The Settler Colonial Present by Lorenzo Veracini

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Settler Colonial Present by Lorenzo Veracini Martin Crevier Veracini, Lorenzo – The Settler Colonial Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. 159. Settler colonial studies is an emerging distinct field of academic inquiry, replete with its own journal (Settler Colonial Studies) and interpretive lens. Drawing on this now wide-ranging literature, in The Settler Colonial Present, Lorenzo Veracini, who has been at the center of this development, aims to show that settler colonialism is a crucial feature of "the global present." His subsidiary objective is to offer pathways for strategies of decolonization. Four chapters structure the argument. Each seeks to situate and contextualize the global and current impact of settler colonialism by proposing a negative definition. As Veracini convincingly shows in the introduction, settler societies have been negatively defined, from inside and outside, against an abiding Indigenous presence or a distant but hovering metropole. As such, chapters argue that settler colonialism "is not colonialism" (chapter 1), that "it is not somewhere else" (chapter 3), and that "it is not finished" (chapter 4). Chapter 2 also frames itself in the negative by arguing that "settlers are not migrants." Readers familiar with Veracini's corpus might be surprised by the seemingly hackneyed themes of the chapters. The distinction between settler colonialism and colonialism tout court is the principle on which the scholarly edifice of settler colonial studies is erected. As for the purported permanent and structural character of settler colonialism, having been so well encapsulated in Patrick Wolfe's memorable phrase, one would expect it to be the premise of Veracini's project. If all chapters expand theoretical debates and offer insightful interventions, too little is nevertheless said on this global "settler colonial present" and how to transcend it. The first chapter is based on an analogy. "Colonialism" and "settler colonialism" are respectively comparable to viruses and bacteria. Both are exogenous elements that "dominate" their locales, but while viruses (colonialism) need living cells to survive, bacteria (settler colonialism) do not necessarily rely on other organisms. The analogy is useful on a conceptual level as a way to distinguish between both modes of domination and to account for their relationships contingent on time and place. Yet, as Veracini takes us from heuristics to contemporaneous times, it obfuscates more than it reveals. There is, for instance, something dehumanizing and needlessly abstract in comparing Second Intifada Palestinian suicide bombers to "repeated doses of penicillin" (p. 30). Apart from a section on settler colonialism's imperviousness to the "viral medicine of traditional decolonization methods" (p. 20) such as declarations of independence, it is not clear how the analogy [End Page 714] helps us apprehend current predicaments. Moreover, although it is intended to nourish thought along the rest of the chapters, few references are made back to the first chapter as the book progresses. Veracini stresses that the analogy is solely metaphorical, but the reliance on a biomedical vocabulary sits uncomfortably with the malign history of technological and biological disruption in settler colonial and colonial contexts. Chapter 2 argues that unlike migrants, settlers are defined by a conquering "sovereign capacity." They create political orders by disavowing Indigenous sovereignties, while migrants recognize the sovereignty they encounter and are therefore subjected to already constituted political orders (p. 41). The distinction matters because migrants are generally characterized as settlers and thus as a force of dispossession. Yet in their subordination to the settler state they in fact resemble Indigenous peoples, especially when they do not fit a predetermined "ethnic mould." Veracini thus encourages us to think of settlers and migrants concurrently, especially since Indigenous sovereignty claims and defiance to migratory regimes both serve to destabilize settler orders (pp. 40–48). These assertions are original in their attempt to link conversations often held in parallel: the immigration to settler states and the displacement that is the founding act of these societies. Yet, one wonders again how to render these ideas on the ground. In contrast, in Elusive Refuge (2016), Laura Madokoro describes a series of workshops she organized to foster dialogue between immigrant and Indigenous communities in Canada and how they exemplify the messiness that these difficult questions entail in reality. Veracini's insistence on remaining at a...