Summary
The form of belonging Lorenzo Veracini holds settler colonial formations to be inherently premised on: elective and/or selective belonging, in which membership follows the voluntary act of moving to the settler locale rather than ascriptive facts such as the accident of birth (The Other Shift: Settler Colonial Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, PDF p.17 / printed p.16).
Details
- The term is taken from Mike Savage, ‘The Politics of Elective Belonging’, Housing, Theory and Society, 27, 2, 2010, pp. 115-135 (PDF p.17, note 25).
- Thomas Jefferson, who understood the serial establishment of settler republics as his personal duty, knew that belonging to the US, unlike belonging to other national entities, was “a matter of individual conscience and choice” (quoted in Onuf and Sadosky, Jeffersonian America, 2002, p. 40) (PDF p.17, note 26 / printed p.16).
- Volitional belonging, as epitomised by the very act of having voluntarily moved to America, and to the West, is structurally different from ascriptive types of belonging, the accident of birth for example (PDF p.17 / printed p.16).
- The North American case as Aziz Rana outlines it: immigrating co-ethnics were necessary and welcome and were for a long time seamlessly incorporated on arrival as settlers through alien voting legislation and access to land (PDF p.16 / printed p.15).
Related pages
The Other Shift: Settler Colonial Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Settler Colonialism, Indigenisation, Recolonisation, Aziz Rana