Desire, Settler Colonialism, and the Racialized Cowboy

In this paper, I argue that settler colonialism is a project of desire, and that attention to desire is particularly useful for understanding the relationship between racialized subjects, whose access to political power in settler regimes is tenuous and uneven. Drawing upon psychoanalytically-inflected theories of race, I examine how this desire is articulated, and look to its effects. To do so, I offer a reading of the 2004 South Asian-American film, Indian Cowboy, reflecting on how racialized subjects negotiate and express the desire to access and be included in settler subjectivity.