The Settler Complex: Recuperating Binarism in Colonial Studies

253 Pages·2016·39.662 MB·English

by  Patrick Wolfe (editor)

THE SETTLER COMPLEX
RECUPERATINGB INARISMIN C OLONIALS TUDIES
EDITED BY
PATRICKW OLFE
AMERICAN INDIAN STUDIES CENTER
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. LOS ANGELES
3220 CAMPBELL HALL. BOX 951548
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90095-1548
Copyright ©2016 by The Regents of the University of California
Published by the UCLA American Indian Studies Center
http: //www.books.aisc.ucla.edu
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
consent of the publisher.
Cover photo; The Bulldozer ©Miki Kratsman
Cover design: William Morosi
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015950093
ISBN 0-935626-69-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-935626-69-8
Printed in the United States of America
Printed on recycled paper by McNaughton &Gunn, Inc.
For Leonard Peltier.
Free him.

CONTENTS
1. Introduction
Patrick Wolfe. 1
2. Settler-Colonial Landscapes and Narratives of Possession
Tracey Banivanua Mar 25
3. Driving with the Driven:A Re(-)view of theT rail ofT ears in the Roadside Montage
Ken Whalen 43
4.“ Aloha‘ Oe”:S ettler-ColonialN ostalgiaa ndt heG enealogyo fa LoveS ong
Adria L. Imada 65
5. The Mutuality of Citizenship and Self-Determination: Proposing Alternatives to
Adversarial Binarism in United States/Native American Relations
K. Tsianina Lomawairna 83
6.W hyA sianS ettlerC olonialismM atters;A ThoughtP ieceo nC ritiques,D ebates,
and Indigenous Difference
Dean Itsuji Saranillio 99
7. Desire, Settler Colonialism, and the Racialized Cowboy
Beenash Jafri ..117
8. All the Eagles and the Ravens in the House Say Yeah: (Ab)original Hip-Hop,
Heritage, and Love
Lauren Jessica Amsterdam ..133
9. Resentment and Indigenous Politics
Glen Sean Coulthard 155
10. The Wealth of the Natives: Towards aCritique of Settler-Colonial Political Economy
Manu Vimalassery 173
11. The American Liberal Colonial Tradition
Kevin Bruyneel .193
12. Revisiting 1967: The False Paradigm of Peace, Partition and Parity
llan Pappe 207
IV
13. What Is Settler Colonialism? (For Leo Delano Ames Jr.)
Maya Mikdashi 221
About the Authors 233
Permissions, 235
Index 237
V
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Pamela Grieman, our editor at UCLA's American Indian Studies Center Press,
has been at the heart of this venture from the start—encouraging, discouraging,
suggesting, improvising, troubleshooting, ruffle-smoothing—unfailingly patient,
unfailingly intelligent, unfailingly constructive. Thank you, Pamela.
Tsianina Lomawaima came into this project as one of its many peer reviewers.
Her comments on the articles in the first of the preliminary journal collections
were acute, thorough, and, above all, helpful. You can't let talent like that go
astray, so Tsianina was wheedled into submitting an article of her own for this
final collection, which is all the richer for the addition. Thank you, Tsianina.
This collection has been blessed by its peer reviewers, all of whom brought an
extraordinary degree of care, thoughtfulness, and critical acumen to their task. In
addition to Tsianina, we are indebted to Joseph Bauerkemper, Arif Dirlik, Jennifer
Henderson, Alex Hirsch, Lorenzo Veracini, and two anonymous referees. Thank
you all.
Vi
INTRODUCTION
PATRICK WOLFE
Inthe contemporary Western academy, especially in the United States, the repu¬
diation of binarism partakes of acertain sacredness. Not only are its premises
unquestionable, though they certainly are. More strictly, and in keeping with
Durkheimian fundamentals, the repudiation of binarism expresses membership
of acollectivity that constitutes the source and origin of righteousness—hence
the heat that typically accompanies its enactment.' An identification is at stake. In
notable contrast to the customary wordiness of scholarly interchange, as anyone
who frequents conferences in the humanities will have experienced, the repu¬
diation in question is typically expressed with emphatic brevity, the charge of
binarism constituting one of the more conversation-stopping items in academic
theory's inventory of reprimands. Despite the semblance of consensus, however,
adissenting positionality persists. As one who argues that settler colonialism
is premised on azero-sum logic whereby settler societies, for all their internal
complexities, uniformly require the elimination of Native alternatives, Ihave
regularly been accused of binarism—though not once by aNative. Why should it
be that the specter of binarism, so disturbing to non-Native sensibilities, should
be less troubling to Natives? More provocatively, could it be that the repudiation
of binarism itself constitutes acolonizing perspective? To the extent that this may
be the case, the heat that the issue generates is revealing. It takes us directly to the
affective dimensions of settler subjecthood, aconflictual realm that anumber of
the essays in this collection explore.
To situate settler subjecthood historically, we can start with the frontier. For all
its conceptual drawbacks, the notion of the frontier has the virtue of expressing
the primordial fact of ahistorical coming together of societies that had previously
been mutually discrete. Prior to acertain point or points, their separateness had
been unqualified. In our theoretical enthusiasm at the complexities, hybridities,
and transgressions that the study of frontiers opens up, therefore, we should not
lose sight of the fact that, for all the holes and inconsistencies in the concept, its
primary referent is stable enough. Behind all the indeterminacy, the frontier is a
way of talking about the historical process of territorial invasion—a cumulative
depredation through which outsiders recurrently advance on Natives in order to
take their place. Go back far enough, in other words, and there can be no disputing
1
THE SETTLER COMPLEX
the existence of an unqualified empirical binary. The question is not, therefore, one
of the ground for binarism, but one of where and when, if at all, the original binary
came to be dissolved or transcended.
When settler-colonizers first arrive, they generally try to persuade the Natives
to work for them. Typically, this option becomes marginal before very long.
In principle, it is not good policy to incur reliance on apopulation that one is
simultaneously seeking to eliminate, nor to promote the survival of the bearers of
sovereignties that exceed the settler import. Accordingly, settlers generally seek
