A political approach informed by the settler-colonial analytic has in recent years become influential within left and radical activist circles in countries such as Australia, some years after it rose to prominence in the academy. More recently, it has spilled beyond the academy and attracted more mainstream attention in the wake of the violent explosion of Zionist Israel’s occupation and genocide in Palestine, as articles and debates in mainstream outlets such as Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, The New York Times and The New Yorker attest. It seems safe now to say that ‘settler-colonial theory’ has become an established frame of thought, of understanding and engaging with the present.
With such prominence has come substantial criticism. ‘Settler-colonial theory’ has been accused of intellectual imperialism in its subsumption, in certain contexts, of Indigenous studies—in North America especially. This has been accompanied by accusations of the field’s apparently intractable whiteness. It has also been accused, in journals such as Historical Materialism and elsewhere, of universalising settler colonialism at the expense of necessary distinctions (between, for example, capitalist logics of accumulation and settler-colonial logics of elimination), and simultaneously of drawing unnecessary distinctions (between settlers, Indigenous peoples and workers, for example) at the expense of a necessary socialist universalism.
It is ironic, then, that Patrick Wolfe, who did perhaps the most to inaugurate the settler-colonial framework as a distinct approach, originally developed his own theorisation as a rejection of the ‘oddly monolithic, and generally unexamined, notion of colonialism’ he located in the postcolonial studies scholarship that was sweeping through the Australian academy at the time he published one of his early interventions in the field, ‘Should the subaltern dream?’, in 1997. We should note, however, that Wolfe was always clear that he had not ‘invented’ settler-colonial studies, remarking in ‘On settler colonialism’ (2018): ‘I didn’t invent Settler Colonial Studies. Natives have been experts in the field for centuries’. And yet, in its specific social and institutional context—even if Wolfe was always an institutional outsider—it was Wolfe’s articulation that took hold, as evidenced by the nearly 9,000 (and counting) scholarly citations his 2006 article ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’ has received.
Settler-colonial theory
For those unfamiliar with it, Wolfe’s theorisation can be summarised as follows: unlike ‘franchise’ or ‘dependent’ colonialisms, in which the primary purpose remains the extraction of surplus value by means of exploitation, the primary object of settler colonialism is the land itself. Indigenous peoples are therefore ‘in the way’ of the settler project in particular ways, with distinctive implications for settler-colonial relations. First, the settler project is characterised by a dominant cultural ‘logic of elimination’, which seeks to displace, in order to replace, Indigenous societies both on and of the land. Secondly, to the extent that Indigenous peoples resist and persist as Indigenous peoples, refusing to give way to the settler imperative of exclusive territorial occupation, settler colonisation remains what Wolfe called in Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (1999) ‘a structure rather than an event’.
In many ways Wolfe’s theorisation of settler colonialism has been a victim of his/its own success, and particularly his unique propensity for aphoristic expression. Several of his ‘terms of art’ have since entered the lexicon within and beyond the academy, and have now become part of the contemporary activist’s intellectual furniture, ‘invasion is a structure not an event’ and the ‘logic of elimination’ foremost among them. As regards the coming to prominence of the settler-colonial framework in recent years, it seems useful to take as a departure point the wilfully naïve questions ‘Why here? Why now?’ The settler-colonial framework was first developed by scholars such as Fayez A. Sayegh (see Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, 1965) in Palestine/Israel in the 1960s as a way of reconceptualising the Zionist project and Palestinian resistance to it. There it remains one of many left/radical approaches to the colonial question. It was here in Australia, however, and specifically in the south-eastern corner of the world’s only continental nation-state, that ‘settler-colonial studies’ was rearticulated and eventually institutionalised, as signalled by the establishment of the eponymously titled journal in 2011.
The easy answer to the first of these questions is that Australia is the case study for settler colonialism par excellence. In other settler-colonial societies, what Carol Pateman defined as the ‘settler contract’ similarly proceeded from imagined conditions of non-encounter (in which settler society concludes an originary contract with itself), which she characterised in the familiar terms of terra nullius. Elsewhere around the Anglophonic settler-colonial world, however,this process was at least formally mediated by the treaty-making traditions the United States, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand, alongside other more limited forms of recognition of Indigenous polities, even if the ostensible protections such recognition provided would ultimately prove illusionary. In this and other senses, Australia was and remains anomalous. Only in Australia was the logic of terra nullius applied as the legal justification for the new society’s foundations, if not explicitly, then practically and constitutionally.
