AHA Session 31
Thursday, January 5, 2023: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Regency Ballroom B (Loews Philadelphia Hotel, 2nd Foor Mezzanine)
Chair:
Manu Karuka, Barnard College, City University of New York
Papers:
Comment:
Anthony Pratcher, Arizona State University
Session Abstract
The global rise of an authoritarian strand of white supremacy and the transnational reverberations of the Movement for Black Lives have called attention to the enduring legacies of settler colonialism, the global color line, and empire in the twenty-first century. Alongside these developments, Anglophone scholars of the Americas, the Pacific World, and, to a lesser extent other regions, have increasingly adopted the lens of settler colonialism to critique national foundation mythologies. This panel responds to these developments and critiques and brings together scholars of the Americas, Middle East, and Pacific World to discuss settler colonialism, empire, and race as intertwined world-historical processes. Building upon indigenous studies, Cedric Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism, and theories of spatial racialization, these papers interrogate how ongoing settler occupations have perpetuated racialized labor systems, land appropriation, exclusionary immigrant regimes, and the suppression of political autonomy and sovereignty of colonized communities to maintain the settler state in metropolitan, urban, and rural spaces. The first paper in this panel argues that the development of the California wine industry was central to the making of the settler colonial state. Coupled with the mythologies of the Frontier and the Spanish Fantasy Past, the California wine industry contributed to the formation of a racial hierarchy that elevated white European and American settlers, obscured Indigenous and Mexican dispossession, and racialized agricultural labor. The recent ascendance of California as a premier wine producing region and tourist attraction continues to obscure the state’s settler colonial nature. The second and third papers turn their attention to a different settler colonial context, that of twentieth century Palestine/Israel. The second paper explores how spatial racialization and the racialization of labor defined the settlement and economic policies of the Israeli state in the aftermath of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe). As the nascent state contended with the decimation of entire economic sectors and patterns of settlement, as a result of the forced migration, state authorities tasked Mizrahi (North African and Middle Eastern) Jewish immigrants with replacing the expelled Palestinians. The panel’s third paper examines the formation of settler colonial citizenship among Palestinian citizens in Israel and more specifically the case of the internally displaced Palestinians who were granted Israeli citizenship in the years following the 1948 Nakba. It demonstrates how the Israeli state’s model of settler colonial citizenship conditioned indigenous populations’ access to limited rights and claims upon the perpetual recurrence of the foundational act of land theft, engendering patterns of recursive accumulation through dispossession. With a wide geographical and temporal focus, the panelists hope to discuss how settler colonial regimes have and continue to shape multiple economic, political, and environmental structures.
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