Biopolitics, Necropolitics and Geopolitics: A Critical Evaluation of Settler Colonial Fascism

This thesis offers a critical analysis of fascism in the context of the Canadian settler state. In the first step of the argument, I problematize standard definitions of fascism, which tend to focus on European state fascism as their primary historical reference, through a shift in focus to the settler state. I argue that settler colonial fascism is biopolitical, necropolitical and geopolitical in structure. I understand biopolitics in the Foucauldian sense as a strategy of population management that makes some live while letting others die; necropolitics intensifies biopower by compounding letting die with outright killing; and geopolitics describes the ambitions of the settler state to claim and control Indigenous lands. Together, these forms of power target Indigenous bodies and lands to secure and expand settler access to territory and resources. The second step of the argument is evaluative; I argue that many of the biopolitical, necropolitical and geopolitical structures of settler colonial states like Canada are evil in Claudia Card’s secular sense of the term: namely, as a form of violence that seeks to destroy conditions of life that make it meaningful while implicating victims in this destruction. Building on this critical evaluation, the third step of the argument rethinks standard accounts of two fascist practices – eugenics and genocide – beyond a Eurocentric framework. Through a critique of ‘birth alerts’ in northern Ontario, I argue that eugenic practices continue to target Indigenous women for child removal, long after the dissolution of official eugenics programs. I then examine three sites of ongoing genocidal violence against Indigenous peoples in the Canadian settler state, arguing for a Cardian understanding of genocide as a form of social death. The final chapter presents a critical analysis of the Indian Residential School System that complicates the distinction between positive and negative eugenics by showing how a single group of people—namely, Indigenous children—can be subject to biopolitical attempts to both ‘make live’ and ‘let die.’ The conclusion proposes an antifascist politics of resistance to biopolitical, necropolitical and geopolitical violence in Canada.

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