It was this context—and its specific composition at the historical conjuncture of the late 1980s and early 1990s—that encouraged and enabled Wolfe’s key claims. The politics of that period—of state-sanctioned self-determination and the success of the Meriam people’s Native Title claim in Mabo no. 2—had encouraged, among a certain ‘progressive’ cohort of the population, fantasies of Australia becoming ‘postcolonial’. This was (and still is) epitomised by Keating’s, and others’, ideal of Australia as a soon-to-be ‘reconciled republic’. It was also a period marked by reactionary settler backlash, represented by the mining lobby’s anti-Native Title campaign and the ‘white blindfold’ brigade in the so-called History Wars, for example.
In the academy, in studies of formerly colonised and ‘New World’ societies alike, this was a period dominated by the theoretical perspectives of postcolonial studies. Wolfe’s objection to the application of ‘post-colonial’ to the Australian context followed and responded to those already made by Bobbi Sykes, Tony Birch and Larissa Behrendt, among many others, in rejecting the temporal disjunction implied by the prefix ‘post-’. His argument that the Native Title regime represented the ‘fulfilment’ rather than the overturning of terra nullius echoed those articulated already by Gary Foley and others as well. To put the matter simply, Wolfe’s contributions should be read as critical, even at times strategically essentialist, responses to the prevailing intellectual and political climate of the time.
In this context, his critical reading of ‘the historical development and complexification’ of Australian society brought him to the conclusion that the designation ‘settler-colonial state’ was ‘Australian society’s primary structural characteristic rather than merely a statement about its origins’. This was a project that despite ‘changing … modalities’ evinced ‘the primacy of a cultural logic of elimination’, which he defined as ‘a sustained institutional tendency to supplant the indigenous population’. In this light, ‘invasion emerges as a structure rather than an event’, even if the scholarship that has followed has comprehensively demonstrated that, as Lorenzo Veracini emphasises in Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2024), settler-colonial and other logics and approaches invariably ‘intertwine, interact, and overlap’ on the ground.
Agents and objects of elimination
Wolfe, in his essay ‘Nation and miscegeNation’ (1994), defined the logic of elimination as being ‘premised on the securing—the obtaining and maintaining—of territory’ which in its ‘purest form … seeks to replace indigenous society with that imported by the colonisers’. Territoriality, he insisted in Traces of History (2016), was settler colonialism’s ‘specific, irreducible’ element. From the perspective of European imperialists, it was (and still is) a primary and, in the terms of stadial history, ‘primitive’ connection to place that in the first instance defined the native as native, while conversely it was Europeans’ dominion over it that defined their society as ‘civilised’. Misconstrued as lacking the practices and rights associated with cultivation, Indigenous populations were denied the status of cultured—ergo propertied, civilised, sovereign—peoples, while settler-colonists’ claims to such status were sustained. In this framework, the struggle over land, and specifically for exclusive territorial ownership and control, emerges as the key driver of the settler-colonial ‘logic of elimination’.
It is critical, therefore, to understand that ‘elimination’ was never intended to refer only and necessarily to the physical elimination of Indigenous peoples. Wolfe termed its object ‘structural genocide’, foreshadowing Kanaka Maoli scholar J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s subsequent clarification in the essay ‘“A structure, not an event”: Settler colonialism and enduring indigeneity’ (2016) that the logic of elimination was and remains oriented towards ‘the elimination of the native as native’. As a dominant ‘cultural logic’ bound up with the settler-colonial imperative to displace in order to replace Indigenous societies, Wolfe’s ‘logic of elimination’ might be usefully reframed as a logic of displacement for the purpose of replacement. And it is in the very incompleteness, the continuing failure, of the settler project—in Indigenous peoples’ endurance against elimination; their refusal to disappear, or to cease to be Indigenous—that the settler-colonial framework’s emphasis on Indigenous agency inheres.
