A Response to “On Colonial Unknowing”

This response to the editors of “On Colonial Unknowing” both acknowledges the vital intervention of their special issue and contests their characterization of settler colonial studies as an “academic field formation” marked by dogmatic and hermetic methodological tendencies. Settler colonial studies, we argue, is a still emergent subfield marked by a dynamic interchange with related fields and disciplinary formations. Settler colonial studies and its critique of a specific and contingent structure of violence has continuing utility, we suggest, not as a hegemonic discourse (a condition the field never aspired to), but rather as a supplement to adjacent field formations engaged in the critique of racialization and empire.