Summary
Scholar of comparative settler colonialism whose formulation of elimination, quoted by the editors of the 2012 Settler Colonial Studies special issue on Palestine, anchors that issue’s argument that natives face elimination at the hands of settlers, and whose essay “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” the issue reprints in Arabic translation as a foundational text (Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.4, p.6).
Details
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The editors quote Wolfe, from his chapter “Palestine, Project Europe and the (Un)Making of the New Jew: In Memory of Edward W. Said” in Curthoys and Ganguly (eds), Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, p.333 (no year given in the note as printed): “‘For natives’, as Patrick Wolfe puts it, ‘the issue is that, at the hands of the settlers, they face [physical and symbolic] elimination’.” (PDF p.4, note 6 on PDF p.8)
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His article in the issue compares the Zionist colonisation of Palestine with Australia and the United States and points to the historical and material conditions underpinning the project; the editors summarise his argument: “Zionism constitutes an intensification of, rather than a departure from, settler colonialism” (PDF p.6, editors’ summary of Wolfe’s article, not a quotation from it).
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The issue closes its historical-documents section with the Arabic translation of his “seminal essay, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’”, described as “a foundational text for comparative settler colonial studies”; the translation is by Dalia Taha, with additional edits and review by Hamzeh Asad, Hazen Alnamla and Magid Shihade (PDF p.6-7).
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Wolfe is named among the participants in the March 2011 SOAS conference out of which the special issue emerged (PDF p.7).
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In Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, Chapter 4 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).
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His article in the same 2012 issue, Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, is his Palestine-specific statement: the Nakba as consolidation rather than origin, the concept of Preaccumulation for the endowment settlers imported, and the Conquest of Economics by which non-profit diaspora capital and the Conquest of Labour built a contiguous Jewish-only zone before 1948, so that the Nakba was a continuation of purchase by other means (Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, PDF p.1-2, p.5, p.21, p.27-28).
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The article’s Biographical Note describes him as a freelance historian associated with La Trobe University, living and working in Wurundjeri country, who has written, taught and lectured on race, colonialism, Aboriginal histories, genocide, theories of imperialism and the history of anthropology, and was working on a comparative account of regimes of race in Australia, the USA, Brazil and Palestine/Israel; research for the article was enabled by an Australian Research Council fellowship at La Trobe (PDF p.29).
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Lloyd cites Wolfe’s ‘Race and the Trace of History: For Henry Reynolds’ (2011) for the two possible relations a settler colony’s expropriation of indigenous land demands to the indigenous population — exploitation as a subordinated labor force, as in much of Latin America, Algeria and South Africa, or more or less rapid extermination, as in Australia, North America and the Caribbean — and argues Israel has engaged in both tendencies (Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, PDF p.8, 21 / printed p.66, 79).
Related pages
Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, Settler Colonialism, Logic of Elimination, Preaccumulation, Edward Said, Gershon Shafir