TRACES OF HISTORY: ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES OF RACE - PATRICK WOLFE

I got this after seeing that Wolfe is considered a prominent voice in and one of the creators of the academic discipline of Settler-Colonial studies, which is an interest of mine. Additionally, he’s an Australian academic and I don’t usually hear from our Aussie siblings, which is a shame since they clearly have a long history of genocidal settler-colonial activities that should be considered alongside the ones I’m more familiar with in the Americas and Europe. Also, I’m constantly being mistaken for Austrainl here in Japan so it’s really been on my mind recently. Wolfe makes a bunch of really interesting and useful points in the book. He looks at a different situation in each chapter and highlights the ways that race is used as a tool in settler-colonial regime. As he points out, again and again, race is a tool, it serves a purpose and is put to use, “race is colonialism speaking” as he so memorably puts it. For instance, he points out how in the USA there are two large colonized groups, Native Americans and Blacks. First, we can see that one name refers to their land and the other two their body, which is what the YT regime is looking to take from each. Indigenous people are assigned to vanish and an imported labor group is destined to work this newly freed up land. This also explains why blood quantum laws are used to take people out of the category of Native, i.e. it is possible to not be Native enough, to be diluted into YTness, while the one drop rule means any percentage of Black ancestry renders one, functionally and legally, Black. This is because they need a large and clearly defined Black labor force and they need the Indians gone. He then pivots to Brazil to show how the reality on the ground effects race, not vice-versa, since there there are dozens and hundreds of very nuanced racial categories, because the goal is not to unite a YT majority (like it was/is in the USA) but rather to fracture a non-YT majority into competing factions. The book was full of interesting insights like this. Like I mentioned, it was interesting to read about how all this played out in Australia, it was fascinating to see what this meant in Brazil and elsewhere. There was a whole chapter about Israel which was quite illuminating in light of current events. Sadly, he writes that “Since even Israel couldn’t continue to rely of Western support if it embarked on a full-scale campaign of direct physical annihilation…” which has been proven untrue. He brings up a theory I’d never heard before from Arthur Koestler and Shlomo Sand that the large part of Ashkenazi population is descended from Khazar conversations in the 8th Century CE, which would add all sorts of layers and ironies to their history that is a bit mind-bending to fully consider. I’ll have to look more into that. Overall, I’d highly recommend this, especially if you’re from a settler-colony of any sort. It’s one of the clearest-eyed and insightful things I’ve read on the subject.