Settler Colonialism
Edited by Maya Mikdashi
“Imperialism was the theory, colonialism the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of the European metropolitan society. Everything in those territories that suggested waste, disorder, uncounted resources, was to be converted into productivity, order, taxable, potentially developed wealth. You get rid of most of the offending human and animal blight—whether because it simply sprawls untidily allover the place or because it roams around unproductively and uncounted-and you confine the rest to reservations, compounds, native homelands, where you can count, tax, use them profitably, and you build anew society on the vacated space. Thus was Europe reconstituted abroad, its “multiplication in space” successfully projected and managed. The result was a widely varied group of little Europes scattered throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas, each reflecting the circumstances, the specific instrumentalities of the parent culture, its pioneers, its vanguard settlers.” — Edward Said, “Zionism From the Standpoint of Its Victims”
Colonialism is most broadly understood as the conquest and rule of a far away territory by, and for, the economic, political, and social benefit of an imperial metropole. Thus “post-colonial” most often refers to the era following the end of formal colonial rule in those territories, even if the metropole and the former colony continue to unevenly shape each other economically, politically, socially, and culturally. Both colonialism and settler colonialism derive from imperialism—an archive, practice, and ideology based on and constituted through civilizational, racial, and gendered hierarchy. But settler colonialism has a different, though related, teleology. In a settler colony, colonial authorities (and later, nation state authorities) facilitate the settlement (later called “immigration”) of non-indigenous people on indigenous land. In a settler colony, colonial authorities build structures (laws, bureaucracies, infrastructure, states, and social/kinship relations) that privilege non-indigenous peoples over indigenous bodies, communities, sovereignty, political, social and economic structures and systems, and moral and intellectual cosmologies. Settlers come to replace. Given the foundational and sustained importance of settlement/immigration to settler colonies, many contemporary settler societies—most notably the USA, Australia, Canada, Israel, and South Africa— have built a national identity out of the language of immigration, diversity, and multiculturalism. In these nation states, as in all contemporary settler societies and colonies, we have never been post-colonial.
Patrick Wolfe has written “settlers come to replace” (Wolfe, 2006). This “replacement” is not only corporeal. It is also social, structural, cultural, philosophical, and religious. Indigenous practice and theory have been and are also absorbed, uncited, into the founding documents and national identity of settler states such as Australia, Israel, South Africa, New Zealand, or Canada. Often, indigenous practice and theory are appropriated and whitewashed as indigenous bodies—indigenous societies—are made to disappear materially as well as discursively. One might only look to the founding documents of the United States for examples of this dual absorption and repudiation move. While the Constitution was deeply influenced by the constitution of the Iroquois League, the Declaration of Independence also declared American Indians to be “merciless savages.”
Settler colonial and indigenous theory have made critical interventions into how we teach, and inhabit settler societies and settler states. Some of these critical interventions include the study of law as a tool of subjection, separation, and continued settlement/immigration (Barker 2011, Williams 1992), debates over binarism within colonial and settler colonial studies (Wolfe 2016, Rifkin 2010, Shafir 2005), the production of genealogical, bureaucratic, and archival “truth” around both indigenous and settler belonging and identity (Kauanui 2008, TallBear 2013, Morgensen 2011) the relationship between settler colonial projects and the genesis of the modern university and its disciplines (Povinelli 2016, 2002, Mamdani 2015), and the theorization and practices of sovereignty that are both embedded within and detached from the nation state form (Bruyneel 2007, Simpson 2014). One of the most provocative interventions, from the vantage point of Middle East Studies (and in the opinion of this editor), comes from Jodi Byrd. She demonstrates how US Empire has been studied, theorized, and organized against as a phenomenon and structure of power that occurs outside the continental United States—despite the fact that the US continues to colonize, dominate, and settle native bodies, lands, and life-worlds. She argues that this “transit of [US] empire” (Byrd 2011) colludes with the continued colonization of indigenous peoples within the United States, and calls on us to critically reevaluate our thinking, writing, and teaching about the imperial United States. This is a welcome and captious invitation to scholars who teach US colonial practices in the Middle East, an invitation to ethically, politically, and intellectually engage with the question of what it means to teach such a subject from within that settler colony/imperial center and to draw and think on the sinew that connects and invigorates de-colonial theory and practice from the continental United States to its imperial outposts in the Middle East.
