Settler common sense

Settler colonialism has been characterized as a structure, a system, and a logic. However, how do varied administrative projects of settlement and accompanying legal categories, geographies, and subjectivities become part of the everyday life of non-Natives? How do they come to shape settler self-understandings in ways that are not experienced as falsifiable philosophical propositions or as an integrated public policy program? Affective networks need to be explored as part of understanding how settler colonial governmentality comes to be lived as the self-evident conditions of possibility for (settler) being. This essay addresses that feeling of givenness and the kinds of social trajectories from which it emerges and which it engenders – a set of dynamics that can be described as settler common sense. Instead of suggesting that quotidian forms of settler sensation, self-hood, and possession follow axiomatically from policy formulations and official legal geography, it argues that the (shifting) parameters of settler governance help provide orientation, inclination, and momentum for non-Native experiences of the everyday.