Settler Memory

Kevin Bruyneel is professor of politics at Babson College.
For more information about Kevin Bruyneel, visit the Author Page.

“Through the lens of settler masculinity and heteropatriarchy, the violence of dispossession, and the history of race, Bruyneel carefully deconstructs historical and contemporary events by confronting American collective settler memory that disavows genocide, dispossession, and the alienations of Indigenous peoples.”—Indiana Magazine of History

“Drawing on twenty years of experience teaching political theory, US politics, Indigenous studies, and critical race studies in the US, Bruyneel was faced with the challenge of how to incorporate and connect Indigenous politics and settler colonialism to these topics, especially the structures and practices of white supremacy and Black radical politics. Settler Memory responds to those challenges, refusing the too-often-taken approach of separating out Indigenous and critical race studies.”—American Quarterly

“Settler Memory offers a rich discussion on the power of collective remembrance that nuances concepts like the logic of elimination and colonial amnesia to compel readers to be accountable to the multiple histories of the white settler nation-state. . . . A crucial read for anyone working within settler colonial contexts.”—Native American Indigenous Studies

“Brilliantly cutting to the heart of the entwined politics of race and settler colonialism, Settler Memory argues that the ‘simultaneous presence and absence of Indigeneity’ in the collective memory of the US stymies an adequate theorization of and political response to white supremacy and oppression more generally.”—Theory & Event

“Kevin Bruyneel’s pathbreaking, indispensable book exposes the persistence of settler memory and lays out a path to resist it. The lessons are clear: there can be no freedom under the settler state, no justice without returning the land, no liberation without Indigenous sovereignty, no future without decolonization.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“As Black and Indigenous identities are needlessly pitted against one another within a white supremacist ideology, Bruyneel offers a way through, liberating key moments of America’s racial history from static retellings and centering Indigenous people in the nation’s present and future political life.”—Malinda Maynor Lowery, author of The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle