 Welcome, everyone, to CMS Colloquium, and today we welcome James Wynn, who is Associate Professor of English and Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University. His research and teaching explores science, mathematics, and public policy from a rhetorical perspective. His first book, Evolution by the Numbers, examines how mathematics was argued into the study of variation, evolution, and heredity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His most recent monograph, Citizen Science in the Digital Age, explores how the internet and internet-connected devices are reshaping the landscapes of argument occupied by scientists, laypersons, and governments. Currently, well, today, I think, saw the publication of Arguing with Numbers, co-edit a volume that Professor Wynn co-edited, a collection of essays co-edited with Jean Mitchell Reyes, whose contributors investigate the relationship between rhetoric and mathematics. He is also working on a new book project on the rhetoric of Mars colonization, from which he will be drawing in today's talk. Welcome, James, and I will pass things over to you. Thank you so much, Vivek, for the introduction. I want to acknowledge and thank Ed Shiappa, who is a faculty at MIT. I also want to acknowledge that the collection that is coming out today, Ed has a chapter in that, so he is also part of that wonderful project, so I want to thank him for his participation and for inviting me here today to talk to everybody about another project I've been working on. Also, I want to thank you, Andrew, for setting everything up for the logistics, making this all happen, making sure my slides work, everything. Thank you for doing that. And Vivek, thanks for the introduction and also for being moderator today in our conversation. So, as Vivek mentioned, what I'm going to talk about today is actually some a new project that I've been working on, in particular the first chapter of this book about Mars colonization. And so what I want to share with you today is a little bit about my research project, my methods and concepts, and also then a little bit about my findings so far. Now there are lots of things that I'm interested in and I've worked on in the book, so you don't need to sort of, if you have questions about other things, I'm happy to answer them. But, you know, I'll focus today on just one part of the project that I've been working on. So I'm going to try, I'm going to share my slides here, and then I think we can go from there. Are these slides visible? Can everybody see them? Okay, great, thanks. All right, excellent. So I'm just going to make sure I can get the full screen. So the title of my talk today is promotional narrative science fiction and the case for colonization. So there are a few things I'd like to talk about today. First of all, why Mars colonization? Why is this particular topic exigent right now? Why is it we're thinking about or talking about? Also some of the concepts and methods that I'm using to do the analysis that I'm going to share with you today. And of course, my findings, the sort of themes or issues that developed out of the analysis that I've done. And finally, discussion. This is going to be, on my part, very brief because I want to have a larger discussion with everything, everyone about the topics I'm covering in my talk. I'm thinking that this will probably take about 40 minutes to talk through my slides and to show my evidence and discussion and hopefully we'll have a really nice discussion after that. But I wanted to just talk a little bit about the public exigence for this work. In other words, why am I interested in it? Why do I think it's something that we should be paying attention to right now? So first of all, just two months ago, Perseverance landed on Mars and there's been a lot of hoopla and discussion about that particular moment of getting involved with Mars and taking the next steps towards sending people there. In 2010, so essentially in the last five years, there's been a lot of political movement towards Mars colonization, or actually I should say in the last decade, there's been a lot of movement towards actually devoting government resources towards sending humans to Mars and making Mars sort of a priority project for NASA. So in a speech in 2010 at Kennedy Space Center, Obama said for example that by the mid-2030s, we will be sending humans into orbit around Mars and returning them safely and then landing on Mars will follow. President Trump actually signed the NASA Transition Authorization Act which was developed under Obama and then it was signed as one of the first things that Trump did when he came into office and within that particular document that act, there is explicit language that the whole one of NASA's main goals is to achieve the human exploration of Mars and beyond and just sort of prioritize this and everything it does. So in other words, if they're going to build technology, it should be built with forethought about going to Mars and how this is going to impact that project. So in other words, a lot of the planning for NASA is now everything sort of is related to Mars and is about going to Mars. Also of course, we can't forget the interest in the private sector in Mars, particularly of course Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos who have started their own rocket companies and have begun to privatize space travel which has some important implications I think for this. Of these two, of course, Elon Musk is very, very interested in Mars' colonization and is hoping to see this in his lifetime. If you go to Musk's web page of SpaceX, there's a particular section on Mars and in this section he has this quote, you want to wake up in the morning and think that the future is going to be great and that's what being a space varying civilization is all about. I can't think of anything more exciting than being out there and being amongst the stars. So Elon Musk is very sanguine about Mars and that's sort of one of his main goals and main priorities in the development of his technology and his company. Before I sort of get into the data and the methods that I want to use, I want to just step back for a second and talk a little bit about the disciplinary perspective I'm coming from. Professor Chiap and I share rhetoric as our disciplinary lens that we look at things through. Essentially when I go to cocktail parties and people ask me, well, what is it you do? And I say, well, I'm a professor of rhetoric and then they ask me, well, what do rhetoricians do? I like to explain that rhetoric is sort of the study of argument in all of its splendor. And what I mean by that is that rhetoricians are really interested unlike some other fields that study argumentation in really the broad range of persuasive means, including emotions, including arguments from the character of people of the speaker, and of course, looking at these things in various contexts and across different kinds of media. So for this project, I thought I became very interested in colonization sort of generally, but specifically because I study rhetoric of science and public policy from the perspective of thinking about colonization in the context of Mars colonization. So from a disciplinary perspective, I want to talk a little bit about the contribution I think that my project is making in the field of rhetoric. Most studies of colonization in rhetoric and in other fields that are that are closely associated with it, think about colonization as a completed act or thinking about the impacts of colonization after they happen. What I'm really interested in though is thinking about colonization in these very early moments where, and I call these moments, protocolonial moments, because in these moments, the colonial enterprise is very fragile and uncertain. So typically when people talk about colonialism, they look at already established colonial projects, ones that have succeeded, but I'm interested in those projects in very early stages when people aren't sure that they're going to succeed. And they also need to really rely on argumentation to get to persuade people to really think about engaging in these projects. So some questions I'm really interested in are, one, what are the rhetorical challenges for the colonizer? How do you get people to buy into colonial projects at a very early stage? And also that how do previous colonial acts influence present colonial acts? And finally, what do we learn by contrasting colonial, protocolonial moments? If we, and so for my project in particular, I want to look at the colonization of North America. So these colonial moments and then juxtapose those with this protocolonial moment we're having now, thinking about colonizing Mars. In order to talk about these things, though, I think it's important to have sort of a set definition or a definition that I'm going to operationalizing or using in my research of what colonialism is. So in particular, what I'm talking about is physical colonialism. And what I mean by that are the movement of people from what are called source communities or metropolitan communities into which are where they come from into these target spaces or target communities, which are foreign places. And also movements of people where they're moving into these spaces and they are intending to permanently reside in those spaces. So there's a lot of, there was a lot of rhetorical back and forth and sort of arguing about colonialism as versus imperialism. So a lot of the discussions revolve around the permanency of these versus imperialism, which tends to be less permanent. And it is sort of a shuffling of bureaucratic and