« The ‘traditional culture’ of settler colonialism: Anthea Compton, The Politics of Traditional Culture under Australian Settler Colonialism 1963-2007, Australian National University Press, 2026
The limits of a paradigm: Jean Muteba Rahier, ‘The settler colonial studies paradigm as a discursive reaffirmation of the preeminence of Indigeneity in the field of ethnoracial alterity in the Andean sub-region’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies’, 2026 »

Logocentric settlers: Janice Feng, ‘”Peoples Without Writing?” Logocentrism, settler colonialism, and indigeneity’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 31, 5, 2026, pp. 33-49

19Oct26

Abstract: How does logocentrism, which rests on the strict separation between speech and writing and posits Indigenous peoples as “peoples without writing,” erase Indigenous sovereignty, both historically and at the present? In this essay, I take up Jacques Derrida’s critique of European logocentrism that he develops through a critique of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s account of writing to argue that it is by positing Indigenous peoples as innocent and self-present beings who possess full self-presence that settler-colonial discourses denied their political subjectivity and failed to acknowledge them as rule-governed peoples. Taking up this critical lens, I show how logocentrism was deeply ingrained in concrete settler-colonial practices by closely reading the early Jesuits Relations written by French missionary Paul Le Jeune in the New France Colony in the 1630s. Facing incommensurability between Indigenous and French social and political orders, Le Jeune painted Indigenous peoples as devoid of all laws and governance so that Catholic and European rules and norms could be imposed. Derrida’s critique of logocentrism, I argue throughout the essay, provides us with ample resources to disrupt the logic of logocentrism that underwrites settler colonialism.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed