« The settler and the migrant, and the question of revolution: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Displaced: John Mulgan’s Man Alone and Guido Morselli’s The Communist’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 38, 1, 2020, pp. 84-104
Settler colonial novels: Zachary R. Hernandez, ‘Imagining the Southwest in Willa Cather’s Frontier Novels: Settler Colonialism in The Song of the Lark, The Professor’s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop’, in Jada Ach, Gary Reger (eds), Reading Aridity in Western American Literature, Rowman & Littlefield, 2020 »

Settler colonialism is a pandemic: Renisa Mawani, ‘A Historical Account of the Pandemic: Health, Colonialism and Racism in Canada’, RSC, 12/11/20

24Nov20

Abstract: In this paper, I situate the Covid-19 pandemic within a longer historical context in Canada. I argue that settler colonial state has produced the conditions in which certain (white) lives are valued, protected, and nourished while other lives (Indigenous/ Chinese) are left to die. I make this argument by focusing on two examples: the role of the Indian Act and the enactment of Canadian Immigration legislation. While the former has produced unliveable conditions for Indigenous peoples on and off reserves, the latter has suggested that certain migrants – particularly the Chinese – were “foreign” and diseased. The racial inequalities that have surfaced in the current pandemic, I suggest, requires us to consider the long histories of racial violence in Canada, the ways in which certain bodies have been made vulnerable to disease, while others have been blamed for its proliferation, all in the interests of white (re)settlement. 


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