Arpit Lam

The Royal Sydney Golf Club

Address: Kent Rd, Rose Bay NSW 2029, Australia

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This also means that land is at the center of the settler project, even as the settlers also utilize strategies such as enslavement, racialization, forced assimilation, and genocide. Settler colonialism, as Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard reminds us, is “territorially acquisitive in perpetuity,”

In a similar vein, anthropologist Maya Mikdashi emphasizes how settler colonialism’s territorial acquisitiveness is accompanied by the imposition of regimes of possession and dispossession:

Finally, as we learn from the work of indigenous scholars such as Celeste Pedri-Spade, settler colonialism also has an identitarian element to it that is especially insidious: over time, settler ideology is increasingly oriented toward claiming Indigeneity for itself, reinforcing settler regimes of individualism and private property while also waging a biopolitical war on those whose land it has conquered:

So to summarize, settler colonial invasion is all about the permanent transformation of the land, including the people who belong to the land; as Wolfe famously argued, it is “a structure, not an event.” That is to say, despite hegemonic narratives that place “the colonial era” in the distant past, settler projects are ongoing by definition.

At a local and national level, these ongoing projects constitute the deepest of deep structures in the territories where they continued to be carried out. At the global level, settler colonialism has long been a defining structural feature of the modern world. We see this in the systematic facilitation of white settlement in all its forms, from territorial conquest and resource extraction to privileged processes of migration and tourism.

And now for the disconnect: scholars who use settler colonialism as a primary analytical category are rarely quoted in news coverage addressing situations of, well, settler colonialism. Indeed, the category of settler colonialism itself is a kind of ghost whose absence haunts contemporary news coverage. As I have argued elsewhere, settler colonialism is a creature that never speaks its own name – at least not in dominant public discourse. Instead, it speaks of things like security, terrorism, democracy, civilization, progress, multiculturalism, reconciliation, and peace (as defined by the settler state).

To explain this absence and its political significance, I turn to the concept of myth in work of Roland Barthes, the French semiotician and author of the classic book Mythologies. Barthes describes myth as “depoliticized speech” that serves the interest of the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) by “turning history into nature” – that is, taking things that are the product of historical forces and making them seem natural or inevitable.

One of the ways this works in public discourse is through what he calls exnomination – literally the “un-naming” of things. For Barthes, the paradigmatic example of exnomination is the bourgeoisie itself, which steadfastly refuses to speak its own name.

Following Barthes, we can say that “America,” “Israel,” “Australia,” and “Canada” are all myths. They are hegemonic ways of naturalizing what are, in fact, ongoing processes of settler colonization that have their roots in histories of conquest, expulsion, and genocide. These myths are enacted through the exnomination of settler colonialism itself – the systematic refusal to name it.

As Mahmoud Mamdani argues, this form of exnomination is especially strong in the United States: