Lorenzo Veracini's 'Introducing Settler Colonial Studies'

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In his introductory article, “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies,” Lorenzo Veracini makes the case for a distinction between colonialism and settler colonialism and attempts to argue for the necessity of making distinctions between them. Veracini marks the distinction between colonialism and settler colonialism through saying that colonialism is a matter of the Settler proclaiming “you, work for me” and settler colonialism “you, go away.” Though, these simple distinctions are misleading and require a much deeper analysis of what constitutes “work” and what constitutes “going away.” It is also worth thinking about how the Settler comes to be shaped by the demands themselves and how the Settler as ontological position becomes different in the demands. Specifically, Veracini defines colonialism as a form of “exogenous domination” which is foundationally built upon the extraction of labor in …show more content…

Is it possible to dream of the Settler’s disappearance? Perhaps, rather than ask what a politics of decolonization might look like one might be better served asking what is a politics of nothing? The annihilation of being that exceeds the categories of life and death might be something that cannot be thought because if thought requires signification within the Symbolic and the Native lacks any signification (which is to say that it cannot exist within the Symbolic) then how would one even think of the Native much less her liberation? Decolonization in the settler colonial context is not simply barred, it is foreclosed because the Native lacks the possibility of semiotic coherence. When Subcomandante Marcos asks Presidente Salinas why do the Zapatistas need to be pardoned, when he asks what are they to be pardoned for, and when he asks who should ask for pardon, and who can grant it, he is not merely exposing the gratuitous violence of the Settler upon Red bodies, he is revealing the impossibility of an

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