military folks into a space and then shuffling them out again. Another important feature of colonialism, which differentiates it from other kinds of movements of people is that there is a notion where that the people that are going to these foreign spaces maintain political identity and rely on the original state for their identity, their protection, the resources they need to sort of maintain their colonial presence in this target community. So these are some very basic definitional qualities that I'm using when I'm talking about what a colony is and what colonialism is. One of the things that's also important to this project, and this isn't something that I found in my research on defining colonialism or talking about what it means, is this idea of stages of colonialism. So by reading a lot of colonial tracks, it emerged for me that there are different stages of colonialism. The first stage is what I call the exploration stage, which is essentially you send out people or in the case of Mars, instruments that are there to sort of understand that the resources and the conditions of the space and to decide whether it has potential for colonization. Then you have a planting stage, which is where you put small outposts there. If you think back to the early colonial period in North America, these are typically forts with military folks that were there to establish a foothold, but they weren't sort of full blown colonies. And next, of course, you have the settlement phase, which is where these forts begin to expand. We get different sorts of people that begin to live there. So children, women, people from different walks of life, blacksmiths and barrel makers and so forth. So it's not just sort of a military operation, but it's a diversified, more heterogeneous population. And finally, the very last stage of colonialism is, of course, when it disappears. So it either disappears through emancipation. So in the United States, obviously, after the after the war for independence, the United States became its own country. So it was emancipated from its original colonial source, or it's incorporated. So you can think about Ireland and Scotland, for example, which became part of Britain in the United Kingdom. And so therefore, there's a sort of like two ways that can go. You can either emancipate or you can become incorporated, and you lose your status as a colony. For this particular project, I looked at two sets of texts. So as a rhetorician, we study typically artifacts and typically written artifacts. One set of texts I looked at are what are called promotional literature. And I'll say a little bit about what that means or what that is. So I looked at 10 different texts, which are examples of promotional literature from the 16th and 17th century. And particularly during the English colonial period, the settlement of North America from about 1495 to 1650. I also then looked at modern science fiction texts from the 20th and 21st century. And I looked at seven of these. I mean, I read lots more, but there are only seven that seemed to be particularly impactful talking about colonialism in very detailed and specific ways. In my analysis, what I did is a close reading of all these sources and close reading for thinking about particular kinds of questions. So one of the questions I was very interested in is how do supporters of colonialism persuade people to like leave their homes and go into these foreign spaces, which are typically very hostile? And also, are there sort of common lines of argument that emerge from their efforts to persuade people to do this? And so through historical comparison, by looking at early modern texts and modern literature about colonization, I was interested to see whether there are similarities and differences in the lines of arguments that we find and what might account for these similarities and differences. So I'm going to talk a little bit about specifically the last question in the discussion part of my presentation. So let's start with the early modern protocolonial period. So typically, when people think about colonization, they typically think of colonization as something that people really wanted to do, either because there's some instinctual nature within humans that wants to go out and explore places or because they thought it was like some great, I don't know, escape from their socio-economic conditions or whatever. But in fact, it was really hard to persuade people in to go to colonize or to be part of this sort of colonial project. And we see this time and time again when you look at these very early protocolonial tracks. So for example, John White's planner's plea, which is written in 1630, he is sort of emblematic of the kinds of things that you read or that these folks that are writing these kinds of tracks write. So he writes in this, someone are content to remove from their dwellings and leave their beloved country and friends, let no man conceive that we shall find over many of that humor. We English are known too well to the world to love the smoke of our own chimneys so well that hopes of great advantages are not likely to draw many of us from home. So many of the folks that write these tracks say it's really hard to get people to leave. So then what I was really interested in is the arguments that they then made to try to get people to buy into the colonial project and be participants in it. The kind of literature that emerged, so this actually emerges as a genre of literature during this period called what's called promotional literature. And typically what happened during this period is that some folks would go over and they would, you know, be part of one of these fortress colonies that were meant to sort of stake things out and maybe make a military foothold to make a claim. And then they would come back and they would say very nasty things about being in the colony and how not really wonderful it was. So a lot of promotional literature was sort of aimed at addressing these brutes as they were called where people were just sort of talking badly about the colonial experience. So as a definition of this genre, one historian writes, the principal purposes of promotional literature was to combat the flood of slander and malicious gossip about the colonies of which almost every important writer complains. So we have this promotional literature then that's meant sort of as a rhetorical tool to get people to think positively about the colonies. So one of the things I was interested in is, well, okay, you know, what kind of rhetoric do we find in this literature? And what I found is that typically in the early modern period, we have what's called reassurance rhetoric. There's an argument theoretician named Haim Perlman who talks about dissociative argument. Dissociative argument is essentially argument where you say, well, this is what they're saying but what really is happening is this. So it's a dissociation of the imagined and the real. So a lot of argument in this vein is about trying to correct sort of incorrect or inappropriate descriptions of the risk in the colonial faith. So there were lots of different kinds of risks that these writers talk about in promotional literature. One of them of course is indigenous people. So here's an example of colonists who went to Virginia. His name is Ralph Lane, and he came back and he wrote a very scathing negative description of the experience that he had. So he writes about the indigenous people. They wanted no store of mischievous practices among them, the indigenous people of Roanoke. And the dead of night they would have beset my house and put fire in the reeds that myself would have come running out and have a sudden amazed in my night shirt without arms, meaning weapons. Upon an instant whereof they would have knocked out my brain. So Lane is describing his fear that the Native Americans of the Roanoke were going to essentially slaughter all the colonists and that he would be a main victim and that they were going to sort of set fire to his house and then beat his brains out when he ran out. Of course then the promoters of this colony needed to have some way of responding to these sort of negative impressions that they were giving about the colony. So another piece was written soon after Harriet's, I mean soon after the one we just read by Thomas Harriet, which is known as the Brief and True Report written in 1587. And this report Harriet tries to rehabilitate people's beliefs about Native Americans suggesting that, you know, the slanderous accounts are incorrect and really there's a very different way that we should think about the Native Americans. So he writes, the rest of that I speak a word or two of the natural inhabitants, their natures and manners, as that you may know how that they in respect to troubling our inhabiting and planting are not to be feared but that they shall have cause to both fear and love us that shall inhabit with them. So he was really trying to change everybody's mind about these stories that they were hearing about the dangers of the Native Americans. I'm not going to offer all the evidence here but what I can tell you is that he makes a series of arguments one based on the fact that their militaries are not very big and also that the weapons that they have are much cruder than the English and therefore they're not really much of a threat militarily speaking. He also makes a sort of technological argument arguing that the Native Americans were so amazed by their technologies that they in some ways thought that they were they were to be respected and worshiped because their God was so superior and and that they would sort of fall in