Settler colonial ontocides? Severin Fowles, ‘Settler Ontocide’, in Gavin Lucas, Shannon Lee Dawdy (eds), Undoing Things: How Objects, Bodies and Worlds Come Apart, Routledge, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial ontocides? Severin Fowles, ‘Settler Ontocide’, in Gavin Lucas, Shannon Lee Dawdy (eds), Undoing Things: How Objects, Bodies and Worlds Come Apart, Routledge, 2025

11May25

Abstract: It is increasingly claimed that the global environmental crisis known as the Anthropocene is poised to universalize the experience of land dispossession, economic breakdown, and societal unworlding, leaving history’s colonizers as vulnerable as those they have colonized. The former now awkwardly look to the latter for models of how to survive collapse and to build more sustainable worlds in the aftermath of the current political order and the capitalist system that animates it. This chapter considers the growing ecological imperative to dismantle settler colonialism and its links to fantasies of “becoming indigenous.” It argues that such fantasies have historical roots in the post-World War II era among the first generation raised in the wake of the atomic bomb. Looking to the 1960s hippie communes of the American West as on-the-ground experiments in the conscious rejection of capitalism, militarism, and settler subjectivities, this chapter explores the paradoxes therein, asking what happens when our political projects of undoing themselves come undone.

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