The Perversity of Colonial Desire: The Erotics of the Settler Unconscious

Abstract:This article engages a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of the process of subjectification that produces the settler as a social subject. The analysis is rooted in a reading of Lacan through Deleuze and Guattari, which the article argues may offer an alternative nonessentialist and more historically grounded analysis. Specifically, this article attends to the role that the fetish plays in the ongoing cultural appropriation of Indigenous spirituality and culture within an ongoing neocolonial material context.