Colonialism, n. — The contemporary use of this term refers mainly to modern settler colonialism, or the unequal relationship displacing, depopulating, and disempowering indigenous peoples and enacted by various European sovereignties who spread their control across the planet. Jackson maintains that the term is derived from the Latin words colōnia and colonus, but the direct translations of these root words into English has imbued ideological significance into the etymology of the target word (Jackson 2018: 51). The subsequent impact of the imposed unequal relationship has raised questions about its interconnection with other ideological movements of the era, such as modernization and nation-building. The example of the ambiguous extent of colonial influence on contemporary society, because its influence is inextricable from the influence of other goals of Western societies at the time, reveals the necessarily undefinable aspect of this word as it gets lost in the rhetorical-ideological ambiguity of its root words.
The root words of this term have slightly different referents, which casts ideological confusion on the implementation of the term on modern settler colonialism. On one hand, colōnia refers to a “colony or settlement of conquered or annexed lands by Roman citizens” and applies to modern settler colonialism since American settler colonialism has been seen as a continuation of Greco-Roman project (Jackson 51-4). This suggests that colonialism focuses on the land conquered or annexed, while also acknowledging the violent seizure aspect through the use of the terms “conquered” and “annexed” to qualify that land. The Oxford English dictionary’s third definition of “annexed” appears as “added, attached, or appended as subordinate or supplementary; subjoined; rendered subject,” and this timeline of uses for this definition is the only one to include colonial implications starting as early as 1883 (OED). Thus, this root word acknowledges the land and the unequal dyadic relationship established to control it. The rhetorical significance of this etymology is a disregard for the people whose lives are impacted in the implementation of colonization, both as colonial subjects and as colonizers. On the other hand, colonus describes “someone who settles, cultivates or farms land,” which focuses the root of the word on people but continues to neglect the colonial subjects. This root word provides agency to colonizers as an ideological foundation through the act of cultivation, whose definitions in the OED refers specifically to “improve [land] and render fertile by husbandry” (OED cultivate). The implicit notion of improvement and the focus on the colonizer of colonus as a root word confirms that this etymology of the term adhered to the “civilizing mission” which was present in at least French colonial ideology. Through etymological analysis, any inquirer can discover that the two root words of the term possess a focus on either the land or the colonizer, with complete disregard for the ontology of the colonized peoples throughout the several decades of modern settler colonialism.
The focus that the root words infer connects to Western European societies’ other contemporaneous and ideological goals. Particularly noteworthy is the redefinition of humanity on the personal and societal level. There is significant emphasis on the modern self-creation project of humanity in postcolonial attempts to define colonialism because “it was as much about, among other things, bodily regimes, aesthetics, ethics, and the management of time as about the brute extraction of labor power or raw materials…” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2018: 71). Their suggestion here is that the Western European expansion across the globe offered these societies the opportunity to be self-referent in a way that their empires could not be before, as Comaroff and Comaroff say, in a Sartrian moment to “re-cognize one’s self as ‘native’” (73). Such realization plays into the nation-building ideology of the period, during which the imperial nations were determining themselves in an age of humanism, because the colonizers would feel themselves native to a nation rather than a land which one had conquered or originally come from. With this goal of autodetermination contemporaneous with the goal of colonialism to improve annexed lands across the globe, the overlapping epiphenomena complicate the knowing with certainty where colonialism begins and the rest of Western European modernism ends.
Fortunately, critical thinking has already addressed this ambiguity. Returning to Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masksas an analytical source text, the discourse on the ambiguity of colonialism asserts that “to have no certainty of judgment is the only certitude that Fanon’s conclusions demand” (Marriott 2018: ix). Therefore, any hope of determining colonization from the rest of modern European ideology is a vain attempt to extricate the extreme violence and racial impact on the future for which colonialism provided the structure; it is an act similar to the designation of one of its root words over the other as the prime root of this horror.