to avoid the predicament of relying on Native labor by importing coerced labor
from elsewhere (slaves to the Americas, convicts to Australia, indenturees to Fiji,
and comparable populations). Not only is this situation inherently divisive but, in
the context of settler expansion, which occurs both territorially and demographi-
cally, settler hegemony is further challenged by the disruptive presence of large
numbers of recently arrived immigrants, still undomesticated to new-world civic
norms. In numerous ways, therefore, settlers' dependence on the work of others
engenders complexity—most obviously, demographic complexity, but also the
discursive and psychological complexities that are involved in the construction
and maintenance of viable settler subjecthoods. As Beenash Jafri's investigation
of settler desire illustrates, colonial subjectivities are inescapably bound up in the
wider field of identity politics, ultimately in the intense classificatory contestation
over positionality: who are the settlers, and where does that leave everyone else?^
Far from being obvious, this apparently statistical distinction becomes the primary
battleground of postfrontier settler social relations, its clamor penetrating the
intimate reaches of individual consciousness. The stakes could hardly be higher.
If the one-drop rule applying to Black people in the United States were applied to
Aboriginal people in Australia, for instance, Australia could become an Aboriginal
nation overnight. In declaring that the sovereign decides who is to be included
and who excluded, therefore, Carl Schmitt was only telling part of the story.3
Assimilation does not merely include (and, thereby, reciprocally exclude). It posi¬
tively produces the occupants of those categories in the first place. To breed White
is to make anew. Assimilation reverses the republican formula: rather than the
people constituting the government, the government constitutes the people.
As groups of immigrants who have arrived under widely varying dispensa¬
tions, from bondage to subsidized passage, settler societies typically evince ahigh
degree of internal heterogeneity. But the existence of major differentiations within
settler (and, for that matter, within Native) societies does not alter the binary nature
of the Native/settler divide. The respective differentiations are of different orders.
In this connection, it is important not to be misled by voluntarism. The opposition
between Native and settler is astructural relationship rather than an effect of the
will. The fact that enslaved people, for example, were forcibly transported against
their will does not alter the structural fact that their presence, however involuntary,
was part of the process of Native dispossession. White convicts also came against
their will. Does this mean that their descendants are not settlers? There could
hardly be abetter illustration of the determinate nature of structural relations than
2
INTRODUCTION
the recent report that the Jewish Agency has been recruiting Native Peruvians from
Iquitos, in the Amazonian rainforest, to bolster the population of Israeli colonies
in occupied Palestine. Allegedly, the recruits in question trace their descent from a
group of Mizrahi Jews from the Maghreb who migrated to the Amazon region in
the nineteenth century to work in the rubber industry. More than 250 are reported
to have arrived in Israel in the 1990s, with afurther 100 currently having their
applications considered by the Israeli Interior Ministry.“ Regardless of the outcome
of the Israeli Interior Ministry's deliberations (the Jewish Agency has reportedly
been asked to supply "complementary" evidence in relation to the group), the
mere possibility of Natives from one country being enlisted as settlers in adifferent
people's country demonstrates the supra-individual, structural contingency of the
designations "Native" and "settler." It also highlights the error of essentializing
Nativeness. Although Native peoples participate in global solidarities flowing from
acommon need to overcome the adversities of invasion, the state of being Native
is not an inherent quality that individuals carry with them. Rather, it is structural
and site-specific. Circumstances permitting, there is nothing to prevent colonized
Natives from one region becoming settlers in adifferent region. Think, for instance,
of Native American soldiers stationed in Hawai'i.
Awidespread settler response to the problems posed by demographic hetero¬
geneity is assimilation, apolicy that seeks to neutralize the political consequences
of ethnoracial inequality. Assimilation is multiply deceptive. In the guise of multi-
culturalism, asemblance of heterogeneity not only sustains asubtler privileging
of Whiteness, as the work of Ghassan Hage has shown.s Where Native people
are concerned, it effaces their specificity within awelter of undifferentiated (and
generally trivialized) "differences," seeking to pass off Indigeneity as just another
tile in the multicultural mosaic. Accordingly, it is not surprising that Natives
should see through the surface profusion of assimilationism to the binary reality
below. This is not to discount the hardships to which others have been subject,
in particular the long-run oppression of African American people in the United
States, which is manifest and unquestionable. It is, rather, to deplore the relative
devaluation of Native history There is no competition. One history of persecution
does not diminish another. On the contrary, they have aided and abetted each
other. Both are foundational to the development of US society and its trademark
democratic institutions. Both live on in the present. Certainly, the Indian popula¬
tion is smaller (and, in many cases, out of sight on reservations), but that is the
whole point. The Jewish population of Germany is small as well, but nobody
suggests that this makes the history of Jews in Germany relatively unimportant.
Condescension is the scholarly face of the ongoing elimination of Native American
peoples. The core project still to be adequately foregrounded and resourced in US
history is the redressive inquiry into how it came to be, and has continued to be,
that Indians are relatively invisible in their own land. Failing the proper promotion
of this project, US history simply belongs to the victors.
The binary nature of settler societies is not aperspective confined to Natives.
In various ways, albeit tacitly and in spite of itself, settler discourse acknowledges
3