Adam J. Barker, Making and Breaking Settler Space: Five Centuries of Colonization in North America (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021)

Adam Barker’s Making and Breaking Settler Space is a wide-ranging analysis of settler colonialism that seeks to awaken settlers to the realization that decolonization starts with the relationships they forge with other people and places, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and that being a good decolonizer means being a “bad settler.” Building on Unsettling the Settler Within (2011) by Paulette Regan, whom the author identifies as a friend and mentor, as well as other works in the growing field of settler colonial studies, Barker’s monograph examines historical and contemporary processes of place-making in northern North America to “expose the ways that space, power, and identity are produced in these settler colonial societies … and ultimately dismantle the settler colonial assemblage.” (5) The goal is to disrupt not only settlers’ complicity in ongoing settler colonial processes but to “shift the locus of settler colonial power away from governments, corporations, or even persistent systems of social hierarchy and labour and toward the biopower generated by settler people living ordinary lives.” (222) To succeed, decolonization, Barker argues, must be an effective process of social transformation at the individual and community level whereby settlers “radically remake who we are” and embrace an ethic of failure (250). The book’s methods and structure reflect this approach to decolonization. Each chapter begins with a personal anecdote or story from the author’s life that personalizes its content and grounds theoretical analyses of the embodied practices of making settler colonial spaces into relatable, even mundane, experiences. Following a lengthy introductory chapter that familiarizes readers with key theories and concepts, including social movement theory, low theory, the settler colonial assemblage, autoethnography, and more, Chapters 1 and 2 revisit the history of European imperialism in North America to identify the geographies of settler colonialism and patterns of spatial production that justified the claiming and transformation of Indigenous lands, the displacement and erasure of Indigenous presence, and the validation of imagined settler presence, authority, identity, and belonging. Although the content is not novel, the perspective Barker takes illuminates elements of settler colonialism that may not be obvious in studies of historical geography that focus primarily on territorial expansion and other mostly material consequences of colonialism. Reflecting on settler colonialism through the lens of spatial production reveals how immaterial and ultimately fragile settler claims to sovereignty in the “northern bloc” are.

The subsequent two chapters shift Barker’s analysis of the spatialities of settler colonialism from the past to the near present. Chapter 3 discusses the connections between settler colonialism, capitalism, and the state and how they have contributed to place-making historically and today in the form of settlements, cities, suburbs, and other contested spaces, while chapter four explores social movements, such as the Occupy movement and Idle No More, and the tensions within and among them. These discussions illuminate the complexities of settler colonial society today, separate from but intertwined with other systems of power and oppression that structure North American society and elicit diverse expressions of activism and resistance, many of which are not decolonial despite claims to the contrary. Here, Barker highlights flaws in decolonization movements that either fail to listen to Indigenous peoples themselves or fail to disentangle themselves from the benefits and privileges they, like settler people, embody and perpetuate, consciously or otherwise.

Chapter 5 is the most original and provocative. Reflecting on the author’s own shortcomings and missteps as an activist and ally, Barker outlines an “efficacy of failure” in which the settler “accepts responsibility for our own inabilities to escape dominant settler colonial norms, and resolves to fail better” (208; emphasis in the original). This, for Barker, is what it means to be a “bad settler.” (209) If being a “good settler” involves upholding, overtly or passively, the settler colonial order and ongoing land theft, racialization, discrimination, and erasure, then the bad settler ideal is inherently subversive, a model of decolonization that embraces failure as a form of progress. Quoting Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Barker argues that “there is something powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing … all our failures combined might just be enough, if we practice them well, to bring down the winner.” (208) The concluding chapter applies this insight to decolonization more broadly as a site of individual and collective transformations and affective relationships. “If some settlers choose to attempt to ‘become decolonizing,’ then settler society,” Barker suggests, “is also unwittingly, contestedly, perhaps minutely, and maybe even futilely, pushed toward becoming decolonizing … I may have to accept my own colonial nature, but settler society must also deal with my decolonizing trajectory.” (220)

Overall, Making and Breaking Settler Space makes a significant contribution to settler colonial studies, Canadian studies, social geography, and related fields. Although settler colonialism at times appears to be more monolithic and linear than the author intends, which perhaps is unavoidable in a study that seeks to analyze five centuries of history across almost an entire continent, Barker argues persuasively that these processes and the spatialities and identities they produce are just the opposite: messy, dynamic, and paradoxical. This analysis adds nuance and depth to existing interpretations of Canadian and American history and historical geography, while the book’s use of autoethnography and emphasis on affective, unsettling engagements make what is otherwise rather dense subject matter more accessible to undergraduate students and non-academic audiences. Most importantly, this book succeeds in failing to live up to the settler colonial ideal, making it “bad” settler scholarship in the very best way.

Liam Haggarty

Vancouver Island University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2023v91.0016.