L. Veracini - The Settler Colonial Present

The Settler Colonial Present

The Settler Colonial Present

Lorenzo Veracini

Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

Lorenzo Veracini 2015

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Contents

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Australian Research Councils Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DP0986984). A five-year fellowship enabled me to pursue without major distractions what I believe was a worthwhile project. I have been lucky and I know it. This book is one of the outcomes of that extended project and the ideas I present in this book are part of a developing research agenda. Some of them were tried first in articles that have appeared in Interventions, Politica e Societ, Arena Journal, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, and Settler Colonial Studies.

I also want to acknowledge the vacuum cleaner. I started developing the main idea for this book and its methodology the notion that, really, current dispensations no longer require us to perform reproductive labour, and that every definition is a negation while I was cleaning up after we hosted a massive playdate with six children involved, and three were mine. Unlike the wage relation, rent extraction in the age of debt does not care in particular for an industrial reserve army. While indigenous peoples under settler colonialism have always faced a similar predicament, informateur extraordinaire Alex Young and magnificent blogger Edward Cavanagh should also be mentioned here.

The picture I have chosen for this books front cover depicts the 1820 Settler National Monument in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. I believe this image engages with the main scholarly propositions this book is premised on. If settler invasion is a structure and not an event, the 1820 Settler National Monument is actually a structure that celebrates an event. The monument, however, represents settlers that are manifestly made by conquest and not just by immigration. They dominate a strange landscape and remain alien to it. It is indeed the combination of an empty setting and very specific human forms that produces a powerful contrast. This image also effectively illustrates the nature of the settler revolution: this reproductive unit is as far as it can be from the rebarbarised Europeans living at the fringe of civilisation that populated the anxious perception of the various metropoles. These respectable settlers bear all the markers of civilisation itself; they dont move away from it, they carry it with them. It is in this way that the settler revolution turned a cautionary tale into a tale of exemplary regeneration. We live with the consequences of that revolution, and it is significant that the monument is about history but is not an historical artefact. In 1994 a bushfire destroyed it. Two years later Nelson Mandela, who knew how to deal with settlers, rededicated it. If this familial unit represents the settler revolution, in a way, the monument epitomises the settler colonial present.

Finally, but very importantly, I want to acknowledge Clares contribution. Among a number of other fundamental things, she introduced me to a few vampire stories.

Introduction: The Settler Colonial Present

In a seminal 1998 book, an intervention that kick-started what with hindsight could be called the settler colonial turn, Patrick Wolfe concluded that settler invasion is a structure not an event.

Wolfes conclusion about structure, event, and their relation was cited again and again by scholars who found the new paradigm effective. (Of course, those who found this paradigm unhelpful also referred to it.) The interventions that collectively constituted this scholarly subfield have recurrently noted that indigenousnonindigenous relationships under settler colonial conditions remain a current concern. Thus, even if it stemmed largely from actual historical work on the settler economies and societies and on the recuperation of the historical trajectories of indigenous peoples, settler colonial studies has continuously and programmatically thought of itself as an inquiry having important ramifications in the present.relevance of settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination. It is an argument about the settler colonial present.

A workable definition and a suitable methodology are needed for this task (any task, really). As well as on the recent scholarly literature on comparative settler colonialism, The Settler Colonial Present is premised on the Spinozean notion that omnis determinatio est negatio, that is, on the proposition that all determination [i.e., all definition] is negation. According to Kenneth Burkes influential rendition of Spinozas method, to define a thing in terms of its context, we must define it in terms of what it is not. This book pursues a contextual definitional strategy. In its four chapters, it outlines the global impact of a specific mode of domination, settler colonialism, by outlining what it is not.

This methodological approach is not only due to the fact that defining contextually is generally an effective way to establish an operative definition of socio-historical phenomena.

In Australia, during earlier times and in various localities this role was performed by Chinese coolies, for example, or by kidnapped Pacific Islanders brought to Queensland to work the sugar plantations, or by the various nonwhite collectives identified by the White Australia policy and its successors. Unsurprisingly, other settler projects have used different collective alterities for their negative definition.

It is not only, however, a matter of defining oneself negatively in the context of a specifically settler colonial population economy. Much more is defined negatively by settler colonial processes. More generally, the notion that class is absent from the settler societies is, after all, as old as the very study of their comparative development, at least as old as Tocquevilles observations on Jacksonian America.