« Health sovereignty: Randall C. Burson, ‘Health Care as a Territorial Matter: Plural Medical Practice Across the Borders of Settler States’, Medical Anthropology, 2026

Settler Aestheticism’s vampiric ways: Amanda Shubert, ‘Response to Dustin Friedman’s “Strange Beauty and Settler Aestheticism: Olive Schreiner’s Transimperial Aesthetics in The Story of an African Farm”‘, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 64, 4, 2026, pp. 923-926

16Nov26

Abstract: Dustin Friedman offers a fascinating exploration of a new concept, “settler aestheticism,” through a close reading of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). For Friedman, settler aestheticism is an aesthetic practice that grants legibility and value to Indigenous art only through white mediation. The settler aesthete redeems Indigenous art from colonial charges of primitivism and ugliness but only by appropriating and recasting it through a European lens. The beauty of the artwork thus becomes a mirror for and expression of the settler’s own refinement. In this framework, aestheticism is a manifestation of settler colonialism. The settler’s aesthetic affinity with the Indigenous artwork and his “capacity to feel beauty” marks him as “heir to the land.”1 Friedman develops this theory through an analysis of a chapter of The Story of an African Farm in which Waldo, one of the novel’s central characters and Friedman’s chief example of the settler aesthete, encounters a sophisticated English traveler who becomes enamored of one of Waldo’s woodcarvings. Their shared appreciation for the Indigenous forms that have inspired Waldo’s work turns Indigenous art into a medium for a “white aesthetic communion” premised on the erasure of Indigenous people and history.


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