The Settler Colonial Present

by Lorenzo Veracini

The Settler Colonial Present explores the ways in which settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination informs the global present. It presents an argument regarding its extraordinary resilience and diffusion and reflects on the need to imagine its decolonisation.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

167 pages, Paperback

First published February 25, 2015

About the author

Lorenzo Veracini is a historian and professor at Swinburne University of Technology’s Institute for Social Research. He is the editor in chief of Settler Colonial Studies and has been a key figure in the development of the field of settler colonialism. His book Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview was published in 2010.

Reviews

[Randall Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Winthrop noted in 1629, that indigenous people “enclose no ground”; that set the “terra nullius” stage for the theft of their land, and for their extermination, the twin pillars of settler-colonialism. Settler-Colonialism is colonialism where settlers permanently remove residents from their cherished land through threat of violence assisted by the state. Think of the sordid settler-colonial history of the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Israel, et al, and which groups they each nastily dispossessed. Lorenzo builds on the shoulders of Manu Vimalassery, who has shown us that US sovereignty claims are actually counter-sovereignty claims, as well as Patrick Wolfe who has shown us that settler-colonialism, as in Israel, is “a structure, not an event”. George Washington was a leading settler-colonial figure – he said we have to “extirpate” the Iroquois, because they are in our way. Lovely. If you found him at your dinner party today sprouting crap like that you’d think he was both racist and probably a sociopath – how could the Enlightenment bring us such attitudes? Lorenzo says George says this after knowing they were already stealing parts of the Iroquois’s constitutional system, and knew they were an advanced civilization. Jefferson not to be outdone by Washington says yes, and the reason we must destroy these indigenous is because they are “attacking” us. Why these peaceful indigenous might be attacking their invaders is of course not explained by Jefferson. The irony to the author, is that it is the pre-technological people who point in the right direction for humanity to avoid extinction of course, and not the dominant “wetiko” culture. All colonialisms are, part of the “imperialist appropriation of markets and resources”. Richard Gott believes we should apply our collective settler-colonial lens on South America as well; in 1990’s Peru, around 300,000 indigenous women were forcibly sterilized. Lorenzo insightfully sees other offbeat settler-colonial motifs most Americans live by: science fiction seeing the future as a settler-colonial frontier past… vampire stories which further normalize concepts of settler-colonialism through the culture… Bram Stoker’s reviewers have analyzed his original Dracula stories as a fear of reverse colonization. Even, the movie, The Croods, is shown to be a settler-colonial story. Finally, Lorenzo even sees the surplus population victimized in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, as in effect, settler-colonial. When segments of the population are no longer needed as “an industrial reserve army”, they will become under Capitalism “expendable”. Lorenzo’s shocking and bold conclusion is that we are facing a settler-colonial present for all with disaster capitalism controlling a beholden debt-ridden surplus population. Great book…

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite the power of and the insights granted by theories of post-colonialism as they have developed since the late 1970s in particular, one of the glaring gaps has the question of the still-colonised. Among the most significant of those gaps has been the still colonised in places such as the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – those places European-descent populations established themselves as the dominant group, usually but not always in population terms, and began to build outposts of Europe as new nations. They may have decolonised, as in become independent (in some cases well before the end of Empire) but they remained colonial, with sizeable Indigenous populations living marginalised lives.

A significant set of developments from the late 1990s saw the beginning of the systematic theorisation of settler colonialism, as a form of colonisation distinct from the creation of colonial outposts for strategic military or resource exploitation purposes. In this theorising, settler colonialism was increasingly seen as a condition where an exogenous-derived population took over a territory, marginalised the Indigenous population and set out to redefine themselves as Indigenous. The value of the work was that we began to develop a set of structural characteristics that allowed us to make better sense of the settler colonies. Yet, initially, much of this work focused on the historical dynamics of settler colonialism, considering the dynamic inter-relation between Indigenous and settler populations. All of this work was drawn together in Lorenzo Veracini’s important and valuable Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview from 2010 that examined the 20 or years work that had gone into building a clear view of settler colonialism as a structure, not an event as Patrick Wolfe had described it.

This deceptively svelte volume, at 109 pages of text, is a rich part 2 of Settler Colonialism (form 2015) exploring the challenging question the structural characteristics of settler colonialism in the contemporary world, not that we need to have read the first book for this one to make sense – part 2 it may be, but it is a free-standing analysis. It is deceptively svelte because of the richness of the argument and complexity (note, complexity, not inaccessibility) of the case made. It has regrettably taken me 4 years to get to it.

