Responding to Palestinian organizers’ calls to use our voice, continue to engage in conversations, and to speak out, this statement articulates what we see as the abolitionist and anti-colonial way forward—the only way we can commit to a free Palestine. Imagining and building alternatives is the future, the horizon of possibility, that Lateral, as part of the intellectual and activist project of cultural studies, is imperfectly but consistently striving toward. Here, we highlight work in this issue, including the Towards Third Worlding forum, articles, book reviews, and the second installment of the Positions podcast. We continue to welcome authors to join in this work of pushing the field of cultural studies further, towards its promise of critical inquiry matched by political engagement.
Keyword: settler colonialism
Decolonization and the Third World
This essay asks why the Third World has become a symbol of poverty and failed infrastructure while the political imperative towards decolonization has gained popularity. By examining histories of decolonization in mid-twentieth century and the subsequent establishment of postcolonial nation-states that often ignored, suppressed, or actively participated in settler colonial occupations both globally and internally, I argue that there needs to be a widespread reckoning with what constitutes anti-colonial liberation.
Review of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King (Duke University Press)
In this ambitious first book, Tiffany Lethabo King disrupts what she sees as settler-colonial studies’ tendency to privilege the settler/conquistador as the ethical subject of Western theory. To do so, she undertakes the urgent work of considering historical, ceremonial, imaginative, and theoretical ways that Native and Black studies intersect and overlap within the North American context. Drawing in particular upon Afro-pessimism (for instance Frank Wilderson, Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, Alexander G. Weheliye, and Sylvia Wynter) as well as Native studies’ refusal of sovereignty as a political, ethical, and material formation (Audra Simpson, Glen Coulthard, Jodi Byrd, and Andrea Smith), King joins the likes of Tiya Miles in seeing as insufficient any account of settler colonialism or Western humanism that does not consider how Black and Native epistemologies and histories intersect.
Review of Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania by Maile Arvin (Duke University Press)
Arvin explains how dispossessing Polynesians was predicated on a logic of settler colonialism inflected by white supremacy. Casting Polynesians as white—specifically, as “almost white”—as opposed to distancing Polynesians from Caucasians, simultaneously provided white settlers the justification they needed to occupy large swaths of Oceania and precluded Polynesians from enjoying the full set of rights available to non-almost whites. By establishing a clear racial continuity between settlers and Polynesians, possession through whiteness made whiteness indigenous to the islands; doing so “suited [settlers’] own claims of belonging to Polynesia while [also soothing] colonizers’ racial anxieties about those they dispossessed.” Throughout the book, Arvin argues that anti-Blackness was as pronounced and as integral in possessing Polynesians as whiteness and calls for future research that more centrally examines the specific and nuanced functions of whiteness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in Melanesian and Micronesian contexts.
Introduction: US Gun Culture and the Performance of Racial Sovereignty
This introduction examines gun culture in the United States and argues that it is a product of the longstanding practices of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and misogyny that have shaped life in the United States. Invoking an anthropological definition of culture, it argues that gun violence is a central facet of US political and social life and that performances of gun use and ownership, particularly when enacted by white men, embody a kind of “racial sovereignty,” or a violent limitation of the practical applicability of citizenship to those who promulgate whiteness, maleness, and violence as primary markers of full belonging in the civic community.
The Necropolitics of Liberty: Sovereignty, Fantasy, and United States Gun Culture
This article approaches the speculative fiction of the survivalist right as an archive that can illuminate the continuities between the fantasies of necropolitical power that animate the radical right and undergird the sovereignty of the United States. Focusing on Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupier LaVoy Finicum’s 2015 novel Only by Blood and Suffering: Regaining Lost Freedom, this essay argues that such survivalist fiction, in imagining a future civil conflict that enables the reinstatement of Lockean property rights, should be understood as settler colonial rather than anti-statist. In representing the dystopian future in which “public lands” are reopened as a frontier, survivalist novels like Finicum’s reaffirm, rather than challenge, the fantasy that produces the constituted power of the United States.
Webs of Relationships: Pedagogies of Citizenship and Modalities of Settlement for “Muslims” in Canada
Immigrants to Canada must pass a set of pedagogical gate-keeping exercises that compel settler socio-spatial relations to allow them to come into the fort of the nation-state as neoliberal multicultural subjects. Bringing together Sunera Thobani’s concept of exalting the white subject and Sherene Razack’s theorizations on Muslim eviction from Western politics, I argue that those racialized as Muslim are positioned as perpetual immigrants, compelled to exalt whiteness or be evicted. Caught between an unresolved tension of settler spatial relations to nation and Indigenous spatial relations to Land, I examine what decolonial subject positions are available for “Muslims” using the Canadian citizenship study guide and oath as focal points. I foreground an Indigenous analytic and my Arab lived experience to do a contrapuntal reading of the social construction of Canada in the study guide and trace how the relationships to nation espoused in the manual are incommensurable with the relationships to Land fundamental to Indigenous worldviews. Throughout the paper, I draw on the experience of Masuma Khan, who was censured by her university and the public when she advocated that Canada 150 be remembered as Indigenous genocide rather than a celebration of nationhood, to unpack how racialization colonizes and colonization racializes.
Review of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism by Iyko Day (Duke University Press)
Iyko Day makes a compelling intervention in discussions of race, capital, and settler colonialism. Her book presents a theorization of the abstract economism of Asian racialization by examining how social differentiation functions as a destructive form of abstraction anchored by settler colonial ideologies of romantic anticapitalism. By engaging with capitalism’s abstraction of differentiated gendered and racialized labor in order to create value, Day’s project diverges from scholarship arguing that capitalism profits from labor via the production, rather than the abstraction, of racialized difference (Lowe 1996; Roediger 2008). Her book engages a rich multimedia archive and uses principal historical instances of Asian North American cultural production as theoretical texts to examine key racial policies since the 19th century: Chinese railroad labor in the 1880s, anti-Asian immigration restrictions; internment of Japanese civilians during World War II, and the neoliberalization of immigration policy in the late 1960s.
Toward Alternative Humanities and Insurgent Collectivities
Introduction to Part II of the forum, Emergent Critical Analytics for Alternative Humanities. Here, emergent scholars respond to essays by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Julie Avril Minich, and Jodi Melamed, each of whom elaborated on the alternative possibilities of dealing with the legacies of settler colonialism, new materialisms, disability, and institutionality in Part I, published in Lateral 5.1.
Ongoing Colonial Violence in Settler States
Response to J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “A Structure, Not an Event: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” published in Lateral 5.1. Jafri articulates how a critical race feminist/queer lens makes possible thinking that sees the repetitions of racialized, gendered, sexualized colonial violence.
The Times of Settler Colonialism
Response to J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “A Structure, Not an Event: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” published in Lateral 5.1. Gniadek approaches settler colonialism via questions of time—asking When is settler colonialism?—which reveals how narratives of national belonging tend to operate, as narrative confrontations that facilitate violence throughout and across time.
Thinking with Melissa Gniadek and Beenash Jafri
In “The Times of Settler Colonialism,” Melissa Gniadek urges me to go beyond the formulation of settler colonialism conceived as a problem of space. She pushes to further consider how Wolfe’s theorization of settler colonialism as structure (not an isolated episode) to examine “not only how histories of invasion do not stop, but also how…
“A Structure, Not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui discusses the distinctive shifts toward examining Patrick Wolfe’s theory of settler colonialism as ‘a structure, not an event.’ Kauanui argues that a substantive engagement with settler colonialism also demands a deep rethinking of the associated concept of indigeneity–distinct from race, ethnicity, culture, and nation(ality)–along with the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies.