A Fashionable Madness: The Obsession with ‘Settler Colonialism’
The works of literary critic Adam Kirsch and of novelist and memoirist Joan Didion provide a salutary rebuttal of settler colonialist theory.
A review of On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice by Adam Kirsch, 160 pages, W.W. Norton & co. (August 2024).
According to legend, in around 1626, Dutch trader Peter Minuit arranged the purchase of what came to be known as Manhattan by the New Netherland company for “24 dollars’ worth of beads and trinkets.” Historians have long considered the transaction just one—albeit especially significant—item in a long inventory of dispossession and displacement of natives by settlers in the New World. This history has more recently become the focus of public consternation. In its official land acknowledgement, for instance,
New York University acknowledges that it is located on Lenapehoking, ancestral homelands of the Lenape people. We recognize the continued significance of these lands for Lenape nations past and present, we pay our respects to the ancestors as well as to past, present, and emerging Lenape leaders…. We believe that addressing structural Indigenous exclusion and erasure is critically important and we are committed to actively working to overcome the ongoing effects and realities of settler-colonialism.
Yet attempting to generalise from patterns of European settlement in North America to other regions with distinct histories often produces absurd and catastrophic delusions, as Adam Kirsch argues in his new book, On Settler Colonialism.
I am a descendant of Protestant Europeans who came to North America in the 1700s. But according to the precepts of settler colonialism, I remain as much a settler as my English and Scotch–Irish ancestors or their German, Polish, and Lithuanian immigrant followers and will bequeath my settler colonialist status to my children and their future offspring. As Kirsch notes, adherents of this view include many young people in the West, for whom the stain of colonial settlement is ineradicable and bone deep. But how different are the descendants of settlers who arrived on distant shores decades or centuries ago from natives whose ties to the land date back millennia?
Kirsch’s book delineates “a political theory of original sin,” a secular theology that demands repentance but allows no forgiveness. His account offers a timely critical analysis of a strangely seductive welter of ideas that has moved from the academic fringes to the progressive mainstream. As Kirsch writes, to describe a society as “settler colonialist” is an attempt to completely delegitimise its claims to permanence. It implies that settlers are intruders whose presence was imposed upon “the people previously living there” against their will and at their expense. The problem is not that the theory’s claims about the past are inaccurate—often they are broadly true, though they oversimplify complex historical developments. The problem is that this is not just about history. The underlying agenda of the proponents of this theory is to change society in the present and future. Settler colonial theory distinguishes itself from standard historical revisionism by its ideological—even eschatological—ambition to reverse history.
At the heart of settler colonial theory is a linguistic equivocation. “Settler colonialist” is a congealed term made up of two words with distinct valences. A settler lands in a particular place and decides to remain. A colonialist dispossesses others of their rightful territory and supplants them. Therefore, a “settler colonialist” is both neutral and malign: someone who does something that is not bad in itself in an especially bad way. Historically, there may be some truth to this. But there is a noticeable reluctance among academics to apply the label to non-Western societies or regimes of the Left. This tendentious usage renders it slippery and ambiguous. “Settler colonialism” can be readily used as a smear against large and powerful Western countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, as well as against small but relatively powerful states seen as aligned with the West, such as Israel. But it is rarely applied to nations like China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela, whose histories are similarly premised on imperial expansion or colonial dominion. Such a deliberately weighted concept has little value beyond providing a way to place a rhetorical thumb on the scale.
The founders of settler colonial theory probably intended this. As Kirsch writes, their aim was “to condemn every possible relationship between settler and native” by substituting resentment and animosity for peaceful coexistence—coexistence based, as they saw it, on oppressive social structures. Initially, Australian and North American academics within the disciplines of anthropology and sociology probably hoped to create a revolutionary vanguard out of the remnants of dispossessed native peoples. Yet the question of how minuscule indigenous populations (who make up only 3 percent of the population of Australia, for example) could overcome settler societies that had expanded to fill a continent had no obvious answer.
The original inspiration for settler colonialism theory, when it first developed in the 1970s, was a strain of third-world Marxism. According to early theorists such as Kenneth Good, the cause of dispossessed indigenous people could motivate political movements that would abolish private property and reverse the timeline of capitalist development in colonised nations such as Rhodesia, Algeria, and South Africa. But the theory was soon put to other uses. Settler colonialism was brocaded into cultural critique. Threats to indigenous people were no longer limited to territorial sovereignty or physical survival; they included cultural and linguistic assimilation.