With this understanding of settler colonialism in mind, its extension and transformation can be traced in line with the development of first the idea and later the social and political institutions of the nation-state ‘Australia’. That socio-political formation, did not, of course, exist as even a glimmer in its/our forefathers’ collective imagination when British invasion commenced, and the logics and methods of elimination associated with settler colonialism were never fully systematised, or all-encompassing. But the project of violent displacement and dispossession that began on Dharawal Country in 1788 and expanded rapidly from there was clearly characterised by a ‘governing logic’ of elimination vis-à-vis First Nations peoples, who in turn alternately attempted to accommodate, moderate and ultimately expel their invaders, even if outsides and alternatives to settler-colonial logics and their application existed as well.
In the lead-up to and after Federation, the boundaries and social imaginary of settler-colonial Australia were extended outwards; the dividing line of the ‘frontier’ that separated the so-called ‘settled’ districts and those ‘out-back and beyond’ dissolved, at least imaginatively. First Nations peoples became anomalous within the boundaries of the settler nation: ‘Australia’. With the birth of this new ‘nation for a continent’ and the exclusive territorial sovereignty integral to its self-conception, the imperative towards displacement was reoriented inwards. The nation-building project that was ‘white Australia’ would be enacted by means of incarceration, segregation and biological absorption, underwritten by ideologies of social evolution and associated fantasies involving the natural and inevitable disappearance of a ‘dying race’. When such explicit approaches were no longer politically-ethically tenable, socio-cultural assimilation and eventually socio-political inclusion were adopted in their wake.
Wolfe conceded that the ‘complexification’ of Australian society that followed, especially in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, had necessitated the development of a range of new strategies of elimination by the agents driving settler colonialism. These departed in important ways from preceding ones. Yet the socio-cultural definition of the ‘logic’ of settler colonialism presented above makes it much easier to see its continuation up to and beyond the end of formal policies of segregation and assimilation in the 1960s and throughout the post-1967 context: from ‘integration’ and official (rhetorical) policies of self-determination through to the Native Title regime enacted by the Keating government in response to the High Court’s decision in Mabo no. 2, which seemed for a moment to threaten the territorial integrity of the settler nation-state; in continuing patterns of incarceration and child removal; and resurgent again in the neo-assimilationism associated with the Northern Territory Intervention, as well as in the ongoing and even accelerating processes of dispossession and cultural heritage destruction facilitated by the deep, mutual integration of extractive capitalism and the settler-colonial state/s, brought most starkly to public attention by Rio Tinto’s destruction of sites of significance for and on the lands of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples at Juukan Gorge 1 and 2 in May 2020.
Questions of cause and effect
Wolfe’s analysis is incisive, and has proven appealing and useful to scholars and activists alike. This has, perhaps inevitably, led to its oversimplification and extension beyond its original intent, especially in the often-uncritical application of Wolfe’s key phrases. The critique mounted against settler-colonial studies by Jack Davies in Historical Materialism is worth referring to here. Davies takes aim at what he terms a ‘characteristic sleight-of-hand in settler colonial studies whereby the “logic of elimination”, which initially followed from the territorial drive of settler colonialism, becomes primary’. This strand of critique amounts to the accusation that, in certain ‘recapitulations of Wolfe’s theory’, the settler-colonial framework confuses not only cause and effect but ends and means as well. Such crudifications of the settler-colonial analytic, Davies contends, ‘invert’ the relation between territorial expansion and elimination, so that ‘the “logic” of the “structure” becomes elimination as such’. Wolfe himself, we should note, was clear enough, in 1994 and again in 1999, identifying settler colonialism as ‘a historical force which ultimately derives from the primal drive to expansion which is generally glossed as capitalism’.
Davies’ second, related strand of critique concerns contemporary settler-colonial studies scholars’ focus on capitalism’s ongoing processes of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ as more or less analogous to the violent dispossession through which the settler colonies were initially established. These analogies, he maintains, repeat the same historical-causal inversion as the former, drawing it forward into a flawed analysis of contemporary capitalism à la David Harvey et al. In such readings—arguably largely, if not entirely, strawmen of Davies’ own creation—settler colonialism is read not as one outcome of capitalist expansion, but rather the primary historical force, with capitalism thereby marginalised as merely one dimension of a global settler-colonial order. This framing produces its own analytical contradiction ‘between identifying the globally dispossessed with indigenous peoples and meanwhile maintaining the uniqueness of the latter’s experience as the basis for a distinct theory of the settler colony’.
