“Such Are the Advantages of Autochthony”: Extracting Indigeneity through CanLit and Settler-Colonial Historiography

Abstract:

This essay looks at early work by two members of the so-called Calgary School of political philosophy, Barry Cooper and Tom Flanagan. I examine how these Western intellectuals draw on Canadian literary conventions and structuralist narratology to construct an extractivist and myth-critical settler colonial historiography that works to maintain the objective normativity of settler culture by assimilating Indigeneity into white supremacy. Cooper and Flanagan's work, I argue, effects cultural genocide by figuring settlers as the originary indigenes of the West in the territories currently called Canada; moreover, Flanagan's work, in which he argues Indigenous peoples are the originary genocidal settlers, is crucial to understanding how extractivism works according to a logic of elimination.


This article ““Such Are the Advantages of Autochthony”: Extracting Indigeneity through CanLit and Settler-Colonial Historiography” originally appeared in Poetics and Extraction 2 Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 253 (2023): 92-119.

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