This course surveys the development of theories of settler colonialism and asks how applicable they are in their current state to nineteenth-century North America and its literatures. It's an open question, so we will also attempt to describe an approach to the nineteenth-century North America that accounts for it as a participant in global colonialism and imperialism while recognizing the complexity of North American cultures, political relations, and geographies.

We'll begin by looking at the gaps and occasional blindnesses in early colonial discourse studies and postcolonial studies developed on Caribbean, African, and Asian models that gave rise to settler colonialism as a scholarly focus. Next we'll read the two scholars most associated with theorizing settler colonialism, the Australians Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini. 

The widespread adoption of Wolfe's and Veracini's arguments among scholars of the US and Canada has given rise to a sustained critique of settler colonial studies from Indigenous Studies and African Diaspora Studies scholars in particular, so we will next look at those critiques, focusing on how these scholars have described the theories' intellectual problems and sociological effects in the academy. Historians of the US and Canada have pointed to the inadequacies of settler colonial theory to account for the complexity of political relations but also geographies--we will look at those as well.

Finally, we will move toward a revised notion of how to think about settler colonialism in North America with a review of some wider-ranging scholars on North American history and politics, including Vine Deloria Jr., Cedric Robinson, Gerald Horne, Taiaiake Alfred, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and others.

This course necessarily emphasizes theory and history; students should be familiar with the readings characteristic of US literature surveys of the period beforehand. Requirements include a presentation on one of the readings; an annotated bibliography; and a 15-20 page research paper.