No Blank Slates

Abstract

Abstract In this roundtable discussion, the interlocutors interrogate the settler utopian logics underlying apparently liberatory movements within a North American context—such as radical queer and trans movements—to examine how these identities and politics tell narratives of liberation that reinscribe the aims of the settler colonial project under new names. Visions of radical utopias as yet to be realized (or, as yet to be colonized) discount the ongoing presence of Indigenous alternatives to the current settler colonial dystopian reality, and instead preserve a view of geographic and social space as blank and ready to be “improved” with a “new” model. In this discussion, the interlocuters argue against linear narratives of societal and environmental collapse that promise to bring about a future idealized world and instead propose ways for radical politics, particularly those espoused by non-Indigenous people, to disavow settler colonial mindsets.