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Review Essay: On Settler Colonialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2019

Kevin Bruyneel
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Extract

As the late Patrick Wolfe phrased it, “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” Settler colonialism as a “structure not an event” captures the idea that settler colonial invasion of Indigenous lands should not be contained as a phenomenon of the past, but rather is continually reproduced throughout the history and present of settler societies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. To say this is also to raise the question of how to trace and analyze the development, legitimization, and maintenance of the colonial structures in these societies: those built on the dispossession and occupation of stolen lands. To this end, Rita Dhamoon's definition of settler colonialism helps in thinking of it as “not only a structure but also a process, an activity for assigning political meanings, and organizing material structures driven by forces of power.” Dhamoon points us toward attending rigorously to this process in ideological, institutional, structural, and historical terms.

Type
Review Essay
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 82 , Issue 1 , Winter 2020 , pp. 145 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2019

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References

1 Wolfe., Patrick “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 388CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Dhamoon, Rita, “A Feminist Approach to Decolonizing Anti-racism: Rethinking Transnationalism, Intersectionality, and Settler Colonialism,” Feral Feminisms, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 32Google Scholar.

3 Morefield, Jeanne, Empire without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Grande, Sandy, “Whitestream Feminism and the Colonial Project: A Review of Contemporary Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis,” Educational Theory 53, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 329–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Hartman, Saidiya, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women's Labors,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 18, no. 1 (Jan.–Mar. 2016): 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Simpson, Audra, “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gendered Costs of Settler Sovereignty,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016)Google Scholar. The two feminist theorists Simpson credits with this insight are in, Andrea SmithConquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2005)Google Scholar and in, Jacki RandKiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008)Google Scholar.