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Abstract:
How does settler-colonial imperialism operate in Asia, and what are the ways in which Asian Indigeneities become mobilised? To address this question, in 2017, I brought together scholars who are observing various settler-colonial and imperial dynamics and developments across Asia for a panel discussion titled ‘Asian Settler-Colonialisms and Indigeneities’ at the 116th annual American Anthropological Association conference. At that time, scholarly considerations about Asian land and resource extraction emphasised capitalism, development, and governmentality, with scant consideration of settler colonialism, even though the last remains a vital framework for understanding the structural nature of imperial projects (Wolfe 2006). Even the literature that adopted this frame drew its analysis primarily from Euro-American–centred examples, implicitly suggesting that settler colonialism is an innately Western phenomenon (Pels 1997). Yet, capitalist developments with imperial consequences continue to impact Asia at varying scales (Tsing 2005). Such contemporary developments, alongside long Asian imperial histories, including those of China, Japan, and India, complicate this assumption. This provokes questions such as: How does settler domination work when those involved in it are neither white nor from the West? How can we critically engage with this while not Orientalising this history as a cultural peculiarity or delinking it from the deep influence of Western empires?
About the Speaker:
Dawa Lokyitsang is a Tibetan American political and historical anthropologist. Her scholarship looks at Tibetan agency as an anticolonial effort in response to China’s developing imperial colonialism in Tibet. Her scholarship on Tibetan schools in India historicises the national agency of Tibetans in exile and examines how the preservation of their national and spiritual identity as Tibetans—an identity criminalised and securitised by China within Tibet itself—became grounds for community-building and movement-generating efforts that regularly unsettle China’s settler-colonial consumption of Tibet. Her scholarship on the decolonising agency of Tibetans thus sits at the intersection of developing Asian imperial colonialisms, reactive anticolonial nationalisms, and creative Indigenous sovereign futurism.