Perm do both— Utilizing a genealogical study of colonial biopolitics unmasks the way settler relations naturalize and operate in political and academic spaces

THE!GLOBAL!SITUATION!IN!SETTLER!COLONIAL!TIME Scholars must examine the past and present biopolitics of settler colonialism to challenge presentist horizons in theories of biopower and colonialism. I argued that liberal governance under Western law is presaged and instituted by the biopolitics of settler colonialism. Here, Indigenous peoples are recognised with a provisional humanity for amalgamation by settler nations, where their elimination nevertheless follows whether they defy or conform to a promised consanguinity with settlers who replace. Sherene Razack and Sunera Thobani have modelled the acknowledgment of settler colonialism as a condition of the colonial biopolitics scholars increasingly diagnose in contemporary states and global regimes. Yet my argument extends theirs by requesting even broader enunciation of settler colonialism as an activity directly manifesting as the biopolitics of the present. My account suggests that the growth of liberal modernity by universalising Western law and its exception was facilitated by settler states that circulate and sustain them today. Here I echo Anna Tsing’s account of the conditions of theories and practices of globalisation – ‘the global situation’ – when I argue that they also arise in relation to the intimate and systemic procedures of settler colonialism.37 In particular, scholars must challenge ahistoricity in accounts of the coloniality of biopower, as these temporalise colonialisms in various pasts only to link them to supposedly unprecedented power relations in the present. Certainly distinctions within present power relations must be specified. But to posit their temporality as advanced beyond colonialism is to naturalise how settler colonialism acts continuously within them. The persistence and naturalisation of settler colonialism defines the present as colonial, while occluding settler colonialism’s action in and as the power we wish to critique. Even to mark this would transform most work on coloniality and biopower. Yet while I did intend my words to call for such analysis, my argument more deeply marks the specific biopolitics of settler colonialism as generalised tactics of late modern power relations, which proliferate by naturalising their settler colonial conditions. Agamben’s work is ripe for such analysis given that, by the appearance of State of Exception, the superpower status of the United States becomes his central case. Yet given that his prior scholarship concertedly traced a European horizon, citing the United States as exemplary of ‘Western’ sovereignty occludes its formation outside Europe through settler colonial processes that remain opaque to his critique. For instance, when Agamben traces the history of the camp to Spanish Cuba in 1896 and to the twentieth century British conquest of the Boers, he omits knowledge in Native studies that nineteenth-century U.S. expansion used internment camps to relocate Indigenous peoples and to model their militarised containment on reservations.38 Some scholars date this process to the 1837 Treaty of New Echota – passed by Congress in disregard of Cherokee protest – which through military force contained Cherokee people for removal on the Trail of Tears.39 Another noted example is the 1862 Dakota War, in which Dakota peoples denounced the breaking of treaties by Congress and the State of Minnesota by fighting back against land theft. The war concluded with the largest mass hanging in U.S. history, of 38 Dakota men at the Lower Sioux Agency; the three-year internment of 1700 Dakota people at Fort Snelling on Pike Island, Minnesota, where over 300 died of starvation and disease; and the forced relocation of survivors hundreds of miles to militarised reservations.40 Pike Island sits at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, a central site of the traditional spiritual homeland of the Dakota people. Today it remains a Minnesota state park, where the now-forested internment site is overlooked by the massive stone fort, its gun turrets still pointing down at passing bicyclists and day hikers, while historical reenactors of U.S. soldiers employed by the fort educate visiting children by teaching them how to march in formation while pretending to hold bayonets.41 Dakota activist, historian and critical theorist Waziyatawin has helped lead annual Dakota Commemorative Marches the 150 miles from Lower Sioux Agency to Pike Island during the cold autumn season when these events transpired. Dakota activists continue to mobilise to ‘Take Down the Fort’ and return the lands and internment site to the Dakota people.42 Given that the 1862 events followed Minnesota Governor Ramsey declaring that ‘the Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state’, the genocidal biopolitics that defined Dakota people for one and a half centuries would seem relevant to a history of the camp within Western modernity.43 I do not mark Agamben’s neglect of histories such as this as an erasure correctable by citation. Rather, I am identifying here a naturalisation and continuation of settler colonialism within Agamben’s theoretical apparatus and the horizons of critical theory. Certainly, Agamben’s account of the camp elides the encampment of Indigenous peoples as distinctive nations resisting incorporation by a settler nation. Yet, at once, Agamben obliquely invokes, without discussing, two more cases of settler colonialism: Spanish removal of Cuban revolutionaries seeking self-rule on lands erased of Indigenous national difference; and British containment of Boer settler colonists so as to pursue their own white settler conquest of African peoples and lands. We see here that white supremacist settler colonialism was already fully present, yet fully occluded in the history of the camp provided by Agamben, whose citational trail leads to twentieth century Europe and National Socialism. 