{"id":63,"date":"2024-11-07T07:08:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-07T06:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/?p=63"},"modified":"2025-10-28T14:29:18","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T13:29:18","slug":"review-adam-kirsch-on-settler-colonialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/?p=63","title":{"rendered":"Review: Adam Kirsch, \u201cOn Settler Colonialism\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019m disappointed by Adam Kirsch\u2019s essay \u201cOn Settler Colonialism\u201d. Without in-depth knowledge concerning all the debates concerning theories of colonialism in historical scholarship, I first learned quite some things from the essay. I had usually taken the term \u201csettler colonialism\u201d to be a rather colloquial way to refer to colonies with large shifts of population structures due to settlers in general. Adam Kirsch tries to lay out the particular theoretical implications <\/a>associated with the term in so called studies of settler colonialism as they have been shaped by anthropologist Patrick Wolfe during the last 25 years. Adam Kirsch points at the crucial difference to the earlier definition of the term by Kenneth Good, which refered to economies shaped by the exploitation of indigenous workers by settler populations like in South Africa, Algeria, and Rhodesia. The use of the concept by Wolfe shifted attention to the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel and moved the concept away from an economic definition towards a focus on what Wolfe and others call elimination, understood as a persisting structure shaping settler colonial societies. Kirsch convincingly points at severe problems within the field departing from this approach: For example the inflationary use of the terms genocide and genocidal to refer to a conflated spectrum from systematic mass killings to all kinds of expulsions, population shifts and cultural or political assimilation, as it is done in the works of Lorenzo Veracini and Damien Short. This approach evidently hinders the proper understanding of mass violence. Kirsch points at bad research within the field of settler colonialism studies, which are reductionist, reduce everything to the \u201coriginal sin\u201d of colonisation, romanticise pre-colonial societies, and foreclose an understanding of the actual historical, material conflicts sometimes leading to elimination of large parts of indigenous populations, attributing everything to a settler-colonial mindset (he for example looks at the work of Dunbar-Ortitz on the settlement in the US). One further nice example for the reductionism Kirsch points at is the inflationary references to the terra nullius doctrine even in contexts where it was very much not used (however, he fails to acknowledge that it indeed played an ideological role in the settlement of what became the US, although finally American Indian land ownership was in principle recognised as the basis for treaties, despite the forceful expropriations especially in later 19th century).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Unfortunately the essay does not keep its focus then. Kirsch blames settler colonial studies to be a kind of activist scholarship, subordinating scholarly rigour to the practical, political urge to fight the settler colonial ways of thinking. Kirsch, however, very much fails to keep these two realms separate in his own treatment of settler colonial studies. He fails to give a compelling argument how exactly the theoretical framework of settler colonialism leads to questionable. He gives some hints, for example by his contrasting with the earlier approach by Kenneth Good, but there is no attempt to systematically discuss how Wolfe\u2019s particular concept of settler colonialism relates to other approaches of theorising different kinds of colonialism. Before criticising the political motivations and implications of settler colonial studies, one should first open mindedly ask for its theoretical merits: What do they actually aim to explain, do they help to explain it? After all: In those historical cases where large scale not just cultural, but physical elimination was actually the reality, one should first ask whether the theory describes and explains it well, whether it is truthful, before immediately jumping to a critique of the political implications of the theory which one might not like. For example when Kirsch criticises that proponents of settler colonial studies engage in bad politics when they\u2014unlike for example Martin Luther King Jr.