Settler bodies: Lisa Guenther, ‘Unsettling Perception: A Critical Phenomenology of Settler Colonial Body Schemas’, in Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Délia Popa (eds), Doing a Phenomenology of Political Life: Social Critique, Sense-Institution, and Political Emancipation, Springer, 2026, pp. 255-268 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler bodies: Lisa Guenther, ‘Unsettling Perception: A Critical Phenomenology of Settler Colonial Body Schemas’, in Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Délia Popa (eds), Doing a Phenomenology of Political Life: Social Critique, Sense-Institution, and Political Emancipation, Springer, 2026, pp. 255-268

23Dec25

Abstract: Historian Patrick Wolfe argues that colonial invasion “is a structure, not an event.” The violence of colonialism is not confined to an isolated moment with a definite beginning and end; it is an ongoing process that organizes the political, economic, social, and interpersonal life of both settlers and Indigenous peoples. This chapter reflects critically on the way colonial structures are lived and experienced—or ignored and disavowed—at the level of the settler body schema. Are there specific forms of perception, cognition, and action that colonialism engenders and reproduces in those who benefit from colonial power? And if so, how do we disrupt and transform these structures, such that they no longer appear as simple pathways to objective knowledge but as contingent schemas that have sedimented over time and remain open to revision, perhaps even to abolition? I engage with these questions through a reading of Susanna Moodie’s 1852 colonial narrative, Roughing it in the Bush, and Margaret Atwood’s 1970 poems, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s 1953 course notes, The Sensible World and the World of Expression.

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