line just out of sheer I don't know a belief that the technology was superior so that they would just they would just sort of go along with whatever the English believed in. There were other hazards and risks of course outside of Native peoples. There was a live discussion in these in these tracks about hazardous fauna. In the planters plea for example white talks a lot about snakes. People were really afraid of these snakes they were bigger than the ones in England so he had to say say a few words about the fact that no one really ever sees them and the more people that go the less snakes they'll be. So the idea here is to sort of dismiss out of hand the dangers of these snakes their existence and the fact that they're going to really have a problem with the colonists. The other thing were mosquitoes. So even didn't really have mosquitoes but of course North America was plagued by them especially in the places that that these colonies were were set down. So one of the things they had to say is look the mosquitoes aren't that bad right you can wear long sleeves you can go in thorns you can set fires and you know frankly if you live there after a while you don't even notice them. So these are some strategies that they they had to sort of reassure potential colonists that these problems weren't really that serious problems. Now another risk that people in the early modern period took very seriously was the effect of the food and climate and drink on the bodies of the colonists. So this is a very big deal at this period and now of course as well. So William Bradford when he talks about the history of the Plymouth plantation he talks in detail about the arguments that the group of Calvinists that that joined him in Plymouth had over the kinds of problems that they were going to face and why they should or shouldn't colonize or decide to build to have a colony in North America. One of these debates is is based squarely around the conditions and the effects of the conditions on the bodies of the members of his congregation. So for there in North America they should be liable to famine and nakedness and the want in a manner of all things the change of air diet and drinking of the water should infect their bodies with sore thickness and previous diseases. So this is one of the arguments made against setting up a colony in North America. To sort of counter that we have we have tracks like John Brayerton's A Brief and True Relation. So Brayerton essentially was traveling around Martha's Vineyard and he comes back and he says a few words about the food and the drink and how it affected the folks that were in his particular expedition. We found our health and strength all the while we remained there so renewed and increased as notwithstanding our diet and lodging was none of the best yet none of our company felt the least grudging or inclination to any disease or sickness but were much fatter and better health than we went out of England. So there are a lot of instances in these tracks where they will talk about how the food and the drink and everything else actually made the the colonists healthier and didn't have the negative impacts on the health that was brooded by some of these other accounts of of the New World. So I'm going to switch gears now so I've been talking about North America and the colonial experience there. So there were some some similarities and differences obviously between North America and Mars. One of the differences of course is there to our knowledge there are no indigenous inhabitants of Mars. We have not found life there yet so and and the other thing is that no humans have ever been there so we can't have the same kinds of accounts and and brutes of the experience of being on Mars because no one's ever done it. Also though there is a similarity because there are some climactic hazards on Mars that we don't share in our own in our own earth. Now of course the climactic hazards are very different than the one the climatic hazards are very different than the ones that you experience in North America. First of all the average temperature is much colder on Mars than it is on earth this is not something there are temperature problems that colonists had to deal with but not to this extreme. Oxygen so we never had to worry about oxygen when when setting up colonies in North America or other places on earth and of course there is problems of radiation there's a lot more radiation on that that's given on a daily basis on Mars than there is on earth so there definitely risks obviously environmental risks to talk about when we talk about Mars. So because there are no there's not the same kind of writing about colonization for Mars that there was for North America we have to turn to a new source and so one of the sources that we have is science fiction so science fiction is great because even though there's not there hasn't been a human experience on Mars science fiction writers imagine what it would be like to set up a colony on Mars and imagine what would be like to be the humans that are colonizing and what their experience would be like. What's also very interesting is that science fiction writers like like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark and Ray Bradbury were very supportive of the notion of astro colonialism even Ray Bradbury who who does write very critically about colonialism for example in the Martian Chronicles has other writings where he is sort of very sanguine about this idea of astro colonialism so for example for the 1964 World Fair he wrote a particular script for this journey through America in which in the final part of the script he writes build pyramids of men and fire toward landfalls on the moon and bright new independence days looking back from space to see our birthplace earth the old wilderness dwindles as the human race reaches for eternity survival and immortality in the next billion years man god made manifest goes in search of himself the great outpour of all nations which crushed the buffalo grass and reached the end of one frontier now finds greater challenges in the star wilderness above so we see in this the very language of colonialism the very language of sort of the the westward expansion of the buffalo grass in Bradbury's comments so it suggests that he too is sort of enamored by the notion of the colonial the astro colonialism of other planets so what we find that's a little bit different in science fiction writing then in the earlier colonial tracks is that the rhetoric here instead of being reassurance rhetoric is what I would call inspirational rhetoric and there are sort of two sorts one is what I would call heroic inspirational rhetoric and the other is utopian inspirational rhetoric heroic inspirational rhetoric is really interesting because what it does is instead of trying to reassure the the readers and and the audience that life on on in the colonial space isn't so bad they actually leverage the challenges and the struggle for existence within the colonial space to make to to valorize to make people heroes and by doing that also valorizing the process of colonialization and the people that are going to become colonialists so we see this very obviously in Andy Wears the Martian which many of you probably have seen as a film or you've read in the novel form in this novel in the film of course we have the protagonist Mark Watney who is a scientist he's a botanist engineer and he uses his maker skills and his rational thinking ability to of course send off one disaster for another and by doing that sort of becomes a hero by his ability to sort of conquer the challenges of Mars as a space we also see the same thing happening in Isaac Asimov's The Martian Way which is written in 1952 and in Asimov's novel there's also sort of a hero scientist who's an engineer and the idea is that that Mars is being cut off from water and they have to solve this problem sort of through their own ingenuity and and I won't spoil the plot of this but what I can say is that what's different a little bit about the Watney example and this heroic example is that the hero in the case of the Martian Way draws their draws their very ability to make and do certain kinds of things from their from their existence as colonists in other words only Martians only somebody who lives on Mars and deals with the conditions can do the kinds of techno can do the kinds of technological things that make survival possible so Asimov writes for example we can we can do it and earth men can't they've got a real world they've got open sky and food getting into a ship will challenge them right we've been living on a ship our entire lives breathing packaged air drinking packaged water we eat the same food and rations we eat aboard a ship we get into a ship the same thing we've known all our lives so the colonial conditions themselves um condition the settlers to actually be able to survive in ways that folks that are not Martian um can't do so they can sort of solve problems in ways that earth people can't solve problems so now I want to switch a little bit and talk about inspirational rhetoric um and I call this this argument that of inspirational rhetoric as as argument pro arge or argument through adversity and what we see here is what's called a means ends argument so um in this kind of argument the the the person the the colonists is submitting themselves or the potential colonists is submitting themselves to extraordinary trials which are the means and the ends are the extraordinary benefits that you reap through these trials so the idea is that going to Mars is hard but through this hardship um we get these unique benefits