« And now, ending a massive year in settler colonialism (and inaugurating the Permanent Observatory on Settler Colonialism): Ohio Barbarian, ‘We Are All Indigenous Now: How financial cleansing supplanted ethnic cleansing in the United States’, 29/12/25
The settler’s cosmopolitanism (cosmosettlerism): Fabián Flores Silva, ‘Kantian Cosmopolitanisms Encountering Isolated Indigenous Groups: Between Ambiguous Anti-colonialism and Risky Oversight’, Revista de ciencia política (Santiago), 45, 3, 2025 »

The settler’s anthropocentrism (settlerocentrism): Avlokita Sodhi, ‘The Settler’s Gaze: Patrick White and the Problem of Anthropocentrism’, Literary Endeavour, 2025, 119-123

02Jan26

Abstract: This paper interrogates the complex negotiation of anthropocentrism within the literary imagination of Patrick White. While his oeuvre is celebrated for its profound engagement with the Australian landscape, this analysis argues that White simultaneously employs and subverts the settler-colonial gaze, exposing the inherent violence of an anthropocentric worldview. Through an ecocritical and postcolonial lens, this study deconstructs White’s narrative strategies in key works such as Voss and The Tree of Man. It examines how his protagonists—from the megalomaniacal explorer Voss to the pioneering Stan Parker—initially impose a hermeneutics of domination upon the land, perceiving it as a space for conquest, spiritual trial, or material utility. However, White systematically dismantles this gaze. The Australian environment is not a passive backdrop but an active, agential force that resists, transforms, and ultimately obliterates human pretensions of mastery. This paper traces the progression from a colonizing perspective to moments of ecological reckoning, where the human subject is rendered vulnerable and re-situated within, rather than above, the more-than-human world. By foregrounding the land’s formidable alterity and its capacity to erode ego and identity, White’s fiction performs a crucial critique. It reveals the spiritual and ecological poverty of anthropocentrism, suggesting that a tenuous, fraught coexistence, predicated on a recognition of human insignificance, is the only alternative to the settler’s doomed project of domination.


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