SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Settler colonialism is a specific configuration of the complex relationship between home and immigration. As an organized migration movement, settler colonialism is a political movement whose main aim is the construction of senses of home and belonging in new territories. Furthermore, as such a movement, settler colonialism is also a massive movement for the construction of physical homes for the colonizing population coupled with the destruction of local homes. Either concretely or more metaphorically, settler colonialism is thus an act of living inside depopulated homes. As a result, legitimacy regimes, legal means and land-use regulations render the homes of the colonized temporary and unstable. But precisely therefore, merely being at home becomes an act of resistance for the colonized. This chapter works through this dialectic of destruction and belonging, presenting the home in the colony as a political site, both of control and of resistance, exploring the political, cultural, economic, symbolic, and affective dimensions of the home in settler-colonial settings.