October 16 - 18, 2007 

Settler Colonial Narratives

Lorenzo Veracini

Australian National University

Contrary to other typologies of colonial practice, settler colonialism has been in many ways remarkably resistant to decolonisation. This paper suggests that an appraisal of a narrative deficit can contribute to explaining particularly troubled traditions of decolonisation in settler societies.

The first part of my paper deals with settler narrative forms. A sustained scholarly activity on the literatures of colonialisms has not yet explored the specific differences separating colonial and settler colonial storytelling. Conversely, this paper distinguishes between colonial and settler colonial narrative forms (it argues that they interact, overlap, and interpenetrate, but that they are analytically distinct). Colonial narratives normally take a circular form, an Odyssey consisting of an outward movement followed by domination over and/or interaction with a colonised ‘other’ and by a final return to an original locale. On the contrary, as settlers came to stay, the narratives generally associated with settler colonial enterprises resemble an Aeneid where the colonizer moves forward along a story line that can’t be turned back. This structural difference expresses an intractable dichotomy of colonial narratives.

The second part of my paper explores the structural divide between colonial and settler colonial forms. Postcolonial studies have traditionally been reluctant to recognise settler colonialism’s autonomous status in the context of colonial phenomena. However, although both colonialism and settler colonialism pertain to a general process of European expansion, an exploration of the structural differences between varying colonial typologies would confirm the need to understand settler colonialism as a distinct and autonomous set of political traditions. This is one constitutive difference between colonialism and settler colonialism: whereas colonial regimes are geared towards the perpetuation of their colonial character (i.e.: a continuation of the coloniser/colonised divide), settler colonialism endeavours to supersede its colonial determinants (i.e.: to ‘close’ frontiers, exterminate, extinguish, assimilate Indigenous autonomies, establish independent nationhood, etc.).

The third part of my paper explores the issue of decolonisation in settler contexts by bringing together the first two sections of the paper. Because of a circular narrative form, discontinuation of a colonial regime always remains within colonialism’s cultural horizon. On the contrary, because of a linear narrative form, discontinuation of a settler colonial regime remains unthinkable beyond its extinguishment by way of its fulfilment (i.e.: a final assimilation/destruction of autonomous Indigenous subjectivities). The scramble for colonies had produced colonial states that could be turned over to successor polities in a symmetrical process of counter-scramble: the great imperial rush of the late nineteenth century was replicated in the decolonising rush of the 1960s. On the contrary, in the case of settler colonial contexts, a specific narrative form produces a circumstance in which there is no intuitive narrative of settler colonial decolonisation and/or Indigenous or national reconciliation.

If settler colonisation is an ultimate colonising act where settlers envisage no return, settler colonialism still tells a story of either total victory or total defeat. Discontinuing settler colonial forms requires conceptual frames and supporting narratives of reconciliation that have yet to be fully developed and narrated.

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