Colonialism and genocides: notes for the analysis of the settler archive

In this chapter I propose to consider a Western settler consciousness as a discursive and ideological practice utilizing a 'settler archive' that was constituted through numerous passages of political, religious, and colonial histories during the last five centuries. Whereas the archeology of a number of other types of colonial imagination has been approached authoritatively already, the settler consciousness of the European gaze has yet to find its Edward Said. This archive---constantly tested, updated, added to, in progress, and continuously transforming through time---was (and is) readily available to be mobilized in different contexts and for different objectives.1 I propose to understand a settler mentality and its ultimately ethnocidal racism not as a full-fledged ideology-neither as a coherent conceptual system, nor as a discourse-but as a practice in which one can enter, slide, pause, and from which one can also depart in different moments. Individuals, groups, cultural and political movements, and obviously states have adopted this practice throughout history for purposes, in contexts, and with consequences extremely diverse