« A settler neighbourhood: Samuel Jacob, ‘Nearer Neighbors: Settler Sublimation and Human Gardening in the Russian-American Neighborhood of Crèvecoeur’s Letters From an American Farmer’, American Literary History, 38, 4, 2026, pp. 464-489

Culture wars? Lorenzo Veracini, ‘AIPAC jeremiad: on Adam Kirsch′s settler colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

26Oct26

Excerpt: Atlantic senior editor, Columbia University faculty member, critic and poet Adam Kirsch’s Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (2024) is disconnected from morality and not informed by facts. To genuinely engage, I will refrain from offering a moral rejoinder and will respond in accordance with its logic. Should I remind readers that Palestinians are human, and that this carry consequences, including political consequences, or refer to a genocide that was and is broadcast worldwide and in real time? No need: most readers would know about humanity and about genocide, and other reviews of the book have drawn attention to this its fundamental biases. Besides, I assume that Kirsch knows they know, and this is probably why he builds a straw man argument. The straw man in the argument is named ‘settler colonialism’.


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