This is an author version; published article with copyediting and formatting available as
Elizabeth Strakosch & Alissa Macoun (2020) The violence of analogy: abstraction, neoliberalism and
settler colonial possession, Postcolonial Studies, 23:4, 505-526, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2020.1834930
The Violence of Analogy: Abstraction, neoliberalism and settler colonial possession
Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun
ORCID: 0000-0002-7607-8424 School of Political Science and International Studies,
University of Queensland
ORCID: 0000-0002-4012-4062 School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology
This paper explores the value of theorising about colonialism that is specific rather than
universal, informed by our locations in colonial struggles and driven by engagement with our
continuing material colonial relationships with land, place and people. We do this by
examining recent scholarly engagements with our contemporary precarious global economic
and environmental conditions, particularly within settler colonial theory. We argue that using
analogy to think our way out of material colonial and racial relations can obscure the
authority of Indigenous peoples and reproduce colonial epistemologies. This attempt to create
solidarity through political equivalence risks reifying imperial relationships and resecuring
white possession. Rather than seeking to evade our positions as colonisers embedded in
violent political systems, we argue it is possible for colonisers to act in solidarity from a
position of complicity. Working towards justice from our own locations involves building
solidarity across differences, without first needing to reduce these differences to sameness.
Keywords: settler colonial studies; colonialism; neoliberalism; precarity; solidarity;
decolonisation; ontological turn
When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it
recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler
future... The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form
of settler appropriation…When we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a
metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression1.
Introduction
In their now classic essay, ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang
are clear that no intellectual moves—however sophisticated—will exempt us from the hard
material work of decolonisation.2 Similarly, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith notes that ‘[i]mperialism
cannot be struggled over only at the level of text and literature. Imperialism still hurts, still
destroys and is reforming itself constantly’.3 Colonial projects rely on many kinds of
violence: military, economic, bureaucratic, psychological, carceral and racial. Importantly,
their violence is also ideational and epistemological. Like many other scholars engaged in
work on colonisation in the context of Indigenous sovereignty, we are concerned to help
unravel the conceptual fabric holding these different forms of violence together. As
colonisers and white members of a colonial political society structured in white racial
dominance,4 we feel a particular responsibility to challenge this society’s silences, fictions
1
and justifications. This means working to refuse the dehumanisation and erasure of
Indigenous peoples, and—so far as we can—the alliances and excuses that complicity with
this colonial society constantly offers us.
For us, such a political project must involve interrogating any implicit claims that our
political or intellectual commitments allow us to transcend our interests and locations, or free
us from the structures in which we operate. Tuck challenges us to ask ourselves how we
conceptualise mechanisms of change, and how we imagine that our research contributes to
such transformation.5 It is in doing this that we come to question increasingly prominent
theoretical moves to ‘renarrativise’ our colonial relationships, with the assumption that in
doing so we substantively change their operation and provide a new basis for social struggle.
Tuck and Yang’s formulation of decolonisation as not a metaphor is implicitly accompanied
by the corollary, that colonialism is a deeply material set of political relationships to be
struggled over in and from our concrete locations. As Snelgrove, Dhamoon and Corntassel
note, ‘settler colonialism will not be undone by analysis alone, but through lived and
contentious engagement with the literal and stolen ground on which people stand and come
together’.6 A set of structures and relationships anchored in land, place and people cannot be
transcended by political hot takes or sophisticated theoretical abstractions. Yet there are
increasingly prominent threads in settler colonial and political theory which seem to attempt
this. In this article we trace and challenge intellectual moves which work to distance theory
from the material realities of colonisation, and ‘solve’ colonial dilemmas through theoretical
re-categorisations. The idea that finding the correct, hyper-critical take will transform us
connects to the Enlightenment belief that individual rationality releases us from our material
bondage, yet some Western critical theoretical traditions continue to operate within this
framework of individualist intellectual liberation.7 This article is concerned with the violence
we enact and fail to see, and the potential for transformative work we miss, when we follow
this path of trying to think ourselves out of our predicaments.
We suggest that the dangers of settlers ‘analysing’ our way out of complicity are amplified
when we deploy analogy to build solidarity and reconceptualise ourselves as Indigenous. In
the work we analyse here, the use of analogy is acknowledged, but quickly lost as the new
story of political relations, and of ourselves as outside neoliberal and colonial power
structures, is naturalised and taken as a basis for action in the present.
In this paper, we explore the value of theorising about colonialism that is specific rather than
universal, informed by our locations in colonial struggles, and driven by engagement with our
continuing material colonial relationships with land, place and people. We do this by
exploring recent scholarly engagements with our contemporary precarious global economic
and environmental conditions. Our analysis is deeply indebted to Zoe Todd’s critique of the
ontological turn,8 David Singh’s ongoing challenge to abstract theorising in the context of
embodied racial violence,9 Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s conception of the white possessive10
and Snelgrove, Dhamoon and Corntassel’s conversation about the relational dynamics of
settler colonial studies.11 Through an exploration of recent theoretical moves which abstract,
analogise or universalise colonialism to a global theoretical register, disconnected from land
2
and from local political relationships, we show how a certain type of political thinking can
tend to erase the authority of Indigenous peoples and reproduce colonial epistemologies.
We primarily explore these questions through a case study of a particular line of thought in
settler colonial theory (SCT), which argues that intensifying neoliberal economic exploitation
constitutes a new kind of mass dispossession in which settler colonial modes of domination
have gone global, rendering ‘us’ (that is, some conceptualisation of ‘the 99 percent’)
dispossessed in ways analogous to Indigenous peoples.12 As shown in this article, this thread
is connected to broader sociological theoretical arguments about the settler colonial present
and ‘becoming Indigenous’.13 It is important to note that this is only one strand of SCT,
which is a more plural and diverse body of work than is often acknowledged.14 It is also
important to acknowledge that there are crucial contemporary connections between
neoliberalism and settler colonialism, which intensify long standing colonial and racial
violences. Yet in collapsing neoliberalism and settler colonialism together and suggesting that
settler colonialism has ‘gone global’ in the neoliberal present, new forms of violence and
appropriation are made possible.
We find four key intellectual slippages in this ‘analogising’ argument: from settler fantasy to
reality, from colonist to worker, from superfluity to elimination and from capitalist
accumulation to real possession. We suggest, drawing from the work of Moreton-Robinson
and Tuck and Yang, that this argument reinforces an epistemological form of white
possession. It can serve to appropriate Indigenous authority, land and knowledge to solve the
problems of neoliberal crisis which European colonisers have created. This argument, which
uses ‘analogy’ to construct an authoritative global theory, allows non-Indigenous theorists to
skate over real differences between people, groups and political orders in ways that do harm;
while the argument is made by analogy, the political authority and innocence claimed are not
metaphorical but real. In doing this, this recent set of arguments represent an intensification
of the dynamics noted by Jodi Byrd, who suggests that ‘the dazzlement of shared vocabulary’
creates the ‘illusion that critiques of settler colonialism serve Indigenous ends’, and marks a
‘troubling trend to supersede, append, and supplant Indigenous voices at the moment they are
poised to make significant intervention’.15
As we argue, these trends in settler colonial theory are not isolated moves; they reflect a style
of argument that is common in some influential critical social theory. Zoe Todd has noted
that theoretical movements across multiple disciplines with many different thematic strands
(including post-humanism, the Anthropocene, Actor Network Theory, new materialism and
cosmopolitics) are often collectively referred to as ‘the ontological turn’.16 In versions of this
turn, as in recent moves in SCT, a conjunction of claims about precarity, climate change and
neoliberal capitalism coalesce in the declaration of a moment of crisis demanding a radical
rethinking of all our categories and political practices. The solution that key theorist Bruno
Latour offers is to be at home, to be in place, to occupy—in short, to settle and become
Indigenous.17 A binary emerges—on the one hand, a chain of crisis: precarity, neoliberalism,
climate change, migrancy, capital flight, deterritorialisation, air, destruction of Indigenous
lifeworlds, dispossession. Against this is established a chain of ‘solutions’: solidity, worker
security, climate action, resilience, territorialisation, soil, Indigenisation, possession.
3
Scholars in settler colonialism and the ontological turn have made several similar moves. An
unprecedented global crisis is identified, requiring dramatic theoretical paradigm shifts and
movements which render the theorist and most of humanity newly Indigenous, regardless of
their political location in contemporary imperial and racial hierarchies or actual relations with
Indigenous peoples. This effectively naturalises white possession, in political and
epistemological terms. Abstract, globalised theory works to colonise and then Indigenise
white settler scholars, positioning us as transcendent, objective and at the forefront of
anticolonial struggle, even as such work claims legitimacy for us, in the Indigenous territories
we occupy and speak over Indigenous peoples and expertise.
In this article, we explore the detail of these manoeuvres in SCT and briefly look to
resonances in Latour’s version of the ontological turn. We conclude by reflecting on
possibilities for action which do not rely on theoretical recategorizations. Returning to the
question of what constitutes change, we argue that analysis is not action, but action is always
possible. Decolonisation is not a metaphor, and neither is colonialism: while the
Enlightenment’s mode of individualist imperial theorising about globally applicable political
truths helps maintain our current colonial context, it cannot unilaterally generate its
dissolution.
Rather than seeking to evade our position as colonisers embedded in colonial political
structures, assuming that this is necessary to give us agency, we can act towards justice from
our own locations. Part of this involves identifying and taking responsibility for violence of
our own making; in so doing we frustrate colonial goals. The leadership of Indigenous
peoples provides pathways for us to contribute to radical decolonial action already taking
place.
Neoliberalism and Settler Colonial Theory
The politics of knowledge in the field of SCT (as established by core scholars Patrick Wolfe
and Lorenzo Veracini, who are often cited as ‘founding fathers’) have been the subject of
extensive analysis and debate. Critical Indigenous scholars and scholars of colour have long
raised concerns about SCT’s epistemological practices and political implications. These
concerns include the failure of SCT to adequately address imperialism and broader questions
of empire and race; the inadequate political solidarities that the theory assumes and asserts;
the erasure of the racial and colonial interests of the field’s many white settler scholars
claiming authority in the traditional domain of Indigenous studies, and the concomitant
erasure of Indigenous scholarship.18;19 In this context, we analyse the work of Veracini as
having particular status and influence. Additionally, as Veracini himself articulates, his work
resonates with new directions in social theory:
The eliminatory logic that typically characterises settler colonialism is replicated by
contemporary modalities of domination subjecting other constituencies… My work
proceeds alongside that of others. A number of influential interventions have drawn
attention to the ‘new’ phenomena characterising current global dispensations… A number
of interventions have recently also emphasised the contemporary global relevance of
settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination.20
4
Similar arguments are made by scholars who do not explicitly identify themselves within
settler colonial studies, but who write with its language and generalise the settler colonial
condition via a specific analysis of Australia. Ghassan Hage is a prominent critical
anthropologist, and in his recent book Alter-Politics also argues for ‘the globalisation of the
late settler colonial condition’.21 However, he makes this argument through attention to the
‘settler colonial ethos’ as much as through a structural economic analysis, suggesting that
settler colonial societies are geared towards war, and prioritise the (often cruel) defence of the
good life over the provision of that good life within society.22 This attitude increasingly
characterises all ‘developed’ nations, who combine an awareness of the decline of their
power with enough ongoing material power to inflict devastating harm on those perceived as
threatening. We do not engage with Hage’s argument in depth here, noting its different
constitution and implications, but cite this work to demonstrate the broader trend to identify
the globalisation of settler colonialism in the present. This globalisation renders scholars from
‘traditionally’ settler countries as uniquely positioned to speak to the current global moment
(an interesting inversion of standard imperial epistemologies, but still one which can
nonetheless decentre Indigenous authority in this ‘speaking back’ to the metropole).
In previous work we have acknowledged the power of SCT in revealing to settlers the
ongoing nature of colonial conflict and our own implication, while questioning the assumed
epistemological and political authority of the field.23 Others have also noted the value of the
paradigm while using it critically.24 We have also suggested that the field’s structuralism
could be mobilised to empower ‘settler scholars, marginalise Indigenous resistance’, and
give rise to a colonial fatalism in which domination is seen ‘as an inevitable structure likely
to exist across time… [which can] excuse us from human political action in the present’.25
We see recent work in SCT as attempting to overcome this fatalism by describing a ‘break’ in
contemporary power relations, so that non-Indigenous people are reconfigured and newly
empowered to challenge colonial domination. In contrast, we believe theory-induced fatalism
does not reflect the material realities of colonial formations and Indigenous lives, and so the
proposed solution is unnecessary and only serves to obscure these realities. Precisely because
colonial formations are incomplete and unstable, and Indigenous sovereignty is always
already being exercised within and against them, we can always already act differently from
our places within power hierarchies.
We are concerned by the way that the globalisation of SCT appears to replicate the
indigenising moves of settler colonialism itself. Neoliberal capital is indeed a violent force in
the world, but to position it as an external dispossessing power that functionally shifts settlers
to the equivalent political category of Indigenous people appears to ‘complete colonisation’,
in that we have finally ‘replaced’ Indigenous people and been made at home in our colonial
locations. More importantly, in making this argument for a paradigm shift, SCT does not
change its tendency towards objective and disembodied structural analysis, nor its
assumptions about the nature of colonialism and political action. In many ways, this recent
trend appears as the logical extension of a settler theory claiming universal status, to the
extent that it claimed to be able to give an objective, definitive account of the entire colonial
encounter.
Narrating a structural transformation
5
The problem of ‘telling the end of the settler colonial story’ is one with which SCT scholars
have been grappling for some time. The problem is made real by the field’s tendency towards
structuralist analysis. This creates limited possibilities for political change, as Strakosch
outlines in detail:
In certain registers, settler colonial theory presents interaction between Indigenous and
non-Indigenous people as already determined and negated by the deeper colonial
structures that bind us… When, for example, settler colonialism is presented as a
primarily economic relationship with a political and cultural superstructure, then real
change must come from transformations in this economic base…The only political
pathway forward in this context would be to show how structural transformation is
ultimately inevitable (say through the intensification of conflictual dynamics) or to
represent settlers as also structurally dispossessed by settler colonial regimes (so to
reposition them as political subjects struggling alongside Indigenous people for
liberation).26
Veracini is articulating his own response to this problem of political transformation. In doing
this, he builds upon an earlier article by David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe27 and draws on work
by a range of other theorists including David Harvey,28 Nicholas Brown,29 Ghassan Hage,30
Glen Coulthard31 and Bruno Latour.32 For the purposes of this paper, we focus on Veracini’s
articulation of this argument while noting its broader resonances.
