The Making of Modern South Africa

How can you study settler colonialism when official archives are incomplete or biased? Archiving Settler Colonialism, edited by Yu‑ting Huang and Rebecca Weaver‑Hightower, argues that culture itself can be an archive—a living repository of how settlers imagined belonging, sovereignty, and exclusion. The book redefines what counts as an archive and how scholars might read everyday materials to uncover the logic and contradictions of settlement.

You often imagine archives as government ledgers or boxes of treaties. This collection expands that scope: postage stamps, psychiatric case files, parks, novels, paintings, and buildings all operate as archives of settler ideology. Each object both stores and performs power, translating colonial hierarchies into social practice.

Expanding the Field of Evidence

When you treat cultural artifacts as archives, ordinary things—stamps, parks, songs, architectural carvings—become primary evidence. Josiah Brownell’s analysis of Rhodesian stamps during the Unilateral Declaration of Independence shows how postage could assert sovereignty at the microscopic level. Yichi Zhang’s study of Victoria Park in Tianjin reveals how leisure spaces performed British municipal control in semi‑colonial China. Similarly, Claudia Jansen van Rensburg’s reading of W. H. Bell’s Cape Town symphonies proves that sound itself can encode colonial relations through harmony and motifs.

In Huang and Weaver‑Hightower’s framework, cultural materials do the same work as traditional archives but reveal emotional, aesthetic, and ideological structures. Every detail—a painted sky, a bandstand, a postage crest—translates state intent into cultural habit. As Lorenzo Veracini notes in the afterword, archives are “settled places”: they stabilize what settlers know. Reading culture as archive thus exposes settlement as an ongoing epistemic project, not merely a political one.

Method and Purpose

The book’s methodological turn centers on everyday materiality. Instead of viewing archives as static, you understand them as active assemblages of memory and control. Scholars here demonstrate how the built environment and imagination intersect. The Te Ahu center in Kaitaia, New Zealand, for example, acts simultaneously as museum, town hall, and genealogical archive—its carvings and name embody ongoing negotiations of decolonization. Likewise, German reprints in Namibian bookstores archive nostalgia and denial, reasserting settler memory decades after formal empire’s end.

These examples collectively argue that settler colonialism survives through cultural repetition. By reading cultural forms as evidence, you see how settlers continuously rebuild their sense of belonging even after territorial control fades.

An Interdisciplinary Invitation

This expanded archive invites anthropologists, historians, and literary critics to rethink their sources. Psychiatric files in British Columbia reveal how “wandering” Indigenous women were pathologized as insane—a bureaucratic enactment of dispossession. Landscape paintings in South Africa display settlers’ triumph through visual absence of Indigenous presence. Even sound—the bush ballads in Australia—preserves anxieties about gender, race, and community failure following violence. Each artifact transforms the personal and political into collective narrative, allowing you to trace settlement’s emotional residues.

Ultimately, the book teaches you that every act of classification, naming, or representation is archival work. Settler colonialism depends on these micro‑archives that define who belongs, who vanishes, and what stories persist. By recognizing stamps, songs, parks, and psychiatric notes as active archives, you gain tools for uncovering power where history seems benign or naturalized. This shift—reading culture as archive—re‑orients how you research empire, memory, and decolonization.

Settler colonialism is often defined by Patrick Wolfe’s phrase “invasion is a structure not an event,” but this collection pushes you to see that structure as unstable, diverse, and sometimes fragile. Scholars such as Juliana Hu Pegues, Alyosha Goldstein, and Manu Vimalassery warn against overgeneralization: each locale tells a different story about settlement, failure, or hybridity.

Multiple Forms of Settlement

Across the book, cases like Liberian repatriates, German farmers in Brazil, and Anglo-Texans under Mexican law demonstrate that not all settlers are sovereign or victorious. Jeffrey Mullins’ study of Liberia shows freed African Americans reproducing colonial hierarchies even as they escape European control. Frederik Schulze’s German films about Brazil depict settlement as fantasy, not fact. These “settlement without statehood” examples prove that the logic of elimination is not universal—it’s mediated by race, power, and circumstance.

Centering Indigenous Perspectives

Kēhaulani Kauanui and Avril Bell remind you that settler‑colonial theory should not eclipse Indigenous Studies. Bell’s Te Ahu case, for instance, restores Māori governance to both architecture and narrative, showing decolonization as a process of shared control rather than symbolic recognition. Indigenous scholarship grounds theory in lived sovereignty, recalibrating research away from settler self‑reflection toward Indigenous voice.

By treating the framework as an analytic toolkit instead of a formula, you learn how settlement morphs—sometimes defensive, nostalgic, or hybrid. Each chapter’s microhistory teaches that power is negotiated in cultural detail, not uniform across empires.

The contributors show you how genre and materiality reveal colonial mechanics that political discourse alone obscures. Every medium—music, print, film, architecture—conveys settler identity through tangible form. Material details become critical evidence of how authority is felt and normalized.