Claims that late-stage capitalism renders human labour and therefore its bearers ‘surplus to requirements’ have been thoroughly explored in the pages of Arena. Yet the analogising of this to Indigenous status can indeed have the effect of flattening historical processes, conflating socio-economic forces, and failing therefore to account for their radically unequal impacts, both historically and today. As Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun insist in ‘The violence of analogy: Abstraction, neoliberalism and settler colonial possession’ (2020), the ‘logic of elimination’ is not a product of the ‘non-exploitation’ of Indigenous peoples ‘in relation to settler capitalism’ as much as of ‘their status as legitimate, sovereign owners of land which settlers desire’. Yet a crucial question that is all too often glossed over in debates over the explanatory power of competing theoretical frameworks—each accusing the other of being totalising and inane—remains: What is it, specifically, that the settler-colonial logic of elimination seeks to eliminate, and why?
If, for example, we follow the logic of Davies’s critique in conceding that settler colonialism comprises nothing more or less than one capitalist project among others, then the wrongs that it does—and here we should remind ourselves that this is a moral critique of a major socio-historical process—are simply and exclusively those associated with capitalism’s commodification of life as labour, and alienation of the surplus arising from it. This suggests the counterfactual that had, at some point, Australia become a genuinely socialist society, with fully universal citizenship, then the damage wrought by displacement, dispossession, cultural disruption, segregation, absorption and assimilation, to cite only the most egregious examples, would have been far less consequential, socially, politically and even ethically. These would have comprised (merely) the (horrific) acts of a defeated and superseded regime.
If, on the other hand, we accept the proposition that there is something specific, and specifically destructive, about the nature and effects of settler-colonial regimes and their dominant cultural logics, then this returns us to the question above. And a more socio-culturally oriented, historically nuanced understanding of settler colonialism must surely be taken to suggest that above and beyond the ongoing project of capitalist accumulation, alienation and harms arising, there has been an ongoing process of social damage that could never have been recuperated or transcended through socialist or any other means. This process has frequently been entangled with processes of commodification and alienation, but it runs parallel to and at times independently of them, and cannot be reduced to their equivalent.
Constituting settler society
One approach that might help to avoid at least some of these traps, and bridge the divides between these competing theoretical perspectives, is that developed by Arena writers over a sustained period, emphasising the manner in which different social formations are constituted through different forms of social interchange across multiple levels of material abstraction. That is, the argument that the technologies of communication and interaction available to a given society make possible the formation of distinctive social objects and institutions, and relations between them, the relative absence of which also sets limits on what is socially possible.
The development and spread of language, then writing, then print, followed by electronic and digital media, for example, has ratcheted up the conditions of possibility for the emergence of socially abstracted forms and institutions, such as the state, the public sphere, the university and even the individual, as well as much more besides. This, we would argue, is a process that is ontologically (and historically) prior to the processes of commodification and alienation in driving human transformation. Our reading of the historical processes involved has two further implications of relevance here: first, that sustained social relations characterised by embodied and emplaced face-to-face co-presence are the primary foundation of all societies; and second, that while the advent of writing and subsequent social transformations is a gain in some respects, it also and necessarily entails a degree of loss of the qualities of social life maintained more or less strongly within a given society through embedded relations of co-presence as the dominant or only mode of interaction.
This approach can help us to think more carefully and critically about the doubled, ongoing processes of displacement that are at the very heart of the settler project itself, and the cultural contradictions thereby introduced for Indigenous peoples and settlers both, without falling into the conceptual trap of rendering them or their implications somehow analogous, let alone equivalent. Following this train of thought, we might thereby follow Wolfe in naming capitalism as the primary driver behind imperial expansion while focusing also on social abstraction as its enabler. These ongoing processes have implications for both settlers andIndigenous peoples, but these implications are not analogous, let alone the same. This perspective points towards the common humanity underlying all contemporary, socially constituted subjects and identities. It also retains scope for following Wolfe’s injunction to trace the ‘continuities and discontinuities’ of settler colonialism while maintaining a focus on the particularities involved.