Veracini suggests that he ‘exceeds Wolfe’s invitation’ to identify settler colonialism as a
specific phenomenon, and ‘looks for settler-colonial structures beyond the contemporary
polities established by settlers during the age of the “settler revolution”’33 (exceeding one’s
invitations being a common settler move). Settler colonialism, he argues, has ‘gone global
and fundamentally defines present dispensations’.34 Most importantly, he identifies a
‘growing commonality of dispossession’ between Indigenous people and settlers, based on a
‘similarity in relationships’ that subjects us all to a logic of elimination.35 How is this the
case?
As we identify it, the basic argument that is made (which we refer to as ‘the SCT neoliberal
argument’) is as follows:
1. Primitive accumulation is a form of capitalist accumulation where people are
dispossessed of their common property, which becomes private capitalist property.
They are then forced to become workers within the capitalist regime to survive.
Primitive accumulation is not something that occurs once but is an ongoing part of the
capitalist system.
2. Settler colonialism relies on a particular version of this ‘accumulation by
dispossession’,36 as it takes Indigenous land, but, importantly, does not have a place in
its system for Indigenous people as workers. They are dispossessed but then become
superfluous to the new settler capitalist regime.
3. In the new neoliberal global order, all people are being dispossessed of what we (nonIndigenous people) still hold in common—public goods, social services, the earth, the
environment, our bodies, our data and so on. Increasingly, all areas of life are being
commodified and stolen from us by a deterritorialised global capital.
4. Unlike previous forms of primitive accumulation, the majority are no longer required
as workers in the neoliberal present. ‘The working poor are growing in number almost
everywhere; reproducing labour power is no longer a priority’.37 We are dispossessed
by and also superfluous to capitalism.
6
5. Therefore, the experience of all people is similar to that of Indigenous people, and
settler colonialism as a mode of accumulation and domination has ‘gone global’.
Veracini is careful to note that ‘similarity does not mean identity’ and that his argument is
based on ‘the heuristic potential’ of an analogy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous
people.38 This analogous experience is enough to motivate us to struggle alongside
Indigenous people out of self-interest rather than virtue. Critically, for Veracini, the reason
that this analogy is legitimate despite the real differences between the comparators is
‘responsibility means literally being able to respond. The opposite stance is despondency’.39
Therefore, in the name of action in the face of growing harm, the comparison is rendered
legitimate; Veracini effectively works backwards from the problem of political
transformation identified above to validate the conceptual argument as necessary to achieving
that transformation.
We are suggesting therefore, that Veracini makes a virtue out of finding commensurability
between things which are different. We, however, find four points at which the slippages
involved in sustaining these analogies are problematic. We deal with these under four subsections: fantasies are not realities; colonisers are not workers; superfluity is not elimination;
and appropriation is not possession. At a more fundamental level, as we outline below, we
also question the rationale that motivates this analogising—we do not need to transcend or recategorise ourselves in order to resist either settler colonial domination or neoliberal
capitalism.
1. Fantasies are not realities
As SCT scholars including Veracini have noted, settlers seek to end their problematic
colonial status by eliminating existing Indigeneity and occupying its place.40 Settlers want to
become Indigenous as part of the logic of settler colonialism. This desire is so intense that it
results in multiple fantasies which settlers wilfully insist are reality.41 In the name of the
(post) settler colonial future, settlers legitimise all kinds of projections, and then take action
to make these projections into reality. As Veracini notes, settler colonial narrative forms
‘move forward along a story line that can’t be turned back… settler migration remains an act
of non-discovery. Settlers do not discover: they carry their sovereignty and lifestyles with
them… settler colonialism mobilises peoples in the teleological expectation of irreversible
transformation’.42 Yet this transformation is never complete—always receding beyond the
temporal horizon, ‘The vanishing endpoint that is continually pursued is, in effect, the
moment of colonial completion. That is when the settler society will have fully replaced
Indigenous societies on their land, and naturalized this replacement’.43 Naturalising this
replacement requires immense psychosocial investment, and results in ongoing fantasising.
The ultimate and underlying settler colonial fantasy is of colonial completion—the moment
of becoming Indigenous. It must be a moment, because of the teleological nature of settler
colonial stories, and it must be Indigenising, because this is the ultimate successful resolution
of troubled settler colonial possession. Veracini writes of ‘the well established colonial genre
describing the possibility of “going native”… [a] celebratory tale of a renewed or newly
acquired capacity to genuinely connect with the authentic and truly uncorrupted in a new
place.’44 He identifies the persistence of a ‘specifically settler colonial need to transfer
indigenous people away, [and] the equally settler colonial need to indigenise settler
subjectivities’. However, we as settlers cannot become Indigenous without eliminating or
7
subordinating actually existing Indigenous people, as he notes in his analysis of the film
Avatar (about the settler colonial invasion of the Na’vi people on the planet Pandora):
Settler indigenisation in Avatar, of course, inevitably transforms the status of really
existing Indigenous people. Since Jake has in fact out-Na’vied them, the moment when
Jake takes up the Pandoran struggle and takes charge constitutes both the moment of
his final indigenisation and the moment when really existing indigenous Pandorans and
their polities become subordinate… Indeed, the need to effectively resist external
invasion has forced all the Pandoran polities to confederate.45
As this quote indicates, one recurring way that settlers fantasise about becoming Indigenous
is by projecting a second invasion which will create a structural inversion. We will move
from being invaders to defenders of the land; our defence will at last render the land truly and
legitimately ours, and we will prove ourselves to be the natural leaders in this place. As
Veracini states clearly ‘What can possibly supersede the indigenous-settler relation? Or, as
Mahmood Mamdani rhetorically asked, “When does a Settler Become Native”?... a shortcut:
a new invasion—the appearance of new settlers—can immediately turn the settler into a
“native”’.46 The threatening force of this second invasion takes many forms—the invaders
might be a racialized threat from nearby ‘hostile’ nations, an overbearing ‘mother country’, a
wave of refugees, a science fiction story of aliens (as in the Western scifi Cowboys vs
Aliens)… or even deterritorialised neoliberal capital. All fulfil the ‘settler craving for
immediate indigenisation’.47
Crisis and hope are intermingled in this second invasion, for it must be an existential threat to
bear the weight of full and irreversible Indigenisation: ‘settlers often dream of alien invasions
that will fully indigenise them. Yet again, it will all be in vain if these invasions do not
ultimately fail. In other words, the invading aliens must depart at the end, while the
indigenisation of the settler that their presence brings about must be irreversible. Dread and
desire invariably mix: invasions must happen and must fail’.48
When Veracini makes an argument that changing global structures mean that we are all now
dispossessed by an external (in the sense that none of us here are perpetrators, we are all
victims) capitalist force, and are all made ‘Indigenous like’, he must be aware of these
dynamics. The justification can only be the need to create the possibility of alliance and
action in the face of the overwhelming threat to our existence. The SCT neoliberal argument
is an attempt to resolve the structural stasis of settler colonial theory and to ‘tell the end of the
settler colonial story’ in a way that simultaneously seeks to address other urgent global
problems.
