Settler Colonial Logics Research Articles

The Biopolitical Logics of Settler Colonialism and Disruptive Relationality

This essay argues that the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism function according to a naturalization in Western thought of politics as a project of hierarchically ordering life in relation to the sphere of politics. Significantly, such a mode of thinking discredits socio-political orders that operate on the basis of a non-hierarchical place-based relationality of all life forms including the land. Through a reading of Foucault and Agamben in their use of Aristotle, I want to show how hierarchy as a principle of the political is already implemented in the premise they draw upon for analyzing the biopolitical. In the same way it remains unrecognized in their analysis of biopolitics, this principle also becomes operative within settler colonial logics of life and land. Recently, however, Indigenous scholars and writers have mobilized relationality in its formative characteristic for Indigenous polities and politics as strategy to disrupt biopolitical logics and denaturalize settler colonial rule, which I want to show through engaging Daniel Heath Justice’s Indigenous fantasy trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles as a site of disruptive relationality and political knowledge production.

Security Theology, Surveillance, and the Politics of Fear by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

<i>Security Theology, Surveillance, and the Politics of Fear</i> by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

The Walking Dead: Late Liberalism and Masculine Subjection in Apocalypse Fictions

From The Road to The Walking Dead, contemporary apocalyptic fictions narrativize the conjunction of two central “crises”: late liberal capitalism and twenty-first-century masculinity. This conjunction underlines the insights of a variety of scholars and cultural critics who analyze the “crisis” of contemporary masculinity, often specifically white masculinity, as a product of recent economic and social transformations, including the perceived disempowering of white male authority in a neoliberal era of affective labor, joblessness and multiculturalism. But the apocalypse, especially as a television series, is a rather peculiar narrative vehicle for the articulation of a transformative future for – or a nostalgic return to – masculine agency and authority. Focussing on questions of subjection and agency in the late liberal/neoliberal moment, I suggest that zombie apocalypse stages a debate on the status of masculine agency that has roots extending deep into the foundations of liberal modernity and the gendered selfhood it produces – roots that are ironically exposed by the popular cultural referent that dominates The Walking Dead: the frontier myth. The frontier and the apocalypse both draw from Hobbesian prognostications of a state of nature as relentless competition and a war of “all against all” that are foundational to modern liberal political theory and questions of sovereignty, self-interest, and collective governance. But they also index a narrative antidote to the erasure of political agency as traditionally enshrined in liberal democratic norms and traditions. Like the western, the zombie apocalypse speculates about possible ways in which masculine agency in liberal modernity might be reimagined and/or reinvigorated. In the place of a tired, automated neo-“official man”, the apocalypse in The Walking Dead promises an opportunity to “finally start living” – reminding us that white masculinity figures precisely the Enlightenment liberal subject-citizen and the authoritative, if highly fictional, agency which has been notoriously crushed within regimes of late capitalist biopower. And yet, even as the zombie apocalypse engages foundational myths of liberal modernity, it elaborates them in surprisingly nihilistic set pieces and an apparently doomed, serial narrative loop (there is no end to the zombie apocalypse and life in it is remarkably unpleasant). The eruption of haptic elements in the television show – especially in the visual and aural technologies that allow representations of bodies, suffering, dismemberment, mutability, disgust – further counters the apparent trajectory of apocalyptic allegory and opens it to alternative logics and directions. The narrative options of the zombie apocalypse thus seem to be moving “back” to a brutal settler colonial logic or “forward” to an alternative, perhaps more ethical, “zombie logic,” but without humans. This essay is interested in what these two trajectories have to say to each other and what that dialogue, and dialectic, indicate about contemporary economic governance as it is experienced and translated affectively into popular narrative and cultural product. That is, to what extent is the racist and economic logic of settler colonialism already infected by the specter of another logic of abjection and otherness, one that is figured both by the zombies and by the nonnarrative function of spectacles of embodied male suffering? And what does that slippage between logics and directions tell us about the internal workings of settler colonialism and economic liberalism that have always been lodged within mythic fantasies of the frontier?

