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  • Introduction: Settler Colon...
    Castellanos, M. Bianet

    American quarterly, 12/2017, Letnik: 69, Številka: 4
    Journal Article

    While recent forays to bring postcolonial studies in conversation with American Indian studies and to frame indigenous Latinx communities within a settler colonial paradigm gesture toward new engagements with the global South, these efforts remain focused on North America.1 The term itself is difficult to translate.4 We are left with the quandary of debating who is a settler....few scholars in Latin America are familiar with this body of work because of a lack of Spanish and Portuguese translations.Efforts to distinguish regimes of colonialism in the Americas by their method of dispossession, as rooted in either land or labor expropriation, ends up reproducing binaries (land/labor, settler/native, Latinx/Latin American) that mask articulations spanning imperial and colonial regimes.5 The emphasis on binaries risks reproducing a monolithic, self-contained theory of settler colonialism lacking historical and relational specificity, the very project initially challenged by Patrick Wolfe.6 We advance an analytic project that acknowledges the multiple iterations of settler colonial projects that have been instantiated within and beyond postcolonizing societies.7 Scholars of Latin America have relied on theories of “coloniality” to account for the production of racialized power as a hegemonic and historical project.8 Coloniality is a cognitive mode of power based on a “new perspective of knowledge within which non-Europe was the past, and because of that inferior, if not always primitive.”To challenge the “brute binary division” of models of coloniality, scholars like Lisa Lowe and Evelyn Nakano Glenn propose a comparative and relational model that illuminates colonialism’s spatial and temporal projects.12 Cognizant of the diverse experiences and histories that have shaped indigenous communities in the Americas, the essays connect these distinctive geographies, histories, and intimacies by identifying and historicizing settler colonial projects in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and the United States.