“Imperialism was the theory, colonialism the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of the European metropolitan society. Everything in those territories that suggested waste, disorder, uncounted resources, was to be converted into productivity, order, taxable, potentially developed wealth. You get rid of most of the offending human and animal blight"--whether because it simply sprawls untidily allover the place or because it roams around unproductively and uncounted-and you confine the rest to reservations, compounds, native homelands, where you can count, tax, use them profitably, and you build anew society on the vacated space. Thus was Europe reconstituted abroad, its "multiplication in space" successfully projected and managed. The result was a widely varied group of little Europes scattered throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas, each reflecting the circumstances, the specific instrumentalities of the parent culture, its pioneers, its vanguard settlers.” -- Edward Said, Zionism From the Standpoint of Its Victims
Colonialism is usually understood as the conquest and rule of a far away territory by an imperial metropole. The “post-colonial” period refers then to the era following the end of formal colonial rule in those territories, even if the metropole and the former colony continue to shape each other economically, socially, and culturally. Settler colonialism has a different, though related, genealogy and teleology. Both colonialism and settler colonialism derive from imperialism—an archive, practice, and ideology based on and constituted through civilizational, racial, and gendered hierarchy. In a settler colony, colonial authorities (and later, nation state authorities) facilitate the settlement (later called “immigration”) of non- indigenous people on indigenous land. In a settler colony, colonial authorities build structures (laws, bureaucracies, infrastructure, states, and social relations) that privilege non-indigenous peoples over indigenous bodies, communities, sovereignty, political and economic structures and systems, and moral and intellectual cosmologies. Settlers come to replace. Settlers come to stay.
The last Thursday of every November is the most broadly celebrated national holiday in the United States. Called “Thanksgiving,” the holiday is a celebration of the settling of the Americas and the subsequent consolidation, expansion, and formation of the United States—a process that took almost three hundred years to produce today’s national borders. For American Indians, Thanksgiving is just only one more day of colonization, and the normalization of settler colonialism, in the contemporary United States.
Every year, the holiday weekend poses challenges to native and non-native teachers, professors, and students who are critical, and critically aware, of the fact that Thanksgiving is, foundationally speaking, a celebration of the ongoing genocide against American Indian peoples in the United States.
For those interested in settler colonialism as a form of domination and rule, we have gathered a selection of articles published on Jadaliyya since the site’s founding in 2010. The articles focus on the technologies, histories, and quotidian practices of settler colonialism in states such as the United States, Algeria, Canada, Israel, South Africa, and the Western Sahara. We hope that you will find this collection as useful, challenging, and inspiring as we have.
In solidarity,
Jadaliyya Co-Editors
General/Comparative/Thematic Articles
Algeria`s Impact on French Philosophy: Between Poststructuralist Theory and Colonial Practice
Settler Colonialism and Alliance: Comparative Challenges to Pinkwashing and Homonationalism
Vineyards of Colonial Algeria: A History of French or Algerian Wine?
Who Are the Insurgents and Counterinsurgents?
Aloha Aina: Notes From The Struggle in Hawai’i
Black Feminism Is: Reflections on the Black Feminist Think Tank Symposium
Memory and Forgetfulness in A Settler Colony
Country/Nation/State Specific Articles
New Texts Out Now: Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine
Settler Colonialism, Normalization, and Resistance at the Zionist Borders
The Infrastructure of Israeli Settler Colonialism (Part 1): The Jordan Valley
الثورة الجزائرية: محاورة الماضي
The Moral Economy of Settler Colonialism: Israel and the “Evacuation Trauma”
Sexual Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism
Video Resources
America’s Native Prisoners of War
Settler Colonialism: Then and Now
Settler Colonialism, Normalization, and Resistance at the Zionist Border