Session 5: Deconstructing Settler Colonialism

Key Questions

• What is settler colonialism?

• What is the relationship between settler colonialism and the prison industrial complex?

• How can we understand the relationship between settler colonialism and racial capitalism? How can we make these connections clearer?

• How can our movements for abolition better incorporate the analytic of settler colonialism into our organizing, coalition-building, and strategizing?

Required Readings

• Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates, “Introduction”

• Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, “Dreams of the New Land”

Supplementary Materials

• Book: Lorgia García-Peña, Borders of Dominicanidad, “Of Bandits and Wenches: The US Occupation (1916-1924) and the Criminalization of Dominican Blackness”

• Article: Nick Estes, “The Empire of All Maladies” (PDF)

• Podcast: The Red Nation, “Abolition and Covid-19” with Nicolás Cruz, Mohamed Shehk, Emmy Rakete, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore

• Poem: Shailja Patel, “Migrant Song”

• Visual Art: Dylan Miners, “No Bans on Stolen Lands” (PDF)

• Primary Source: American Indian Movement (AIM) Trail of Broke Treaties (1972)

• Primary Source: The Red Nation, “10 Point Program” (2015)

Recommended Materials

• Jalil Mutaquim, We Are Our Own Liberators: Selected Prison Writings, “A Case Against United States Domestic (Neo) Colonialism: for the National POW Amnesty Campaign”

• A. Naomi Paik, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II, “Just to Stay Alive”

• Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, “Chapter 1”

• Rustbelt Abolition Radio with Kelly Lytle Hernández

Exercise

1. How would you draw the relationship between prisons and formation of national boundaries in the U.S. context? What is the function of policing and prisons in the U.S. nation state?

2. The Abolition & COVID-19 podcast made the case for an internationalist abolitionist movement. How would you draw or depict connections between different abolitionist presences or places?

Reading Guide

1. Kelly Lytle Hernández distinguishes between settler colonialism and other forms of colonialism (p. 7). What is the central objective of settler colonial societies and what does this mean for Native societies?

2. Kelly Lytle Hernández begins City of Inmates, “Mass incarceration is mass elimination. This is the punchline of the book.” How does her argument build upon the concept and history of settler colonialism? What does her argument add to understandings (from this and previous sessions) about the roots of imprisonment? How do such arguments help us to understand racial and class inequalities of the COVID-19 pandemic?

3. Robin Kelley’s chapter, “Dreams of the New Land,” discusses the centrality of real and imagined lands within Black radical thought. What meanings of freedom have been constructed through dreams of a New Land? What relationships to place, citizenship, mobility (or travel), and the future have these dreams offered?

Questions for Supplementary Readings

1. How does Ruthie Wilson Gilmore’s discussion of abolition as presence build on the dreams of a New Land that Kelley traces? 

2. Nick Estes argues that, “colonialism is not only a contest over territory, but over the meaning of life itself.” What meanings of life have been advanced together with U.S. settler and imperial conquest for land? How do anticolonial politics challenge “terminal narratives” about history and COVID-19? (You might also consider AIM’s Trail of Broken Treaties.)

3. Lorcia Garcia-Peña’s book focuses on how US imperialism has contributed to the drawing of racial boundaries between the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the United States. She writes, “At the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly during the US military regime, Hispanophile ideology fused with US paternalistic discourse--which was also a discourse of racial anxiety--contributing to the further erasure of black bodies from the nation and its archive” (72). How was anti-Black racism marshaled by U.S. occupying forces and Dominican elites who opposed U.S. occupation? What (settler) colonial ideas did US officials and politicians draw on to rationalize US claims to this territory? What ideas of gender and masculinity did they invoke?