Race, Place, Trace: Essays in Honour of Patrick Wolfe

by Lorenzo Veracini, Susan Slyomovics

Overview

Continuing Patrick Wolfe’s work on settler colonialism

This edited collection celebrates Patrick Wolfe’s contribution to the study and critique of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination. The chapters collected here focus on the settler-colonial assimilation of land and people, and on what Wolfe insightfully defined as “preaccumulation”: the ability of settlers to mobilise technologies and resources unavailable to resisting Indigenous communities. Wolfe’s militant and interdisciplinary scholarship is thus emphasised, together with his determination to acknowledge Indigenous perspectives and the efficacy of Indigenous resistances.

In case studies of Australia, French Algeria, and the United States, contributors illustrate how seminal his contribution was and is. There are three core reasons why it is especially important to develop the field of thinking inaugurated by Wolfe: first, because the demand for Indigenous sovereignty has been crucial to recent struggles against neoliberal attacks in the settler societies; second, because a critique of settler colonialism and its logic of elimination has supported important struggles against environmental devastation; and third, because the ability to think race in ways that are not disconnected from other struggles is now more needed than ever. Racial capitalism and settler colonialism are as imbricated now as they always have been, and keeping both in mind at the same time highlights the need to establish and nurture solidarities that reach across established divides.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781839766176
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	02/01/2022
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	354 KB

About the Author

Lorenzo Veracini is Associate Professor of History at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. His research focuses on the comparative history of colonial systems and settler colonialism as a mode of domination. He has authored Israel and Settler Society (2006), Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010), The Settler Colonial Present (2015), and The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea (2021). Lorenzo co-edited The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism (2016), manages the settler colonial studies blog, and is Founding Editor of Settler Colonial Studies.

Susan Slyomovics is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages & Cultures at the University of California Los Angeles. She is the author of The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Epic Poet in Performance (1988); The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (1998); Women and Power in the Middle East (co-editor, 2001); The Walled Arab City in Literature, Architecture and History: The Living Medina in the Maghrib (editor, 2001); The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (2005); How to Accept German Reparations (2014); and L’inévitable prison / The Inevitable Prison (co-editor, 2019). She is currently writing a book on the afterlives of Algeria’s French colonial monuments

Table of Contents

List of Contributors ii

Race, Place, Trace: A Preface Susan Slyomovics Lorenzo Veracini vii

Introduction: Patrick Wolfe's Legacy and Method Lorenzo Veracini 1

Part I Assimilations

1 Colonization, Land Registries, and the Torrens Act in French Algeria, 1863-1903 Sung Eun Choi 21

2 'False Friends?' On Algeria, the Algerian Jewish Question, and Settler Colonial Studies Susan Slyomovics 55

Part II Preaccumulations

3 Mormonism, Primitive Accumulation, Preaccumulation Lorenzo Veracini 93

4 J.G.A. Pocock's Antipodean Gaze from the Standpoint of a Fellow Colonist Gabriel Piterberg 119

Conclusion: 'They Are in Our Town but Not of It' - Patrick Wolfe and Belonging Lynette Russell 165

Editorial Reviews

Patrick Wolfe reached into the dark heart of settler colonialism and provided us with a world changing theory, grammar, and politics with which to respond to the ongoing subjugation of colonised peoples. These essays enact the profound legacies of a singular intellectual-activist and demonstrate the enduring power of his analysis.”
—Melinda Hinkson, Director, Institute of Postcolonial Studies and Associate Professor of Anthropology, Deakin University

“Setter colonial studies is impossible to imagine without the concepts that Patrick Wolfe developed over decades of thinking about Indigenous dispossession and racialization. Because colonialism is not ‘post’ in settler societies, the task of theorizing their modalities of domination and erasure remains a pressing task. Race, Place, Trace is a fitting tribute to, and continuation of, his singular legacy.”
—A. Dirk Moses, author of The Problems of Genocide

“Patrick Wolfe would have loved this book. I could imagine him wanting to participate in the arguments that are offered throughout its pages, for all the chapters are infused with the same scholarly rigour and critical passion that characterised his own work.”
—Ghassan Hage, Anthropology, University of Melbourne

From the Publisher