Centering settler interiority depends on rendering the native as negligible.

Evidence

Killing an Arab is central to Camus’s drama, but “the Arab” is a negligible footnote to Meursault’s story. The plot proceeds to center the feelings of the white Frenchman, his travails between nihilism and numbness, and his existential vacillations between those poles and the spectrum of positions in between them. The native Arab sprawled dead on the coastline did not matter. To the story line, he only mattered as much as Meursault made him matter. The Arab was first a “black dot,” then moments later, a limp carcass. Then nothing more. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1173

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the reader’s parallel reading of Iftikhar and the broader global-synthesis project: the colonized figure is structurally marginal to the plot of the empire. — connects to: Overlaid settler landscapes make settlers unable to perceive Indigenous presence. — Kyle Whyte, Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and…, 83
• SHARE: Someone teaching The Stranger would want this: the Arab’s total narrative neglect despite being the plot’s engine.