Formations of United States Colonialism ed. by Alyosha Goldstein (review)

Formations of United States Colonialism addresses a couple of important questions: What is settler colonialism and how can the concept be deployed to help us better understand the history and present of colonialism? In a smart introduction, editor Alyosha Goldstein asserts that settler colonialism is a composite of disruptive, violent and incomplete formations, troubled by persistent resistances, in varying locales and time periods. The volume features an impressive set of rigorous essays on the coloniality of the United States, itself a “volatile assemblage” of discourses, practices, events, actors and institutions (2). The topics pursued include the politics of recognition, American football, racial capitalism, multiculturalism, gender, cartography, law, and translation. I highly recommend the book for both the insightful depth with which it explores the practices of settler colonialism and the range of topics, cases and time periods the contributors examine so well. My task then is to provide a sense of the array of flavors and some appropriate pairings one can expect to enjoy in this hearty collection.

Joanne Barker’s opening chapter analyzes the Delaware Tribe’s (Lenape) effort to gain federal recognition, which, among other things, required producing a narrative of historical continuity and geopolitical distinctiveness cleansed of the colonial practices that disrupted and displaced their people, land, and culture. To Barker, such narratives require the “negation of Native humanity—grief, loss, pain, passion, joy—and the foreclosure of a Native future” (52). If accomplished, then “dehumanized, dehistorized, deculturated—the tribe’s existence is then recognized” (50). Via this analysis, Barker’s chapter draws out the epistemological, ontological, and political presumptions of US colonialism. We see these presumptions exposed further in Fa‘nofo Lisaclaire Uperesa’s chapter on the influence of American-style football in American Samoa since the 1970s. The presence and influence of football exemplifies and is productive of the complicated intersection between “local agendas and desires for status and upward mobility” of Samoans and the “longer history of US strategies of empire and projects of modernization” (218). Uperesa sheds light on colonial formations in their “nonsettler character” (228), in which the focus is on labor less than on land. We see here the imperatives of capitalism and US imperial hegemony in Samoa, as well as the complex expressions of Samoan agency.

Similarly, the chapters by Manu Vimalassery and Barbara Krauthamer analyze the relationship between colonialism and racial capitalism in the United States. For Vimalassery, the context is the exploitation and resistance of Chinese workers in the construction of the Central Pacific railroad on Paiute territory in the late 1860s. The Central Pacific claim to Indigenous sovereign territory was a form of “counter-sovereignty,” a reactive mechanism serving intertwined colonial-capitalist interests (88). Even more compellingly, Vimalassery draws out the epistemological implications of the role of rumors that offer a “democratic form of communication” (90) among non-dominant peoples while also having value for “settlers who naturalize their history and presence on the land” (95). For scholars of colonialism, a major lesson here is that “an empirical, settled explanation of this story” (97) is impossible to tell because colonial formations are always in process, a moving target if you will. Similarly, Krauthamer’s study of early nineteenth-century American missionary work concerning the enslavement of Black people by the Choctaw nation finds that “the sources do not present a stable and straightforward narrative of colonial domination” (142). Many missionaries opposed slavery and even saw it as a sign of Indian laziness, but these missionaries concurred with slaveholders that Black people were not ready for full liberation, even while they found commonalty with Black slaves on such matters as Christianity. And for their part, some Indigenous nations defended slaveholding as a matter of national sovereignty. Krauthamer’s study blurs the lines between colonizer and colonized, and as with Vimalassery she advises historians to bring a “critical eye” to sources so as not to diminish or erase the agency of non-dominant parties (154).

When agency is acknowledged, though, it often occurs through an assimilative multicultural framework that serves...