As Arena writers have long emphasised, all contemporary cultures are comprised of differently organised combinations of concrete face-to-face social relations grounded in place and characterised by the physical presence of others, and increasingly abstract and extended social relations with more or less absent others. Western society and its presumption of universality (of form; its content invariably remaining racially and culturally bounded) is characterised by the relative dominance of these more abstract forms, yet even in the most highly ‘modernised’ society, grounded and emplaced relations of social presence remain, if only as unacknowledged vestigials.
The ideological counterpart to these historical developments is the taken-for-granted assumption among members of societies characterised by the increasing dominance of materially abstract levels of interaction that there is no loss or displacement of the very qualities of life, grounded as they are in the face-to-face, which make their continued existence as societies possible. This is a frequently occluded dimension of the development, if not the imperative,of imperial expansion, of which settler colonialism formed a part. The broader social processes out of which settler colonialism emerged—the conceit that a ‘civilisation’ might be unproblematically transplanted to the antipodes and a new society constructed on ‘alien’ lands, for example—relies on such a thoroughly abstracted social imagination, after all.
The liberal universal, which presupposes the Western liberal (i.e. colonising and enslaving) subject’s transcendence of nature and locates, in that transcendence, the right to possess ‘territory’—itself an abstraction—and the right to dispossess those ‘savages’ encountered around the world who had not yet transcended the state of nature and reached the universal liberal ideal of ‘Civilised Man’ was, of course, never universal in practice, shaped as it was by specific, residual racialist ideas. Its self-conception as universal, however, ideologically underwrote the Civilising Mission of European colonialism as it swept around the world. It still does today, as seen, for example, in the neo-assimilationism that characterised the Howard era, as well as in the claims to already existing ‘equality’, against all evidence to the contrary, prominent on the ‘No’ side of the recent debate over an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
From the perspective outlined above, in a gross oversimplification of the complex and continuing processes involved, we might suggest that the logic of elimination should be understood as one artefact of imperial expansion, with imperial expansion in turn understood as one of many processes set in train by the longue durée of post-Enlightenment social abstraction that characterises the West as we know it and its various ideological and material manifestations, with imperialism’s key motive force—that is, capitalism—persisting as perhaps the most notable and consequential among them.
This points us towards the doubled displacements constitutive of settler colonialism at large—of settler-colonists, from home there to home here, and of Indigenous peoples to make way for the settler society to come—and the cultural contradictions thereby introduced at the very heart of both settler and Indigenous societies and the ongoing relations between them. The original displacement of the settler population and its subsequent attempts to displace in order to replace Indigenous societies both on and of the land are products of antecedent processes of social abstraction and productive of those that have followed. Today, as Arena writers continue to emphasise, techno-scientifically enabled processes of abstraction continue apace. Yet access to territory, now for the benefit of the extractive industries to which much of the continuing settler-colonial agency, the state and its institutions included, has been signed over, remains central to ongoing settler-colonial projects aiming towards the displacement of Indigenous peoples from the land. In the settler-colonial imagination, at least, this ongoing project of displacement remains equivalent to the elimination of the native as native.
Complicity and the politics of (dis)engagement
In taking up Wolfe’s invitation to trace the continuities and discontinuities of settler colonialism within and between different periods in settler-colonial history, it is important to consider the nature, scale and accelerating pace of social change over the quarter-millennium since the onset of British invasion in 1788. The changes wrought by settler colonisation on Indigenous peoples and communities should by now be well known, but we should take seriously the changes that have taken place within settler society as well, and their implications. From the 1950s, and especially throughout the 1960s and beyond, those changes occurred very rapidly, with under-recognised consequences running the full gamut of Australian social relations. In the most recent ‘torque’ of the abstraction of social life, people have been rendered as increasingly free-floating, atomised individuals constituted through increasingly abstract social relations, contradictorily confined to the hyper-individualised identities they inherit, aspire to and/or claim.
