Decolonising settler colonialism

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Title: Decolonising settler colonialism
Author(s): Veracini, Lorenzo
Abstract: This paper contributes to interdisciplinary reflection on decolonisation by focusing on the settler polities of the British Empire. These polities achieved independent status in the context of metropole-assisted processes that envisaged ultimate substantive devolution as an enhancement of political ties rather than their discontinuation. These drawn-out processes have been the subject of extensive comparative scrutiny; however, the isopolitical nature of the imagination that underpinned these shifts has remained relatively unexplored (an isopolity can be described as a single political community joining separate jurisdictions). The independence of the 'other Englands' (as J. A. Froude described them in Oceana [1886]) was to constitute (as Charles Wentworth Dilke put in Greater Britain [1890]) a British Empire of 'racial identity': an empire imagined as a dialectical counterpoint to the ongoing political subordination of the colonial world. Appraising isopolitical relationships can contribute to an understanding of independence and decolonisation that goes beyond familiar narratives emphasizing anti-colonial militancy, metropolitan concessions, and nationalist takeovers in the context of a nonsovereign to sovereign/colony to independent polity paradigm. The first section of this paper focuses on isopolitical relations as an alternative possibility besides sustained colonial domination on the one hand, and internationally recognized independence within an international system of formally independent polities on the other. Crucially, these polities’ independence was premised on an assumption of ultimate responsibility regarding the management of the indigenous peoples contained within the area they exclusively claimed. Paradoxically, as it removed the possibility of appealing to the metropolitan sovereign against settler abuse, this decolonisation was thus premised on the enhanced colonisation of indigenous others. The second section of this paper outlines what is here defined as deep colonisation: a circumstance in which the very institutions that should operate towards the supersession of colonial forms actually entrench colonialism’s operative registers (that is, settler independence constitutes an acceleration, not a discontinuation, of colonial practices). The notion of deep colonisation also upsets traditional amelioristic narratives emphasising progressive processes leading to the achievement (or granting) of social and political rights for colonized and formerly colonized peoples. A focus on decolonisation processes in settler colonial settings indicates the need to think about independence and decolonisation as (at times) antithetical dynamics.
Publication type: Seminar, speech or other presentation
Source: Paper presented at the Transforming Cultures Research Centre Round Table: Settler Colonialism and Colour Line: A Topicality?, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 03 May 2010
Publication year: 2010
Keyword(s): British Empire; Decolonisation; Deep colonisation; Isopolitical relations; Settler colonialism; Settler polities
Publisher: Transforming Cultures Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney
Publisher URL: http://datasearch2.uts.edu.au/tfc/news-events/events-archived-detail.cfm?ItemId=20962