Adherents of this outlook sometimes seem partially aware that they have enlisted in a lost cause. As Kirsch writes, “Its impossible goal is to turn the clock back to the world that existed before 1788 or 1607 or 1492.” According to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, this involves “relinquishing settler futurity,” meaning literally dispossessing the 98 percent or more of the US population of non-indigenous origin of their ill-gotten gains. As Kirsch dryly observes, this unlikely goal “removes the ideology of settler colonialism from the realm of politics,” and explains its limited appeal to the people “it claims to vindicate.” Settler colonial theory is, in short, a paradigmatic example of elite capture of a social movement—that of indigenous peoples for greater sovereignty, recognition, and equal rights.
The indigenous rights movement emerged in the 1960s alongside other civil rights and anticolonialism movements. Settler colonial studies was institutionalised as its academic manifestation in the West. As with other radical social movements, this institutionalisation led to a shift away from direct political action to post-materialist activism centred on scholarship, artistic expression, and pedagogy. The change of emphasis altered the aims of the movement itself. Joan Didion has memorably written about a similar transformation within feminism:
More and more, as the literature of the movement began to reflect the thinking of [those] who did not understand the movement’s ideological base, one had the sense of this stall, this delusion, the sense that the drilling of the theorists has struck only some psychic hardpan dense with superstitions and little sophistries, wish fulfillment, self-loathing and bitter fancies. To read even desultorily in this literature was to recognize instantly a certain dolorous phantasm.
The “dolorous phantasm” to which the feminist movement reduced its object was the universal victim in one of many guises. This transformation of a social movement into an ideological fantasy-scape did not further material progress for women. Instead, it encouraged psychic and political regression. As Didion scathingly chronicled, social movements tend to dissolve into wishful thinking and revenge fantasies when subjected to the tender mercies of elite sympathisers with the oppressed. As the Australian historian Fiona Paisley has noted, the history wars over colonial settlement primarily reflect a crisis in white identity. Kirsch observes that “a similar point can be made about the discourse of settler colonialism in the United States. It is primarily a conversation among ‘settlers’ about their own identity, and what it offers is less a program for action than a political theology.”
Joe Hefferon
As Kirsch notes, the rhetoric of sin and redemption often resounds in settler colonialism discourse, “even when writers themselves aren’t fully conscious of it.” One of the field’s luminaries, Lorenzo Veracini, describes the goal of his work as “to kill the settler in him[self] and save the man.” Kirsch also highlights another peculiar rhetorical habit common among the field’s practitioners, including Veracini—a regular recourse to metaphors of violence to describe the prospect of decolonisation. Kirsch detects in Veracini’s formulation an echo of the anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, who celebrated redemptive murder in the following words (in Kirsch’s translation): “To work means to work toward the death of the colonist.” And what if the colonist happens to be a descendant of Jewish refugees residing in a small country in the Middle East? Well then, no one ought to accuse the colonised who are seeking to drive out their oppressors of antisemitism—even when they borrow freely from ideological perspectives infused with it.
Like many other theorists, Veracini finds settler colonialism at its most unrepentant in Israel and in the United States. This pairing recurs frequently. Mahmood Mamdani refers to the United States and Israel as the exemplary “settler-colonial nation-state projects.” In The Routledge Handbook to the History of Settler Colonialism, Kirsch points out, “Israel is the subject of three separate chapters… more than any country except the United States, which gets four.” Either these two nations distinctively embody the many evils of settler colonialism past and present or something else is at work. As Kirsch points out, there are obvious historical differences between the fate of the indigenous peoples of the United States and those of Israel/Palestine, whose claims to indigeneity rest on very different arguments and depend on very different sources. Palestinian Arabs inhabited the Ottoman territory roughly equivalent to today’s Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank—but so did other ethnic and religious groups, including Jews. Furthermore, many of the arguments for Palestinian nationhood rely in part on religious claims of Muslim sovereignty over specific places, such as Al-Quds (Jerusalem) and its Dome of the Rock. Jewish zealots make similar territorial claims to Judea and Samaria. Imagine the land acknowledgements.
The history of the United States seems to be more suited to being branded as settler colonialist. But to embark on a detailed study of settler colonialist analyses of American history is to enter a topsy-turvy world in which even the descendants of formerly enslaved black Americans are often viewed as exploiters. For example, settler colonial theorist Kyle Mays argues that, by demanding reparations for crimes perpetrated against their enslaved ancestors, “Black people are either erasing Indigenous peoples, attempting to replace them or are outright settlers.” By demanding reparations, they are granting legitimacy to the United States government and acknowledging its right to make use of the “illicit” resources it controls. Accusations of settler colonialism have become just another tool in the rock, paper, scissors game of competitive victimhood.
Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz states simply that “the settler-colonial foundation [of America] is to be eradicated”—voicing an ambition similar in scope, if far less achievable, to that of radical anti-Zionists who long for the complete destruction of Israel. Perusing Dunbar-Ortiz’s scholarly work on early American history, Kirsch notes her blatant disregard of the written record. Thus, she describes the Pequot War as a “devastating” massacre of the native population in which “the Puritan settlers, as if by instinct, jumped immediately into a hideous war of annihilation” on the slenderest of provocations. The truth is far more complicated. The Pequot War began with a series of tit-for-tat retaliatory raids, sparked by the gruesome murder of a colonist. In Kirsch’s view, the truth of the matter is irrelevant to theoretical purists whose aims are instead “to make the past as morally legible as possible” within the confines of a fixed grid of innocence and guilt. To put it simply, “the account of American history offered by settler colonial studies is tailored to cultivate hostility to settlers,” Kirsch writes.
It is tempting to dismiss the statements of Veracini, Mays, Dunbar-Ortiz, and others as marginal and unrepresentative. But these scholars hold distinguished academic positions and publish in prestigious outlets and with well-respected presses. While preaching “vengeance and murder from an ivory tower,” as Maxime Rodinson puts it, they have carved successful careers out of crooked timber. And since the Hamas attacks of 7 October, their influence has become harder to deny.
Despite its scholarly credentials, Kirsch argues that ideology and fantasy comprise the essence of settler colonialism studies. Rather than reckoning with historical complexity, it describes all evils as flowing from the twin wellsprings of capitalism and white supremacy—i.e. from the values of the West. Some settler colonialism theorists even condemn “the soul of the settler” and of Western civilisation itself. But more often, they simply reject large parts of Western society. “Abolishing settler colonialism,” Kirsch writes, “means transforming the ways that we individually experience and understand the world.” Every practice associated with settler ways of being—from travel to monogamy to sports to children’s entertainment—must be ruthlessly critiqued and then discarded.
The joylessness of this worldview is only a prelude to its cruelty. As Jean-Paul Sartre writes in the preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: “we [Europeans] are being decolonized: meaning the colonist inside every one of us is surgically extracted in a bloody operation.” Fanon proclaimed that the death of the settler was necessary to cleanse the stain of colonialism and to redeem the dignity of the dispossessed native. The role of violence in settler colonialist theory reveals its theological aspect. In a system of secular morality or ethics, violence may be justified as a means but not as an end—as it is within the settler colonialist paradigm. Only under the auspices of theology does violence become redemptive. The imagined revolutionary unsettlement of long-existing nations blends political messianism with romantic fatalism.
So, how did we get here? Kirsch takes note of an interesting coincidence. While countries throughout the West have histories of colonial settlement, this discourse has gained serious traction in only a few—principally in the US, Canada, and Australia. The early settlers of all three nations were predominantly anglophone Protestants. (In the United States that picture was complicated only somewhat by the presence of enslaved Africans, who adopted the language and religion of their enslavers; Canada’s French Catholic minority diminished in power and influence from the nineteenth century onward.) Political movements that critiqued the dominant forces in these societies—such as movements championing abolition, women’s suffrage, and civil rights—tended to articulate their critiques using the terminology and ideas of Protestant Christianity, with its narrative of sin and redemption.
Anglo-Protestant settlers tended to display certain distinctive cultural and psychological traits. They were ruthless yet guilt-ridden, avaricious yet suspicious of wealth, both self-reliant and reckless. In Joan Didion’s debut novel Run River (1963), the protagonist Lily Knight claims that her family’s origin story “had been above all a history of accidents—of moving on and accidents.” There is no better representative of settler colonialism and diagnostician of its discontents in American literature than Didion herself, a seventh-generation descendant of European settlers whose ancestors arrived in Virginia in the mid-1700s and settled in the Sacramento basin a century later. Starting with Run River, a Faulkneresque saga, Didion repeatedly composed unsparing appraisals of this legacy. She would revisit her “native” terrain many times in essays and fiction.
