« Parasite to host (on settler belonging): Sarah Galletly, ‘Serial Representations of Indigenous Peoples and Settler Belonging in The Queenslander’, JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 22, 2, 2022
Narrating settler extractivism: Julia Siepak, ‘Storied Geographies: Settler Extractivism and Sites of Indigenous Resurgence in Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild’, Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, 44, 2, 2022, pp. 150-169 »

Parasite to host (on settler belonging, again): Ethan Plaue, ‘The Parasitical Trick: Mediating Dispossession in Early America’, American Literature, 2022

25Dec22

Abstract: How do settlers organize their discursive relationship with the lands they settle, in order to claim, conceptually and materially, the position of owner and occupant? What must they do to transform themselves, in their eyes and in the eyes of others, from parasite to host? And in what ways have these practices been contested? This article addresses these questions in the historical context of early American settler colonialism and demonstrates the relational structure that colonial legitimation requires, including how this structure is mediated by subjects not strictly part of that relation. Through readings of John Marshall, Mary Rowlandson, James Printer, and Martin R. Delany, this article brings together the fields of media philosophy and settler colonial studies to theorize the “parasitical trick” as a fundamental and flexible technique of settler colonialism that removes Indigenous people from relationality by, paradoxically, making them central to it.


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