Breadcrumb
Adam Kirschâs colonial revisionism should shame his publishers
Last week, Adam Kirsch published a controversial in The Atlantic, based on a forthcoming book, criticising what he described as the âfalse narrativeâ of settler colonial studies.
Kirsch is not alone in his efforts at delegitimisation. In his 2023 Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, Nigel Biggar dismissed postcolonial approaches as something simply âfashionable, opening doors to posts, promotions and grantsâ. Robert Tombs, one of the founders of the project, argued that the entire field was âsophisticated propagandaâ.
Kirschâs intervention expands this new âanti-postcolonialâ trend to argue that the âideologyâ of settler colonialism fails to meet its mark when it comes to Israel/Palestine. He argues that Israel does not fit the profile of âEuropean settlers discovering a land that they consider âterra nulliusââ because Israel did not âerase or replaceâ Palestinians, but rather âcoexistsâ with them.
These two claims will sound quite bizarre to anyone with an introductory level awareness of postcolonial theories and approaches.
In omitting the work of numerous Global South scholars, Kirschâs essay reveals a severely deficient literature review that leads him to make the remarkable statement that â[t]he concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s by theorists in Australia, Canada, and the US, as a way of linking social evils in these countries today (âŠ) to their origin in colonial settlementâ.
Already in 1950, the famous Martinican scholar, Aimé Césaire, wrote in his classic Discourse on Colonialism that the key characteristic of colonialism was the impetus to civilise the so-called barbarian.
Colonialism is therefore defined not by European explorers claiming res nullius on behalf of their empires, but by the ârelations of domination and submissionâ that underpin it, that turn the coloniser into âprison guardâ and the indigenous person into an âinstrument of productionâ; a âthingâ.
Colonialism is a set of relations, not a specific period in history. It is entirely possible to argue that a postcolonial Global South state is colonially oppressing an indigenous population.
In fact, this is the state of the discipline in Latin America since at least the 1960s. In his influential 1969 book Sociology of Exploitation Mexican scholar Pablo GonzĂĄlez Casanova famously that in Latin America, Spanish domination was substituted for that of white elites of European descent, in such a way that âthe exploitation of the indigenous continues to have the same characteristics as in the time before independenceâ.
In other words, the Spanish empire is no more, but remain very much in place.
Colonialism is rooted in the present
Understanding colonialism as a set of relations of domination explains how and why Israelâs policies in Palestine are colonial in nature. As the famous Palestinian scholar Edward Said in his classic 1979 essay Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims, Zionists portray themselves as a movement âbringing civilization to a barbaric and/or empty localeâ.
It is this fact that allows Said to identify a key connection between Zionism and European colonialism, conceived as two types of imperialist praxis, both seeking to change supposedly âuselessly unoccupied territoriesâ into âuseful new versions of the European metropolitan societyâ.
Thus, a good decade before Kirschâs proposed origin date for the term, Said concludes that âeverything the Zionist did in Palestine they did of course as settler-colonialistsâ.
Similarly, in his 1973 book, Israel: A Colonial Settler State? French historian Maxime Rodinson concluded that Israelâs settler-colonial nature was an âobvious diagnosisâ, as its creation was âthe culmination of a process that fits perfectly into the great European-American movement of expansion (âŠ) whose aim was to settle new inhabitants among other peoples or to dominate them economically and politicallyâ.
In fact, according to Rodinson, that Zionism was a colonial ideology because it met the key requirement of establishing a relation of domination through a âmission civilisatriceâ was an âalmost unanimous accusationâ among the Arab intelligentsia of the 1970s. Kirsch simply never mentions them.
This lack of rigorous engagement with fundamental pieces of literature is also behind Kirschâs second misrepresentation, that the model of settler colonialism does not fit Israel because it âdid not erase or replace the people already living in Palestineâ.
And yet, as is well known, the Spanish colonial empire also did not (could not) eradicate the indigenous people of the Americas, preferring instead to set up what Peruvian decolonial scholar AnĂbal Quijano defines as a relation âof direct, political, social and cultural dominationâ.
In his 1992 Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality, Quijano offers a very simple answer to Kirschâs conundrum.
When indigeneity is not eradicated, the colonial structure of power produces âspecific social discriminationsâ, codified as âracial, ethnic, anthropological or nationalâ which are then âassumed to be objective, scientific categoriesâ of historical significance.
In other words, this type of colonialism produces what the International Court of Justice recently described as Israelâs system of racial segregation and apartheid against Palestinians.
Kirsch would probably reject this comparison to Latin America. In his article he suggests that the very concept of indigeneity is antisemitic, originating from 19th-century German philosophers who enabled the âblood-and-soil nationalismâ of Nazi Germany.
For Kirsch, indigeneity is the âirrationalâ idea that âdifferent peoples have incommensurable ways of being and knowing, rooted in their relationship to a particular landscapeâ.
This concept, however, is exactly the kind of essentialism that anticolonial Bolivian scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, an Aymara indigenous herself, criticises.
In her highly influential 2010 Châixinakax Utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization, she argues, that the liberal construction of indigeneity that Kirsch adopts uncritically âdenies the contemporaneity of these populations and excludes them from the struggles of modernityâ, turning them into rural stereotypes âin an almost theatrical display of alterityâ.
In other words, if Kirsch had bothered to read indigenous authors, he would know that they often also reject the concepts he criticises.
That Kirsch ignores this vast array of literature is, however, something that postcolonial scholars entirely predict.
Building on Argentinean scholar Enrique Dusselâs regarding the âgeopolitics of knowledgeâ, scholars like Quijano that the âperspective and concrete mode of producing knowledge is Eurocentrismâ. Global South scholars fully expect to be ignored by the Global North. The very existence of Kirschâs article then proves a key post-colonial point.
The claim that settler colonialism was developed as a concept in the 1990s in the Global North for entirely selfish Anglo-centric aims is absurd but entirely consistent with the predictions of postcolonial theory.
In reality, Global South scholars have concluded since at least the 1970s that Israelâs policies in Palestine are colonial in nature, in ways that refute Kirschâs key arguments: colonialism does not need to meet the paradigm of European imperial explorers claiming res nullius on behalf of their empires nor does it need to lead to the eradication or replacement of the indigenous population.
As Postcolonialism prescribes, Kirsch simply â and predictably â ignored these findings, and his publishers did not take the trouble to fact-check him.
Alonso Gurmendi is a Fellow in Human Rights & Politics at the London School of Economics & Political Scienceâs Department of Sociology.
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