Introducing an American Quarterly forum on Patrick Wolfe’s legacy and method: Cynthia G. Franklin, Njoroge Njoroge, Suzanna Reiss, ‘Tracing the Settler’s Tools: A Forum on Patrick Wolfe’s Life and Legacy’, American Quarterly, 69, 2, 2017, pp. 235-247

02Jul17

Excerpt: In this forum, scholars from different disciplinary locations take up Patrick Wolfe’s 2016 book, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, and consider its importance for the field of American studies. Contributors discuss challenges that Traces of History poses and the possibilities it opens that are of value to American studies and its approaches to racial formation and settler colonialism. They approach Wolfe’s book as experts in one or more of the racial discourses and histories it takes up, and from different disciplinary homes.

Having this forum in American Quarterly challenges interdisciplinary scholars across fields to explore how and why the study of geographies of settler colonialism has and has not found a home in American studies. Taken together, and in dialogue with the comparative approach Wolfe himself takes, the essays in this forum invite readers to consider the importance of a comparative approach to racialization and settler colonialism that extends beyond US borders. This can enable new and necessary understandings of the articulations among racisms as they take place in disparate sites linked through circuits of imperialism.