Settler colonialism is founded on a method of biophysical control – the 1ac investment in ‘green tech’ furthers this logic

If settler colonialism is understood narrowly as the occupation of stolen land decolonization must be deoccupation. The complexities of decolonization and its colloquial use within liberal education has been powerfully laid out in Tuck and Yang’s (2012) essay, “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” They argue that anything other than decolonization as deoccupation reduces decolonization to a metaphor taken up by settlers to disguise continued settlement or to avoid imagining the possibilities of actual deoccupation. This also leaves the question of whether it is possible to decolonize a 28 society that is still actively colonizing. As such, in an effort to give credence to Tuck and Yang’s argument, this essay does not claim a decolonial stance but rather attempts to take on the anti-colonial task of capturing settler colonialism in motion, in the present, and as it is disguising itself within what appears to be something else. Within this study, that something else is climate mitigation. Settler colonialism as a mode of domination premised on ongoing, rather than a legacy of, occupation foregrounds the need to first imagine the possibility of ceasing the progression and transformation of settler control before decolonization can be resuscitated from its metaphorical usage. Settler colonialism is a landed cultural politic in that settlers are always defined in relation to its genesis within a particular location as a fundamentally temporal orientation. Veracini claims that “settler colonialism is immediately premised on a foundational and historical situated movement (settlers move in from elsewhere at a particular point in time)” (p. 96). Settler narratives construct time as a palindrome within a particular locale as settler society is imagined through “a perception of a constant struggle is juxtaposed against an ideal of ‘peace’ that can never be reached, settler projects embrace and reject violence at the same time”(p. 77). Settler time is characterized by the resemblance between past and future, either as a progressive or degenerative tendency. Further, settler time is established within the settler narrative form and is leveraged in the creation of subjectivities. Based on this sense of time, settler subjectivity is defined by a sense of self characterized through an individual, rather than imperial, sovereign capacity. This sovereign capacity, the capacity to govern oneself and others, is carried by individuals who think of themselves as ‘founders of political orders’ (p. 53) establishing a truer 29 society and an “uncorrupted version of the original social body’ (p. 77). Further, because ‘settler citizenship is seen as conditioned on property of and residency on the land’ (p. 80), settlers are also characterized by anxieties over ‘the need to biopolitically manage their respective domestic domains’ (p. 16). The capacity to manage the population, or inclusion into the settler class, is a crucial marker of settler sovereignty. Finally, Veracini sees settler colonialism as a defensive project, which reproduces itself through an inherent disavowal within the settler through the “fantasy of communities devoid of disturbances or dislocations, and a situation where the transplanted settler collective would get back a jouissance that was historically taken away’ (p. 77).