um and there is a there is a rich history of this kind of argument in our own colonial experience in our own colonial tracks um so Frederick Jackson Turner um in his very famous piece on the frontier writes it is to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics that coarseness of strength combined with acuteness inquisitiveness inquisitiveness and practical that practical inventive turn of the mind quick to find expedience and masterful grasp grasp of material things our traits are called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier so the notion is that the frontier in some ways um is responsible for the kind of traits that made America America that made it great that made it unique um and so we but it's only through the trials of the frontier that you get those kind of qualities and we see this very same argument being made in science fiction texts um a perfect example of this is Arthur C Clark's The Red Sands of Mars and in this book we have the protagonist Martin Gibson who's a journalist and he's sort of writing an expose on Mars he's going to journey to Mars and talk about what colonial life is like and so forth and he's really skeptical first about about the colonial project right he says you know look from the point of view of earth you know Mars is a long way it costs a lot of money it doesn't offer anything and the question that we're all asking is what do we get out of it right so the whole point of this novel then is to answer this question what do we get out of it and after spending time in the colony um Gibson has this sort of epiphany experience and then he becomes a strong advocate in fact he becomes the PR person for Mars and what he finds is that he experiences when he gets in with with the folks on Mars right he begins to understand that what they gain from being on Mars in their colonial experience right is this keen-eyed competence and readiness to take well calculated risks which in any able them not merely to survive on this heartbreakingly hostile world world but to lay the foundations of the first extraterrestrial culture so this notion that you know that a utopia or a return to utopia begins to develop through existing within the harsh conditions of Mars another example of utopian rhetoric is in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Red Mars which is part of a trilogy so what's interesting is that in in Robinson's novel there are a hundred colonists of the original colonists of Mars and the whole point of this novel is to talk about how they struggle to realize their utopian vision for a particular colony and it's really the struggle itself um and and sort of maintaining a pure space for Mars which is uh which is the struggle that if they succeed will have this sort of utopian benefits so one of the main characters writes all of our earth says all of our governments are flawed it's why history is such a bloody mess we are now on our own and I for one have no intention of repeating Earth's mistakes we are the first Martian colonists we are the scientists it is our job to think things new and make them new so the idea is that Mars is really a tabla rasa in which we can build this ideal society on and the struggle is not so much the struggle of existence on Mars but the struggle to keep this a free space in which to create this ideal colony here this ideal utopia that the Martians want so now very briefly I'm just going to talk about the the sort of the the contrast we see between the rhetoric of early modern colonialism the rhetoric of science fiction and Martian colonialism so early modern promotional rhetoric is devoted to reassuring potential colonists and supporters by dismissing and diminishing the risks of colonial life right don't worry about the serpents don't worry about mosquitoes or the indigenous uh people's there everything's going to be fine inspirational rhetoric however of the modern science fiction leverages the risks of colonization to valorize the colonists and to make a case for the good consequences that will arise from the colonial act right you will become a hero um you will realize utopian visions that you have on earth so why why these differences what might account for it so in thinking about these different cases one thing that occurred to me is that in our modern context right we have a real faith in sort of the techno scientific capacity to address risk in a way that early modern folks did not so they had in fact offer reassurances why well because they couldn't really say that they could solve the problems but now we have this sort of belief in technology and belief in the technological progress such that we can almost valorize um these these moments of of colonialism as a way of showing our chops of a way of showing how we can solve the problems and make ourselves heroes by doing so the other thing that's interesting is that um in early modern colonialism in the in the british context there's not really a lot of ideal models um that can serve as this notion of colony as utopia i mean the the goddess colonization and the irish colonization were kind of a big bloody mess to the most part they didn't really have very much ideal there wasn't a lot of idealism associated with it and there were a lot of um writings by historians that suggest that they can't really find this kind of utopian statements very early in these protoclonial periods but they do find them later and we see of course historically that these develop and modern science fiction writers have these as resources for making their arguments okay that's all that I have um so uh vivic i will turn it back over to you um for moderation purposes so thank you so much for listening thank you um well i'll first open it up to questions from our our students yeah natalia hi uh thanks for the talk um i was wondering what made you choose the early american exploration um rather than i guess like what i think a lot of people compare which is like the westward hoe sort of um like frontier period thank you natalia so that's a great question so one thing i want to say is that you know the reason first of all kind of um i chose the british colonialism because i speak english um and frankly you know i don't have the chops to read you know spanish texts or texts in other languages but the reason why i chose um north american colonialism and not westward expansionism is because at that stage so there's an argument about whether that's really colonialism in the first place because america um is technically a nation and those lands are part of the nation although there's a there's a debate over whether or not and i tended to come down on the side that yes that is a colonial moment as well the difference is that i'm looking at proto colonial moments right so in the proto colonial moment um there's a there's a lot of uncertainty um about the the capacity to even establish a foothold or whether you want to establish these colonies or then get people to go there i mean there is some of that of course in the westward expansion um but i think there's there's a stronger analogy with um mars and the the sort of north american settlement or this the yeah essentially because um you know these people are really going out into these unknown spaces um and they're you know they're they're sort of uh base is far away and it's much more i think more like uh mars colonization i hope that answers your question thank you uh kelly thank you yeah thank you for the talk um um i guess i was just wondering your talk was very much framed from the perspective of the colonizer so like when you frame talking about indigenous peoples you label them as like risks or harms or like you just said you know these people going out into the unknown where you don't know what's out there but people do know i mean there are people living there that do know it's out there um and there's always like an other side to that story um so i guess i wonder how like why not why not talk about some of the harms that have happened in the process and i'm sure in the mars case maybe it's not that there are people there but that there are people harmed in this process of thinking about a single framework for utopia that doesn't include everyone and kind of how even in your talk continuing to label these people as like harms or risks perpetuates that violence kind of thank you um kelly for that question so what i want to say to everyone is this is part of a larger project so i'm just starting it and my first chapter happened to be on this um but i will have a later chapter that is about sort of anti-colonial arguments right so there will be a whole chapter that i'm going to dedicate to those questions specifically um but the other thing that i would say kelly is that what's what i find interesting is that people in the humanities have done a lot of work on the colonized but they have done very little work on the colonizers um so to me as a as a rhetorician that's interested in argument from whatever from whoever's perspective it's interesting to me that no one really has written much about the colonial arguments the arguments of the colonizers and why you would want to colonize and how do you get people to go there so these are i think spaces that are that's underexplored um which is why i decide to explore them in the first place um the other thing i would say about indigenous people um my project is is about thinking about how they're imagining these these groups and how they're talking about it right so because i'm writing because i'm analyzing the argument from their perspective that's how they're talking about it so um i'm not trying to um perpetuate violence i'm just