Understanding the Settler Colonialism Movement (with Adam Kirsch)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 January 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

Under settler colonialism, you're either a settler or indigenous and the sin of the founding of America, Australia, and Israel, for example, is not just a past injustice but a perpetuating mistake that explains the present. Listen as poet, author, and literary critic Adam Kirsch explains how an academic theory helps us understand the protests against Israel on America's college campuses, the phenomenon of land acknowledgments, and more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
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0:36.7	Today is December 16th, 2020. My guest is poet, author, and literary critic Adam Kirsch.
0:43.3	He is an editor at the Wall Street Journal. His latest book published this year on our topic for today on settler colonialism, ideology, violence, and justice.
0:53.6	Adam, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:55.7	Thanks very much.
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1:07.1	And now we're going to talk about settler colonialism, a phrase that I had heard of, but never fully appreciated or understood until I read your very short, extremely provocative and interesting summary.
1:22.6	Thank you.
1:23.2	Let's start with the definition. What is settler colonialism?
1:33.3	Well, settler colonialism is an idea that is talked about a lot in the academy. I think if you've studied history or a lot of humanity subjects, social sciences in the last 15 years, you probably encountered the idea of settler colonialism.
1:43.3	And it's a term that's undergone some changes in meaning over time.
1:48.4	Really, it refers to sort of the best one-sentence definition I could give would be to say that it's the idea that countries founded by European colonialism,
1:59.9	primarily countries like the United States, Canada and Australia, and then often by extension Israel, are sort of permanently shaped by the original sin of colonization so that the countries, even hundreds of years after the original settlement, remain shaped by this settler colonial experience,
2:20.3	and that a lot of the injustices and problems, as critics see it, with those countries, can be explained by reference to that European settlement.
2:32.7	The idea of a settler colony is older than the last 15 years.
	...

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