For those interested in settler colonialism as a form of domination and rule, as well as for those currently navigating settler societies as spaces of living, working, and acting—we have gathered a selection of articles published on Jadaliyya since the site’s founding in 2010. The articles focus on the technologies, histories, and quotidian practices of settler colonialism in states such as the United States, Algeria, Canada, Israel, Australia, and South Africa. Questions of ethics, transnationalism, epistemology, intersectionality, race, indigeneity, gender and sexual difference, comparative analysis, solidarity, and political action are paramount to this collection of articles. Muriam Haleh Davis elucidates the intersections and imbrications between practices of French settler colonialism in Algeria and French post structural theory. Rafeef Ziadeh and Brenna Bhandar offer a comprehensive and critical overview of the “settler colonial term,” if you will, within Palestine Studies. Maya Mikdashi contributes a piece that highlights the multiple resonances and affective states of inhabiting settler and indigenous space, across the contexts of Lebanon, Palestine and the United States. In another piece she suggests the importance of incorporating US settler colonialism into the pedagogy of US based Middle East Studies programs and classes. Noura Erakat writes of the ethical, political, and legal affects of her experiences as an invited lecturer on the US-occupied Island of Hawaii. Magid Shehada delves into the joined temporalities of memory and settler colonial governance in Israel-Palestine, a theme that is amplified in the wide-ranging and provocative conversation staged between Elizabeth Povinelli, Raja Khalidi, and Vivian Ziherl on questions related to the histories and presents of settler colonies and societies, as well as on the critical dimensions of inhabiting settler societies. Scott Morgensen and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Suhad Daher Nashef highlight intersections between sexuality, feminism, and settler colonialism in the contexts of Canada and Israel, in addition to within the sphere of transnational solidarity organizing. Maya Mikdashi and Sherene Seikaly together think about, and across the borders of the United States and Palestine/Israel, in order to think about the place of settler colonialism in political, intellectual, and affective states. Finally, Elyse Smeidjran2 completes our collection with an interview conducted during a spectacle of settler colonial violence, the standoff at Standing Rock between Native Americans and US government and private economic interests. The interview, though anchored in a moment of crisis, is dedicated, along with the rest of this issue of JadMag, to thinking critically about what role the notion of “crisis” plays in the technologies of rule and the disciplining of history practiced by settler colonies and societies.
We hope that you will find this collection as useful, challenging, and inspiring as we have.
For more information, go to the bibliography.
Edited by Maya Mikdashi
“Imperialism was the theory, colonialism the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of the European metropolitan society. Everything in those territories that suggested waste, disorder, uncounted resources, was to be converted into productivity, order, taxable, potentially developed wealth. You get rid of most of the offending human and animal blight—whether because it simply sprawls untidily allover the place or because it roams around unproductively and uncounted-and you confine the rest to reservations, compounds, native homelands, where you can count, tax, use them profitably, and you build anew society on the vacated space. Thus was Europe reconstituted abroad, its “multiplication in space” successfully projected and managed. The result was a widely varied group of little Europes scattered throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas, each reflecting the circumstances, the specific instrumentalities of the parent culture, its pioneers, its vanguard settlers.” — Edward Said, “Zionism From the Standpoint of Its Victims”
Colonialism is most broadly understood as the conquest and rule of a far away territory by, and for, the economic, political, and social benefit of an imperial metropole. Thus “post-colonial” most often refers to the era following the end of formal colonial rule in those territories, even if the metropole and the former colony continue to unevenly shape each other economically, politically, socially, and culturally. Both colonialism and settler colonialism derive from imperialism—an archive, practice, and ideology based on and constituted through civilizational, racial, and gendered hierarchy. But settler colonialism has a different, though related, teleology. In a settler colony, colonial authorities (and later, nation state authorities) facilitate the settlement (later called “immigration”) of non-indigenous people on indigenous land. In a settler colony, colonial authorities build structures (laws, bureaucracies, infrastructure, states, and social/kinship relations) that privilege non-indigenous peoples over indigenous bodies, communities, sovereignty, political, social and economic structures and systems, and moral and intellectual cosmologies. Settlers come to replace. Given the foundational and sustained importance of settlement/immigration to settler colonies, many contemporary settler societies—most notably the USA, Australia, Canada, Israel, and South Africa— have built a national identity out of the language of immigration, diversity, and multiculturalism. In these nation states, as in all contemporary settler societies and colonies, we have never been post-colonial.