Settler colonial logics and the neoliberal regime

It is often assumed that while both capitalism and the modern state may originate in processes such as primitive accumulation, imperialism and colonialism, and conquest, modernization in both the political and economic spheres gradually leaves those stages behind, allowing for some form of cosmopolitan transnational globality to emerge. In particular, settler colonialism and primitive accumulation have been understood to belong to early stages of capital expansion and accordingly to be formations lodged in the past. This introduction argues that the ongoing history of settler colonialism forms a crucial terrain through which to understand military occupation and the formations and practices of the neoliberal state that has emerged to regulate and promote a new regime of accumulation. It also explores the ways in which the formations of the contemporary state, whether military, economic, political, legal or cultural, may remain grounded in apparently peripheral or outmoded modes of domination. Understanding the neoliberal regime of accumulation in terms of its continuing debt to such histories will have a crucial bearing on the organization and articulation of resistance and dissent in the present.

Spectacles and spectres: settler colonial spaces in Vancouver

This paper argues that non-Indigenous ideas of Indigenous alterity shape and are shaped by processes that render Indigeneity spectacular and/or spectral. In Vancouver, BC, the urban centre of the Northwest Coast and ancestral homeland of the Coast Salish people, performances, art, and other forms of display are experienced by non-Indigenous people as spectacles: cultural not political, visual not otherwise sensorial, passively observed not participatory. And Indigeneity also haunts; despite dispossession, erasure, and displacement, Indigenous people return again and again to exercise their sovereignty and refuse conditions of disappearance and display. This revenant spectrality combined with spectacular representation creates a complex structure of feeling in the city. I suggest that, for non-Indigenous people, these conditions produce a holographic Indigeneity: hyper-visible from some angles, invisible from others; constantly present even in moments of apparent absence. Drawing on urban ethnographic research with non-Indigenous subjects, I use the socio-spatial cases of Stanley Park's totem poles and the Downtown Eastside's social marginalization to exemplify how spectacular/spectral dynamics characterize and sustain settler colonial logics in a city decorated with Northwest Coast art, haunted by legacies of colonialism, and uncertain about the future of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. I argue that conditions of spectacle and spectrality must be identified and transgressed to reimagine a different future.

The American liberal colonial tradition

The American liberal myths of the self-made man, of the liberal individual, and of American exceptionalism all rely upon a disavowed relationship to the constitutive role of settler colonization in the foundation, development, and structure of the USA. I place political scientist Louis Hartz's 1955 work, The Liberal Tradition in America, at the center of this essay because his argument re-animates while posing as a critique of the narrative of American exceptionalism. We see in Hartz someone struggling, and not quite succeeding, to challenge the constraints of American political discourse. In this effort, Hartz implicitly suggests the presence of an American liberal colonial tradition, one that upsets the story of America's exceptionalist founding by seeing liberalism and settler colonialism as mutually constitutive logics. In the end, Hartz sees but cannot fully grasp the explanatory power that comes with placing settler colonial logic at the center of a critique of the foundational myths of America.

Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization by Scott Lauria Morgensen (review)

