« Settler colonialism is also climate change transfer: Chris D’Angelo, ‘ A Louisiana Tribe Is Now Officially A Community Of Climate Refugees: Since the 1950s, the Native American tribe has lost 98 percent of the land it calls home’, Huffington Post, 12/02/16
Introducing a special issue on indigenous-settler relations in anthropological practice: Brian Noble, ‘Consent, Collaboration, Treaty: Toward Anti-Colonial Praxis in Indigenous–Settler Research Relations’, Anthropologica, 57, 2, 2015, pp. 411-417 »

‘The Work of Settler Colonialism’: April 2, 2016, The Graduate Center – City University of New York

13Feb16

Rationale: Recent years have witnessed the growth of ‘settler colonialism’ as an organizing concept within North American academic and activist circles, emphasizing the continued occupation of Indigenous lands and the necessity of foregrounding land-based decolonization, Indigenous political and cultural resurgence, and the sovereignty of First Nations. Meanwhile, the unending crises of neoliberal capitalism have fostered new forms of labor action, popular confrontations with austerity, and a proliferation of scholarship on the history of capitalism. Despite the contemporaneous nature of these developments, little conversation exists between them. This symposium attempts to address the lacuna between these fields, and find productive gaps, tensions, and entry points. If, as Patrick Wolfe contends, settler colonial invasion “is a structure not an event,” then the future of the settler state will be brought about through continuous labor in multiple arenas of social life. Yet this also signals the radical potential of labor to disrupt the global capitalist system, exposing its foundation and replications in Indigenous dispossession. This symposium holds out hope that by bringing these fields together, new solidarities, strategies, and scholarly agendas can emerge.


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