Post-Cultural Hospitality: Settler-Native-Migrant Encounters‪.‬

Contemporary settler states can be characterized as conjunctural formations that attempt to address the demands of the historical legacies of colonization at the same time as dealing with the present-time and future-oriented imperatives of transnational and international global forces. (1) Indigenous collectivities' calls for social justice challenge the legitimacy of settler-state law at the same time as global economic and cultural flows erode the sovereignty of the nation-state. As a recent special issue of Postcolonial Studies entitled 'Unsettled States' makes clear, these competing conditions (of past and future played out in the heady culture of the everyday) invite settler states to address the question of: In contemporary settler states the need for a strong (certain and predictable) national presence on the global market is undermined by intra-national concerns that contest the basis of contemporary settler governmentality. In light of these global economic imperatives and intra-national concerns, strategies of reconciliation instigated by nations such as Australia and South Africa take on new meanings. That is to say, strategies such as the recognition of historical injustices and the attempt by governments to reconcile indigenous claims within the contemporary context are ostensibly discourses of social justice. Yet they are also attempts by a once-colonial nation-state to decide the undecidable (to be done with the responsibility of a settler past), so as to attain a sense of national unity for the future. This is the surest expression of the persistence of settler sovereignty: to make a decision on how differences between settler and native collectivities will be negotiated, maintained, and (ultimately) overcome.