Our genealogical method is integral to unveiling settler colonialism as the structuring cause of modern biopower

THEORISING!SETTLER!COLONIAL!BIOPOWER Foucault and Agamben theorised biopower as a present activity that inherits and transforms the deeply historical conditions of Western law. Foucault incited this theory by examining the modern proliferation of procedures to produce the life of the nation in relation to deadly regulation of its others, a process that he argued displaces the power of the sovereign ‘to take life or let live’ with a governmentality that enacts ‘the power to “make” live or “let” die’. 3 Judith Butler emphasises that, for Foucault, governmentality in the modern state or in global regimes acts as an ‘extra-legal sphere’ – ‘an art of managing things and persons, concerned with tactics, not laws’ – that then ‘depends upon “the question of sovereignty” no longer predominating over the field of power’. 4 Hence, governmentality acts in the name of the very sovereignty that it exceeds, producing ‘a lawless sovereignty as part of its own operation of power’. 5 Agamben adapts Foucault’s account of modern biopower as governmentality when he claims that its extra-legal appearance is a recent adaptation of qualities intrinsic to Western law; as he says, ‘it can even be argued that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’. 6 Citing the Roman legal origins of Western law, Agamben links sovereignty to a power to designate subjects of the law as homo sacer, the sacred man who may be killed without being sacrificed or made subject to homicide. The placement of homo sacer in a zone of ‘bare life’ establishes Western law precisely by placing it in abeyance in this case. The sacred man enters a ‘state of exception’ to the law that simultaneously reinforces its rule. Agamben notably defines the exception by reference to the camp as ‘in a decisive way the political space itself of modernity’, which by forming a permanent ‘space for (bare) life’ creates a ‘materialization of the state of exception’ as ‘the rule’. 7 Agamben thus reinterprets the biopolitics of the modern state as an effect of Western law’s constitution by the state of exception. In this reading, the function of governmentality to ‘make life’ is compatible with the state of exception remaining intrinsic to law, as consigning certain subjects to a state of bare life (‘let die’) reestablishes a power to produce and defend life among those who remain. Yet significant tensions appear in the work of Foucault and Agamben – and, hence, also in Agamben’s revision of Foucault – in that neither scholar directly theorises colonialism as a context for biopower. Scholars of colonialism respond by arguing that colonialism is intrinsic to processes of biopower in the past and present. Reading Foucault’s account of the modern biopolitical state in relation to colonial situations, Ann Laura Stoler definitively demonstrated that its racial, sexual and national power arise at colonial sites or relationally among colonies and metropoles, not as projections from a European source.8 Following Stoler, modern biopower is the product and process of a colonial world. Achille Mbembe extended such reinterpretations of Foucault in conversation with Agamben by reading the colony as exception, which defines Western law amid the globalisation of European capital and empire.9 Sherene Razack and Sunera Thobani engage all such theories to explain that in contemporary modes of biopower, the colonial returns or never left; and, notably, both centre settler colonialism as a condition of the power they examine.10 Mark Rifkin signally engages Agamben’s theses with settler colonialism by arguing that the ‘geopolitics’ of conquest place Indigenous peoples in a state of exception that simultaneously troubles the territorial and national integrity of settlers as representatives of Western law.11 Together, these scholars respond to colonialism’s elision in theories of biopower by demonstrating that it conditions biopower and critical theory – an intervention deepened by Rifkin’s and my work centreing settler colonialism for study. Addressing these critiques requires adjusting the very advance of Agamben’s argument that biopower is intrinsic to Western law. Michael Dillon identifies a lingering ahistoricity in Agamben’s ‘ontologization’ of Western law that he argues would benefit from a return to Foucault’s genealogical method, which for Katia Genel will result in ‘revisiting and complicating Agamben’s formulations and more complexly applying them’. 12 Theorising biopower from within a genealogy of settler colonialism will trace how deeply historical procedures in Western law confronted the specificities of the era of European settlement and shifted in response. In such a genealogy Agamben remains crucial, given that scholars of settler colonialism may trace biopower to situations that existed prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth century era that Foucault linked to the rise of the modern biopolitical state. Already in the sixteenth century and across the Americas, settler colonialism grew to condition colonialism and biopower in settler and other societies worldwide. The continuity of settler colonialism at these sites up to the present then demonstrates that this periodisation meaningfully explains biopower today. Patrick Wolfe’s theorisation of settler colonialism already incites a genealogy of its biopolitical form. Arguing that ‘settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure, not an event’, Wolfe explains that assertions of sovereignty by settlers ground Western law in ‘a logic of elimination’. 