Settler subjects: Mérédith Laferté-Coutu, ‘A Generative Phenomenology of Settler Homeworlds in Canada and the United States’, in Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Délia Popa (eds), Doing a Phenomenology of Political Life: Social Critique, Sense-Institution, and Political Emancipation, Springer, 2026, pp. 269-288 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler subjects: Mérédith Laferté-Coutu, ‘A Generative Phenomenology of Settler Homeworlds in Canada and the United States’, in Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Délia Popa (eds), Doing a Phenomenology of Political Life: Social Critique, Sense-Institution, and Political Emancipation, Springer, 2026, pp. 269-288

23Dec25

Abstract: This paper is about the relationship between intergenerational and subjective dimensions of settler colonial power. I mobilize both generative phenomenology and settler studies to analyze how settler affects toward land have maintained logics of dispossession and elimination of Indigenous people in Canada and the U.S. in past decades. I do so through Eva Mackey’s ethnographic study of settler feelings of surprise and anxiety in the context of 1990s land disputes in Southern Ontario and Upstate New York. Through a critical uptake of the phenomenological distinction between homeworld and alienworld, I propose the notion of settler homeworlds, where senses of home are generated not in co-relation to the “alien,” but through the intent to replace entire peoples on foreign land and erase that ongoing history of elimination. My approach challenges the absence of the land in the general structure of lifeworlds and offers an account of the term “settler subjectivity.”

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