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Not a thesis (something can be true even if apologists and critics agree): Rhys Machold, ‘Reconsidering the laboratory thesis: Palestine/Israel and the geopolitics of representation’, Political Geography, 65, 2018, pp. 88–97 »

‘Settler’ defined: Alex Trimble Young, ‘Settler’, Western American Literature, 53, 1, 2018, pp. 75-80

06Jun18

Excerpt: The word “settler” tends to carry with it connotations both bucolic and nostalgic. Even certain dictionary definitions are at pains to remove it from the colonial circumstances in which it is most often employed. The Oxford Living Dictionary offers a definition and sample sentences that exemplify the willful act of erasure at the heart of everyday understandings of the word:

A person who settles in an area, typically one with no or few previous inhabitants.

“the settlers had come to America to look for land”

“Jewish settlers”

The field of settler colonial studies has worked to undo the erasure performed by this definition by theorizing settler colonialism as a distinct structure of imperial domination defined by a genocidal project aimed primarily at seizing Native territory rather than exploiting Native labor. Settler colonialism, in the United States and other settler societies around the globe, is a structure that must be dismantled in the present, rather than an event that can be consigned to the historical past. For settler colonial studies, “settler” names both the perpetrators and the beneficiaries of this form of structural violence.


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