Wolfe’s analysis of settler colonialism was premised on a fundamental, persistent, socially and politically constitutive settler/native binary, within which Indigenous peoples were defined by their prior and persisting connections to place, the category ‘settler’ containing all those who came after. When asked about this in an interview with Kauanui, published in 2018, Wolfe argued that while it was important to acknowledge that ‘degrees exist within the population that dispossessed and replaced Native peoples’, from ‘the Native point of view … it’s a zero-sum contest—you or me, for land, for livelihood, for the places that are special, sacred to you that keep your society alive, culturally, spiritually and every other way as well your economic subsistence [sic]’. In this context, he insisted, it ‘doesn’t matter if the [colonising] people are enslaved or coerced or co-opted … They are still part of the invasive society that is taking your land over and driving you off … it’s not a matter of volition on their part, and certainly not of culpability. It’s just a structural fact’.
This has become a major stumbling block in debate and strategy among the left/activist/radical circles that are driving the contemporary challenge to the settler-colonial mindset. Rather than encouraging the kinds of ethical engagement Wolfe’s theorisation sought to—and did, for many—demand, the impermeable settler/Indigenous binary can at times have the opposite effect, encouraging further disengagement on the part of those thus rendered ‘complicit’ in the settler project itself. The now-common act of identifying oneself as ‘a settler on stolen Indigenous lands’, for example, is all too often performed as a purely rhetorical act of recognition and/as complicity and contrition at the level of the individual subject, at the very same timeas it works to inoculate the speaker from any substantive obligationsthe social and political relations implicitly recognised might otherwise impose.
This stance can, and does, exacerbate already existing tendencies towards ‘opting out’—that is, towards social isolation and political disengagement—produced by the pervasive sense of atomisation, alienation, deracination and futility that characterises the political present. It also affirms the exclusivist mode of contemporary identity politics writ large, in which prospects for solidarity across social and political differences are pre-emptively denied. If the contemporary composition of fluid and intersecting yet paradoxically fixed and competing categories of ‘identity’ is all that remain of a vestigial social bond, or at least is all that is recognised as such, then an individual’s ‘subject position’ readily becomes the only thing that matters. The constraints against engagement thereby imposed seemingly present a political impasse.
Setting aside the wilfully naïve European progressivism of those on the Right, questions concerning the nature of the social formations now confronting one another, and the epochal framework within which their confrontation takes place, are therefore of real and pressing concern, even if rarely addressed.
Social class, abstraction and recognition
Jordan Humphreys, in Indigenous Liberation & Socialism (2023), has recently argued that ‘reducing contemporary Indigenous oppression to the land question creates a highly distorted picture of contemporary Indigenous political life’. As one result of this, he contends, ‘settler colonial theorists … find it difficult to understand the emergence of class divisions within the Indigenous population, and why ruling classes and state institutions have embraced recognition for Indigenous people in recent years’. There is more to say here, much of which has already been said, regarding the settler nation’s desire to appropriate precisely such an abstracted, symbolic form of indigeneity to confer ‘indigeneity’ and thereby legitimacy upon itself, but the point I want to make here is that from the broader Arena perspective outlined above, the dynamic Humphreys highlights is not so difficult to understand after all.
The recent recognition of Indigenous peoples, largely at the level of the symbolic—from pre-recorded Acknowledgments of Country as flights land to the addition of Country names to postal addresses—has been made possible precisely by the lifting-out of an imagined essence of indigeneity from the historically prior relations to Country, culture and kin through which indigeneity is, in an ontological sense, constituted. This occurs within a settler nation that is itself ‘abstractly constituted’—as all nations are—but which has had much of its own historical-cultural content hollowed out by the triumph of globalisation, which has undermined the given social relations of the nation-state form and replaced them with the ungrounded placelessness of global mass culture. The settler nation, in the absence of those prior social forms and the homelands from and in relation to which they derive meaning and are sustained, however abstractly, is constitutively abstract to a significantly higher degree. The cultural void Patrick White and many others have repeatedly located at the heart of Australian social, cultural and political life—the ‘Great Australian Emptiness’, in White’s formulation—is arguably one outcome of this.
In 1998, in the context of the first coming of Pauline Hanson, Arena general editor Geoff Sharp wrote:
At present we appear to be confronted by an either/or choice: to continue to take for granted a unitary conception of the nation which grew up in that earlier period of a capitalism which is now in transition, or simply to go along with its displacement by the different forms of life inseparable from techno-scientific globalism.