trying to open up a discussion about this is how they were seen this is how they were thought of by this group right and then of course this can be critiqued in a thousand ways but it's i think it's valuable in the first place to know what kind of language what kind of um place that these indigenous peoples had in their arguments how they thought about them how they argued about them right does that make sense so it's not that i it's not that my intention is to ignore um the opposite position um but that i'm taking i'm i'm looking at this from one particular lens in this chapter but later chapters you know then we can swing the lens and look at it from a different perspective um i i'll go ahead sorry kelly i was gonna say yeah i i that makes a lot of sense and i think you're totally right that like looking at it from that perspective is helpful i just think maybe when talking about it it's good to kind of acknowledge that because i think it can still be traumatic for people to like see those images and hear that rhetoric and so maybe just acknowledging that is worthwhile oh yeah i mean this is certainly traumatic um um especially because the more you read these you more you see the trauma that happens right because in these tracks they talk about what they did and what happened and they're very traumatic yeah but i think it's important to expose that trauma and expose those perspectives right as part of what i called what rhetorical disoid logoi which is seeing different different sides of a particular issue or perspective um so i wanted to just follow up on on those two questions as well um you know as because i know that there are some of us here who are descended from people who were colonized um and for whom that that trauma is very real and continual and and trans generational um and i guess um from from the standpoint that you're talking about um you know focusing on the rhetoric that the rhetoric that was used to encourage colonization from the side of the colonizers um i guess i would urge you to to um to think about the the underlying there's an underlying rhetorical move right um that is that the united states is terra nullis right that that the united states is not occupied right or north america or you know those lands between the pacific and the atlantic um because i'm not going to call them that um yet so um for for this territory to be considered terra nullis in other words unoccupied territory there's a really deep rhetorical move that's being made that's essentially um you know the rhetoric and and the technology of race right which renders the the indigenous inhabitants as part of the landscape rather than as human beings occupying the the land for generations and so you know there's that i think that's where the difference between um talking about north america and talking about mars is so apparent because um if if you make that comparison without um acknowledging that in the same way that that mars is being considered as colonize a bull right um because it's empty um that's essentially the argument that was made about north america and that that argument was was one that entailed violence you know and enabled it right so um i guess that's that's what i would urge you to think about um and also to think about the colonial moment not as the early colonial moment right um where the colonial moment ends as as you were mentioning when the the colonizers break off from the home country but to think about the fact that settler colonialism was a continual process and so even if the east coast uh of of this region was settled by colonists who had broken off from britain they were still in a pre-colonial or proto-colonial relationship to the rest of the the country right yeah i mean i it's interesting because i think that that the notion of terra nolis is a little bit fraught um on the one hand um there is sort of there are sort of property arguments about you know land that's available but i think that what these tracks show is that they are painfully aware that these lands are people and that that's a risk um and that they're real people there they are they are like them they are and that they can fight and that they are a risk so i i don't i wouldn't say that that they they're going into this thinking like oh nobody's there like i think they're very painfully aware and that it's part of their the fact that they have to write things like oh it's fine you know there are people there but they're not gonna you know try to harm us if we live there so i mean i i think that that i'm not sure that that's necessarily true of the rhetoric of that of that of that situation um but it but it is interesting because they're there and of course there's so much going on in in this period like you know the fact that um the the the Spanish and the Portuguese have essentially had the world divided between them um but with the blessing of the Catholic Church so um technically this isn't even a space where the the British are allowed to go but after the the you know great battle of the Spanish Armada and the the the English winning that battle and they feel a little bit more okay with you know setting up settlements and places i mean it's very it's a very complicated story um but i don't want to diminish i don't want to diminish in any way the violence that were that were done to the native peoples and and continue to be done right so this notion that you mentioned um what's and it's called in in the literature neocolonialism right this notion that colonialism keeps going and going and going like you can't escape it um even after the fact um it still is perpetuated within the system with movies and tv and all kinds of media um so i'm not i'm not negating any of that but i will say that you know i am taking a particular lens and perspective to look at this through the perspective of the of the colonizers and how they're trying to get people to go to that space um i think it is important to think about the difference between mars and north america especially with the notion of um indigenous persons or indigenous life there because so far as we know there we have not found life on mars yet um and so that that some of the issues that um are very present in discussion of colonialism on earth um maybe either absent or different in thinking about the colonialism of mars and and the the the the presence of sentient people who would be colonized um or destroyed or you know whatever is a different question on mars so yeah so thank you for that feedback in other words thank you um there's some questions actually that are in the q and a um all right from jason lynch what do you see as the relationship between colonialism and capitalism relatedly have you read or watched the expanse and what are your thoughts on its politics of colonialism exploitation in the labor um and then there's addition to that do you see any differences between imagining of mars colonization versus other interplanetary and interstellar notions of colonization thank you those are great questions are you seeing the qa bar as well i am thank you so uh yes i see that that's at the top by jason thank you jason for your question um yes uh it's it's interesting because colonization and capitalism are are very very much intertwined but in ways that we don't always expect um so what what i found interesting is that many of the early efforts of of the english to set up colonies were actually business ventures um and the the thing is that in the very early so the very early colonial efforts especially in newfoundland which is where the english first went around 1495 which is very early right a couple years after um columbus um and initially um the the folks that went there like cabot and others um when they went they couldn't get any they had to like essentially sell people a story like we're going to find the northwest passage i mean the northwest passage so i want to i don't i know this has probably been a long time since you know in high school history or whatever that you've talked about that northwest passage but i can't emphasize enough how important the idea of the northwest passage was because at the at this point trade and and was was really built around stuff coming from the east spices silks all these kinds of things and the way that it came into the west and to europe was through the middle east and because of religious differences um there were some tensions there about you know dealing with um non christian folks um and also there was a problem of prices right so by the time silk went from china and ended up in a port on the mediterranean that you could actually go and get it from um it was really really expensive so for these um i really like to call them entrepreneurs because cabot in particular and some of the early folks were entrepreneurs like they were saying like if we find this passage we are going to be rich beyond our wildest dreams because we're going to be able to bring spices and silks and there'll be no metal man we're going to get all the we're going to get all the the benefit um we could charge lower prices you know this is going to be great so the idea is that and and what's interesting about north america is when the spanish went into the south um they found a lot of gold and resources um the the british and some other folks thought that they would find the same in the north and they didn't and so for a long time north america was just not not really that important because frankly there weren't they weren't finding the northwest passage and they weren't finding any gold so um if you look at the early i mean it was very it was it was kind of bad business and a lot of a lot