On February 27th, 2024, I delivered a research presentation as part of a spring semester fellowship with the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus. The presentation draws on a recently completed chapter of my manuscript, which is likewise titled “The Settler’s Secret.”
I had previously presented a longer version of this presentation for the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin Madison on February 15, 2024, as part of their Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture Colloquium Series. My thanks go out to Drs. Allison Prasch, Rob Asen, Jennell Johnson, Rob Howard, Mary McCoy, and the graduate students of Communication Arts at UW Madison for extending this invitation and opportunity to share research.
- You can access a written transcript of the talk here (from UW Madison on 2/15/24)
- You can access the recorded presentation here (from the IAS at UMN-TC on 2/27/24)
Abstract/Synopsis: The presentation examines narrative tropes that characterize the psyche and worldview of the “settler subject”—the Western protagonist across stories of neocolonial conquest. Specifically, this settler subject adopts the role of detective, imagining themselves as a detector of atrocities while disavowing complicity in the systems of violence they discover. Rather than drawing on the detective’s substantive traits, this egoic position is triangulated by narrative tropes: analepsis (past), paralipsis (present), and prolepsis (future). Rhetorically, the prefixes ana-, para-, and pro- evoke forms of self-effacement that place the settler “in the middle of things,” as the main character in a story that is not about them. Analepsis establishes the settler’s narrative past by rewriting history, paralipsis enables the settler to acknowledge but disidentify with neocolonial acts, and prolepsis forecasts apocalyptic outcomes that perversely reinforce the settler’s need for continuous armament. Each trope also aligns with a psychoanalytic register – the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real, respectively – which manage the absent center of settler subjectivity. The discussion of each trope is paired with a unique collection of texts to demonstrate the dispersion of these subject-constituting tropes across coverage of contemporary, high-tech war.
Atilla Hallsby 