Dear Patrick,
I very much appreciated your note in response to my April 9 blog, “Settler” What? Our conversations at UCLA and since are helping me sort out my thinking about “settler colonialism.” In the hopes of continuing these conversations (and provoking others in this blogosphere to participate), I have some questions for you. I hope this will not be perceived as a surely indulgence of the argumentative or pedantic, nor too much of an assumption on your time. I will do my best not to continue in the rhetorical. These are genuine questions.
Question 1: And for another “settler” thing….
I do not need “settler colonialism” to have a concrete, global definition of what it means as much as I am concerned about what I have perceived to be the far too general application of the term to seriously diverse histories of imperialism and the continuing political struggles of Native peoples for de-occupation and self-determination.
In other words, the lack of a concrete, global definition is not an issue for me; but, the analytical equivalences of or between vastly different historical situations and ongoing political struggles is. It has seemed to me that these equivalences occur in the context of the explicitly comparative approaches characteristic of “settler colonial” studies (if such a studies exists as such) that illuminate some characteristics of colonialism while obscuring or misrepresenting others in the name of the comparative.
I do find your arguments about the “logic of elimination” useful and important. Your care in retaining an analytical focus on the violence and the subliminal of “elimination” in understanding the social inequalities and oppressions that African and Native peoples confront is necessary.
So my question is this: When you argue that the “elimination continues beyond the establishment of settler society,” are you locating the “logic of elimination” as a decidedly colonial structure? Why “settler colonialism” and not “imperialism”? Why – or how – is the “settler colonial” society or state different from the empire?
When “imperial” means “having a commanding quality" and the “empire” means "rule, authority, kingdom, imperial rule" (at least according to a quick look at the on-line etymology dictionary) – why do I need “imperialism” and “the empire”?
To try to make obvious that which I take for granted.… At whatever historical point in time the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand were “colonies,” “settlements,” or newly formed “nations,” they are most certainly now empires. Different kinds, of course. But empires with all of their implications to militarized and economic violences that enact – sometimes through celebratory apologies – their plenary powers to enslave, to kill, to dispossess, and to subjugate, “at home” and abroad, within national boundaries and beyond.
“Settler colonialism” seems to qualify a colonialism, suggesting that other kinds of colonialisms took place andor are taking place. Maybe as a project of imperialism? Maybe instead of the imperial? I do not understand the qualification since its own differentiations are left unclear (usually in claims of its specific comparability). Why or how are we in a "settler" society now as opposed to an empire?
Question 2: On why “settler” is not a proxy for racialization…
On your points about racialization within “settler colonial” societies, I concur. In your presentation at UCLA – and as an issue that percolated throughout the symposium – and in your blog here on April 26, African slavery and Native land dispossession were addressed as interrelated to the “uninterrupted operation of the logic of elimination after the frontier,” and into the present. I agree that slavery and dispossession are linked by the “logic of elimination” and that the logic includes not merely physical violence -- though it certainly includes that -- but the violence of re-representation/interpolation into the nation’s juridical hold (most evidently via ideologies of blood’s equation to culture).
But I must equivocate again over language. What do you mean by “the frontier”? Is this marking a moment of “colonialism” proper, and then the advent of “settler colonialism” after, or when something else happens? Was the colonialism “settler” all along, now that we can see its structural legacies?
Question 3: Concluding….
I have written about the racialized and gendered politics of right’s discourses in relation to Native women’s roles in Native sovereignty movements in Canada. These discourses are put to work to thwart anti-imperial solidarities but also to distort the terms and conditions of existing relations and politics within Native communities -- pitting Natives against one another (around women’s equality rights, for instance) and pitting Natives against African Americans and other racialized and ethnicized groups (such as over the perception of ever limiting and threatened federal resources or lands – and I’m thinking of Malinda Lowery’s excellent discussions of the mythologies of “the pie” during our panel’s Q&A at UCLA).
But again I am stuck on the “settler colonial” teleology, geography, episteme. What is illuminated about the operations of the empire and the social terms and conditions of imperial social formations, and what is not.