of the early colonial efforts just failed because they they couldn't show profit they couldn't make a buck and in fact the only thing that kind of saved north america i mean looking at it from the from the business perspective um is sassafras because sassafras was in high demand in england it was all over north america it was very cheap to transport and you can make a buck off of it so it's it's strange how like fish and sassafras were things that kept people kind of interested in going to north america when in fact um for the most part it was really kind of seen as a bad business deal so i know that's a really long that's a really long answer to your question but i hope it shows like how integral sort of capitalism is to thinking about even the possibility of colonization because it was a huge risk it was a huge financial risk and without reward people were not willing to do it which again is why in the protocolonial period there's a lot of interesting rhetoric and arguments about the economics of it okay sorry that's a long that's a long answer but i'll go to go to another question um are there any questions on the on the screen before i go back to the q and a okay um so let me see i i took one from q and a and i'm going to take one from chat now um uh this is from riccardo pares um rhetoric is a fascinating exploratory discipline the first colonizers to america were mainly convicts searching for liberty from imprisonment that was a major motivational factor enabling the exploration there's also a myth of richness that may have been instrumental in the genesis of the process so oh and then oh there is a question at the um at the bottom and why was avatar not considered in your rhetoric exposition thank you um avatar is great it's a perfect example of like multinationals coming into a pristine environment and destroying it um i didn't i didn't use it because it's not mars um all of the all of the science fiction i looked at was specifically about mars and mars colonization um so all of the novels i read were squarely about that um just because it was my topic area not because i'm not interested in avatar and other examples like expanse and um because there's so much out there um so thank you for that question but that's that's really i was trying to focus on mars um from hamed reza nissiri uh in the q and a thank you for the interesting talk two questions if you have time for both um first it's interesting that here uh here when we focus on mars colonization we read sorry this is jumping over my page but i've got it um it's interesting that when we focus on mars colonization we read those sci-fi works literally but at the same time many of those sci-fi novels and films have been making the case for american neocolonialism in an allegorical way uh how do you deal with this kind of dialectic between allegory and literal in such sci-fi works yeah i mean i think um what's interesting is that these works and we may not be thinking about this but these works really do um circulate within the american public and prime the american public to think about colonization in particular ways to valorize it um and to imagine it in particular ways so i think that these that these instruments i mean nasa knows this i mean the martian was sponsored by nasa was vetted by nasa writers i mean by by folks at nasa so i mean they realize that this is a way to help shape the story or the frame of colonization of mars and i don't know if you guys watch the national geographic uh mars series that's a great series all of these theories are really designed specifically to make particular kinds of arguments about what it's going to be like why we're doing this um it's very important to is it sort of like um a prelude to actually doing it right you have to prepare the audience to to see this in a particular way before then they're willing to like open the checkbook of the national government and spend money on these things and spend their lives going there if they do okay i'm going to go to kenneth alba and then i'll come back to hamed reza to your second question um i wonder if you could speak to the way that hard science fiction like red mars uh comes bundled with epistemological claims that end up supporting ideological claims i really like really like the protocolonial text you brought up but the comparison that always jumps to mind for me is the uh robinson date robinson aid robinson cruzo um when where the focus on accounting and details and so forth has certain truth claims grounded uh could you speak to speak a bit to how genre specificity and epistemology interact in these kinds of neocolonialist texts wow that's a very rich question so there's a lot there to talk about um it's interesting robinson cruzo there are a number of films and there's one novel that's an amazing it's right it's called it's called robinson cruzo on mars it's a great novel um by i think his name is rex morgan he's an australian writer uh a british writer australian writer that writes goes to britain and writes about this in britain um but yeah the robinson aid does appear in in in different instances in discussions about mars and mars colonization particularly the notion of like the marooned like if you think about andy where's the martian like this notion of the marooned scientist or the marooned explorer on mars so you do have that as sort of a trope that goes through some of the literature um but i this notion of hard science fiction i think is very important because um in my estimation the more real the science fiction is um the more real that it seems that it's true so one of the things about the martian that i find really kind of compelling as an example is in the movie it seems like this is real like people are already on mars like they're really doing this they could really survive so the realism of it i think supports um the supports the premise that we could do this or we have done this or we can do this um so i think that the genre matters like if it's all sort of you know really super fictional and and and um not quite so true to life um i think it's harder to make the case that this is true or this can happen or we should do this so i think like weir's novel in this and robinson were you read that you believe that people are there you believe that you could do this and that this is how it's gonna it's gonna unfold um so i think the read the the hard science fiction is extremely important genre in thinking about um arguments from our school and station okay great um i'm going to let me see i'll come back to hamin reza um the second question um also i'm curious whether you're considering making comparisons between the rhetoric used for the case of israel and the discourse arguing that life actually originated on mars and then transferred to earth the argument of original home for colonialism interesting so actually um i had been thinking about israel but not in that sense like the notion of like life starting on mars and then coming to earth um i really haven't thought about that so that's a great angle and thank you for that um but i haven't been thinking about um colonization in different spaces and so this notion of setting up um uh kabuts is as sort of being also um as a way of thinking about colonization um is that colonization if so why or why not or you know what what is the sort of language what are the arguments um for these kinds of settlements um i think i i've looked into it a little bit not a lot but i was kind of intrigued by this notion of thinking about whether there might be some analogs there that would be useful to help me think about um colonial arguments and colonial moments okay um ali has a question do you want to um do you want me to take the question from the chat or would you like to oh i i didn't drop it in the chat sorry um i can i can just say it um i was also really interested in your reading of kim's damley robinson's uh red mars series um i really wanted to ask you about your reading of it as utopian and heroic which is really interesting to me especially with the overtones of like the martian exceptionalism and the people on mars are going to achieve x y and z um and especially just with like the the how how the fault lines show in that i was wondering how the how that exceptionalism plays into the narrative of colonization if that makes sense i can yeah yeah it's showing like this notion that like we are an exceptional people therefore you know we have the right to colonize here or it is our destiny to colonize here sort of thing or the sense that uh people who are on mars are um the i believe the quote you used was uh we won't make earth's mistakes or something on those lines um that kind of thinking yeah i mean um so it's really interesting because uh in the beginning of robinson's book you have a hundred colonists right and they train in Antarctica and they're supposed to give like reasons why they want to go to mars and most of this is supposed to be like oh well i'm really interested in this science or we could do this thing but when they all get on the spaceship and they're away from earth they're all like screw it the reason we want to go to mars is we want to build a new society because we're tired of earth in the way that you know earth society and capitalism and everything's messed up and we're going to start sort of a really a new utopic world on mars um and of course what's interesting about the novel is that um it's a very about half of the novel the first half they're able to do this and they're they're you know they've created this place called under hill um and they've they've started to make their utopian ideas come true in some small