Patrick Wolfe
Biographic Data
| ID | 433060 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patrick Wolfe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patrick |
| FAMILY NAME | Wolfe |
| SIGNATURE | WOLFE P |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2137 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 14 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
History and Imperialism
History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism - 1
Chapter 4 – Structure and Event Settler Colonialism, Time, and the Question of Genocide
Israeli Practices of Governance in Palestine
By the standards of historical and anthropological scholarship, Israel constitutes a colonial settler regime whose certain features may differ from those exhibited by other European settler regimes. Yet, in the larger scheme of things it shares with other such regimes the displacement of the indigenous population, seizure of their territory, the passing of racially biased laws that discriminate against the native population, and reliance on viole…
Traces of History
Traces of History presents a new approach to race and to comparative colonial studies. Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on Aboriginal people in Australia, on Blacks and Native Americans in the United States, on Ashkenazi Jews in Western Europe, on Arab-Jews in Israel/Palestine, and on people of African descent in Brazil, this book shows how race marks and reproduces the differe…
Settler colonial logics and the neoliberal regime
It is often assumed that while both capitalism and the modern state may originate in processes such as primitive accumulation, imperialism and colonialism, and conquest, modernization in both the political and economic spheres gradually leaves those stages behind, allowing for some form of cosmopolitan transnational globality to emerge. In particular, settler colonialism and primitive accumulation have been understood to belong to early stages of…
What Is Settler Colonialism? (for Leo Delano Ames Jr.)
The question that titles this article is deceptively simple. It invites answers that do not, and cannot, exist. One can only address the remainder of a settler colonial project, particularly one as successful as the United States. It is impossible to write about that which cannot be known, and yet there is an ethical imperative to do so. In looking for answers to the question of settler colonialism, I have only a narrative, one that tries to resi…
Recuperating Binarism
In the contemporary Western academy, especially in the USA, the repudiation of binarism partakes of a certain sacredness. Not only are its premises unquestionable, though they certainly are. More s
"Aloha 'Oe"
Hawai'i's most renowned song, "Aloha 'Oe," was composed by Queen Lili'uokalani before she was deposed by missionary settlers. Circulating in the cultural imaginary since the late nineteenth century, "Aloha 'Oe" was transformed from a love song into a dirge that erased the sovereign rights of Lili'uokalani in and beyond Hawai'i. This article theorizes "settler colonial nostalgia" as a gendered material and symbolic process of effecting indigenous …
An Account of the Dakota-US War of 1862 as Sacred Text
Fluent Dakota-speaking elders Clifford Canku and Michael Simon have translated from Dakota into English fifty letters written by three-dozen Dakota prisoners of the 1862 US-Dakota War. Both translators are Dakota Presbyterian ministers as well as traditional Sun Dancers, and are descended from two of the letter writers. Many letter writers, like the translators, were Christian Dakota who still followed some of the traditional ways. Dr. Canku and …
A Global Potlatch
This article identifies a seminal instance of Indigenous influence on Western thought. It does so by revealing a form of idea power exercised by Indigenous Americans: the power to transmit messages through the medium of people who came to meet and learn from them. In 1894, the Kwakwaka'wakw people of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, invited the anthropologist Franz Boas to take part in their system of Indigenous governance, the potlatch. At a …
The Settler Complex
Introduction
"There's Something in the Water"
This paper seeks to decentralize the human and interrogate the ways in which settler colonialism shapes the land itself by engaging with indigenous epistemologies that take seriously notions of place, relationship with the land, and the spatially located lifeways of non-human beings. Analyzing public discourse around the ongoing lawsuit filed by the Humane Society against the states of Oregon and Washington and the Columbia River Indian tribes ov…
Stitching Osage Governance into the Future
The writers of the 2006 Osage Constitution had to work against processes of settler colonialism which attempt to deny Indigenous peoples a political future. The Constitution provides a foundation, but much work still remains in order to build a strong Osage Nation that can truly serve its people. This paper uses the metaphor of Osage ribbon work to envision such a future for Osage governance, moving away from the binaries that underwrite colonial…
"The Last Bastion of Colonialism"