2. Colonisers are not workers
The SCT indigenising argument is based on an economic analysis of colonialism. Settler
colonial studies as a field has a strong Marxist bent, tracing colonial structures to underlying
economic relationships shaped by the material interests of colonisers. Settler colonialism has
always been defined in contrast to ‘what it is not’49 and the basic referent of what settler
colonial domination is not is exploitation. Wolfe contrasts extractive colonialism—where
colonists come to exploit Indigenous labour and resources in order to extract a surplus and
take it back home—with settler colonialism, where they come to stay and to replace
Indigenous people as the ‘rightful and natural’ owners of a place.50
8
This contrast has been immensely useful in pointing out that settler colonies are different in
key ways from situations where colonists always remained minorities, such as the British
colonisation of India and most European colonies in Africa, and that most settler colonies
have not decolonised. However, this simplified dichotomy between extractive and settler
colonial regimes tends to position colonialism as a fundamentally economic relationship
defined by the possessive practices of the colonisers, with the political and psychosocial
dimensions of colonialism operating as a kind of secondary ‘superstructure’. This suggests a
reason that Veracini looks for politics in the economic relations between classes—Marxist
analysis sees this as the site of true political change. Yet, as Dene scholar Glenn Coulthard
argues, ‘there is much more at play in the contemporary reproduction of settler colonial social
relations than capitalist economics; … it only [plays a vital role in facilitating dispossession]
in relation to or in concert with axes of exploitation and domination configured along racial,
gender and state lines’.51 He argues for a ‘radical intersectional analysis’ in ways echoed by
Vimilassery, Pegue and Goldstein’s persuasive call for a ‘relational’ settler colonial studies.52
The latter argue that ‘when settler colonialism is deployed as a stand-alone analytic it
potentially reproduces precisely the effects and enactments of colonial unknowing that we are
theorizing… Settler colonial histories, conditions, practices, and logics of dispossession and
power must necessarily be understood as relationally constituted to other modes of
imperialism, racial capitalism, and historical formations of social difference’.53
The contemporary debate about the relationship between neoliberalism and settler
colonialism is part of a much longer history of political theorists linking together capitalism
and colonialism. Marx and Lenin viewed imperialism as an end stage of capitalism, and
Locke and other early theorists associated with liberalism justified imperial expansion on the
basis that Indigenous people did not meaningfully own private property or possess
sovereignty.54 While neoliberal thinkers are usually viewed as economic rather than moral
thinkers, Jessica Whyte has recently shown how the neoliberal theorists of the Mont Pellerin
Society viewed imperial expansion as the global spread of civilisation via commerce (which
was the prerequisite of the highest form of peaceful, ordered society).55
Recently, settler colonial theorists and intellectual historians have excavated Marx’s own
work on settler colonialism.56 They argue that the political economy of settler colonialism
was a part of Marx’s formulation of the concept of primitive accumulation,57 and that he (like
his pro-colonial contemporaries) saw settler colonies as displacing revolutions in Europe. By
providing a stock of ‘new land’ and a promise that workers might suddenly cross classes to
become land owners, settler colonies such as the US and Australia prevented the full class
consciousness of workers and drained revolutionary energies. However, there is a difference
between showing the role of settler colonies in the formation of Marx’s thinking, and
assuming that the ensuing analysis correctly encapsulates settler colonialism. Colonialism
and capitalism are deeply intertwined, but they are not indistinguishable and not reducible to
one another.
This becomes particularly important in understanding the political consequences of the SCT
neoliberal argument. We, as white settlers in Australia, are colonisers, with all the complex
social, psychological, economic and political investments that entails. We are often also
workers in a capitalist economy, and this economy is changing dramatically. However, a
9
change in our status as workers does not entail a comprehensive change to all aspects of our
status as colonisers. It is not the case, as for example Simon During claims in relation to
neoliberal capitalism more broadly,58 that the concept of the precariat has ‘undercut the
analytical power of the subaltern’ or of the other racial, gender, sexual or colonial categories
that position us hierarchically in relation to one another. During’s 2015 article, Choosing
Precarity, explicitly demonstrates that prioritising this economic category over other
intersecting structures is an analytical choice that universalises relatively privileged groups’
experiences, while undercutting the legitimacy of intersectional analyses. As Briony Lipton
notes in response, ‘feminism is needed most precisely when it is understood as having been
superseded… it is invariably women, and particularly women of colour, who will experience
the most disadvantage and inequality in this process of “reflexive modernisation”’.59 This
process erases the organising complex, entangled, historically produced and locally
maintained political relations and replaces them with a unitary global meta-system.
Somehow, when those who are advantaged along other axes of power find themselves newly
economically marginalised, this status is understood as superceding all other statuses and
they are empowered to speak as archetypical victims. This is understandably distressing to
those who have been marginalised in other ways by those very groups now identifying as the
‘new’ precariat (as others have noted, Indigenous people, people of colour and women have
never been secure), and who have developed complex analyses and forms of resistance to the
very power formations that the newly precarious subject now seeks to lead them in resisting.
Such a move centres ‘the primary position of the “waged male proletariat in the process of
commodity production”’ rather than ‘the subject position of the colonized vis-à-vis the effects
of colonial dispossession’.60
It is especially important to understand that our roles as colonisers are not subsumed by our
roles as precarious workers. It is possible to be both colonisers and precarious workers.
However, when our status as precarious workers exploited by global capital is understood as
in some way reducing our violence as colonisers—as making us ‘Indigenous-like’—then
colonial political identities are reduced to economic phenomena. The specific political
violence that continues to be enacted by colonisers—as well as the particularly intense ways
that global capitalism also inflicts its violence upon Indigenous peoples—are similarly
erased. Veracini is making an argument that our position as precarious workers should be
understood as our defining political identity, and that this redefinition will have beneficial
political consequences. We disagree. As colonisers, we still work on stolen land in a capitalist
relation which we imported; this ongoing relationship with Indigenous peoples does not alter
simply because our capitalist relations are changing. ‘Superceding’ our colonial identities in
ways that legitimise and authorise us leads us to devalue Indigenous voices and ongoing
resistance. As Coulthard argues ‘rendering Marx’s theoretical frame relevant to a
comprehensive understanding of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance requires that it
be transformed in conversation with the critical thought and practices of Indigenous people
themselves’61
3. Superfluity is not elimination
As discussed above, the SCT neoliberal argument suggests that we are all Indigenous-like
because we are both dispossessed by and surplus to the new capitalist dispensation. This
10
relies on a series of oppositions built on a basic contrast between exploitation and superfluity
within the capitalist system. The problem with binaries is that oppositions become overstated,
and equivalences between categories on each side of the binary are also overstated.62 Settler
colonies are opposed to extractive colonies, and by implication settler colonialism is opposed
to exploitation. We as workers are no longer essentially exploited and exploitable in the new
capitalist regime but are newly superfluous. Therefore, because Indigenous people facing
settler colonialism are also not categorised as primarily to be exploited63 because they are
subject to a logic of elimination, we must also be subject to a logic of elimination.
Exploitation
Extractive colonialism
Wage labour
Reproduction
Superfluity
Settler colonialism
Dispossession
Elimination
Expulsion
Containment
Terra nullius
The categories on each side of the table are too easily substituted, as in the following
sentence, ‘A type of dispossession that is fundamentally informed by a “logic of elimination”
or containment rather than exploitation is analogous to what indigenous peoples facing
expanding settler-colonial regimes have faced and are facing’.64
This is not the case. Elimination is not synonymous with containment nor superfluity, and it
is not a result of in-exploitability. What makes Indigenous people subject to a logic of
elimination in colonial regimes is not their non-exploitation in relation to settler capitalism.