ways and they're thinking and planning how to do it and then they find gold on mars and the minute gold is found on mars all the trans nationals show up and all of a sudden it's just like earth again right um and so there's this notion of there's this constant tension between like and then they have to go underground and they become revolutionaries i don't want to rule the whole plot of the the novels but but i i think there is this notion that you know their ideas are pure um and correct and and that all everything that earth stands for with capitalism and and big government right um and not allowing like small self-government or allowing people to form their own groups and and do have their own lives i mean i think kim staley robinson is a libertarian so much of the libertarian thinking kind of comes out in his novels um so i don't know if i'm answering your question ali um but i think there is this notion that that this is the right way to think about how the world should be which is essentially an anti-capitalistic perspective but then things are more egalitarian thank you natalia had her hand up a moment ago yeah um so i'm i work in exoplanets and um i have also seen that um in the space community at mit and aro estra as well there's been a big move in changing the language of how we talk about humans going to the moon uh to mars or like in the very distant future exoplanets and um it's becoming very unpopular to say colonize or we're trying to actively tell others like maybe we shouldn't say colonize maybe we should say explore or visit um and rethinking it like as scientists and like nasa decadal surveys are starting to like include that in thinking about the next 10 years and so um i'm really curious about this section in your project on anti-colonial thinking and what that's going to look like thank you natalia i hope um maybe we can connect because i'd be really interested in talking to you a little bit about the kinds of language changes that you're seeing and the kinds of documents that i might be able to look at to talk about this because i think that's fascinating that that you know because if you look at nasa stuff it's pretty colonial focused at least during the periods i've been looking at so it's interesting that they've kind of cottoned on that this might not be the breast framing for this and they might want to think rhetorically about changing the way that they talk about um their their exhibition they're they're traveling to exoplanets and mars and other spaces um i'm trying to think okay i hopefully i'm not losing the thread of your question um could you just repeat the last part that you said because i think i've lost that thread yeah i was curious if you could give like a brief outline or like teaser of like what um what the path is going to be for like the anti-colonialist yeah parts of your project so it is interesting because there are so i mentioned ray bradberry earlier um the martian chronicles is actually science fiction that's very anti is is sort of focused towards anti-colonialism um because what he talks about is how one you know like um so the the space travelers go to earth the the martians aren't too excited about having them there like they don't think it's great and they end up like trying to eliminate them until of course all the martians die of a disease that's brought from earth right which is um analogic to the smallpox outbreak in the united states after european settlers got here so we see a lot of this sort of like he's reminding us of all of the the atrocities essentially that occurred when when they colonize north america right so these are very much present in bradberry's work which is interesting given the sort of juxtaposition that it has with that quote that i showed you earlier so there's sort of like maybe a fraught um relationship for him about about this moment about going to mars the other thing there is a very interesting environmental argument where you know humans go to mars and they trash it so they're throwing junk in the canal and they're essentially doing the same thing to this planet that they did to earth right so this notion that humans aren't going to change and they're just going to get this new beautiful planet and they're going to destroy it and i think kim stanley robinson also talks he there's a there's a there's a lot of discussion about terraforming which is a very central part of his novel and so terraforming is going to be an interesting um way of thinking about colonialism because it's like uber colonialism you're not only like showing up in a place you're just completely transforming it so that you can live there right which you know we've done that in a number of ways on earth but this is like taking it to the next level where you're just totally taking this ecology of a planet and completely changing it so it suits your own needs right so there's that issue um there's also issues of race there's issues uh especially so um i don't know if you guys know gilscarron but he has this really great song called white he's on the moon right where he talks about how essentially you know we could be using the money for space projects for social projects on earth um why don't we do that um there's also the same environmental arguments about why don't we use the money that we could be exploring Mars to work on climate change on earth right why why don't we worry about on planet and not worry about going living on other planets um but sort of the the racial inequities also come out in other kinds of stories about questions of like so they're they're like i think it's philip k dick where he talks a lot about like these people go to the moon and they work as miners like who are these miners like while they end up being people that were poor on earth that they could just sort of exploit and send them ours which is a terrible environment to extract resources and then bring them back to earth for everybody else who's rich so there's there's a lot of this this sort of notion that colonialism is going to be um they're going to colonize they're going to just there it's going to it's going to be extractive of resources you're going to have the same folks on earth that are taking risks in labor to take those risks on Mars and on other planets you also see this in the expanse right where um the the folks that are working um and i can't i can't recall the name right now the folks that work on the outer rim and the asteroids are all like sort of poor um folks that are you know the rights are trampled on and they're just sort of exploited for their labor in these very dangerous spaces so we see those so those are like that's a preview of the kind of things that i'd like to talk about um and i'd be interested to hear from anyone else if there are other kinds of issues that i think are worth talking about um with respect and and of course aproputurism um if we want to talk about race and space that's something also that's important to talk about think about thanks i'm going to go back to the q and a um let's see where was i um from anonymous attendee have you read and do you have thoughts on a memory called empire often noted as an anti-imperial space opera thank you i have not read that so um thank you so much for bringing to my attention i just wrote it down i've got a little tablet here i'm writing down stuff people are asking and saying uh so a memory called empire um i am going to explore that that thank you for the source i'm always the more i can get the more i can look at the better i the happier i am the better i feel um next from yin we uh have you read how jing fang's vagabond and if so what are your thoughts on whether there is a difference in the ideas of colonization in this chinese science fiction text compared to the english texts that you use so um i have not i have not read vagabond i have heard about it um there was also another text whose name escapes me right now but i think is by a chinese author and the whole um premise of the story is that um officially earth sends and receives signals from an extraterrestrial life form um and then they realize oh my god if someone can send and receive these signals it's very likely that they're going to like come to us and that we're going to be colonized so there's about oh yes thank you the three-body problem thank you so much um the name of the novel is a three-body problem um or and so the idea is that you know what if what if we should maybe not be sending all these messages out into space because we could be the next place to get colonized by some uh by some some folks out there that have more technology than we do um so that's a very interesting sort of alternative perspective um but of course you know there are the sci-fi five flicks from the the fifties and sixties where you know extraterrestrials come to earth um and like how to serve man right as a menu and not uh and not a doctrine about how to help men um so anyway uh i think that was the day the earth stood still but there are lots of there are lots of examples like that where you have films about earth being colonized but i think the chinese writers that that particular series i think is very interesting the three-body problem thanks um i've been going to the list a lot are there are there other graduate students or anyone else on screen who wants to ask a question um i'm going to go back to the list then and then i have one other question but i i'll go through um a couple more um oh this is from riccardo again what factor commands the massive commitment of national resources to explore a hostile environment and not the ocean yeah interesting that's a great question um