Abstract
This chapter focuses on a specific mode of domination and its contemporary manifestations. It outlines what is here defined as the global settler colonial present: a predicament fundamentally characterised by a logic of elimination and containment rather than exploitation. This appraisal of a developing dispensation is offered as a reminder of the need to develop indigenous-nonindigenous alliances.
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Notes
- 1.
The notion of ‘political descent’ constitutes my rejoinder to ongoing contestations regarding the advisability of seeing migrants and ‘people of colour’ as ‘settlers’: yes, one can be a settler on indigenous land even if her ancestors were forcibly moved or displaced as colonised subalterns and did not establish the political regimes of the settler societies to come.
- 2.
It seems important to stress that this argument is premised on an analogy. It refers not to the current occurrence of actual settler colonialism as a mode of domination but to a similarity in relationships. In this context, the eliminatory logic that typically characterises settler colonialism is replicated by contemporary modalities of domination. It is a fraught situation and an analogical rather than direct correspondence fundamentally limits the possibilities of indigenous-nonindigenous alliances. There is no assumption of a shared consciousness here.
- 3.
I use the expansive first person advisedly (and so I did in the introduction to this chapter): these are genuinely global trends, the middle classes are shrinking, and warehousing is a fast developing technology.
- 4.
‘Nostalgia’ itself, after all, was once a neologism. It is significant that as a concept it emerged in the late eighteenth century during an age of revolution and unprecedented upheaval.
- 5.
Even the dramatic ‘ngoisation’ of the structures of international governance can be seen as part of this pattern (see Choudry and Kapoor 2013). As NGOs compensate for the apparent failure of the postcolonial state, they become a constituent part of the global settler present in a growing assemblage of stateless ‘frontiers’.
- 6.
Thomas Olsen categorises various possible types of solidarities: ‘political’, ‘rights’, ‘material’, and ‘global’ solidarity. Only the last one is not premised on inequality and ‘emphasizes similarities’ while ‘acknowledging’ differences (Olesen 2004: 259). Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003: 502–505) similarly advocates for ‘deep solidarity’: a type of solidarity that is ‘noncolonizing’ and can be established across power imbalances.
- 7.
It is significant that Partha Chatterjee’s ‘Foreword’ to Sanyal’s book explicitly mentions the ‘millions of dispossessed peasants who migrated to the settler colonies’ as one of the no longer existing outlets for the absolutely redundant (Chatterjee 2014: 12). Settler colonialism as a mode of domination was simultaneously one global result of processes of primitive accumulation and a crucial driver of them.
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Veracini, L. (2016). Facing the Settler Colonial Present. In: Maddison, S., Clark, T., de Costa, R. (eds) The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2654-6_3
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