Indigenous peoples are subject to specific, sustained and genocidal elimination, due to their
status as legitimate, sovereign owners of land which settlers desire. Moreton Robinson65
notes that liberal nation-states are ‘predicated on the social contract model, the idea of a
unified supreme authority, territorial integrity and individual rights’. This model is
underwritten by notions of consent-based legitimacy and universalism, and as Strakosch has
argued elsewhere:
Structured by these political commitments to unified territorial authority, contemporary
liberal settler colonialism struggles to contemplate two or more political societies
coexisting in one place. It therefore targets Indigenous political difference by
attempting to deny, destroy or absorb it. At this projected moment of Indigenous
political extinguishment, settler sovereignty can finally become what it already claims
to be—completed, unified, authoritative, universal and neutral.66
This is the driving force of the ongoing logic of elimination, which operates intensely even
when Indigenous peoples appear to settlers to have been successfully removed from their
land. If Indigenous peoples in these contexts are deemed inessential to capitalism, it seems
likely that this rejection as a potential workforce derives precisely from their legitimate
ownership of land (as mixing labour with land that is already inhabited is dangerously close
to a Lockean definition of private property).
No similar condition renders non-Indigenous people the targets of a logic of elimination. We
might be inconvenient, demanding, hungry, disobedient, and so on, and thus difficult for
capitalist systems in a number of ways. We might be inessential, which means this system
has less and less interest in providing us with the means of subsistence and reproduction.
11
However, capitalism does not wish to replace or become us, and there is no imperative that
mirrors the settler colonial need to be the only and legitimate authority in a place. Indigenous
peoples are not just inconvenient or unnecessary to settler colonial regimes; they are the
targets of extreme, sustained violence because they fundamentally prevent these regimes
from becoming what they say they are already. ‘The masses’ in the new global dispensation
might not be useful (although, we still seem important to capitalist order in a number of
ways—not least as consumers) but we are not subject to a logic of elimination. For this
reason alone, the analogy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people cannot be
sustained.
4. Appropriation is not possession
Primitive accumulation, or ‘accumulation by dispossession’67 is conceptualised as an ongoing
process in which new areas of life are opened up to dispossession, actioned by ‘wholly new
mechanisms’ such as intellectual property rights. In short, accumulation is the continual
search for new things to own rather than the ongoing maintenance of ownership of a thing or
an ongoing practice of possession. In this framing, the ongoing dispossessive work
undertaken to maintain colonial possession is erased, substituted for a moment of possession
from which we only move onward and forward (unless we ourselves are subsequently
dispossessed).
This point may seem minor, but it is in fact at the heart of the problem with many settler
colonial analyses of colonial possession. They assume that colonial possession is real and
possible, and that possession takes place once, with ownership being genuinely transferred.
This holds not just for land, which is assumed to be, in the main, now in possession of the
colonists, but for sovereignty. As Wolfe and his co-editors argue in their book on the topic:
Indigenous sovereignty is not an all-or-nothing ontology but a contingent dialectic
whose balance reflects the strength of the external dimension… This is not to be
defeatist with regard to the emancipatory aspirations of peoples who currently find
themselves disadvantaged by this measure (though it is as well to be realistic). It is,
rather, to stress that for all its bombastic claims to completeness, settler colonialism is
actually a matter of degree.68
But settler colonial sovereignty is not ‘real’, not even to a degree (this is, of course, not to say
that it does not have very real effects). To the extent that Western sovereignty asserts unified
territorial legitimate authority, it can never be real in the presence of ongoing Indigenous
polity. It is a form of possession that must be continually maintained in the face of its own
illegitimacy, because its claim to be grounded in territory is false—and demonstrably so, for
as long as Indigenous people continue to exist. This territory is not owned by colonisers but
by Indigenous peoples—it was never accumulated.
As Coulthard states:
what must be recognized by those inclined to advocate a blanket ‘return of the
commons’ as a redistributive counterstrategy to the neoliberal state’s new round of
enclosures, is that, in liberal settler states such as Canada, the ‘commons’ not only
belong to somebody—the First Peoples of this land—they also deeply inform and
sustain Indigenous modes of thought and behaviour that harbor profound insights into
the maintenance of relationships within and between human beings and the natural
world.69
12
The present tense is critical here: the land and rightful political sovereignty still belong to
Indigenous peoples. How can newly precarious settlers be dispossessed and ‘become
Indigenous’ when our colonial possession is illegitimate and constantly maintained? This
echoes the fantasy of the second invasion—in being stolen from us, what we stole from
others is naturalised as our legitimate possession.
This is the ultimate error of settler colonial theory itself, and of the theory of primitive
accumulation through which it now articulates. Both believe that it is possible to dispossess
Indigenous people, own the land and extinguish their sovereignty. Tanganekald, Meintangk
and Boandik scholar Irene Watson identifies this as a premise drawn from European
conceptions of law and property that are fundamentally unthinkable to Aboriginal peoples:
The idea of extinguishment of First Nations Peoples’ relationship and connection to
the land is an idea that is alien to an Aboriginal ontology. There is no rule that would
enable the extinguishment of the law and/or the extinguishment of our relationship to
our ancient territories. Aboriginal peoples could not hand over authority and our
responsibility for the land; there can be no agreement to enable, for example, uranium
mining and nuclear waste dumps, and other harmful developments. These
developments would be agreements against Raw Law.70
Moreton-Robinson tells us that the crucial point is not that sovereignty was not ceded, but
that ‘sovereignty can never be ceded’:
Bloodline to country is about sharing the life force with the ancestors that created our
land. That life force is what is in every Aboriginal person. It is in the land, it is of the
land, and it cannot be killed. Even if they annihilated us tomorrow, they cannot kill
our sovereignty… White people and what they have is surface. You are surface
people. We are part and in and of the land. You can put on our country anything you
like, but we and the land remain sovereign.71
What happens if we consider the possibility that our ownership is not completed and is
instead a performance that we are engaged in, constantly maintaining and re-enacting to and
for ourselves? If our actions could not sever the fundamental relation between Indigenous
people and land, and if Indigenous sovereignty is not extinguishable, how can the ongoing
dispossession of Indigenous people be superseded and erased by any new capitalist
formation? This is all happening on the surface, in relation to coloniser’s logics and
structures: it does not fundamentally change the lawlessness of our conduct72 or the
impossibility of our unmediated belonging to this place.73
Theory’s Imperial Response to Crisis
In her critique of the ontological turn, Zoe Todd writes of hearing the ‘Great Latour’ speak
about ‘the climate as a matter of common cosmopolitical concern… [without crediting]
Indigenous thinkers for their millennia of engagement with sentient environments, with
cosmologies that enmesh people into complex relationships between themselves and all
relations, and with climates and atmospheres as important points of organization and
action.’74 She links this to the broader imperial dynamics of Euro-Western academic
theorising, which valorises European male high theorists and cannot consider Indigenous
people as ‘dynamic Philosophers and Intellectuals’.75 Latour’s version of the ontological
turn—in its abstract, globalised theorising—positions European scholars as transcendent,
objective and progressive, while speaking over or ventriloquising Indigenous voices. This
13
epistemological authority is justified by an urgent crisis and defended when challenged on the
basis of a need for action.
This argument and the SCT neoliberal argument are remarkably similar in their discursive
structure. Both framings see non-Indigenous scholars rely on a declaration of crisis to
leverage a wholescale revision of political categories and identities. Both identify the
implicitly white, Western ‘majority’ as now dispossessed, and both advocate for
‘indigenisation’ of this group as the best response to new conditions. Latour goes further than
Veracini in explicitly arguing for territorial possession as the appropriate response to
deterritorialised capitalism and climate crisis—although Veracini develops his ideas in this
direction in the current volume. Fundamentally, this is an imperial response to crisis; colonial
practices, projects and authorities are renewed and reinforced through reference to an
overwhelming existential threat.
