Cultures of Resistance, Cultures of Potential: Anarchist Value-Practices, Settler Colonialism, and Indigenous Resurgence

Abstract

This dissertation weaves together diverse theoretical perspectives from anarchism, settler colonial studies, Indigenous resurgence and resistance, the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and social movement research to consider how anarchists in Southern Ontario approach the context of settler colonialism within their political practices and cultures, and how deeper anti-colonial practices might inform prefigurative approaches to the future. This work employs in-depth interviews to explore how anarchists engage with questions of context, land, history, and ongoing Indigenous resurgence, and the work still to be done to deepen anti-colonial politics.

Pierre Bourdieu’s (1998, 1990) habitus, capital, and field shed light on the ways that structures and practices are created and maintained, but also carry possibilities of change. Using his work I consider how core anarchist value-practices (Jeppesen, 2010), like anti-authoritarian practice, direct action, and prefigurative politics, persist within anarchist culture, and create a baseline of opposition to structures and systems of domination. This baseline, however, is lacking in a wider anti-colonial orientation that can be broadened through critical disruptions of anarchist theory and practice by Indigenous resurgence.

Interviews with anarchists highlight a number of critical tensions related to anti-colonial value-practices and affinities with Indigenous struggles. Solidarity, leadership, taking direction, committed politics, spirituality, and orientations to land and place are tensions where anarchists are considering the wider implications of broadening anti-colonial value-practices.

Engaging these tensions creates possibilities for ‘making time’ to work on anti-colonial value-practices, and more concretely orient anarchism towards prefigurative futures in relation to Indigenous resurgence. May Day, as a cultural and spiritual reference point embraced by anarchists, is one possibility for furthering anti-colonial value-practices. Connections to history, ancestry, land and place, and prefigurative possibilities are touchstones that can further inform anarchist movements and cultures. Anarchists can consider their own forms of ‘grounded normativity’ to orient them to the context of settler colonialism, but also to form complicit and accountable connections to their histories, the lands they inhabit, and the Indigenous resurgence movements they seek to support. These are potent starting points for considering how anarchist anti-colonial value-practices are already taking shape and can be deepened and expanded into the future.