17. The Unsettler

Grant Farred is the author of, among other works, Ethical Solidarity (np:, 2025), The Perversity of Gratitude: An Apartheid Education (Temple University Press, 2024), and Martin Heidegger Saved My Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). His forthcoming books include Diaspora-in-Place (Temple University Press) and Unhappy Negro: The Philosophy of WEB Du Bois (Duke University Press).

Sophia Jahadhmy is a PhD candidate at Cornell University studying race-making, enslavement, and communal violence on the Swahili Coast.

Oliver Layman is a PhD student at Cornell University studying the theory and praxis of subversive movements and their intellectuals.

Alexander van Biema is a PhD candidate in Africana Studies at Cornell University. Alex’s research focuses on 20th century Dutch Caribbean literature.

The Unsettler

by Grant Farred, Sophia Jahadhmy, Oliver Layman, and Alexander van Biema

A co-publication with BugNip Press. Preorder here.

ISBN 978-1-962365-17-8

5.5 x 8.5, 180 pgs., $25

Forthcoming Fall 2026.

“A bold and inventive treatise on the living legacies of settler colonialism. Guaranteed to open up new pathways and paradigms, for all kinds of readers.”

—Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University

The unsettler is presented here as a political actor organized around the principle of the making-dead of the indigenous. In a 2008 essay, "The Unsettler," Grant Farred first develops this concept, both as a figure sui generis but also in contradistinction to that of the settler colonial. At once conceptually specific and allusive, The Unsettler is a deliberate study of that figure in history who is governed by the logic of the thanatopolitical. Drawing on a range of thinkers, from Jacques Derrida to Ghassan Kanafani and V.Y. Mudimbe, surveying a wide range of issues, from biopolitics to the sterilization of the indigenous, from the politics of the “blue grab” to organ transplants, The Unsettler adds its name to that lexicon of struggle against colonialism, neo-colonialism and, most importantly, the practice of unsettling the indigenous.