Comfort and insecurity in the reproduction of settler coloniality

Abstract

ABSTRACT Understood as a practice, citizenship can bring benefits across affective and material registers; however, its possibility also rests on logics of exclusion. This is especially the case in Anglosphere settler colonial contexts in which citizenship is both a function of settler state authority while simultaneously reproducing that very authority. Using Canada as an illustration, the paper reads citizenship through the concepts of implicated subjecthood and colonial liberalism. In doing so it puts forward a phenomenon described as ‘settler insecurity’ to underscore one aspect of how this reproduction occurs. Relating this insecurity to mythologies of the settler geographic imaginary and the affective and material benefits of citizenship, the paper argues the comforts of settler colonial citizenship and this insecurity are co-constitutive. When understood in relation to the un-realised nature of settler coloniality as a genocidal project, the paper outlines how these interconnected phenomena represent important logics in ongoing processes of remaking settler sovereignty through the domestication of Indigenous nationhood and erasure of colonial relations.