Responsible settlers: John David Greenwood, The Flesh Rendered Responsible: Race, Freedom, and the Myth of Self-Making in America, PhD dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Responsible settlers: John David Greenwood, The Flesh Rendered Responsible: Race, Freedom, and the Myth of Self-Making in America, PhD dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2025

24Jul25

Abstract: This dissertation examines the genealogy, racialization, and political consequences of responsibilization—how people are rendered responsible—as a moral technology of governance. It argues that the ideal of self-making—the notion that individuals are wholly responsible for their successes or failures—functions as a racialized and racializing myth sustaining liberal freedom, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism in America. Tracing responsibilization from early Christian pastoral practices and through liberal political thought to neoliberal governance, this project shows how responsibility has been weaponized to secure inequality and justify abandonment. Chapter One follows Michel Foucault’s lectures on abnormality, sexuality, and pastoral power to uncover how responsibilization emerged as a mode of subject formation—especially through the confessional Christian flesh, the family, and the racialization of vulnerability. Chapter Two charts the racialization of responsibility in the American context, opening with the infrastructure of moral rule and moving into John Locke’s Poor Law reforms, colonial pedagogy, and the responsibilization of formerly enslaved Black Americans during Reconstruction. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of burdened individuality in conversation with Carol Pateman and Charles Mills, the chapter theorizes responsibilization as a racial contract—one that converges settler, sexual, and racial logics into a moral economy of conditional freedom. Chapter Three blends autoethnography with critical theory to explore how responsibilization operates through everyday life, familial mythologies, and white moral psychology. It interrogates how whiteness is rendered invisible as the normative horizon of responsible freedom while extracting moral and material costs from Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities. The dissertation concludes by asking what political and ethical possibilities might exist beyond the responsibilized subject—beyond the moral architecture that renders inequality as failure and domination as deserved. Engaging Iris Marion Young’s social connection model, Judith Butler’s ethics of cohabitation, and Cedric Robinson’s critique of racial capitalism, the Coda assembles a speculative dialogue with Black, Indigenous, and queer traditions of refusal. Drawing also on thinkers like Hartman, Joel Olson, Frank Wilderson, and Glen Coulthard, it explores the limits of racial liberalism and the settler order, staging a confrontation with the moral infrastructure of modern governance. In its place, the Coda gestures toward a politics of insurgent responsibility: a non-sovereign, unredemptive form of accountability grounded not in innocence or recognition, but in entanglement, implication, and collective refusal. It concludes not with resolution, but with an opening—a trembling movement toward otherwise.

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