Commemorating settler deathscapes: Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, ‘Edifying: The Deathscapes Project and the Landscape of Settler-Colonial Monumentality in Australia’, in Bronwyn Carlson, Terri Farrelly (eds), The Palgrave Handbook on Rethinking Colonial Commemorations, Palgrave, 2023, pp. 461-484 | settler colonial studies blog

Commemorating settler deathscapes: Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, ‘Edifying: The Deathscapes Project and the Landscape of Settler-Colonial Monumentality in Australia’, in Bronwyn Carlson, Terri Farrelly (eds), The Palgrave Handbook on Rethinking Colonial Commemorations, Palgrave, 2023, pp. 461-484

04Jul23

Abstract: In this chapter, we draw on the Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States project to disclose the bloody foundations that underpin colonial statues and monuments. As the Deathscapes project evidences, these bloody foundations are, in the context of settler states, daily exposed to view through the embodied racialised deaths of Indigenous people. In its focus on the nexus between the settler state’s usurpation of Indigenous sovereignty and its militarisation of the border in order to assert its illegitimate sovereignty, Deathscapes also brings into view the refugee deaths that result from this lethal assemblage of settler power. Situated within the context of this lethal assemblage, Deathscapes draws attention to the fact that these statues and monuments cannot be hived off as historical artefacts in terms of their legacies of violence. The very infrastructural fabric of the Australian settler state is constituted by the violence that these colonial figures unleashed and which continues to shape the colonial present. In the course of the chapter, we examine how some of these commemorative colonial monuments have become sites that, through acts of Indigenous resistance and naming, bring into graphic focus the embodied relations between past and present forms of settler violence.

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