\u2014reject US constitutional patriotism, this in no way refutes the historical claims concerning the roots of US founding principles in eliminationist politics (even if this is the case, this does not at all automatically imply the normative judgment that values of the founding fathers and references to them should be abandoned today). Settler colonial studies often argue with the inevitability of elimination in certain colonial contexts\u2014but is their argument correct or is it just based on equivocations and inflation of the term elimination? This would have to be addressed concretely. We encounter the same problem in Kirsch\u2019s criticism of Fanon (and Sartre): Kirsch does not even try to criticise Fanon\u2019s \u00ab Les damn\u00e9s de la terre \u00bb as a descriptive theory (which it primarily tries to be). Is it actually true that colonialism makes apparent the manichean truth underlying global capitalist relations? Was the manichean character of the decolonisation process in Algeria unavoidable, and why was it? In how far does Fanon fail to address the very different situations concerning economic, political and population structures and cold war dynamics which made decolonisation very different in different places between 1945 and 1980? Kirsch does not ask any of these questions but merely condemns Fanon for his praise of violence (which does not have to be a praise of terror and which partly simply aims to be a description of necessary laws of violence). His underlying completely unreflected liberal convictions concerning violence are often hard to stand. In his view violence is mainly the effect of left-wing or right-wing \u201cradicalism\u201d which would turn violence into a virtue\u2014the virtuous violence of armies and police forces by liberal or not so liberal, colonial or non-colonial governments simply does not seem to exist for him. If you fail to acknowledge that States\u2014liberal or not\u2014are about violence, then your theory is simply lacking something fundamental, and you do not at all have to be an anarchist to recognise that. The idea that armed resistance does not have to be terrorism (i. e. violence against random civilians as it is performed by Hamas) and that it can be legitimate or sometimes even necessary seems to be beyond what Kirsch can even imagine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Repeatedly Kirsch is very quick to abandon whole notions, even if they are not necessarily related to settler colonialism studies, and without asking for any rational core of these notions. For example Kirsch apparently wants to get rid of the notion of indigeneity altogether, simplistically pointing at the African origin of all humanity, but without acknowledging that far beyond settler colonial studies the notion of an indigenous people can serve as a useful umbrella term which in certain postcolonial societies can quite adequately express a certain relationship towards a politically, economically and culturally dominant part of society. In countries like Brasil or the United States or Canada this term (or its equivalents like Natives or First Nations) can also be regarded as a basis for concrete political relationships (e.g. concerning tribal treaty rights or protected territories) which have nothing to do with the ideology of settler colonial studies. Kirsch links allegations of genocide against Israel during the current Gaza war to the inflationary use of the term in settler colonial studies. Indeed there is a clear convergence between these notions of structural genocide from academia and statements by more lunatic pro-Palestinian voices talking about an ongoing genocide against Palestinians since 1948 or equating Gaza with the Warsaw ghetto (inevitably leading to Treblinka). However, Kirsch does not even spend a second to reflect that more \u201cmainstream\u201d genocide allegations do not argue like that and focus on the current war and its underlying intentions. His attempt to uncover double standards are rather inapt (he complains that nobody speaks of a genocide committed by Assad during the Syrian civil war\u2014well, maybe because there is no genocidal intent against any ethnic group by Assad, while in Israel\u2014and Palestine\u2014there are indeed a lot of genocidal intents, but they are probably not the causally primary motivation for the kind of warfare?). While making fun of land acknowledgments (and of course one can make fun of self-righteous rituals), he does not ever come up with the idea that land acknowledgments can have an educational value, actually making people read about the history about their neighbourhood for the first time. He gets lost with quoting most stupid decolonisation rituals and demands by random people, without keeping track of the relationship to settler colonial studies in academia. Of course every good book within the culture wars also finally has to misquote Derrida at some point (Kirsch puts a quote out of context letting it say that distinction in itself would be the essence of logocentrism).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Concerning what Kirsch calls the \u201cCalvinist\u201d or protestant doctrine of grace (which of course can also be found in Augustine and the Jansenists in strong versions) and the repudiation of justification by works I think his polemics against certain practices of acknowledging that one is a settler without being able to propose any positive project are felicitous. Here again Kirsch misses the chance to provide a theoretical underpinning for his claims first. Instead of merely focussing on the political consequences, there should be a discussion concerning the relationship of structure and events in historic scholarship and the shortcomings within the conceptualisation of this relationship in settler colonial studies (which are often undertaken in anthropology instead of history departments). However, I fully agree with Kirsch that the lack of positive economic and political perspectives are a central problem especially among American leftists\/radical liberals\u2014who slogans of demolition and theories of decolonisation, abolition or afro-pessimism (which