Settlers Finding a Place to Land
In Down to Earth, Latour identifies a ‘massive event’ beginning in the 1980s and consisting
of three interlinked phenomena: deregulation/ neoliberalism, the explosion of inequality, and
climate change denial.76 He contrasts two possible actions as part of this event: flight/escape
and finding a place to land. The first response characterises the attitudes of ‘the elite’, an
unspecified small group who are always elsewhere in his story (as they are constantly in
flight) and never overlap with ‘us’. The elite ‘concluded that the earth no longer had room
enough for them and for everyone else. Consequently, they decided that it was pointless to
act as though history were going to continue to move towards a common horizon… and
began sheltering themselves from the world’.77 Thus, in a sense, the critical event itself is
flight; ‘To resist this loss of a common orientation, we shall have to come down to earth; we
shall have to land somewhere’.78
The writing is intentionally ‘blunt’, informal and fluid, but the slippery equivalences Latour
establishes are troubling. He pushes all the harms of Western expansion, neoliberalism and
imperialism into the category of escape/ flight, to better present landing as their alternative.
Thus, Europeans who colonised the world over the past centuries were looking for escape,
not looking for a place to land (despite the fact that the desire to ground a new permanent
home has always been the justification of settler colonists) and Indigenous people are
depicted as seeking a place to land in response to their displacement:
The question of landing somewhere did not occur earlier to the people who had
decided to modernize the planet. It arose—ever so painfully—only for those who for
four centuries had been subjected to the impact of the ‘great discoveries’, of empires,
modernization, development and finally globalisation. They knew perfectly well what
it meant to find oneself deprived of land… They had no choice but to become experts
on the question of how to survive conquest, extermination, land grabs. The great
novelty for the modernizing people is that this territorial question is now addressed to
them as well as to the others. It is less bloody, less brutal, less detectable, perhaps, but
it is indeed a matter of extremely violent attack destined to take away the territories of
those who had up to now possessed land – most often because they had taken it away
from others during wars of conquest.79
14
In this quote, we can see that Latour joins Veracini in identifying non-Indigenous people as
now ‘Indigenous-like’ as a result of their oppression:
Here is something that adds an unexpected meaning to the term ‘postcolonial’, as
though there were a family of feeling between two feelings of loss: ‘you have lost your
territory? We have taken it from you? Well, you should know that we are now losing it
in our turn. And thus, bizarrely, in the absence of a sense of fraternity that would be
indecent, something like a new bond is displacing the classic conflict. ‘How have you
managed to resist and survive? It would be good if we could learn this from you’.
Following the questions comes a muffled, ironic response: ‘Welcome to the club’.80
Thus, Latour ends with an invocation that we ‘indigenise’ and make ourselves at home—
positioning this as an inherently resistant and redemptive move. We note several of the same
dynamics discussed above in SCT at play here. Firstly, Latour leverages the current crisis to
argue that ‘all forms of belonging are undergoing metamorphosis—belonging to the globe, to
the world, to the provinces, to particular plots of ground, to the world market, to lands or
traditions’.81 Thus, existing Indigenous identities and other axes of privilege and oppression
carry less analytical weight. This reauthorises the speaking position and progressive authority
of the white Western male subject over Indigenous sovereign authority. It is not a
coincidence that Latour feels comfortable speaking for Indigenous people, nor that this group
appears ‘muffled’ by the weight of history and contemporary events. ‘We’, on the other hand,
speak clearly and in the present moment.
Secondly, ownership of what we have stolen from Indigenous people is naturalised, and made
even more real by the fact it is now being stolen from us: elites are currently taking ‘away the
territories of those who had up to now possessed land—most often because they had taken it
away from others during wars of conquest’.82 Colonial possession is therefore taken as real,
further performing colonial violence. When this narrative is challenged—when, for example,
it is anticipated critics will note this emphasis on territoriality is not dissimilar to long
existing Western notions of ‘blood and soil (Blut und Boden)’—the response is to leverage
the scale of the crisis, ‘to offer such an objection is to forget the massive event that has
intervened to put in danger the great modernization project’.83
The most important point we emphasise here is that this type of abstract theorising which
purports to speak for the whole globe and erases specific power formations ultimately
transfers the authority and legitimacy of Indigenous peoples to imperial critical thinkers
aligned with the metropole. Indigenous people are rendered (as so often in political theory) as
metaphorical figures from previous and subsumed global orders, and a lever to generate our
theoretical concepts and renew our self-conceptions. This flows from the basic assumption
that coloniser theorists can tell Indigenous people the truths of their situation with analytical
authority, even when it means we insist they have been transcended and must make room for
our suffering. Abstraction renders things theory, but it also can render them white
possessions: it muffles the voices of Indigenous sovereign subjects, but they do not cease to
speak.
Conclusion: Analysis is not action, but action is possible
We began our explorations of settler colonial theory’s recent movements by noting their basis
in the ongoing struggle to build a politically transformative movement out of what can be a
15
paralysing structural analysis. However, theoretical realignments do not automatically
translate to changes in material political conditions, and colonial relations cannot be
intellectualised away. Decolonisation is not a metaphor, and neither is colonialism: while the
Enlightenment’s imperial mode of theorising about global political truths has certainly helped
maintain our current colonial dispensation, it cannot single-handedly dissolve it.
Fortunately, however, it is not necessary for it to do so. Political transformation has never
been solely an intellectual puzzle, and as we have noted elsewhere, non-Indigenous people
cannot and should not expect to theorise decolonisation on our own. Possibilities for
changing our material political circumstances and finding ways to move towards lawful
relations with Indigenous peoples are entirely dependent on colonisers recognising that we do
not have the intellectual capacity nor the political right to frame the struggles of the present
and future; we are often problems rather than providers of solutions, and we might need to
learn very much more than we need to lead.84 Further, it is likely that pathways to dissolution
of settler colonial political regimes will look radically different in different locations,
according to the differing ontologies, sovereignties, political orders and priorities of the First
Nations peoples in whose lands and under whose authorities this work is conducted.
Rather than seeking to evade our position as colonisers embedded in and empowered by
colonial political structures, assuming that this is necessary to give us agency to act in
solidarity, we can act towards justice from our own particular locations. This may require
identifying and taking responsibility for our own violence, and in doing so we may frustrate
colonial goals. It may require refusal to perform roles that our institutions and society
demand of us. It may require a more radical overthrowing of existing systems, and
involvement in imagining possibilities beyond settler futures. The political and intellectual
leadership of Indigenous scholars, activists and communities will determine what is required
of us to act in lawful or ethical relation and provide pathways for us to contribute to radical
decolonising practices already taking place, in the places in which we are located.
We write from a position of complicity in racism and colonialism, and from a belief that we
will never find an ‘innocent’ place to land. Yet long traditions of activist scholarship show us
how we can forge coalitions and act in solidarity across differences, without reducing these
differences to sameness. As Tuck and Yang note, ‘[o]pportunities for solidarity lie in what is
incommensurable rather than what is common’.85 If political solidarity can be formed and
guided by ‘an ethic of incommensurability, which recognises what is distinct, what is
sovereign’,86 intellectual work must also be guided by this recognition.
