Settler colonialism’s (and settler colonial studies’) ‘portability’ (like the frontier story): Samuel Truett, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Borderlands of Early America’, The William and Mary, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 435-442 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism’s (and settler colonial studies’) ‘portability’ (like the frontier story): Samuel Truett, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Borderlands of Early America’, The William and Mary, 76, 3, 2019, pp. 435-442

07Aug19

Excerpt: THE notion of settler colonialism looms large in our tales of U.S. empire. Unlike other colonialisms, which pull peoples and resources into networks of labor, trade, and extraction, settler colonialism “destroys to replace,” Patrick Wolfe wrote. It eliminates others to establish new societies on stolen land. Though scholars often focus on “the elimination of the Native,” some take a broader view. Kelly Lytle Hernández, for instance, uses a settler colonial lens to link the conquest of Native California to efforts to exclude, corral, and incarcerate Mexicans, Chinese, and African Americans. Indeed, settler colonialism’s most salient feature as a category of analysis is its portability. It is, according to Wolfe, “a structure not an event.” That insight gave him a way to compare North America and Australia—but he also meant, in the context of postcolonial studies, that settler colonialism was far from post. Its “logic of elimination” is alive and well. As a link between past and present, it is especially useful in historicizing ongoing capitalist, settler, and state efforts to dispossess, remove, exclude, contain, coerce, and exploit.

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