« Settler worldmaking on tour: Michela J. Stinson, ‘Tourism, worldmaking, and disquieting settler atmospherics’, Tourism Geographies, 2023
Indigenous internationalism as infrastructure: Jordan B. Kinder, ‘Indigenous Infrastructuralisms? Grounding Materialisms along and against the Pipeline’, symploke, 31, 1-2, 2023, pp. 103-118 »

Totally decolonial: John Grant, Corey Snelgrove, ‘Returning to totality: Settler colonialism, decolonization, and struggles for freedom’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2023

16Dec23

Abstract: A unifying feature of the most prominent social movements that emerged in the 2010s is
their dissatisfaction with explaining injustices on a case-by-case basis. In Canada,
movements against settler colonialism express a similar orientation. This elicits a return of
totality thinking, which enables one to grasp the connections between what appears as
isolated or fragmented moments that in fact constitute and are constituted by a larger
whole. Drawing on Marxist and Indigenous theorists, we reconstruct an approach to
totality and a conceptualization of settler colonialism as a totality. Through an immanent
reading of John Borrows’ approach to decolonization, we justify the importance of this
concept for politicizing the persistence of unfree forms of interdependence. Finally, just as
individual struggles point toward the totality, totality thinking draws attention to the
unity-in-separation of different struggles, enabling a politics of “immanent universalism” as
an alternative to both abstract universalism and particularism.


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