Didion showed the discontinuities in her own inheritance and, by extension, in all inherited legacies. In her work, she unstintingly pursued the task of rendering such incongruities visible. As she famously recognised, “we tell ourselves stories” that are never fully true. Given this legacy, it is no surprise that Didion took heat from leftist critics, who chided her for criticising feminism, voting for Barry Goldwater, and failing to note that Mexicans and Miwok Indians travelled with the ill-fated Donner Party. What is more surprising is that, so far, her reputation has resisted the scolds. Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that Didion posed the questions that animate settler colonist ideology before the professors weighed in and continued to do so with more force, historical accuracy, and insight than they have been able to muster. At the core of Didion’s work is a nagging doubt about the possibility of belonging anywhere that deeply undermines the premises of settler colonial theory’s essentialist accounts of indigenous origins.
Didion set out to be a debunker of collective myths. Much of settler colonialist theory, by contrast, seeks to airbrush out shadows, especially when it comes to native peoples whose origins are systematically refashioned to seem pure and untainted. Substantial forensic evidence shows that warfare was ubiquitous among Native Americans in the pre-Columbian era, with rates of violent death of a staggering 16 percent in some cases. Yet Dunbar-Ortiz asserts that before European settlement, North America was a “relatively disease-free paradise” with abundant natural resources and little violence. This myth has become a progressive shibboleth about indigenous peoples on every continent.
Didion’s recollections of her pioneer ancestors certainly contain traces of nostalgia. In retelling stories of their frontier experience—particularly that of the women—she often emphasises lost and forgotten virtues:
These women in my family would seem to have been pragmatic and in their deepest instincts clinically radical, given to breaking clean with everyone and everything they knew. They could shoot and they could handle stock and when their children outgrew their shoes, they could learn from the Indians how to make moccasins.
She credits their pragmatism and moral fibre as a direct influence on her own life. In “On Self-Respect,” Didion quotes the testimony of “an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall” (her own great-great aunt), written during her family’s winter sojourn in the Oregon wilderness: “Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it.” The anecdote leaves little doubt about the way that her forebearers saw these natives; they were a culturally alien and technologically undeveloped people who regarded the pale-skinned newcomers with trepidation.
The shortcomings of settler colonial theory include the way it misrepresents relations between settlers and natives. It envisions settlement as an unequivocal evil. Thus it often reaches for the term “genocide” to describe a cultural marginalisation of native peoples, whether or not their numbers diminished relative to the settler latecomers, or they lost territorial sovereignty. While the westward expansion of white settlers in the United States is certainly a story of conquest and expulsion, it is also one of drift and displacement. The ideological temptation to fix the dynamic movement of peoples traps them in historical amber and presents a tendentiously politicised narrative of systematic, interminable oppression.
David Mount
Interactions between natives and settlers were not marked exclusively by violence, though it was a constant part of the backdrop of frontier life. Didion includes a longer extract from Cornwall’s diary in Where I Was From (2003). Narcissa writes:
We were about ten miles from the Umpqua River and the Indians living there would come and spend the greater part of the day. There was one who spoke English, and he told Mother the Rogue River Indians were coming to kill us. Mother told them if they troubled us, in the spring the Bostons (the Indian name for the white people) would come and kill them all off. Whether this had any effect or not I don’t know, but anyway they did not kill us.
It is startling to think of a twelve-year-old writing this poised, unsentimental account of what she witnessed. These pioneer testimonials are utterly different from the manic posturing of settler colonial theorists, often expressed in the form of social media posts. In Cornwall’s writing, natives and settlers have not yet settled into their conventional roles as oppressors and victims.
As a realist chronicler of the frontier legacy, Didion is a worthy heir to Narcissa Cornwall. Her work also helps shed light on the discourse of settler colonialism as an ideological construct. It is what she elsewhere terms a dreampolitik, an expression of the political unconscious. Its recent surge to public prominence in the context of 7 October and its aftermath is, as Kirsch suggests, a portent, a warning about the waning of intergenerational solidarity and commitment to a shared civilisational project. Young people who sincerely believe that western societies are structurally illegitimate—“stamped from the beginning” with racist ideas, as Ibram X. Kendi has put it—will not rush to their defence. As it has so often in the past, an apocalyptic narcissism distilled out of mawkish self-pity threatens to dissolve normal political life and spiral out into violence. A healthy civilisation that still cherished its legacy would not heed—much less reward—tenured radicals on cultish crusades. It would not have developed such a taste for dreams of justice that can so quickly turn into nightmares of savagery. “We are in bad trouble,” as Didion wrote, when “we join the fashionable madmen” on their doomed quests.
