Summary
Patrick Wolfe’s name for settler colonialism’s cultural logic: a sustained institutional tendency to supplant the indigenous population, which reconciles historical practices that might otherwise seem distinct — homicide, expulsion, confinement, assimilation and representational discourses — under the outcome they share for Native peoples (Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, PDF p.2-3 / printed p.134-135).
Details
- Wolfe restates his 1994 formulation: settler colonialism’s essential feature is “a sustained institutional tendency to supplant the indigenous population”, a cultural logic of elimination that “reconciles a range of historical practices that might otherwise seem distinct” (Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, PDF p.2 / printed p.134, note 4).
- Its primacy is political and perspectival as well as analytical: it prioritises the outcome for conquered Native peoples, distinguishes being eliminated from being exploited for one’s labour, and ranks the logic prior to features distinguishing settler societies among themselves — monarchical or republican, Christian or Jewish, Black or White, communist or democratic, Asian or European (PDF p.3 / printed p.135).
- Applied to Palestine, Zionism is a more exclusive exercise of the logic than the Australian and US examples, because it rigorously refused, and continues to refuse, any suggestion of Native assimilation (PDF p.4 / printed p.136).
- The editors of the 2012 Settler Colonial Studies special issue quote Wolfe: “‘For natives’, as Patrick Wolfe puts it, ‘the issue is that, at the hands of the settlers, they face [physical and symbolic] elimination’” (Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.4, note 6 on PDF p.8).
- Palestine: A Socialist Introduction uses Wolfe’s logic of elimination, alongside Gershon Shafir’s pure settlement form, to analyse the settler-colonial working class (Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, lines 884-890).
Related pages
Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, Settler Colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, Ethnic Cleansing, Decolonisation