Settler colonialism as a ‘veritable apocalypse’: Esme Greene Murdock, ‘Terrortories: Colonialism’s Built Environments as Structural Disablement’, Critical Philosophy of Race, 10, 1, 2022, pp. 106-127 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism as a ‘veritable apocalypse’: Esme Greene Murdock, ‘Terrortories: Colonialism’s Built Environments as Structural Disablement’, Critical Philosophy of Race, 10, 1, 2022, pp. 106-127

20Feb22

Abstract: This article proceeds from the thesis proposed by Frantz Fanon that colonialism, specifically settler colonialism, is a world-destroying structure that the colonized witness as a “veritable apocalypse.” Settler colonialism is apocalyptic not only in the sense that it attempts to permanently destroy and make irretrievable various other Indigenous worlds and ways of being-in-the-world, but also in that it builds the settler colonial world in, on, and with Indigenous lands and bodies. I read Fanon as proposing that settler colonialism builds apocalyptic worlds with the murdered worlds of the colonized and then forces the colonized to navigate and embrace these violent and traumatic landscapes, which I call terrortories. I argue this is directly connected to Fanon’s revolutionary psychiatric work and practice to decolonize and disalienate colonial medical and psychiatric facilities as structures of disablement, which requires the abolition of settler colonialism altogether.

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