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American Settler Colonialism
A History
W. Hixson
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American Settler Colonialism
A History
W. Hixson
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Over the course of three centuries, American settlers helped to create the richest, most powerful nation in human history, even as they killed and displaced millions. This groundbreaking work shows that American history is defined by settler colonialism, providing a compelling framework through which to understand its rise to global dominance.
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1
Introduction: Settler Colonialism, History, and Theory
This book analyzes settler colonialism over the sweep of Euro-American history. It is neither a simple narrative of conquest nor a study devoted solely to ferreting out indigenous agency within the colonial encounter. The narrative instead identifies ambivalencesâthe myriad ways in which both the âcolonizerâ and the âcolonizedâ reconfigured their identities as they traded, allied, assimilated, negotiated, resisted, and otherwise carved out âthird spacesâ within the colonial encounter. Despite these ambivalences, American settler colonialism ultimately drove an ethnic cleansing of the continent.1
I employ the trope of ambivalence as a framework both to incorporate Indian agency and to address the complexity of the colonial encounter. Borderlands history emphasizes local and regional studies and the distinctiveness of each colonial situation. There was no single âfrontier,â of course, but rather many borderlands with fluid geographic boundaries. Mixed ethnicities and convoluted identities, contestation over sovereignty, and varieties of cultural, economic, and social change characterized the borderlands. Yet underlying the history of all regions was dispossession of the indigenous residents backed by violence.
In the end, settler colonialism was a zero-sum game. Settlersâoperating from the bottom up but backed by all levels of governmentâwould accept nothing less than removal of Indians and complete control of the land. As they carried out Indian removal across the breadth of the continent, Americans internalized a propensity for waging indiscriminate violence against their savage foes. Born of settler colonialism, this boomerang of violence would play out over the sweep of US history and help define an âAmerican way of warâ in the process.2
This study flows from the premise that the United States should be perceived and analyzed fundamentally as a settler colonial society. The American âimperial settler stateâ originated in the context of Indian removal and forged powerful continuities over space and time. American history is the most sweeping, most violent, and most significant example of settler colonialism in world history. American settler colonialism evolved over the course of three centuries, resulting in millions of deaths and displacements, while at the same time creating the richest, most powerful, and ultimately the most militarized nation in world history.3
Postcolonial Studies
This book situates itself within postcolonial studies, a term that requires contextualization. The absence of the hyphen distinguishes âpostcolonialâ from âpostcolonial,â a term that might suggest, say, the study of India in the aftermath of British colonialism, or Indonesia following the departure of the Dutch. Hence âpostcolonialâ does not impart a temporal meaning in the way that the hyphenated âpost-colonialâ might bring to mind postâWorld War II decolonization. âPostcolonialâ relates to colonialism, to be sure, but in much more expansive ways than the hyphenated form.4
Postcolonial studies link the colonized past with the present and the future, thereby facilitating analysis over a longue dureĂ©5 of history. The âpostcolonial eraâ is in a sense timeless, thus challenging the historianâs penchant for tidy periodizations, insofar as while there are beginnings, there is no end; the legacies of colonialism persist. The field facilitates comparative studies, as colonialism was an international phenomenon that profoundly influenced (and continues to influence) the entire world. Postcolonial studies blend history, culture, and geopolitics within a âcontext of colonialism and its consequences.â They encourage efforts âto look critically at the world and the knowledge and representations that have been made about it.â6 Because postcolonial studies have been defined and used in different ways, one must be wary of those who either condemn or heap praise upon it.7
Postcolonial critique draws upon classic theorists including Frantz Fanon, who is sometimes credited with âinventingâ postcolonial studies. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon identified a âmassive psycho-existential complexâ under colonialism, within which âThe black man is not a man ⊠for the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.â8 Fanonâs exploration of âthe various attitudes that the Negro adopts in contact with white civilizationââthe white mask over the black skinâstimulated postcolonial analysis, inspiring a virtual subfield dubbed âcritical Fanonism.â In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a more revolutionary Fanon inspired anticolonialism as well as the black power movement with his advocacy of violent resistance to colonial oppression. According to Fanon, the Westâincluding the United States, a former colony that âbecame a monsterââhad nothing to offer to true liberation struggles, and he advised, âLeave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them.â9
