A discovery of settler colonialism: Beenash Jafri, ‘Settler Colonialism’, in Catherine M. Orr, Ann Braithwaite (eds), Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies, 2023
Abstract: My very first encounter with the term “settler colonialism”—a particular form of colonization in which colonizers violently expropriate land that is indigenous to other nations in an attempt to permanently displace and replace Indigenous populations—was in my junior year at Toronto’s York University in my first-ever Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) course. It was an upper-division elective called “Anti-racist Feminism,” taught by Enakshi Dua who proposed to our tiny class of three that people of color, despite their marginal status in Canada and the U.S., were also settlers. It was a jolting provocation, one that challenged me to consider not only how the violence experienced by Native peoples was different to that experienced by me and my community, but also how I / we were benefiting from anti-Indigenous violence. “People-of-color-as-settlers” pushed me to think more deeply about the limitations of belonging, inclusion, and representation in a nation-state steeped in colonial, racist, heteropatriarchal violence. And it shed new light on the complexities of working in coalition with Indigenous peoples, particularly as I’d already been challenged by Native peers to rethink my assumptions and limited understanding of Indigenous sovereignty politics. 1 “Anti-racist Feminism” was an eye-opening course, one that also introduced me to a version of WGS that was inherently invested in addressing questions of race and colonization that transformed my perspective on what social change might look and feel like.
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