Follow the Typical Signs: Settler Sovereignty and its Discontents

Comments made as part of a roundtable discussion on the significance of the US frontier to settler colonial and indigenous studies. Reflecting on the creation and circulation of settler sovereignty as a technology of territoriality, this essay considers how frontier logics inform Jacques Derrida's delineation of the beast and the sovereign in his late lectures. Finally, this essay argues for a perspectival shift in the questions scholars ask about the role of the frontier in order to activate indigenous critiques of settler colonialism.