In Discourse on Colonialism (1950) Amie CĂ©saire preceded Fanon in emphasizing the ways in which the colonizer destroyed the identity of the colonized through âthingification.â The colonized person could not be an individual but rather was a âthingââa savage, a barbarian, a nigger, and so on. Colonization thus worked to âdecivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word.â Similarly, Albert Memmi argued that colonized people were perpetually degraded as the colonizer âemphasizes those things which keep him separate,â precluding the evolution of âa joint community.â10
Building on the work of these classic theorists, as well as on the philosophy of Michel Foucault, Edward Said extended the analytic framework by introducing the concept of âOrientalism.â Said showed how literary discourse established a powerful binary between Western modernityâviewed as rational, progressive, manly, and morally and racially superiorâand the non-Western other, typically represented as heathen, primitive, treacherous, and de-masculinized. Orientalism shifted attention to the ways in which âcolonial knowledgeâ shaped the âencounterâ between the metropole and the periphery in a variety of global settings.11
Colonial Ambivalence
Going beyond black skin and white masks, the colonizer and the colonized, Homi Bhaba identified ambivalence within the colonial encounter. Drawing insight from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacanâs seminars on the formation of individual identity, Bhaba destabilized the sharply drawn binary between the colonizer and the colonized. Bhaba explained that the supposedly all-powerful colonist actually depended on the supposedly totally subservient colonized subject in order to formulate his own identity (e.g., âI am white and civilized, he is brown and savageâ). Rather than being fixed or monolithic, colonial identities therefore were constructed, unstable, and required constant repetition and affirmation in order to assert them as being real. Bhabaâs insight illuminated a âthird spaceâ between the colonizer and the colonized, opening the way for considerations of hybridity within the colonial encounter.12
Critical to Bhabaâs analysis was the ambivalence inherent in the colonizerâs desires as well as the indigeneâs capacity for resistance. The colonizer desired the colonized other, for example for his attunement with nature or sexual liberation, and yet was repulsed by his primitiveness and the dangers that he posed. The slippages and uncertainty within the colonizerâs identity, including taking on some of the characteristics of the âsavage,â produced anxiety and instability. At the same time, ambivalence enabled the colonized other the capacity for agency and resistance because the relations were not as fixed as they appeared to be, but rather were inherently unstable and malleable. Bhaba argued that through, for example, mimicry or mockery the indigene could appear to embrace the colonizerâs authority or display his contempt for it. The colonized subject could also appropriate or adapt to the colonizerâs resources and knowledge for his or her own uses and benefit. The supposedly helpless colonized subject thus had the capacity to cultivate, as Bhaba put it, âstrategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power.â13
On the North American borderlands, colonial ambivalence complicated relations between settlers and indigenes. Masses of Americans empathized with Indians, condemned treaty violations and aggression against them, and strove to shepherd them to civilization and salvation. Almost none of these people, however, perceived Indians as having legitimate claims to occupy colonial space. They often expressed sympathy for Indians even as they advocated removing them from their homelands in order to âsaveâ them. Countless numbers of Indians went a long way toward accommodating Euro-Americans by trading and interacting with them, negotiating and allying with them in warfare, converting to their religions, and showing a willingness to share space.
The persistence of destabilizing ambivalences and uncertainties ultimately could only be addressed through the virtual elimination of the indigene. Arriving in massive numbers, Euro-Americans assumed entitlement to the land and demanded total security from the threat of indigenous resistance. By occupying âmiddle groundâ with Euro-Americans, Indians destabilized the colonizerâs identity and his presumed providential destiny to inherit the land. This persistent rupturing of the colonialist fantasy combined with âsavageâ anticolonial resistance had a traumatic impact on the colonizer. Euro-Americans thus engaged in often-indiscriminate violence aimed at fulfilling the self-serving vision of Indians as a âdying race.â
Borderland studies and postcolonial studies have focused mostly on the indigenes and the complexities of local situations. But a history focused overwhelmingly on indigenous peoples and their experiences is one-dimensional. A history of settler colonialism must by definition also âfocus on the settlers, on what they do, and how they think about what they do.â14 In this study I attempt to probe into the psyche, the ambivalences, and the resort to violence of the colonizer as well as the colonized. The analysis encompasses the complexity of the colonial encounter but suggests that ambivalence and hybridity created unwanted contingencies and psychic anxieties that tended ultimately to be reconciled through violence.