Patrick Wolfe has written “settlers come to replace” (Wolfe, 2006). This “replacement” is not only corporeal. It is also social, structural, cultural, philosophical, and religious. Indigenous practice and theory have been and are also absorbed, uncited, into the founding documents and national identity of settler states such as Australia, Israel, South Africa, New Zealand, or Canada. Often, indigenous practice and theory are appropriated and whitewashed as indigenous bodies—indigenous societies—are made to disappear materially as well as discursively. One might only look to the founding documents of the United States for examples of this dual absorption and repudiation move. While the Constitution was deeply influenced by the constitution of the Iroquois League, the Declaration of Independence also declared American Indians to be “merciless savages.”
Settler colonial and indigenous theory have made critical interventions into how we teach, and inhabit settler societies and settler states. Some of these critical interventions include the study of law as a tool of subjection, separation, and continued settlement/immigration (Barker 2011, Williams 1992), debates over binarism within colonial and settler colonial studies (Wolfe 2016, Rifkin 2010, Shafir 2005), the production of genealogical, bureaucratic, and archival “truth” around both indigenous and settler belonging and identity (Kauanui 2008, TallBear 2013, Morgensen 2011) the relationship between settler colonial projects and the genesis of the modern university and its disciplines (Povinelli 2016, 2002, Mamdani 2015), and the theorization and practices of sovereignty that are both embedded within and detached from the nation state form (Bruyneel 2007, Simpson 2014). One of the most provocative interventions, from the vantage point of Middle East Studies (and in the opinion of this editor), comes from Jodi Byrd. She demonstrates how US Empire has been studied, theorized, and organized against as a phenomenon and structure of power that occurs outside the continental United States—despite the fact that the US continues to colonize, dominate, and settle native bodies, lands, and life-worlds. She argues that this “transit of [US] empire” (Byrd 2011) colludes with the continued colonization of indigenous peoples within the United States, and calls on us to critically reevaluate our thinking, writing, and teaching about the imperial United States. This is a welcome and captious invitation to scholars who teach US colonial practices in the Middle East, an invitation to ethically, politically, and intellectually engage with the question of what it means to teach such a subject from within that settler colony/imperial center and to draw and think on the sinew that connects and invigorates de-colonial theory and practice from the continental United States to its imperial outposts in the Middle East.
For those interested in settler colonialism as a form of domination and rule, as well as for those currently navigating settler societies as spaces of living, working, and acting—we have gathered a selection of articles published on Jadaliyya since the site’s founding in 2010. The articles focus on the technologies, histories, and quotidian practices of settler colonialism in states such as the United States, Algeria, Canada, Israel, Australia, and South Africa. Questions of ethics, transnationalism, epistemology, intersectionality, race, indigeneity, gender and sexual difference, comparative analysis, solidarity, and political action are paramount to this collection of articles. Muriam Haleh Davis elucidates the intersections and imbrications between practices of French settler colonialism in Algeria and French post structural theory. Rafeef Ziadeh and Brenna Bhandar offer a comprehensive and critical overview of the “settler colonial term,” if you will, within Palestine Studies. Maya Mikdashi contributes a piece that highlights the multiple resonances and affective states of inhabiting settler and indigenous space, across the contexts of Lebanon, Palestine and the United States. In another piece she suggests the importance of incorporating US settler colonialism into the pedagogy of US based Middle East Studies programs and classes. Noura Erakat writes of the ethical, political, and legal affects of her experiences as an invited lecturer on the US-occupied Island of Hawaii. Magid Shehada delves into the joined temporalities of memory and settler colonial governance in Israel-Palestine, a theme that is amplified in the wide-ranging and provocative conversation staged between Elizabeth Povinelli, Raja Khalidi, and Vivian Ziherl on questions related to the histories and presents of settler colonies and societies, as well as on the critical dimensions of inhabiting settler societies. Scott Morgensen and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Suhad Daher Nashef highlight intersections between sexuality, feminism, and settler colonialism in the contexts of Canada and Israel, in addition to within the sphere of transnational solidarity organizing. Maya Mikdashi and Sherene Seikaly together think about, and across the borders of the United States and Palestine/Israel, in order to think about the place of settler colonialism in political, intellectual, and affective states. Finally, Elyse Smeidjran2 completes our collection with an interview conducted during a spectacle of settler colonial violence, the standoff at Standing Rock between Native Americans and US government and private economic interests. The interview, though anchored in a moment of crisis, is dedicated, along with the rest of this issue of JadMag, to thinking critically about what role the notion of “crisis” plays in the technologies of rule and the disciplining of history practiced by settler colonies and societies.
We hope that you will find this collection as useful, challenging, and inspiring as we have.
For more information, go to the bibliography.