The ‘Missing’ Politics of Whiteness and Rightful Presence in the Settler Colonial City

Abstract

This article engages the global nexus of colonisation, racialisation, and urbanisation through the settler colonial city of Kelowna, British Columbia (BC), Canada. Kelowna is known for its recent, rapid urbanisation and for its ongoing, disproportionate ‘whiteness’, understood as a complex political geography that enacts boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. The white urban identity of Kelowna defines Indigenous and temporary migrant communities as ‘missing’ or ‘out-of-place’, yet these configurations of ‘missing’ are politically contested. This article examines how differential processes of racialisation and urbanisation establish the whiteness of this settler-colonial city, drawing attention to ways that ‘missing’ communities remake relations of ‘rightful presence’ in the city, against dominant racialised, colonial, and urban narratives of their absence and processes of their displacement. Finally, this article considers how a politics of ‘rightful presence’ needs to be reconfigured in the settler-colonial city, which itself has no rightful presence on unceded Indigenous land.