The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism and the Limits of Foucault’s Historical Method

Abstract

This chapter looks at how the concept of biopolitics can be used to understand the settler colonial legal orders. The focus is on the evolution of the definition of ‘Indian status’ in the Indian Act, which is the central piece of legislation in Canada’s Indian administration regime. Historically, the legal concept of Indian status was used as a way to constitute a population in relation to colonial sovereignty, and later was adapted as a mechanism to internally dividing the population through complex forms of legal domination. Scholars have turned to Michel Foucault’s studies of biopolitics and racism to understand how settler colonial sovereignty relates to a population on a territory. This chapter argues that Foucault’s analysis was radically historically embedded in a way that shapes its relevance to understanding settler colonialism. In Foucault’s original analysis, racism emerges as tool of the state in the relation between territory and sovereignty, which was characteristic in feudal Europe. In settler colonial legal orders such as Canada, however, sovereignty’s relation to the population is constituted in the absence of a prior connection to the land.

Citation

Swiffen, A. and Paget, S. (2022), "The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism and the Limits of Foucault’s Historical Method", Sarat, A., Pavlich, G. and Mailey, R. (Ed.) Interrupting the Legal Person (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 87A), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 89-102. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-43372022000087A006