This article outlines and interrogates the neglected settler-colonial discourse of White Appalachians, in particular their construction of a White indigeneity. In order to justify occupation and reconcile themselves to the wider settler-colonial society, influential settler Appalachian scholars and activists positioned themselves as a colonized Indigenous people, advancing the once-paradigmatic Colonialist model of Appalachian exploitation. This …
All the Eagles and the Ravens in the House Say Yeah
This paper explores how hip-hop artists mobilize sound and style to manage loss, build new futures, and create resilient communities. Embracing an "untraditional" medium, young people contest settler violence and hegemonies of shame by expressing unique, politicized possibilities of being Indigenous, or what I am calling (ab)originality: a style of being first, fresh, and foremost. Heritage is an act of reverent rebellion: an individual honors co…
Challenging Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Queer Politics
By centralizing the experiences of seven, urban, self-identified Two-Spirit Indigenous people in Toronto, this paper addresses the settler-colonial complexities that arise within contemporary queer politics: how settler colonialism has seeped into Pride Toronto's contemporary Queer politics to normalize White queer settler subjectivities and disavow Indigenous Two-Spirit subjectivities. Utilizing Morgensen's settler homonationalism, the authors u…
Desire, Settler Colonialism, and the Racialized Cowboy
In this paper, I argue that settler colonialism is a project of desire, and that attention to desire is particularly useful for understanding the relationship between racialized subjects, whose access to political power in settler regimes is tenuous and uneven. Drawing upon psychoanalytically-inflected theories of race, I examine how this desire is articulated, and look to its effects. To do so, I offer a reading of the 2004 South Asian-American …
American Indian Culture and Research Journal
Front matter
Driving with the Driven
This paper offers a re(-)view of a landscape montage called the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. The United States National Park Service has placed trail markers along county, state and interstate roadways that generally parallel one route taken by Cherokee Indians who were forced to migrate from the southeast United States to "Indian Territory" west of the Mississippi River during the early part of the nineteenth century. The American roa…
Sovereignty
This book brings together some of the fresh and original writing on sovereignty. Sovereignty's many dimensions are approached from multiple perspectives and experiences. It is viewed globally as an international question; locally as an issue contested between Natives and settlers; and individually as survival in everyday life. Through all this diversity and across the many different national contexts, the chapters in this collection address each …
Against the Intentional Fallacy
It has often been observed that, though the outcomes of US Indian law and policy have been consistently negative for Indian peoples, this consistency is belied in the rhetoric of judges and Indian-affairs officials. This article makes the further argument that this legitimatory rhetoric has received endorsement from a liberal-individualist style of historical and legal-studies scholarship that privileges judges’ and policymakers’ intentions, as i…
Purchase by Other Means
This article questions the singularity of the Palestine Nakba. It highlights some of the historical preconditions that enabled the Nakba to occur, revealing it to have been a consolidation rather than a point of origin. The preconditions that had equipped the Zionists for settlement before they first set foot in Palestine combined economic, technological, military, cultural and moral attributes that were the cumulative outcome of centuries of Eur…
Arabic Translation
This article was originally published in English as: Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387-409. DOI: 10.1080/14623520601056240. This translation is published with the permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd (www.tandfonline.com). Original English abstract: The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life---or, at least, …
After the Frontier
This article seeks to chart the shifting post-frontier strategies whereby Indian societies were incorporated into US society. Recognised as techniques of settlement, US policies that have been viewed as discordant or antithetical emerge as complementary implementations of the settler colonial logic of elimination. The article discusses three of these strategies: Indian removal, general allotment, and blood quantum criteria, arguing that scholars …
Universalism and Its Discontents
Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native
The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life-or, at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be-indeed, often are-contests for li
On Being Woken Up