Reviewed by: Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization by Scott Lauria Morgensen Lisa Tatonetti Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization. By Scott Lauria Morgensen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 292 pages, $75.00/$25.00. Scott Lauria Morgensen’s Spaces Between Us is a significant contribution to the field of queer or Two-Spirit Native American and indigenous studies and will be of great interest to scholars who focus on gender and sexuality in western American literature. Together, the book’s two sections—“Part 1. Genealogies” and “Part 2. Movements”—argue that settler sexuality is built upon the specter of indigeneity (2). This “settler colonial logic … disappears indigeneity so it can be recalled by modern non-Natives as a relationship to Native culture and land that might reconcile them to inheriting conquest” (3). The introduction and the two chapters in part 1 sketch out Morgensen’s theoretical claim; the first chapter centers Foucault’s theory of bio-power and the second the figure of the berdache. Biopower—or the shift from the disciplinary power of a sovereign to mete out death to a modern state power that authorizes the life of/for certain populations over others—is central to the institution of settler colonialism in the United States, where white populations were marked for life, while indigenous populations were marked for a demise naturalized by a rhetoric of inevitability. Key to such colonial logics, as Morgensen explains and Native scholars such as Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee) and Deborah Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation/Chumash) have argued previously, is “the imposition of colonial heteropatriarchy and the hegemony of settler sexuality” (34). Morgensen’s intervention lies in his subsequent claim that this imposition “sought both the elimination of Indigenous sexuality and its incorporation into settler sexual modernity” (34). So while actual indigenous subjects were marked for death if their gender and sexuality exceeded the confines of settler subjectivity, their image was deployed as that upon which settler sexuality was defined. Morgensen proves his claim about the centrality of Native people to the creation of settler sexuality by tracing a careful genealogy of “the colonial object berdache” in the entwined discourses of anthropology and the white Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) [End Page 422] rights movement. Non-Native scientists “cited the apparent existence and acceptance of marginal sexual subjects in ‘primitive’ societies as evidence that their nature had been known since human origins and could be scientifically and legally affirmed” (46). In his theoretical framing, as well as in the historical and ethnographic studies in the four chapters that comprise the book’s second section, Morgensen shows how subsequent non-Native social movements, most prominently the Radical Faeries, articulate their sexuality in relation to the berdache and attempt to inhabit indigeneity. Thus, queer settlers (1) authorize their sexuality by noting the existence of multiple gender traditions in indigenous societies, (2) occlude the privileges of whiteness by claiming a minority status in which sexuality equates to race in order to gain the rights and privileges of a settler citizen, (3) establish non-Native queer communities whose social practices are based on romanticized performances of indigeneity (what Philip Deloria has termed “playing Indian”). As a result, Morgensen shows, queer settlers first cite and then claim to inherit indigeneity. Importantly, Morgensen does not confine his book to tracing the genealogy of settler sexuality. He also marks the rise of Two-Spirit societies, many of which precede the 1990 coining of the term two-spirit. Thus, for example, he discusses the creation of groups like the Gay American Indians in San Francisco in 1976 and New York City’s WeWah and BarCheeAmpe society in 1989, noting how such groups challenge settler colonialism through both pantribal alliances and alliances with other queers of color. Morgensen’s final chapter extends his project by citing the transnational nature of indigenous HIV/AIDS organizing and showing how such activism “centers Indigenous epistemologies that dare to imagine and assert autonomy from biopolitical control by proposing the decolonization of gender and sexuality and the pursuit of sovereignty over health” (221). Ultimately, Spaces between Us aligns with Andrea Smith’s interrogation of indigeneity and heteronormativity, Mark...

SETTLER HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE LOCAL HISTORY MUSEUM

AbstractIn what ways does America's settler colonial heritage shape how its citizens imagine the national past? I address this question through a study of county historical museums in rural Arizona, with a particular focus on the Navajo County Museum. This analysis suggests that we consider the “natural history” or “evolutionary” style of organizing collections as integrally tied to a foundational settler colonial logic. Conclusions are drawn about the ubiquity of this orientation to the national past and the difficulties curators may face in effectively challenging it.

After the Frontier: Separation and Absorption in US Indian Policy

This article seeks to chart the shifting post-frontier strategies whereby Indian societies were incorporated into US society. Recognised as techniques of settlement, US policies that have been viewed as discordant or antithetical emerge as complementary implementations of the settler colonial logic of elimination. The article discusses three of these strategies: Indian removal, general allotment, and blood quantum criteria, arguing that scholars who have viewed the surface differences between these strategies as signs of incompatibility have failed to acknowledge the overarching context of settler colonial invasion, a process that continues after the initial expropriations of Indian landowners. Geographical removal eliminated Indians quickly and effectively, but it was an inherently temporary solution. On the passing of the frontier, with no space left available for Indian removal, relations with Indians – the first arena of US foreign policy – became a depoliticised arm of domestic administration. Various techniques of Native assimilation, all of which had previously existed in undeveloped forms, came to dominate US Indian policy. The article considers two of these techniques, allotment and blood quanta, noting their continuity with earlier strategies for eliminating Indians.