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This article argues that the phrase “monopoly of violence,” which circulates in so many contemporary academic critiques of the liberal state, is not adequate to describe the nature of violence deployed by settler colonial societies against indigenous and racialized bodies. Settler colonialism depends on a mode of popular sovereignty that serves primarily as a diffusion of the necropolitical power of the colonizing polity rather than as a check on the tyranny of the state. Through a consideration of an assemblage of unlikely contemporary objects—Glenn Beck's 2013 keynote address to the National Rifle Association, Antonio Negri's monograph Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, and Quentin Tarantino's film Django Unchained—it explores how European and Euro-American imaginings of constituent power can serve to reinforce settler colonial political traditions rather than offer an alternative.

Contemporary “postwestern” literary scholarship has largely turned away from frontier historiography toward a “critical regionalist” approach in its efforts to move western literary studies away from familiar national paradigms. As western studies has moved away from what historian Kerwin Klein calls “big frontier tales,” frontier historiography has made a forceful reemergence in contemporary transnational settler colonial studies.This essay seeks to put the “big frontier tales” of settler colonial studies into conversation with postwestern studies through a reading of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conception of “the rhizomatic West” in A Thousand Plateaus , a text that has been especially influential in postwestern studies and American studies writ large. In addition to exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s Beat Generation and Myth and Symbol School sources, this essay glosses critiques of Deleuze and Guattari by Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd and British-Israeli theorist Eyal Weizman, both of whom relate Deleuzian rhizomatics to the ideological and spatial forms of settler colonial expansion.Having outlined a critique of “the rhizomatic West” from this perspective, it offers a brief reading of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road through the lens of settler colonial theory in order to argue that an engagement with frontier historiography should inform our understanding of contemporary understandings of “westness.”

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