13 Noting that scholars after Raphael Lemkin tend to correlate genocide with extermination, Wolfe argues that settler colonialism performs genocide alongside a variety of practices that converge on a purposed elimination of Indigenous peoples.14 While the erasure and replacement of Indigenous peoples may transpire through deadly violence, Wolfe emphasises that elimination may follow efforts not to destroy but to produce life, as in methods to amalgamate Indigenous peoples, cultures and lands into the body of the settler nation. As Wolfe and Katherine Ellinghaus explain, this amalgamation precisely narrows or erases the possibility of distinctive Indigenous nationalities challenging the prerogative of the settler nation that means to replace them on, now, ‘its own’ lands.15 Wolfe argues that the racialised political economy of ‘franchise colonialism’ intersects settler colonialism, while bearing distinct implications for Indigenous peoples and for racialised peoples brought by settlers to Indigenous lands. In the Americas, for instance, the earliest settlers enslaved Indigenous peoples while producing racialised labour from the transatlantic slave trade and colonised indentured labour, resulting in the formation of franchise colonies that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were among Europe’s most lucrative colonial projects. Yet Wolfe clarifies that these – and their seeming parallel to franchise colonies that appeared across Africa and Asia into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – derived from prior and simultaneous settler colonialism. American settler societies formed distinctly when practicing franchise colonialism: often, by removing European migrants to cultivate ‘emptied’ land, while amalgamating Indigenous peoples within societies dutiful to settler productivity; and by creating franchises that require prior and ongoing conquest of Indigenous peoples to exist and sustain. Thus, Wolfe reminds us that even societies defined by the franchise-orientation of European global capitalism – notably, the slave plantation economies of the Caribbean or southern British American colonies, or of colonial Brazil – relied on settler colonialism to function. Wolfe argues that plantation slavery pursued the elimination of Indigenous nations by plying a ‘difference between one group of people who had survived a centuries-long genocidal catastrophe with correspondingly depleted numbers and another group who, as commodities, had been preserved, their reproduction constituting a singularly primitive form of accumulation for their owners’. 16 Of course, slavery also produced a centuries-long genocidal catastrophe by commodifying African people not for survivability but exchangeability. Any seeming ‘preservation’ of Blackness in white settler societies thus was coterminous with the perpetual subjection of Black peoples to spaces of death, while eliding the formation of Black communities precisely through mixture with Indigenous and European peoples. We find here that the biopolitics of settler colonialism arose in the Americas by perpetuating African diasporic subjugation and Indigenous elimination simultaneously. Following Wolfe’s reading, settler colonialism establishes Western law within a white supremacist political economy premised upon the perpetual elimination of Indigenous peoples. As Thobani eloquently affirms, Indigenous elimination then crucially defines the state of exception in the Western law of settler societies.17 While I will examine specific modes of governance placing Indigenous peoples in exception to Western law, I emphasise first that their settler colonisation informs any simultaneous or subsequent appearance of the state of exception in settler societies or other sites of European colonisation. This analytical qualification is necessary to complicate and deepen recent theories of the colony as exception. For instance, Mbembe and Paul Gilroy portray the transatlantic slave trade creating slave societies in the Americas in a state of exception, a claim Gilroy advances by framing them precisely as a camp.18 Yet Wolfe’s reading, which I think affirms theirs, specifies that the transatlantic slave trade formed amid a prior, simultaneous and continuous exception assigned to Indigenous peoples, which conditioned Western sovereignty on the lands where the African diaspora took form. Indeed, the space-outside-law defining Agamben’s reading of the camp defines slave societies only to the extent that the lands placed in exception to terminate Indigenous tenure became available to new biopolitical violences, even as this naturalised the settler violence enabling them. The implications of such an analysis echo within and also shift Mbembe’s account of colonialism and biopower. Mbembe’s reading of ‘necropolitics’ as the logic of the colony as exception references plantation slavery ‘as one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation’, and then frames relations among African diasporic peoples and white settlers as emblematic of the racialisation of colonialism.19 Mbembe later cites ‘the extermination of vanquished peoples’ assigned the status of ‘savages’ within a list of effects of colonisation worldwide, but without specifically naming Indigenous peoples in settler societies. 20 Following Wolfe, we can read extermination as a biopolitics originary to the settler colonial situations that conditioned enslavement on settled land. While Mbembe is aware that settlement in the Americas appears in his story, it remains oblique, seemingly absorbed within a more general object, ‘colonialism’. This object then appears in his account to be more definitive of populations framed as suffering it in perpetuity, at the expense of bodies that, here, appear erased from its history. In Mbembe’s emphasis on the genocidal colonial violence perpetrated against Africans and peoples of the African diaspora we hear an unintended echo of the logic of elimination defining settler colonialism. As Wolfe argues, that logic places African diasporic peoples under a perpetual subjugation that attempts to naturalise their relational formation to Indigenous elimination and the ‘emptying’ of Indigenous lands. Mbembe further argues that the past of necropolitics informs the present when it recurs in ‘late modern colonial occupation’. 21 Given his prior claims, this temporalisation occludes settler colonisation of Indigenous peoples as significant to the past or present of necropolitics, even as it prevents settler colonialism from being definitive of the present despite never having ended. Indeed, for the United States – a key object of Mbembe’s critique – the visitation of late modern colonial occupation beyond ‘its’ borders transpires only to the extent that the United States simultaneously perpetuates colonisation upon the Indigenous peoples it necessarily occupies. Had Mbembe centred this quality in his account of colonialism, we could ask how late modern colonial occupation acts precisely and continuously as settler colonial, with its global projections being the activity of a settler colonial power that does not cease. Asking this question would resituate our interest in late modern colonial occupation from trying to explain colonialism’s continuation despite its nominal demise, to considering how the failure of decolonisation attends on its failure to be sufficiently extended to settler states and the institutions through which they project settler colonial power in the contemporary world.