In the wake of decolonisation, an increasing number of analyses turned the ethnographic gaze onto anthropology itself. Humbler postcolonial strategies emerged, designed to democratise anthropology's intercultural staging by means of an exchange of dialogue (Crapanzano 1977, 1980; Dwyer 1977, 1982). Though sensitive to the backdrop of neocolonialism, however, these strategies largely ignored anthropology's own cultural genealogy in favour of a mor…
Traces of History
Traces of History presents a new approach to race and to comparative colonial studies. Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on Aboriginal people in Australia, on Blacks and Native Americans in the United States, on Ashkenazi Jews in Western Europe, on Arab-Jews in Israel/Palestine, and on people of African descent in Brazil, this book shows how race marks and reproduces the differe…
History and Imperialism
After the Frontier
This article seeks to chart the shifting post-frontier strategies whereby Indian societies were incorporated into US society. Recognised as techniques of settlement, US policies that have been viewed as discordant or antithetical emerge as complementary implementations of the settler colonial logic of elimination. The article discusses three of these strategies: Indian removal, general allotment, and blood quantum criteria, arguing that scholars …
Race and racialisation
Comments on the similarity of the racial regimes experienced by indigenous peoples in Australia and the United States. Threat of sharing the social space experienced by Native Americans; Challenges to heterogeneity faced by Australian aborigines
Corpus nullius
The coexistence of the rhetoric of human freedom that has characterised the US Government's ‘war on terror’ and the denial of due process to those who have been dubbed ‘enemy combatants’ is by no m
Can the Muslim Speak? an Indebted Critique
Book reviewed in this article: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
White man's flour
The Revealing Fiction of Henry Adams
HENRY ADAMS wrote two novels in his life, but he never publicly admitted his authorship of either of them. Democracy was published anonymously in 188o, while Esther appeared under the pseudonym of Frances Snow Compton in 1884. His authorship was not made public until 1921 and 1918 respectively because Adams preferred to make his name by historical writings.? Significantly, however, upon completing his History of the United States during the Admin…
On Being Woken Up
In the wake of decolonisation, an increasing number of analyses turned the ethnographic gaze onto anthropology itself. Humbler postcolonial strategies emerged, designed to democratise anthropology's intercultural staging by means of an exchange of dialogue (Crapanzano 1977, 1980; Dwyer 1977, 1982). Though sensitive to the backdrop of neocolonialism, however, these strategies largely ignored anthropology's own cultural genealogy in favour of a mor…
White man's flour
History and Imperialism
Settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology
Text and context - anthropology and settler colonialism white manAs flour - virgin birth in anthropology and Australian settler discourse science, colonialism and anthropology - the logic of global transformation mother-right - sex and property in Victorian anthropology totemism yesterday, today and tomorrow - Victorian anthroplogyAs eternal dichtomy survival in paradism shift - E.B. Taylor and the problem of text repressive authenticity
Land, Labor, and Difference
Can the Muslim Speak? an Indebted Critique
Book reviewed in this article: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
Race and racialisation
Comments on the similarity of the racial regimes experienced by indigenous peoples in Australia and the United States. Threat of sharing the social space experienced by Native Americans; Challenges to heterogeneity faced by Australian aborigines
The World of History and the World-as-History
Theories of imperialism emanating from outside the Marxist tradition have generally presented themselves as exceptions. This might well have surprised Karl Marx, who preceded the great global controversy on imperialism and never used the term himself. Yet this did not stop the majority of theorists of imperialism from claiming to be furthering his ideas. To trace the historical career of the term, therefore, it is as well to start with Marx. Marx…
Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native
The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life-or, at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be-indeed, often are-contests for li
Corpus nullius
The coexistence of the rhetoric of human freedom that has characterised the US Government's ‘war on terror’ and the denial of due process to those who have been dubbed ‘enemy combatants’ is by no m
Universalism and Its Discontents
After the Frontier
This article seeks to chart the shifting post-frontier strategies whereby Indian societies were incorporated into US society. Recognised as techniques of settlement, US policies that have been viewed as discordant or antithetical emerge as complementary implementations of the settler colonial logic of elimination. The article discusses three of these strategies: Indian removal, general allotment, and blood quantum criteria, arguing that scholars …
Sovereignty