factor of course is um international one factor is international prestige so one of the chapters i'm going to be devoting my into my book on is about the politics of of you know space research and and mars colonization um because think of if you think about it um there's a really famous speech by kennedy um it's called his moon speech which was given at rice university and i think 1961 or 63 um and in the speech he said he essentially says and this is the per ardua argument i was talking about my talk of argument from difficulty he says we go to the moon not because it's easy but because it's hard and the idea is that if because it's hard if you can show that you can do it then you're better than everyone else so essentially it's a way of you know having national prestige um and it's worth putting a lot of money into um endeavors that show your national prestige um so if you think about mars and especially mars in the last like two months um china the united states and the united arab arab Emirates have all sent um either probes or landers or all the above tomorrows um and the notion is that there is a new in my estimation a new space race on india china the united states the european union everyone is competing for these uh for reaching these extra terrestrial spaces and living on them um so i think that this is going to be heating up in the way that it was heating up uh in the 1960s and and and kennedy's speech i think is very evocative of what i see happening now so why will we spend the resources um because if we don't we're going to be second and um we can't have national pride uh of place so i think that that might be one reason why we will do it been very uh good about answering a lot of questions i i love these are great questions i um thank you this so i'm going to take one more from from the q and a and then then um i have one one last kind of follow-up um and this is well there are a couple of recommendations a couple of scholarly recommendations for following up on some of the earlier comments mark jernig's uh racial world making the power of popular fiction uh and john writers colonialism and the emergence of science fiction um and then in the other list there's a reference to parable of the sewer um and uh have you read parable of the sewer and thought about the rhetoric for dispersing through the cosmos like seed on the wind that's a very common trope actually um isaac asimov talks a lot about this um he talks a lot about us as the float loose vikings of the future um interstellar vikings that is so we get in our longship so we go out and we spread the spread humanity throughout the universe um and a lot of the argument there is well you know you have all these blank spaces and what we want to do is we want to create awareness of these spaces and you can't have awareness without people so therefore we'll bring people there um it kind of goes back to vivek your your notion of terra nulis um so there is this idea that well if if if nothing's there it's not very valuable but if people are there we can make value of it um we can make it exist in a way that it doesn't exist if there aren't people there so um there's some very interesting arguments definitely this this foot loose viking of the future is arthur c clark asimov all those guys talk about this and a lot thanks so uh what i wanted to just circle back to um and i think i i was still kind of um trying to articulate this but um it goes back to i guess the question i asked about whether or what kind of rhetorical moves are being made um to to uh represent certain spaces around the globe as colonizable by europeans in other words what is necessary um you know and and this is why you know i think that that the kind of um early articulations of race and racial difference and the kind of emergence of racial science um that you know in a sense those are those are the rhetorical um the repositories of the rhetorical moves that are being made to render um uh to render certain spaces inhabited by non-european people um considered like fair game right and so i guess that that's that's part of what i was getting about getting at earlier and whether you know whether you can sort of talk about the tracks um without talking about a kind of underlying um set of assumptions about colonize colonizability um that uh that maybe don't appear in the tracks because they're already sort of settled through other kinds of rhetorics of civilization of racial superiority of you know christian religion in relation to other religions um so i'm just interested to to hear a bit um about that before we close out yeah thank you and and and this is gonna send me back deep into history if you don't if you it will bear with me for a second um so yes there there are very formal arguments about this um and what some people may be surprised to know is that uh particularly the spanish were very concerned i mean initially they were flying with whatever was happening but then they got really concerned about it um and they actually had a series of debates about whether that this was even appropriate and by looking at those debates you can see sort of what are the bases of argumentation and it has a has a history that goes beyond even even the the 1492 journey of columbus um essentially so in order for a place to be considered um colonizable or like you know that you can claim as property right so the word the proper word is dominion so a place that you can go and claim dominion over right um there were a couple of things so one um is that that place that space cannot be occupied by a christian king so christianity comes into it right there has to be if there's a christian king there it's a no go you can't just claim dominion over that um the second thing is there were lots of debates over um whether or not the persons in that space were civilized so this goes all the way back to Aristotle and if you if you look at the debates over um these spaces there are certain criteria you have to meet to be considered civilized you have to have a language you had to have a written language you had to have um a social structure um that was that was obvious like a hierarchical structure with like kings and whatever also you can make a case for civilization based on um buildings um so like if you had a town and things were laid out you had temples and stuff so one of the challenges was you know some people that were against um these these early colonial pushes especially by the spanish or like look they have written language they have towns they have kings like you know you you can't claim that these people don't have they're not civilized because they actually do have all these things um there were other parts of the doctrine though like cannibalism so if you were a cannibalistic society you cannot be considered civilized right because that is the most sort of uncivil thing you could do is to eat other people um so a lot of the sort of false arguments about cannibalism amongst certain groups of of indigenous peoples were all aimed at suggesting that they're not civilized right because they couldn't make an argument on these other grounds so so there was there those were what that's one set of arguments so you had the sort of like the legal arguments about the christian king the arguments about whether the people are civilized and then there was a third set of arguments um that were that were there were actually sort of like economic arguments um so a lot of a lot of folks that were doing colonization were trying to find a middle way where they were saying like okay we recognize your civilized we recognize your your dominion to some degree over these places that you're in but what we see is that there are all these uncultivated spaces and so what we're suggesting is that if a space is uncultivated like there's not fields there's not you know animal husbandry we can occupy that space why because you're not using it right so in this way they're not suggesting though that they have dominion over the whole space they're just suggesting that they can move into specific niches which are undeveloped and develop them and claim dominion through development so there's also this sort of third argument about dominion through development so those are like the three I would say main cases that people are making about why it's okay to colonize yeah the last one is is quite interesting in the sense that you know the it is another place where you can see the intersection of capitalism and um and and the these colonial processes that you're talking about because um capitalism only sees land as productive when it's right when it's productive in a capitalist way right in fact I think it's from Locke and his discussion of property that a lot of people draw these these arguments from well we're we're just two minutes over time thank you again for for fielding quite a quite a number of questions and thank you for for sharing your work with us and and and congratulations thank you all for just a wonderful conversation and great questions um definitely keeping me on my toes trying to get me to remember all the stuff that that I've read or thought about so I really appreciate that and I'm I'm glad to hear your questions because it also informs the kinds of topics and issues that I do want to explore as I develop this book as I said it's in it's in its proteo it's in proto stages right so um I've I have one chapter written but I'm looking forward to writing the other ones based on the feedback and discussions I've had here so thank you so much great all right thank you thank you and thank you to everyone who um who attended today and we'll see you next week great