Reading Things as Actions

A postage stamp circulates sovereignty through households; a park bandstand stages imperial leisure; psychiatric case files institutionalize social hierarchies. When you trace an artifact’s production, distribution, and reception, you read settlement in motion. Claus Jansen van Rensburg’s study of W. H. Bell’s symphonies shows sonic domestication of local motifs into European orchestration. Huang’s analysis of Chang Kuei‑hsing’s baroque novels demonstrates that literary excess itself records settler collapse.

Material Form and Affect

Material form shapes feeling. German documentaries about Brazil use framing and sound to simulate conquest; carved Māori pou at Te Ahu evoke ancestors’ presence and reassert Indigenous cosmology. These tangible surfaces are not passive—they perform sovereignty, nostalgia, and resistance simultaneously.

Core insight

Objects archive emotions and operations of power precisely where official documentation is silent. Reading objects as acts teaches you how everyday material life establishes and contests empire.

This methodological attention to form turns art, architecture, and ephemera into central texts of colonial history, broadening how you perceive both authority and dissent in material worlds.

Avril Bell’s ethnography of Te Ahu in Kaitaia, New Zealand, offers a grounded vision of decolonization—one enacted through naming, governance, and architecture. The Te Ahu community center, designed in the context of Treaty settlements, illustrates how symbolic gestures can open but also constrain political transformation.

Names and Negotiation

Renaming the building “Te Ahu” revived pre‑colonial histories and displaced missionary designations, but the process was fraught: Pākehā residents feared exclusion; iwi sought recognition. Bell shows naming as relational—not a simple restoration but an ongoing negotiation of meaning and power.

Pou as Living Archives

Carved Māori pou within the building create physical encounters between ancestral presence and civic life. For Māori, these carvings embody tūpuna and turn public space into an ontological meeting ground; for settlers, they symbolize multicultural virtue. The dual readings reflect both progress and ambiguity.

Beyond Symbolism

Bell emphasizes that decolonization must include resource sharing and governance reform. While Te Ahu’s symbolic landscape achieved visibility, actual decision‑making power remained uneven. This case reminds you that representation without redistribution risks perpetuating colonial imbalance.

Studying this site teaches you to look local: even small places contain complex interweavings of cultural revival and political constraint. Te Ahu proves that decolonization is both visual and administrative—and must be pursued at both levels simultaneously.

Yichi Zhang’s analysis of Victoria Park in Tianjin recasts the notion of settlement beyond frontier colonies. The British concession exemplifies semi‑colonial settlement—a miniature state performing power through design, leisure, and municipal control.

Spatial Practice and Symbolic Rule

The park’s English lawns, bandstands, and cenotaph parades enacted British civic life on Chinese terrain. Councils enforced racial segregation (Chinese required tickets, limited hours), embedding imperial hierarchy into urban routine. These micro‑regulations reveal how public space served as soft sovereignty—even without territorial independence.

Hybrid Aesthetics

Despite the intent to replicate Britain, the concession’s texture was hybrid: Chinese artisans built roofs and added local ornamentation. Such hybridity complicates the narrative of domination, exposing settlement’s dependence on local participation and contradiction.

By reading Tianjin’s concession through its architecture and planning records, Zhang illustrates that urban design itself functions as archive—a stage for the uneasy coexistence of colonial order and cultural exchange. It reveals empire’s reach into ordinary civic aesthetics.

Landscape painting becomes political testimony in the South African chapters. Artists like Jakob Hendrik Pierneef used panoramas to naturalize settler possession, turning artistic modernism into national mythmaking.

Making Land Look Empty

Pierneef’s 1932 Johannesburg Station panels depict an orderly, unpeopled land. Churches, farms, and mines compose a harmonious vision without Indigenous presence. The aesthetic erasure parallels physical dispossession: by painting absence as purity, settlers turned ownership into inevitability.

Modernism as Settler Technology

These landscapes borrowed modernist abstraction from Canada’s Group of Seven and European romanticism but redirected it to local nationalism. Modernism’s claim to originality supported the idea that settlers could be culturally autochthonous. Art thus served ideological duality—universal sophistication and local belonging.

Critical reflection

Absence is not neutral; in visual culture it becomes evidence of elimination. Reading landscapes as political documents teaches you how artistic emptiness works as symbolic occupation.

Art historians and cultural analysts thereby learn to decode aesthetics as colonial infrastructure—the painted panorama doubles as the nation’s mythic deed.

Language itself becomes a decolonial agent in the book’s later chapters. Hawaiian Pidgin literature, Sinophone Borneo fiction, and bush ballads show how vernacular writing reveals the psychological and political workings of settlement.

Hawaiian Pidgin and Indigenous Continuity

John Dominis Holt and Brandy Nālani McDougall demonstrate that speaking and writing in Pidgin dismantles colonial categories like blood quantum. Through novels and poetry, they turn creolized language into rhetorical sovereignty—a means to sustain genealogy and mo‘olelo against English dominance. McDougall’s humor revives mana through local vernacular, proving that linguistic hybridity can be resistance rather than dilution.

