time. This will be achieved by studying mastery and servitude in the neighbouring tropical British colonies of Singapore and Darwin, considering them within a transcolonial network of connection and exchange. The introduction concludes by arguing that the process of comparing an exploitation colony and a settler colony provides an opportunity for a fundamental rethinking of the politics of colonial intimacy, revealing specificities and broad patterns as well as the sharing of ideas and cultural practices between colonies.

The chapter situates Native American incarcerations within a long history of broken treaties, circumscribed sovereignty, land theft, forced removals, reservation and boarding school confinement, and economic and cultural paternalism. The framework that the chapter offers is one centered on what the author calls “settler custodialism,” where the root of Indian incarceration runs through the reservation system. The chapter locates Native American prisoner resistance within a longer trajectory of struggle against settler colonialism that has drawn on traditional ties to land, family, tribe, and community. The rising consciousness of the American Indian Movement (AIM) is linked directly to the incarceration of two of its principal founders, Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt. From AIM’s police patrols to the Alcatraz Island prison takeover, the radicalization of the Red Power movement had more to do with its encounter with the carceral state than has been previously recognized. The chapter concludes that the prison also served as a blunt instrument to dismantle the Red Power movement when many of its leaders were incarcerated following the 1973 Wounded Knee operation.

This chapter lays out the main argument developed in the remainder of the book: that the last forty years has witnessed the hegemonization of a liberal recognition-based approach to Indigenous self-determination in Canada both theoretically and in practice.

This chapter has three goals. First, it situates the story told here in Kenya within the larger white colonial world of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suggesting new ways of understanding race and colonialism worldwide. Second, it brings the story of the settler soul to the present, suggesting ways in which it has and has not changed. Third, it offers some thoughts on how the settler soul affected Africans in the colonial and post-colonial decades.

This chapter overviews the history of uranium mining, focusing on the human and environmental health problems that resulted from the uranium industry. The chapter also introduces the book’s primary theoretical innovation: wastelanding a process by which landscapes are rendered pollutable. The wasteland is a racial and spatial signifier of pollutability.

This chapter brings the book full circle to the overarching argument that settler capitalist states are based on white supremacy and patriarchy as structuring and enduring logics that will continue to render Indigenous women vulnerable without a profound restructuring of society.

This chapter explores the long-term legacies of 1619 for the construction of an English settler colonial model. While contemporary Irish plantation projects gave the English colonizing movement considerable experience with settler colonization in densely populated and recognizably European areas, that experience by no means prepared that movement for planting in far-off lands inhabited by unfamiliar people with exotic cultures. As England’s first sustained experience with settler colonization at a distance, the Virginia colony played a foundational role in identifying, confronting, and working out solutions to the many problems that colonizers throughout the Anglo-American world would face as they created in the Americas the powerful and highly successful settler empire that many observers, including Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776), would celebrate during the last half of the eighteenth century. This essay treats the Virginia colony as a learning laboratory and offer a systematic survey of the problems the colony confronted and how its solutions would inform and influence later English settler colonizing projects.

I lay out the basic argument and the theoretical bases of the book. In order to appreciate the nature of settler colonialism in Kenya – and its impact on the state and on Africans – I argue that we must inquire into how settlers envisioned themselves, their foundational ideas about the settler project, and their (real and imagined) relations with Africans, the state, and one another. I argue that white settlement: (1) was based on particular ideas about white supremacy, whiteness, and civilization; (2) was emotionally enriched through notions of paternalism and trusteeship; (3) appeared constantly under threat by Africans, colonial officials, the judiciary, and fellow settlers; and (4) was shored up daily through rituals of prestige, deference, humiliation, and violence. Through this understanding of settlers’ worldview, we can then better understanding of black peril, which represented the inversion of the emotional and ideological material out of which white settlement was made. I finish the chapter with a historical outline of early colonial Kenya.

Inspired by Che Guevara, who visited the region twice, and taking their cues from Sartre’s position on Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, and Congo, Arab intellectuals jointly translated Sartre’s writing on sites of anti-imperial resistance and used them in order to join the global movement of “Southern” resistance to “Northern” oppression. They also used Sartre’s vocabulary to theorize Zionism as a classic neo-colonial phenomenon of settler colonialism and asked Sartre to acknowledge the ethical meaning of these similarities. Drawing on this new outlook, Egypt enrolled alongside Cuba in African liberation struggles, such as the one in Congo. Against this background, and with war looming in the horizon, Sartre visited the Middle East.

Chapter four critically explores the convergence of Indigenous recognition politics with the more recent transitional justice discourse of “reconciliation” that began to gain considerable attention in Canada following the publication of the Report of Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) in 1996.

This chapter introduces and defines several of the book’s key terms, including biological reproduction, colonialism, settler colonialism, and reproductive justice. Articulating the book’s overarching arguments, the chapter contends that colonial politics have been and remain reproductive politics. It further argues that Native women have navigated pregnancy and birthing in myriad ways that disrupt any tidy dichotomy between “traditional” and “modern” birthing in the twentieth century. The introduction begins with an overview of the founding of the Women of All Red Nations (WARN) in 1978 and suggests that the roots of this 1970s activism are not only in Native struggles for sovereignty and self-determination in post-World War II decades but in Native women’s reproductive-related activism throughout the century.

In Chapter 4 I follow the trail that the very first South Asian camel drivers traced inland to Beltana—a hilly region in Kuyani lands where the first Australian camel depot was established. From the 1860s, Beltana emerged as a transportation hub atop an existing, cosmopolitan center of Aboriginal trade. Telling the history of the settlers and the Aboriginal groups who gathered in Beltana in the evening in 1885 when the very first steam train was due, I piece together the contours of the contested epistemic terrain onto which South Asians led the earliest camels. Contrasting the logic that belied English accounts of the train, with accounts of Beltana in Wangkangurru and Kuyani – two of the many Aboriginal languages spoken in the region – this chapter challenges the imperial myth of emptiness that shaped how settlers saw the lands they invaded.