But I do not think you and I disagree on the analytical necessity of understanding our divergent histories and the current configuration of our social relations and conditions owing to the histories and conditions of imperialism. For you, “settler” illuminates, lays open, and allows for Native perspectives and concerns where other terms do not.
So, beginning there, I quote you back to you: “The surprise occasioned by tensions between Blacks and Indians is an artefact of a liberal universalism that takes for granted a pastiche of difference – colours, races, minorities, ethnicities – on a multicultural canvas that levels the varied histories that produced these differences in the first place.”
I think anti-imperial solidarity must include a fierce and relentless rejection of liberal universalism and all its modernist clichés – from the binaries of the savage and the civil to the celebrated public and national restorations of Native-nation relations via apology. This is because liberal universalism and modernism are the constitutive ideologies and discourses that undergird and regenerate imperial social formations. And one of the central ways that they do this is through the racialization of legal status and rights – to suggest a recognizable and investable (propertied) difference between citizen, native, immigrant, minority and then to regulate, discipline, and punish that difference in the name of national identity and security.
Against that, anti-imperial strategies – such as those enacted by the Indigenous Environmental Network, The Cultural Conservancy, the California Indian Basketweavers Association, the Kumeyaay Cultural Repatriation Committee, and the Native Women’s Association of Canada – insist on other ways of knowing and being in the world. Ways that are about relationship and responsibility, respect and ethics, justice and accountability. With each other and against state oppression.
To those ends….
Tequila Sovereign
This is great, Joanne. A real discussion - and for its own sake rather than for career goody-bars. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI'm on my way out for the weekend so I can't even read it properly right now, let alone respond. More next week.
Very good wishes,
Patrick.
I think the value of "settler" as a way of characterizing a certain mode of colonialism/imperialism lies in the fact that it points to the idea that a "home" country is built around and on top of peoples already there. That formation differs from 1) classic colonialism where populations who are not in the "home" country, and are not considered its "citizens," are ruled as "subjects" of the empire and from 2) more contemporary forms of extraterritorial imperialism where the independence of a given country is foregrounded (either in order to deny the exercise of neoliberal modes of extraction -- such as through international debt -- or to insist on the authority to alter the country's regime so as to bring it in line with "international" norms of how the government should relate to its own people).
ReplyDeleteWhat makes "settler" colonialism distinct, then, is the incoherence within the discourse of the state of the insistence that the settlers go "home." The exertion of governmental authority is predicated on it being over land and people "within" the nation, which is a different kind of authority with its own discourses, modes of implementation, and strategies of legitimation that do not function in the same ways as those of colonial authority over a space not recognized as "home"/"domestic."
Thus, colonization of a "settler" kind is predicated on the claim that the land in question lies inside the boundaries of the state and is validated on that basis (rather than as a "colony" which has a juridical and geopolitical existence differentiated from the "home" space). From this perspective, "elimination" per se is less the issue than domestication -- the subordination of Native polities to the jurisdictional authority and principles of the settler government and the assertion that the settler government always-already holds title to Native lands by virtue of the fact that they are "domestic."
I should add that I don't think "settler colonialism" is very useful as a way of talking about formations other than the settler state. It seems to me to work best as a way of discussing the kinds of jurisdiction and sovereignty exercised by such states over Indigenous peoples and possibly as a retrospective way of characterizing those forms of colonization that eventuated in the creation of settler states (marking the genealogy of forms of law, land tenure, political structure, modes of narration, etc. that would be taken up by the settler state as part of its governance and self-representation). However, again, such forms of colonization (like Great Britain's American colonies) can be characterized as "settler" only looking back from the perspective of the later emergence of a settler state rather than as a quality such forms of colonization immanently or categorically bear.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, "settler" marks the fact that those colonies became settler states, an intellectual maneuver that seems to me to obviate the problem of attributing qualities to settler colonialism that more or less fit Anglo modes of colonization but not necessarily others (like those of Spain). The comparative involved in "settler colonialism," then, would be among settler states rather than political formations in which colonies are held as such (even though settler states may themselves hold colonies, like the U.S. - but those political relations work differently given the ways they are narrated by the state with respect to "domestic" space and jurisdiction).
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