Settler Colonialism: A scattered itinerary

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Hello

Thank you for tuning in to the fifth webinar of our 2024 series, Critical Public Conversations: Sovereignty and Solidarity: Redefining belonging in so-called Australia.

Watch recording here

Professors Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese focus on Germany and France as two cases that illustrate how settler colonialism extends across diverse geographies and temporalities that are geographically outside but remain politically grounded in similar relations of colonial and racial power as the Anglophone group of Canada, the US, and Australia.

Multiple examples are used to fill out the disavowed and obscured relations between Europe and settler colonialism, also between genocide and settler colonialism, historically and in the present. Perera and Pugliese show that the myriad deathscapes of settler states are system effects that enable processes of elimination and replacement while being systematically airbrushed out of both settler self-representations and histories precisely to secure their civilisational claims as model democracies. The offered examples reveal inextricable connections between genocide in Namibia and in Algeria during the 1800s, those which occurred throughout Europe during WWII, and the genocide underway currently in Gaza, connections that are almost completely absent in European consciousness today. Used in this way, the term deathscapes interrogates and overturns self-congratulatory claims, exposing the necropolitical structures that continue to underpin the everyday operations of a settler state.

Themes raised in the webinar

The Deathscapes project seeks to expose how both past and contemporary operations of settler democracies are underpinned by genocidal practices.
Drawing lines of connection between the shared and coordinated techniques of occupation.
Deathscapes names how the governance apparatuses of settler states operate to produce death for its racially targeted subjects as a system outcome of its everyday operations.
A point of entry is to unmask the civilizational lie that settler states continually reproduce and consolidate, right into the contemporary context, across different domains in different registers and across different discourse.

Questions and comments from the audience

Could you speak to the mechanisms/processes whereby Settler-Colonialism effectively accomplishes erasure of the Deathscapes of Colonialty while presenting itself in the garb of Modernity?

Can you make any parallels between settler colonialism and white feminism?

Presenters

Suvendrini Perera is John Curtin Distinguished Professor Emerita at Curtin University. She is author/editor of nine books including the monographs Survival Media (2017), Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats and Bodies (2009) and Reaches of Empire (1992).

Joseph Pugliese is Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. His previous books include Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics (Routledge, 2010), State Violence and the Execution of Law: Torture, Black Sites, Drones (Routledge, 2012) and Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence (2020).

They are the editors, most recently, of Mapping Deathscapes: Digital Geographies of Racial and Border Violence.

Critical Public Conversations

Sovereignty and Solidarity: Redefining Belonging in So-Called Australia

In 2024, the Australian Centre’s Critical Public Conversations series will explore questions of belonging, borders, and place. We investigate how Australia’s founding as a settler colony constrains capacities to welcome refugees to these shores and highlight moments of transnational solidarity that bypass the settler order. We are guided by theorists, activists, and artists exploring the intersections and incommensurabilities between Indigenous, migrant, and other racialised communities’ politics and lived experiences. This series will go beyond settler binaries, boundaries, and borders, to explore the ways more humane international, domestic, and indeed interpersonal relations are inextricably bound to justice for First Nations.

Later this year

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