Veracini builds the argument around four negations, seeking to explore and define contemporary settler colonialism by what it is not: he argues that settlers are not migrants in that settler colonialism is marked by distinctive dynamics of power and relations to sovereignty, while settler colonialism is not colonialism (distinctive relations with Indigenous peoples and places), it is not elsewhere and it is not finished. This is, therefore, an argument about settler colonialism in historical and spatial terms. As well as being an analysis by negation, it is also rich in metaphor meaning that he has to stop from time to time assert the like, such as when he suggests that colonialism resembles a virus infecting a locality with the cultural characteristics of the colonisers (think here of all the language of ‘civilising the natives’ that pervades colonialism) as well as exploiting the local resources and labour power, whereas settler colonialism resembles a bacterial infection settling on a place and seeking to take it over and replace what was there. In terms of relations with Indigenous peoples therefore, (resource) colonialism requires them for their labour power and so forth, whereas settler colonialism does not need them and seeks to replace them. Of course, this is a model, these are ideals and the situation on the ground is more complex than that – but as Veracini repeatedly reminds us, he is exploring a settler colonial heuristic, settler colonialism a s a concept to think with.

This notion of a settler colonial heuristic pervades the book, making it both exciting and provocative (as in stimulating ideas and questions) and frustrating because there is little that provides us with a single vision and therefore single pathway to change. Quite simply, and Veracini makes this case forcefully at the end – don’t expect a simple single solution. Settler colonialism has played itself out differently in each case, in each setting, so responses need to be developed locally – making this a text that is good to think with, and reminding us that decolonial solutions need to be Indigenous led.

There are several powerful conceptual refinements, and one of the most significant, at least to my reading, is the importance of what he sees as sovereign and non-sovereign displacements. Here he builds on Mahmood Mamdani’s argument that settlers are defined by conquest, making them different to migrants, meaning that in settler colonies there are Indigenous peoples and exogenous migrants neither of whom are sovereign; settlers have sovereignty. It is a sharp distinction pointing to a (at least) three-part social dynamic where migrants might benefit from expropriation of Indigenous Peoples but still remain subjugated in very similar ways; this is a powerful refinement of the argument in the previous book that settler colonies include a series of ‘exogenous alterities’. In decolonial terms this distinction points to a need to differentiate anti-racism from decolonisation activities.

Throughout the argument he highlights the persistence of the settler colonial in the contemporary. This is not just in the continuation of the subjugation of Indigenous Peoples in the states conventionally seen as settler colonies, or in the situation of the Palestinians, but also in the persistence of settler colonial motifs in popular culture and forms of political activism: in many contexts that notion of ‘the commons’ has been developed without acknowledgement of colonial appropriation. He also draws attention the persistence of these ideas in other settings, including the global land grabs underway in the interests of ‘food security’ for industrialised nations or to manage climate change through developing carbon sinks often justified on the ground that the land is under-utilised, which sounds like a version of ‘empty’, which sounds like terra nullius by another name. His point here is that settler colonialism has not gone away, and is not relegated to a few outposts but continues to shape both settler colonies themselves and much of the rest of the world – remembering, of course, that this theorising is still largely heuristic, an explanatory device that is good to think with.

It is, as noted, a dense and deceptively svelte volume, but one that is a vital contribution to continuing theoretical and conceptual developments as well as social, cultural and political struggles for many people in the everyday. The theoretical developments here will continue to be refined through that struggle and through local analyses and investigations: this volume (and the previous one) will enhance those analyses by providing a structural frame allowing those of us working in these areas to build a more rigorously comparative approach as well as a clearer vision of where we are and what we are working with. Amid all of that, it also deals with the very real conditions of life for Indigenous Peoples and the efforts to build decolonial options.

All in all, this is a valuable and important text that I am sure will be revisited, repeatedly.

[Al Callon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bizarre and incoherent. Argues that vampires/tiny houses/games are settler-colonialist. Re: games, he says that games are settler-colonialist because they involve different groups seeking to gather limited resources: yes, and that is all games ever, if everyone had unlimited resources there would be no object to the game. Never fully connects the consequences of these "settler-colonialist narratives" to the modern day, only says "they matter" and moves on to talking about settler-colonialist reflexes, which he also never convinced me to care about. Additionally makes a vague distinction between "emplaced revolutionary change" and "evolutionary transformation," because the latter.... abandons anthropocentrism and embraces Nietzsche/Heidegger?? Reads like someone ran out of ideas so remixed colonialist theory, then drew a dozen or so contemporary topics and found some obscure way to link them to said remix. And what, I might add, was the ending attempting to argue? Given the choice between exile and resettlement, we should choose exile?