From Settler Colonialism to a New Postcolonial Settlement

Article for American Affairs Journal

Full article at American Affairs Journal

In this era of heightened racial and ethnic tension, few academic concepts have enjoyed as much success as “settler colonialism.” Notably articulated by the Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe in his article “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” this approach has been used to explain conflicts taking place in Israel-Palestine, Australia, Russia-Ukraine, Latin America, and the African continent, as well as within the Western world.

Settler colonialism is seen as an ongoing process with enduring impacts on indigenous communities and serves as a framework for explaining the complex dynamics of power, domination, and resistance supposedly inherent in settler-colonial societies. Any perceived settler eruption is said to be governed by what Wolfe labels “the logic of elimination,” meaning that settler colonialism seeks to permanently occupy and transform indigenous lands through violent dispossession, forced assimilation, and cultural erasure. As such, narratives of settler colonialism offer no hope of redemption or reconciliation.

Widely taught and embraced on today’s college campuses, and increasingly featured in the media, the settler-colonial concept has vague connections to the original Marxist-Leninist gospel, but is more directly connect­ed to postcolonial movements headed by figures such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Mao, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Kwame Nkru­mah, as well as intellectuals like Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, Robert Sobukwe, Herbert Marcuse, Efraín Morote Best, and Michel Foucault. Less attention is paid, however, to this ideology’s empirical effects and actual history: the most fervent “anticolonial” regimes have generally done little to improve the lives of the oppressed, and often cause their own societies a great deal of harm.

Full article at American Affairs Journal