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Settler colonialism originates ‘replacement’: Sarah Bracke, ‘The subject of population “replacement” anxieties and the spectre of coloniality’, Patterns of Prejudice, 2026

12Sep26

Abstract: Bracke’s article revisits population ‘replacement’ ideologies from an analytical vantage point of coloniality and takes this as a point of departure for a psychosocial exploration of ‘replacement’ anxieties. The article first attends to three prominent instances in the modern genealogy of population ‘replacement’ thinking: Le Grand Remplacement by Renaud Camus in the 2010s; the notion of Umvolkung in Nazi ideology in the late 1920s; and the concept of ‘race suicide’ in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. For each of these distinct articulations of ‘replacement’ ideology, the question of European (settler) colonialism is further investigated and its significance for population ‘replacement’ anxieties demonstrated. This significance is subsequently brought to bear on the subject of ‘replacement’ anxieties, that is, subjects who fear they are being replaced. These subjects can be approached as ‘dethroned’ (Wendy Brown), that is, shaped by a sense of losing power to which they feel entitled. Studies of the far right, moreover, have consistently noted the ‘victim-perpetrator reversal’ (Ruth Wodak) in which these subjects engage. By considering the significance of coloniality, this reversal can be understood, with Frantz Fanon, as a projection of violence on to the Other inflicted by the Self, a projection fuelled by imperial paranoia (Anne McClintock) that pertains to an inaugural scene of colonial conquest.


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