Settler Colonial Studies
The central arguments of this book are framed by settler colonial studies, a relatively recent and cutting-edge field of inquiry. âSettler colonialism as a specific formation has not yet been the subject of dedicated systematic analysis,â Lorenzo Veracini notes.15 Academic conferences in 2007 and 2008, followed by the launching of a journal dedicated to settler colonial studies, have propelled the new field forward.
Settler colonialism refers to a history in which settlers drove indigenous populations from the land in order to construct their own ethnic and religious national communities. Settler colonial societies include Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States. What primarily distinguishes settler colonialism from colonialism proper is that the settlers came not to exploit the indigenous population for economic gain, but rather to remove them from colonial space. Settlers sought âto construct communities bounded by ties of ethnicity and faith in what they persistently defined as virgin or empty land,â Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen point out. A âlogic of elimination and not exploitationâ fueled settler colonialism. The settlers âwished less to govern indigenous peoples or to enlist them in their economic ventures than to seize their land and push them beyond an ever-expanding frontier of settlement.â As Veracini succinctly puts it, âSettler colonial projects are specifically interested in turning indigenous peoples into refugees.â16
Under âconventionalâ colonialism the colonizer eventually departs, but under settler colonialism the colonizer means to occupy the land permanently. âSettler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of the native societies,â Patrick Wolfe explains. âThe colonizers come to stayâinvasion is a structure not an event.â Because it was structural rather than contingent, settler colonialism extended widely and outlasted colonialism and European imperialism. By a process of conquest and âthe reproduction of oneâs own society through long-range migration,â James Belich explains, âIt was settlement, not empire that had the spread and staying power in the history of European expansion.â17
Settlers dispossessed indigenous people by establishing âfacts on the groundâ through mass migrations backed by violence. Hungry for land unavailable to them in Europe, settlers poured into new worlds, leaving metropolitan authorities struggling to keep pace. âMobility and a lack of supervision enabled free subjects and citizens to scout for prospects and to squat,â John Weaver points out. âAll frontiers attracted squatters whose possessory occupation was difficult to supplant.â18
The triangular relationship between settlers, the metropole, and the indigenous population distinguishes and defines settler colonialism. Settlers sought to remove and replace the indigenous population and in the process to cast aside the authority of the âmotherâ country. Settler colonies created their very identities through resolution of this dialectical relationship, in which indigenes disappeared and metropolitan authority was cast asideâthe American Revolution being a prominent example. Thus, the ability to make both the indigenous and the exogenous metropolitan other âprogressively disappearâ established âthe constitutive hegemony of the settler component.â19
The speed and intensity of explosive colonization overwhelmed indigenous peoples. As Belich notes, indigenes âcould cope with normal European colonization [but] it was explosive colonization that proved too much for them.â Masses of settlers brought modernity with them, as they hewed out farms, domesticated animals, and built roads, bridges, canals, railroads, factories, towns, and cities, mowing down indigenous cultures in the process. The migrants âdestroyed, crippled, swamped or marginalized most of the numerous societies they encountered,â constructing new societies at an astonishing pace.20
If âsheer demographic swampingâ failed to overwhelm the indigenous people, the modern societies linked advanced technology with lethal tropes of racial inferiority and indigenous savagery to effect ethnic cleansing campaigns.21 âThe term âsettlerâ has about it a deceptively benign and domesticated ring which masks the violence of colonial encounters that produced and perpetrated consistently discriminatory and genocidal regimes against the indigenous peoples,â Annie Coombes notes. Settlers could be âdangerous people,â Belich adds, âespecially when in full-frothing boom frenzy.â22
This study embraces settler colonialism as a critically important interpretive framework, but one that requires theoretical and historical contextualization. I accept Wolfeâs argument that settler colonialism establishes a structure;however,...