We might learn from Liu and Shange’s observation that attempts to identify similarities in
experience can result in erasure rather than solidarity, and instead work towards a thicker
solidarity that does not rely on false equivalences ‘but rather pushes into the specificity,
irreducibility, and incommensurability of racialized experiences’.87 When we write as though
our connections to colonial histories, our embodiments, and our locations—geographic,
relational, racial, political—do not shape our epistemologies, we make a claim to unmarked,
disembodied and objective knowledge that binds us to colonialism and white supremacy.88 If,
on the other hand, we act from our position of complicity rather than seeking to be saved
from it via analytical transcendence, we might already be working in solidarity. This
solidarity can then be, as Snelgrove, Dhamoon and Corntassel suggest, ‘grounded in actual
practices and place-based relationships, and be approached as incommensurable but not
incompatible’.89 Todd makes a similar political argument in her critique of the ontological
16
turn using the concept of ethical relationality, and draws on the work of Indigenous scholar
Dwayne Donald:
Ethical relationality is an ecological understanding of human relationality that does
not deny difference, but rather seeks to more deeply understand how our different
histories and experiences position us in relation to each other. This form of
relationality is ethical because it does not overlook or invisibilize the particular
historical, cultural, and social contexts from which a particular person understands
and experiences living in the world. It puts these considerations at the forefront of
engagements across frontiers of difference.90
Solidarity built through incommensurability involves engaging with the complexities of the
locations and power formations in which we are enmeshed. Sometimes, this may involve a
refusal of easy binaries. In relation to the debates we discuss here, for example, it is important
to consider that dispossession is not always bad, and possession is not always good,
depending upon who is being dispossessed and of what. In asking ‘What makes political
responsiveness possible?’ Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou note the dual aspect of
dispossession.91 It is the violent, unjust process by which Indigenous societies and others are
harmed through ‘forced migration, unemployment, homelessness, occupation and
conquest’.92 Yet dispossession of dominant subjects (in the sense of being ‘moved by what
one sees, feels and comes to know… into a social world in which one is not the center’) can
be a productive process of ‘responsiveness that gives rise to action and resistance’ by
fragmenting the ‘sovereign self’ which is at the centre of these epistemic regimes of harm.93
Politically, in these terms, new transformative possibilities might open up as some of us are
dispossessed, destabilised and rendered less authoritative.
The current global order may indeed be ‘dispossessing’ previously powerful subjects.
However, if we immediately seek to resecure ourselves (over the top of those who we are
already dispossessing), what possibilities for creative responsiveness do we foreclose? A
simple and universalised story of dispossession potentially involves legitimising and
reproducing white settler colonial repossession. Refusing this possessive move will not
trigger fatalism, nor acquiescence, nor will it foreclose new forms of collective action.
Rather, we can recognise the scale of harms facing us without collapsing them together; we
can act upon such harms while recognising our own implication in creating and sustaining
them; we can find positions of solidarity without pretending to be other than we are.
Notes on Contributors
Elizabeth Strakosch is a non-Indigenous lecturer and researcher in the areas of colonialism,
public policy, critical race and political theory. She works at the School of Political Science
and International Studies at the University of Queensland.
Alissa Macoun is a Lecturer in the School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology.
She is a white woman interested in the politics of race and contemporary colonialism, and in
particular, the ways race is deployed in Australia to entrench colonial relations of rule.
17
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education
and Society 1 (1), 2012, p 3.
2
ibid.
3
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books,
2012, p 57.
4
See Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2015; Stuart Hall, ‘Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in
Dominance’, in Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, Ruth H. Lindeborg, (eds), Black British Cultural Studies:
A Reader, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
5
Eve Tuck, ‘Biting the University that Feeds Us’, in M. Spooner and J. McNinch (eds), Dissident Knowledge in
Higher Education, 2018, pp 90-100.
6
Corey Snelgrove, Rita Dhamoon and Jeff Corntassel, ‘Unsettling Settler Colonialism: The Discourse and
Politics of Settlers, and Solidarity with Indigenous Nations’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and
Society, 3 (3), 2014, p 27.
7
Foucault, for example, locates his work as the new critical Enlightenment project in his famous analysis of
Kant’s essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’; see Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Paul Rabinow (ed),
The Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
8
Zoe Todd, ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on The Ontological Turn: “Ontology” Is Just Another Word For
Colonialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (1), 2016, pp 4-22.
9
See for example, David Singh, ‘Racial complaint and sovereign divergence: The case of Australia's first
Indigenous ophthalmologist’, The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 2020, pp 1-8.
10
Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive.
11
Snelgrove, Dharmoon and Corntassel, ‘Unsettling Settler Colonialism’.
12
Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Containment, Elimination, Settler Colonialism’, Arena Journal 51/52, 2018, pp 18-39.
13
See Ghassan Hage, Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination, Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 2015; Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, English
edition, London: Polity Press, 2018.
14
Jane Carey, ‘On Hope and Resignation: Conflicting Visions of Settler Colonial Studies and its Future as a
Field’, Postcolonial Studies, 23 (1), 2020, pp 21-42.
15
Jodi Byrd in Carey, ‘On Hope and Resignation’, p 31.
16
Zoe Todd ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn’.
17
Latour, Down to Earth.
18
For example: Joanne Barker, ‘Why “Settler Colonialism” Isn’t Exactly Right’, Tequila Sovereign Blog,
March 13, 2011, http://tequilasovereign.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/why-settler-colonialism-isntexactly.html ;
‘“Settler” What?’, Tequila Sovereign Blog, April 11, 2011, http://tequilasovereign.
blogspot.com.au/2011/04/settler-what.html; ‘Settled Contradictions, Necessary Boycotts: A Report from
NAISA’, Tequila Sovereign Blog, May 21, 2011, http://tequilasovereign.blogspot.com.au/ 2011/05/settledcontradictions-necessary.html; Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues and Aloysha Goldstein, ‘Introduction Colonial Unknowing’, Theory & Event, 19 (4), 2016; Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues and Aloysha
Goldstein, ‘Colonial Unknowing and Relations of Study’, Theory & Event, 20 (4), 2017, pp 1042-1054; Jodi
Byrd, ‘Weather with You: Settler Colonialism, Antiblackness, and the Grounded Relationalities of Resistance’,
Critical Ethnic Studies, 5 (1-2), 2019, pp 207-214; Snelgrove, Dhamoon and Corntassel, ‘Unsettling Settler
Colonialism’; Shino Konishi, ‘First Nations Scholars, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous History’,
Australian Historical Studies, 50 (3), 2019, 285-304.
19
We are also indebted to the generative and generous insights of Distinguished Professor Aileen MoretonRobinson and Professor Brendan Hokowhitu who have each articulated critiques of Settler Colonial Studies
over many years, including in unpublished keynotes and remarks at the 2017 NIRAKN Race, Whiteness and
Indigeneity Conference.
20
Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Containment, Elimination, Settler Colonialism’, Arena Journal, 51/52, 2018, pp 18-39.
See also Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, London: Palgrave, 2015.
21
Ghassan Hage, Alter-Politics.
22
ibid.
23
Alissa Macoun and Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘The Ethical Demands of Settler Colonial Theory’, Settler Colonial
Studies, 3 (3-4), 2013, pp 426-443.
24
Simpson and Cattelino 2017, cited in Carey, ‘On Hope and Resignation’.
25
Macoun and Strakosch, ‘Ethical Demands’, 426, 435.
26
Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘Beyond Colonial Completion: Arendt, Settler Colonialism and the End of Politics’in S
Maddison, T Clark and R De Costa (Eds) The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation: Non-Indigenous People
and the Responsibility to Engage London: Springer, 2016, pp 24-25.
1
18
David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime’, Settler Colonial Studies
6 (2), 2016, pp 109-118.
28
David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005.
29
Nicholas Brown, ‘The Logic of Settler Accumulation in a Landscape of Perpetual Vanishing,’ Settler
Colonial Studies, 4 (1), 2014, pp 1-26.
30
Hage, Alter-Politics.
31
Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
32
Latour, Down to Earth.
33
Veracini, ‘Containment, Elimination, Settler Colonialism’, p 18.