44 But what if we took Agamben seriously, so that whether marked or unmarked, his citations prove the case: that the camp does arise within white supremacist settler colonisation, only later to be transported to the Nazi regime? Does our understanding of the camp shift if its definition and containment of racialised populations by the modern biopolitical state was a lesson learned in settler colonial situations and subsequently applied to Europe? Does the camp’s spatialisation of the exception come to exemplify Western law only on its returnarrival to Europe; or, might it have borne that capacity on Indigenous American and African lands? Does its European arrival then constitute a reckoning with what the West could become by following lessons already learned under settler colonialism? And once the camp finally returns again to Cuba – this time, under the United States as supreme arbiter of global law and its exceptions – is settler colonialism irrelevant to its form? Does settler colonialism represent only a historical footnote to U.S. rule at Guantanamo Bay, as representative of an unprecedented scope of power in the contemporary world? Or does the ongoing life of settler colonialism in fact condition and produce all that is new and transformative about that power? Scholars can trace how the U.S. establishment of a ‘zone of indistinction’ for ‘enemy combatants’ on settled Indigenous lands learns from the conquest of Indigenous peoples and its naturalisation, which remain the state’s foundational and sustained activity. Regardless of the answers to my questions, the evidence that they have been unimaginable in theory of biopower – even if a theorist cites settler situations – indicates that settler colonialism remains naturalised within theory and requires a new genealogy to be transformed. Scholars must not interpret modern state biopolitics or its extrapolations in global governance as recent rather than deeply historical phenomena. Nor should we let the preeminent role of any settler state in those processes appear to be the action of ‘the West’, without specifying how settler colonialism acts as the West’s leading edge by establishing grounds for the globalisation and universalisation of its governance. The biopolitics of settler colonialism sustain in the persistence of settler states, and we must interpret their activities as precisely enacting settler colonialism. These notably include the proliferation of Western modernity and liberal governance using methods first learned and still defended by settlement. National resistance to incorporation in the body of Western law continues to result in being placed in the camp. The power of Western law demands incorporation and justifies excision by containing the differences it encounters in a globalizing world: a process highlighted already by Indigenous peoples who confront the West and its law as settler colonial. In conclusion, I hope my analysis illuminates a key implication of Agamben’s work: that ‘if today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri’. 45 Agamben’s statement acknowledges here a longstanding premise of the state of exception, that anyone incorporated into Western law may be assigned to this state: as the defiant son is eliminated by the father in exception to their bond, so the law excises people to constitute a People that returns to conformance with its rule. Yet his statement clearly foregrounds a more recent temporality in which proliferating permutations of the state of exception seem to blur its target, and suggest – using Butler’s paraphrase – that today ‘we are all potentially exposed to this condition’. 46 I submit that how Agamben’s statement reads to you depends largely on whom you think he means by ‘we’. Some of us will always appear to be part of ‘the People’ Agamben perceives within the body of Western law, as if our consanguinity is not in question until confronted by what we do with it. Some of us, however, only appear within the body of Western law once ‘recognition’ of consanguinity arrives as a violence to destroy collective and resistant difference. Thus, today, we are all exposed to bare life not because we appear similarly to Western law, but only to the extent that we are all caught distinctly in the hierarchies that structure its persistently colonial formation. While I expect this point is not lost on my readers, it bears repeating. Ongoing reaction to the U.S. Patriot Act or the war on terror by many white Europeans and white settlers suggests that their potential exposure to bare life comes as an unwelcome surprise. Produced by the securitisation of liberal modernity, white liberal subjects might think that the Act or the war abrogate freedoms promised by a law that should protect them – the very law that they invite racialised and colonised peoples to affirm, as if extending its rule leads to liberation rather than subjection. Yet if we situate the Patriot Act or the war on terror in context of settler colonialism, as does Indigenous feminist theorist Andrea Smith, we can ask what shifts ‘if we understand the Bush regime not as the erosion of U.S. democracy but as its fulfillment? If we understand American democracy as premised on the genocide of indigenous peoples?’47 Such a perspective informs alliances by Palestinians and Indigenous Americans who critique the war on terror for having linked white supremacy, Orientalism, and racial nationalism to reinforce the United States and Israel as settler colonial states. In such a light, Agamben’s assertion might suggest that ‘we’ are all exposed to bare life to the extent that the colonial exception and its universalisation within Western law now mark all peoples for elimination just as Indigenous peoples always were and still are marked. Yet, conversely, if Agamben names an exception that settlers assigned to others now being potentially assigned to them, then for all of us to be exposed to bare life is to potentially position us all as settlers. I write provocatively here to suggest that a normative relationality between ‘Indigenous’ and ‘settler’ structures all logics of inclusion and exclusion in settler law and, therefore, in its universalisation as Western law. Scholars must interrogate how this power-laden distinction imbues not only settler societies, but also their conditioning of liberal modernity along global scales. We must theorise settler colonialism as historical grounds for the globalisation of biopower, and as an activity producing biopower in the present that requires denaturalising critique.