If not now, when? Joyce Dalsheim, ‘The temporality of the structure: When is settler colonialism?’ History ad Anthropology, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

If not now, when? Joyce Dalsheim, ‘The temporality of the structure: When is settler colonialism?’ History ad Anthropology, 2025

15Feb25

Abstract: When does settler-colonialism begin? Using the case of Israel/Palestine, this article moves through multiple historical possibilities proposed by scholars and activists to understand the “beginning” of the colonization of Palestine. Patrick Wolfe’s nowfamous work argued that such colonization should be thought of as a structure. I call for expanding his analysis, arguing that thinking about temporality with structure—that is, thinking about the implications of settler-colonialism’s beginnings and ends–allows us to see the continuities and deeper structures that pre-exist particular settler invasions in specific places. Rather than presenting a linear analysis, I look for patterns that help us think with and beyond the stale categories of oppressed and oppressor, colonizers and colonized, which work to entrench the very systems they seek to dismantle. To move beyond such binaries, I build on Gil Anidjar’s theorizing about the idea of Europe that constructs Muslims and Jews as enemies, and about the continuities of al-Andalus. If the Spanish capture of Grenada and expulsion of Muslims and Jews from their land (1482–1492) is also a form of settler-colonialism, then other forms of expulsion such as the enclosure movement in early modern England might be as well. The long-term continuities of settler-colonial structure rest on interrelated processes of change in the ways we define enemies, organize property regimes, and eliminate or reformulate indigeneity as such.

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