do not have to agree with the premises of settler colonial studies) do not provide a positive picture of a socialist and\/or liberal or anarchist (or whatever, let it be a certain tribal agricultural or a meritocratic bureaucratic) economic and political system and of transformation towards such a system. What Kirsch misses is that centrist liberalism today lacks any such positive visions they are working for as well. Centrist liberals only can trust in \u201cjustification by works\u201d because they represent a status quo within which they can claim to perform works\u2014at least they can still do that till January 20th. Kirsch rejects any possibility of a radical reorientation of one\u2019s thoughts\u2014be it by \u201cgrace\u201d or by historical and scientific study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now concerning Israel and Palestine: Since the book claims that it would not be primarily about the current war between Hamas and Israel, certain inaccuracies concerning Israeli history are forgiveable. Kirsch nicely describes how a certain sphere of American activists can loudly and equally radically call for the decolonisation of both the US and Israel, while it is very clear that in the US this call will never have any major effect, while in concerning Israel it is directly tied to maximalist, irredentist claims by reactionary, bellicist, and terrorist actors like Hamas. However, during the history of Palestinian solidarity movements in recent decades parallels and connections between South Africa and Israel have always been much more prominent. Surprisingly Kirsch largely ignores the South African and does not discuss at all how settler colonial studies might misrepresent similarities and differences between Israel\/Palestine and South Africa, and instead picks the easy target of criticism, namely the comparison between the US and Israel. Of course here it is very easy to identify bizarre consequences of attempts at joint \u201cdecolonisation\u201d of Israel and the US. Kirsch also briefly deals with Rashid Khalidi\u2014the most authoritative historian of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for contemporary Western pro-Palestinian movements. Despite admitting that Khalidi does not share more radical political aims of expelling Jewish Israelis from their home, his understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a conflict between coloniser and colonised also becomes associated with settler colonial studies. Indeed Khalidi is influenced by the recent wave of settler colonial studies. On the other hand Kirsch does not reflect on the much longer history of the coloniser-colonised view of the conflict going back at least to Fayez Sayegh and does not provide arguments what exactly has changed through settler colonial studies. Finally Kirsch\u2019s account of Zionism is quite ironic: Apparently at some point he had completely forgotten about his repudiation of the concept of indigeneity and while being lost in his polemics against anti-Zionist double standards which consider Palestinians but not Jews to be indigenous in Palestine\/Israel he suddenly himself claims that \u201cthe idea that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel\u201d would the \u201cone of the central arguments for Zionism\u201d. In my opinion this is rather one of the weaker arguments for Zionism, especially if\u2014like Kirsch\u2014you do not argue from the continuous Jewish presence in the region and the perpetual migration back and forth between the diaspora and Eretz Israel, but use the references to Jerusalem in the Pessach prayer and in haTikva as an argument. At least from my secular perspective there are far better arguments for Zionism than any prayer traditions (or let alone Biblical land claims or milleniarist ideas), like ethics of collective resistance against persecution and domination, the failure of assimilation during the rise of antisemitism in late 19th century, the success of rescuing about 250.000 Jews from Europe (which might even justify disregard for democratic rights of the Arab population in the case of emergency), general ideas of freedom of movement and the right to seek a refuge wherever possible, or the progressive values of labour Zionism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kirsch could not decide whether he wanted to write an essay on Western pro-Palestinian solidarity movements in the face of the Hamas attack and massacre of October 7th 2023, or just another piece for the US culture wars concerning the perversions of (left-)liberalism, or actually on the problems of a particular academic field. While raising really important issues and probably often attacking the right people, the insights from the book remain quite limited.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m disappointed by Adam Kirsch\u2019s essay \u201cOn Settler Colonialism\u201d. Without in-depth knowledge concerning all the debates concerning theories of colonialism in historical scholarship, I first learned quite some things from the essay. I had usually taken the term \u201csettler colonialism\u201d to be a rather colloquial way to refer to colonies with large shifts of population […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/65"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mynas-on-pines.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}