Settlers representing settlers: Cole Virk, The settler culture of colonial spectacle: A study of settler colonial erasure and assimilation of Indigenous representations, PhD dissertation, University of Sheffield, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Settlers representing settlers: Cole Virk, The settler culture of colonial spectacle: A study of settler colonial erasure and assimilation of Indigenous representations, PhD dissertation, University of Sheffield, 2026

28Sep26

Abstract: This investigation examines how settler colonialism obscures Indigeneity behind the settler Indian caricature. Making Indigenous presence visible, legible, and accessible within the settler colonial landscape of South Florida when attributed within settler colonial Indian representations around tourism. To analyse how settler colonial structures create these Indian representations, this thesis explores the ancestral land of the Seminole and Miccosukee peoples. In this, the field of study does not analyse Indigenous representations but rather settler Indian representations. To perform this, I draw on settler colonial theory, decolonial thought, and Indigenous scholarship. This introspection allows the research to situate and understand colonialism as an enduring structure that continues to organise space, memory, and visual culture in the present. While also being grounded in a decolonial methodological orientation, the thesis engages with urban and rural environments, tourist infrastructures, and public-facing cultural sites across South Florida to examine how representations are colonially manipulated. Through attention to visual, spatial, and textual forms, I examine and display how Indigenous representations circulate within everyday settler spaces, not as contemporaneous political subjects, but as aestheticised symbols that appear detached from land, history, and futurity. Thus, by situating South Florida as a site where spectacle and colonial power intersect, this research contributes to wider conversations in decolonial geography, visual culture, and Indigenous studies. Overall, this work highlights the need to reconsider the unfettered display and consumption of Indigenous representations. This remains central to the reproduction of the settler colonial order of assimilation and erasure. Thus, an active acknowledgement and engagement with the coloniality of representation is needed that frames Indigenous peoples within their own economic, social, and representational sovereignty.

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