Our options have hardly become clearer in the intervening decades. If anything, the lines between recrudescent white ethno-nationalism and techno-scientifically enabled globalism have only grown less distinct, in Australia and elsewhere. Indeed, their cultural and political convergence in Trump’s ’merica now seems to loom as the harbinger of our own settler-fascist future to come. In any case, even were they to be successfully disentangled, neither trajectory offers any hope for addressing the persistent contradictions of settler-colonial societies, their social and political systems of relations, or their ecologically and otherwise devastating effects, introduced as they are at least in part as a result of the fundamental, doubled displacements of settler colonialism in its originary form.
The exigent question, then, becomes one of re-grounding—but a re-grounding of a kind that critically and reflexively avoids the appropriative tendencies of not only settler-colonial subjects, for whom ‘home’ as a place of concrete, grounded, generationally inherited social relations is neither here nor there, but Western subjects more generally too. John Hinkson has framed this as a project of cultural regeneration, although given the paucity of ‘Australian culture’—which tends to operate, in the contemporary, formally post–terra nullius imaginary especially, as a kind of dog-whistle in the mode of John Howard, Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton & Co.—perhaps it is more aptly framed as one of generation instead.
Dutton’s offer of a reactionary regeneration of triumphant settler culture leads to murky waters indeed. If fascism is defined by myths of palingenesis, and settler nationalisms, including both explicitly and more closetedly fascistic ones, by an ongoing search for a re-founding in racial Being, how are ‘we’ settler Australians to engage in social and cultural projects of cultural generation without being drawn in to more established, and socially destructive, means and ends? Surely not through the shallow, purely symbolic forms of ‘recognition’ advocated by ‘progressive’ settler nationalists as an alternative, and offered by the state and its institutions in the mode of an exercise in national rebranding. The contradictory logics of this project were effectively skewered in Guy Rundle’s forecasting in Crikey of a future in which ‘governments … synthesise reconciliation and white-alliance defence’, represented by an imagined fleet of AUKUS nuclear submarines bearing First Nations names and motifs. This is the contemporary mode of ‘recognition’ Humphreys is concerned to critique, but as Rundle makes clear, in this abstract, symbolic guise, ‘the process being presented as true recognition can become … an actual completion of colonisation: the co-option of the recognition process to state ends’.
What is to be done?
If the provisional interpretation offered above helps to reveal the contradictions inherent to Western societies and their cultures generally, and to the contemporary politics of settler societies like Australia perhaps especially, the question remains: ‘What is to be done?’ After all, in recent years the trajectories sketched above, both theoretical and political, have only accelerated. One response is represented by the futile restatements of identity and complicity at the expense of the political engagement such circumstances demand already mentioned, which often operate in tandem with projects of reconciliation and/as national redemption. If ‘I am a settler on stolen lands’, full stop, represents a prominent example of the former, ‘First Nations First’ (and only first) stands as a recent example of the latter. Another has been an embrace of deracinated existence—a globalised cosmopolitan imaginary and a post-human trajectory, a retreat into an abstract, idealised, highly technologised and mediated form of social existence free from earthly ties and any obligations arising from them.
The doubled displacements of settler colonialism, and the cultural contradictions they have introduced and maintained at the very heart of both settler and Indigenous societies and the ongoing relations between them, require instead a radical project of re-grounding and cultural (re)generation, within which ongoing Indigenous struggles to revitalise sovereignty, community, cultural continuity and connection to Country will necessarily form a major part. John Hinkson argued, in Arena 118 (2012), that the ongoing work of rebuilding and regenerating Indigenous cultures can be conceived as being ‘in concert with cultural resistance generally to post-human societies’. Crucially, while Hinkson insisted this would not require us to conflate ‘the terrible travails of Indigenous cultures with the crises of development that now hang darkly over “advanced” societies’, he held that ‘the prospect of real mutual support between the two may help to find a way forward for both over the coming decades’ nonetheless. This would entail a much-needed and long overdue project of ethical and critically reflexive non-appropriative engagement with Indigenous peoples, and with Australia’s origins in and through displacement—a radical project of overturning what Larissa Behrendt has repeatedly characterised as Australia’s ‘psychological terra nullius’, embedded as it is throughout Australian society, culture and institutional-political life.