34
ibid, 19.
35
ibid, 19.
36
Harvey, The New Imperialism.
37
Veracini, ‘Containment, Elimination, Settler Colonialism’, p 21.
38
ibid, 19.
39
ibid, 20.
40
Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an
Ethnographic Event, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1999; Anthony Moran, ‘As Australia Decolonizes:
Indigenizing Settler Nationalism and the Challenges of Settler/Indigenous Relations’, Ethnic and Racial Studies
25 (6), 2002, pp 1013-1042; Emma Battell Lowman and Adam Barker Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st
century Canada, Nova Scotia:Fernwood Publishing, 2016.
41
see Gerald Sider, ‘When Parrots Learn to Talk, and Why They Can’t: Domination, Deception, and SelfDeception in Indian-White Relations,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 29 (1), 1987, pp 3-23;
Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘Settler Fantasies’ in Courting Blakness: Recalibrating Knowledge in the Sandstone
University, F. Foley, L. Martin-Chew and F. Nicoll (eds), Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2015, p
100.
42
Veracini, ‘Telling the End of the Settler Colonial Story’, Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and
Culture, F. Bateman and L. Pilkington (eds), 2011, p 206.
43
Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun, ‘The Vanishing Endpoint of Settler Colonialism’, Arena Journal,
37/38, 2012, p 42.
44
Veracini, ‘District 9 and Avatar: Science Fiction and Settler Colonialism’, Journal of Intercultural Studies,
32, (4) 2011, p 358.
45
Veracini, ‘District 9 and Avatar’.
46
Veracini, ‘Review: On Settler Colonialism and Science Fiction (Again)’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2 (1), 2012,
p 268.
47
Veracini, ‘Review: On Settler Colonialism and Science Fiction (Again)’, p 269.
48
ibid.
49
Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
50
Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology.
51
Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 14.
52
Vimalassery, Pegues and Goldstein, ‘Introduction: Colonial Unknowing’.
53
ibid, p7.
54
This history of political theorising has tended to elide or explicitly legitimise settler colonialism as a specific
part of imperialism. While Friedman and Hayek criticised ‘brutish’ imperialism which aimed at nationalist
expansion, they applauded settler colonialism as an appropriate and peaceful expansion of civilisation.
Similarly, while Arendt saw imperialism as one of the key harms associated with the rise of totalitarianism, she
exempted settler colonies such as America, which she viewed as building political societies where ‘nothing
much had happened’ up until then (see D.M. Temin, ‘“Nothing Much Had Happened”: Settler Colonialism in
Hannah Arendt’, European Journal of Political Theory, 2019). Lenin ‘came out strongly for the Boers in 1900’
despite his profound critique of exploitative colonialism (see A. Emmanuel, ‘White Settler Colonialism and the
Myth of Imperial Investment’, New Left Review, 73 (1), 1972, 40.
55
Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism, London: Verso, 2019,
p 16.
56
Piterberg, Gabriel, and Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Wakefield, Marx, and the world turned inside out’, Journal of
Global History, 10 (3), 2015, p 457.
57
‘Primitive accumulation’ is the term used by Marx to describe a pre-capitalist process in which subsistence
producers are forcibly separated from their land. They become workers, forced to sell their labour to survive,
and their former means of subsistence become the basis of capitalist private property. This is traditionally
viewed as happening at a single period in time, prior to the establishment of full capitalist relations (hence the
use of the term ‘primitive’ to denote the past status of this accumulation; see M. De Angelis, ‘Separating the
27
19
Doing and the Deed: Capital and the Continuous Character of Enclosures’, Historical Materialism, 12 (2), 2004,
pp 57-87. However, another tradition, which has recently become prominent, sees it as a continuous process
which sustains mature capitalism, and which has become particularly intense in the neoliberal era. De Angelis
argues that it ‘is an inherent and continuous element of modern societies and its range of action extends to the
entire world’ (‘Separating the Doing and the Deed’, p 3).
58
Simon During, ‘Choosing Precarity’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38 (1), 2015, pp 19-38.
59
Briony Lipton, ‘Gender and Precarity: A Response to Simon During’, Australian Humanities Review 58,
2015, pp 65-66.
60
Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, p 11.
61
ibid, p 8.
62
Relatedly, relations between categories are erased. In this case, as Barker (see note 18, above) has noted, the
emphasis on distinguishing settler and extractive colonies has deflected attention from imperialism and the
practice of empire (within which these colonies are connected).
63
Although Indigenous labour is intensively exploited in settler colonial regimes, as many have noted. In the
Australian state of Queensland, where we live and work, the same colonial institutions used to remove,
dispossess and incarcerate Indigenous peoples facilitated extensive exploitation of Indigenous people’s labour
into the 1970s. See Ros Kidd Trustees on Trial: Recovering the Stolen Wages, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies
Press, 2006; Jackie Huggins, Sister Girl: The Writings of Aboriginal Activist and Historian Jackie Huggins,
Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1998.
64
Veracini, ‘Containment, Elimination, Settler Colonialism’, p 22, emphasis added.
65
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Introduction’, Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, Sydney:
Allen and Unwin, 2007, p 2.
66
E. Strakosch, ‘The Technical is Political: Settler Colonialism and the Australian Indigenous Policy System’,
Australian Journal of Political Science, 54 (1), 2019, pp 114-130.
67
Harvey, The New Imperialism.
68
Julie Evans, Ann Genovese, Alexander Reilly, and Patrick Wolfe (eds), Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility,
Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012.
6969
Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, p 12.
70
Irene Watson, Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism and International Law: Raw Law, Abingdon/New York:
Routledge, 2015, p 8.
71
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Speech at Clancestry Conversation 3 #SOVEREIGNTYX, Available from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdjBMQ-0FPQ (Accessed 08 January 2020), 2016, 43:20 to 47:06.
72
Irene Watson, ‘What is Saved and Rescued and at What Cost?: In the Northern Territory Intervention’,
Cultural Studies Review, 15 (2), 2009, pp 45-60.
73
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous belonging and Place in a White
Postcolonizing Society’ in Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castada, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller, (eds)
Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, Berg: New York, 2003, pp M3-40.
74
Todd, ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn’, pp 4-7
75
ibid, p 7.
76
Latour, Down to Earth, pp 10-15.
77
ibid, p 10.
78
ibid, p. 11-12.
79
ibid, p 13.
80
ibid, p 13.
81
ibid, p 18.
82
ibid, p 13, emphasis added.
83
ibid, p 18.
84
Alissa Macoun, ‘Colonising White Innocence: Complicity and Critical Encounters’, In The Limits of Settler
Colonial Reconciliation, Sarah Maddison, Tom Clark and Ravi De Costa (eds) Singapore: Springer, 2016, pp
85-102.
85
Tuck and Yang, ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’, p 28.
86
ibid.
87
Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange, ‘Toward Thick Solidarity: Theorizing Empathy in Social Justice
Movements’, Radical History Review 2018, 131, p 190.
88
See further Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonising Methodologies, 2012; Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘The White Man’s
Burden: Patriarchal White Epistemic Violence and Aboriginal Women’s Knowledges Within the Academy’,
Australian Feminist Studies, 26 (70), 2011, pp 413-431; Macoun, ‘Colonising White Innocence’.
89
Snelgrove, Dhamoon, Corntassel, ‘Unsettling Settler Colonialism’, p 3.
90
Donald in Todd, ‘An Indigenist Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn’, p 19.
20
91
Judith Butler, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political: Conversations with Athena Athanasiou,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
92
ibid, p xi.
93
ibid, p. xi.
21