Baroque Anxiety in Sinophone Fiction

Chang Kuei‑hsing’s rainforest novels deploy baroque excess—the overwhelming sentence structures and self-wounding metaphors—to dramatize settler guilt and decline. Yu‑ting Huang distinguishes this from Creolization: the baroque marks collapse, not merger. These texts turn style into confession, portraying a settler world exhausted by its own contradictions.

Folklore and Psychopolitics

Australian bush ballads like “Ballad of the Breelong Blacks” function as communal therapy—reasserting control through verse while exposing racial terror. Psychiatry in Canada performs similar narrative containment, turning Indigenous suffering into case history. Both reveal how narrative genres discipline and justify empire.

Taken together, these literary forms show that language and narrative are battlegrounds of sovereignty. Decolonization happens not only in streets and courts but in sentences, idioms, and poems that rewrite identity from within everyday speech.

Martin Kalb’s analysis of German colonial reprints in Namibia illustrates how print culture perpetuates empire after its fall. Reprinting old memoirs and travelogues restages settlement through nostalgia, transforming bookstores into memorial archives.

Publishing as Re‑colonization

The Swakopmund facsimile series and tourist editions curate selective memory—omitting violence, highlighting adventure, and framing Indigenous people as scenery. Editors defend settler virtue and dismiss Britain’s 1918 Blue Book testimonies as propaganda. Through these revisions, cultural redemption replaces historical accountability.

Networks of Continuity

Publishing houses linked to veteran associations sustain a textual homeland (Heimat) across continents. Tourism and local heritage markets circulate colonial nostalgia as cultural pride. Memory thereby becomes a site of resettlement—paper replaces territory.

This phenomenon underscores a core message of the book: postcolonial societies remain haunted by their archives. Re‑reading and republishing are acts of political reconstruction, making textual afterlives into living instruments of identity.

Helen Bones’ study of the Tasman world reminds you that settler cultures often operate across borders. Writers like Arthur H. Adams circulated between Australia, New Zealand, China, and Britain, revealing that colonial identity is as maritime and mobile as the empire itself.

The Tasman Literary World

Adams’ publishing career entwined with periodicals like The Bulletin, where New Zealanders contributed substantially to Australian discourse. This network created a trans‑colonial space of exchange that later nationalist critics tried to erase, editing trans‑Tasman linkage out of their literary histories to assert cultural purity.

Mobility as Identity

Movement complicates belonging: Adams was neither fully local nor metropolitan, embodying a hybrid modernity. Reading settlement transnationally uncovers how identity thrives in movement and contradiction, not boundary and fixity.

Seeing settlers as travelers rather than static inhabitants allows you to grasp colonial entanglement’s full geography—showing that empire’s cultural world was oceanic and interconnected, not limited to nations.

Kathryn McKay’s research into psychiatric institutions in British Columbia demonstrates how clinical bureaucracy can enact colonial control. Patient files, diagnoses, and police notes archived racialized assumptions that treated Indigenous behavior as deviance.

Medicalization of Difference

Case records often described Indigenous women as “wandering” or “immoral,” pathologizing traditional mobility. “Wandering” became a diagnosis of madness, aligning with settler desires for fixed property and domestic confinement. The Department of Indian Affairs and hospitals institutionalized these biases administratively—turning poverty and displacement into mental illness.

The Logic of Settler Common Sense

McKay calls this system “settler common sense”: an everyday bureaucratic habit rooted in paternalism. It naturalized confinement as care and transformed colonial dispossession into clinical routine. Reading these files reveals how paper and procedure quietly rebuilt settlement through systemic misreading of Indigenous life.

This administrative archive exemplifies the book’s central claim: colonialism reproduces itself through ordinary institutions, not only through overt violence. Bureaucracy and diagnosis are among its stealthiest tools.

In the Kenyan settler romances of Nora Strange, you see how sexual ideology naturalizes colonial power. Strange’s interwar novels—Latticed Windows, Kenya Dawn, and Kenya Noon—translate eugenic anxieties into narrative form, presenting Africa as a landscape that “heals” European sexual neurosis.

Landscape as Cure

For Strange’s characters, physical encounter with the Kenyan wilderness rekindles reproductive vitality. Male dominance and female submission are presented as therapeutic, linking sexual recovery to colonial virility. The land itself is coded as fertile and primitive—a natural ally to eugenic restoration.

Reproduction and Empire

These stories justify both gender hierarchy and territorial conquest. By tying biological success to colonial environment, Strange’s fiction rationalizes domination and reinforces whiteness as “fit.” The private bedroom mirrors the plantation; violence masquerades as regeneration.

Reading these novels teaches you to decode romance plots as political allegory. Settler literature frequently eroticizes the land to turn exploitation into intimacy—a mechanism that must be recognized to understand colonial ideology’s endurance in cultural imagination.