Settler colonial ‘elimination’ operates through assimilation, not just homicide

Evidence

Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base.… In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 420

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that settler-colonial elimination is an ongoing organizing principle with positive, assimilationist strategies.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘rock to be removed’ language in the previous passage resonates with the sacrificial-logic frame in ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses.’
• SHARE: Worth sending to a friend into decolonial theory: the counterintuitive claim that miscegenation and native citizenship are elimination strategies.
• XREF: connects to: Settler-colonial elimination is a permanent structural principle, not a one-time event. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 543