Grief against settler colonialism: Melike İşleyen, ‘Unsettling settler colonial management of life and death through decolonial gestures’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Grief against settler colonialism: Melike İşleyen, ‘Unsettling settler colonial management of life and death through decolonial gestures’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

20Apr26

Abstract: This article is located in decolonial perspectives, framing grief and mourning as a liberatory praxis against carceral coloniality and settler colonial violence. As decolonial, Indigenous, and Black feminist thinkers propose, there is hope for justice so long as we do not forget injustice. This proposal takes us to the conundrum: How not to forget systematically erased children towards resistance and re-existence. How does this conundrum turn into an even more complicated one when we think of grief, mourning, and refuturing in the context of Gaza, in a modern colonial world, in which ways of seeing are determined to indiscriminately erase the land, culture, and history from Palestinian presence? By focusing on the settler colonial management of death through frameworks of settler colonial theory, the coloniality of childhood, and decolonial mourning and aesthesis, this article highlights how art-based practices challenge the settler colonial logic of elimination. It argues that these practices delink from the sovereign settler ‘I’ and the occupation of senses towards projects, ways of being, seeing, and sensing through decolonial gestures, which are often overlooked in scholarship that analyses such works without attending to the coloniality of visuality and its entanglement with broader modern colonial power structures.

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