This book brings together some of the fresh and original writing on sovereignty. Sovereignty's many dimensions are approached from multiple perspectives and experiences. It is viewed globally as an international question; locally as an issue contested between Natives and settlers; and individually as survival in everyday life. Through all this diversity and across the many different national contexts, the chapters in this collection address each …
Against the Intentional Fallacy
It has often been observed that, though the outcomes of US Indian law and policy have been consistently negative for Indian peoples, this consistency is belied in the rhetoric of judges and Indian-affairs officials. This article makes the further argument that this legitimatory rhetoric has received endorsement from a liberal-individualist style of historical and legal-studies scholarship that privileges judges’ and policymakers’ intentions, as i…
Purchase by Other Means
This article questions the singularity of the Palestine Nakba. It highlights some of the historical preconditions that enabled the Nakba to occur, revealing it to have been a consolidation rather than a point of origin. The preconditions that had equipped the Zionists for settlement before they first set foot in Palestine combined economic, technological, military, cultural and moral attributes that were the cumulative outcome of centuries of Eur…
Arabic Translation
This article was originally published in English as: Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387-409. DOI: 10.1080/14623520601056240. This translation is published with the permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd (www.tandfonline.com). Original English abstract: The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life---or, at least, …
What Is Settler Colonialism? (for Leo Delano Ames Jr.)
The question that titles this article is deceptively simple. It invites answers that do not, and cannot, exist. One can only address the remainder of a settler colonial project, particularly one as successful as the United States. It is impossible to write about that which cannot be known, and yet there is an ethical imperative to do so. In looking for answers to the question of settler colonialism, I have only a narrative, one that tries to resi…
Recuperating Binarism
In the contemporary Western academy, especially in the USA, the repudiation of binarism partakes of a certain sacredness. Not only are its premises unquestionable, though they certainly are. More s
"Aloha 'Oe"
Hawai'i's most renowned song, "Aloha 'Oe," was composed by Queen Lili'uokalani before she was deposed by missionary settlers. Circulating in the cultural imaginary since the late nineteenth century, "Aloha 'Oe" was transformed from a love song into a dirge that erased the sovereign rights of Lili'uokalani in and beyond Hawai'i. This article theorizes "settler colonial nostalgia" as a gendered material and symbolic process of effecting indigenous …
An Account of the Dakota-US War of 1862 as Sacred Text
Fluent Dakota-speaking elders Clifford Canku and Michael Simon have translated from Dakota into English fifty letters written by three-dozen Dakota prisoners of the 1862 US-Dakota War. Both translators are Dakota Presbyterian ministers as well as traditional Sun Dancers, and are descended from two of the letter writers. Many letter writers, like the translators, were Christian Dakota who still followed some of the traditional ways. Dr. Canku and …
A Global Potlatch
This article identifies a seminal instance of Indigenous influence on Western thought. It does so by revealing a form of idea power exercised by Indigenous Americans: the power to transmit messages through the medium of people who came to meet and learn from them. In 1894, the Kwakwaka'wakw people of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, invited the anthropologist Franz Boas to take part in their system of Indigenous governance, the potlatch. At a …
The Settler Complex
Introduction
"There's Something in the Water"
This paper seeks to decentralize the human and interrogate the ways in which settler colonialism shapes the land itself by engaging with indigenous epistemologies that take seriously notions of place, relationship with the land, and the spatially located lifeways of non-human beings. Analyzing public discourse around the ongoing lawsuit filed by the Humane Society against the states of Oregon and Washington and the Columbia River Indian tribes ov…
Stitching Osage Governance into the Future
The writers of the 2006 Osage Constitution had to work against processes of settler colonialism which attempt to deny Indigenous peoples a political future. The Constitution provides a foundation, but much work still remains in order to build a strong Osage Nation that can truly serve its people. This paper uses the metaphor of Osage ribbon work to envision such a future for Osage governance, moving away from the binaries that underwrite colonial…
Sociology (25 works) · History (23 works) · Political science (23 works) · Law (19 works) · Colonialism (16 works) · Politics (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights (10 works) · Philosophy (8 works)