|
Article Excerpt
Introduction
IN A RECENT ARTICLE IN SOCIAL JUSTICE, "DECOLONIZING ANTIRACISM," BONITA Lawrence and Enakshi Dua (2005) argue that antiracist theory and practices have historically excluded the concerns of Aboriginal peoples. The result, they claim, is twofold: Aboriginal people "cannot see themselves in antiracism contexts and Aboriginal activism against settler domination takes place without people of color as allies." (1) They further argue that antiracist praxis has actually contributed to the active colonization of Aboriginal peoples (pp. 122-123). Indeed, they contend that "antiracism is premised on an ongoing colonial project" (p. 123, emphasis added) and on "a colonizing social formation" (pp. 129-130). (2)
Examples of antiracist complicity, according to Lawrence and Dua, include postcolonial critiques of national liberation strategies and social constructivist critiques of nationhood or nationalisms. They maintain that such analyses further secure the colonization of indigenous people by contributing to "the ongoing delegitimization of Indigenous nationhood" (p. 128). Moreover, since indigenous "nationhood" is understood in ethnicized terms, Lawrence and Dua also claim that critiques, such as those of Stuart Hall, against ethnic absolutism are destructive of indigenous national identity and struggle (p. 131). (3) Like other nationalist arguments that read the existence of contemporary nationalized polities back into time immemorial, Lawrence and Dua maintain that such critiques are attacks against both the pre-colonial identity of indigenous people and of their contemporary efforts at achieving sovereignty.
Since their critique is broadly focused on antiracism thought and practice as it affects indigenous people in Canada, Lawrence and Dua discuss what they see as the implication of nonwhites within the colonial project. One of their central arguments is that "people of color are settlers. Broad differences exist between those brought as slaves, currently working as migrant laborers, are refugees without legal documentation, or emigres who have obtained citizenship. Yet people of color live on land that is appropriated and contested, where Aboriginal peoples are denied nationhood and access to their own lands" (p. 134). (4)
In this article, we would like to respond to two of these arguments. First, we challenge the conflation between processes of migration and those of colonialism. We ask whether it is historically accurate or analytically precise to describe as settler colonialism the forced movements of enslaved Africans, the movement of unfree indentured Asians, or the subsequent Third World displacements and migrations of people from across the globe, many of them indigenous people themselves. (5) Are there particular sets of relationships that make one a "settler colonist," or are all migrants by necessity part of this group? What are the political consequences of seeing various forced, less-than-voluntary or even fully voluntary migrants and/ or their descendents as settler colonists? What work do these ideas do in today's political movements for justice for indigenous people and for migrants? What are the consequences of naturalizing an ethnicized, racialized, and nationalized relationship between people and with land?
Second, we interrogate the claim that decolonization may be secured through the nationalist project. Is it possible for indigenous nationalisms in Canada or elsewhere to succeed where no others have actually secured what can be called "decolonization" without seriously distorting the term? Do efforts at decolonization that rely on ideas of "nationhood," this time centered on autochthonous discourses of "Native" rights, result in a transformation of colonial rule with its particular definitions of territory, polity, and governance, or do they simply reverse (or loosen) the binary of power while maintaining the dualism? Are critiques of naturalized nationhoods and nationalisms tantamount to support for colonialism? Are there other more transformative and more effective paths to liberation than through the national sovereignty project? What are these?
In challenging two key planks in Lawrence and Dua's argument, we recognize that they are not the first to make these linked sets of arguments. The tying of a particular group of people to particular places--and basing principles of justice and the allocation of resources (especially land) on notions of their natural connection to these--has become increasingly widespread since the late 1980s. Though each has its own specificities, there are, nevertheless, striking parallels in the mobilization of the sorts of sentiments expressed by Lawrence and Dua in South Africa, Equatorial Africa, Australia, New Zealand, parts of Asia, Europe, North America, Latin America, Oceania, (6) and the Caribbean.
In each instance, a particular definition of who constitutes the "Native" is put forward. Some, like the one articulated by Lawrence and Dua in the Canadian context, are part of efforts at decolonization where many "Natives" are subordinated and defined (by both the dominated and the dominating) metaphysically as being of the land colonized by various European empires. Others, such as across Africa and in Asia, are advanced in postcolonial contexts where the polity is redefined over the distribution of power and land and where "Natives" are usually defined ethnically as those living in any particular area (at smaller and larger scales) at the point of colonization (Mamdani, 1998). Still others are formulated in an attempt to make claims for the continuation of rank hierarchies for those "Natives" racialized as either European or white against former colonial subjects who have made a home in various metropoles (Balibar, 1991b).
Although each definition of the Native shares qualities with the other (metaphysical claims of "rootedness" are often racialized and ethnicized, for instance), in each case it is those constituted as "migrants"--the quintessential non-Natives--who come to be the problem for those constituted as "Natives." Migrants are said to take resources properly belonging to Natives, to promote the disintegration of the "nation," thwart decolonization, and so on. In this negative duality of the "Native" and the "migrant," each is defined as existing within discrete, oppositional categories that are wholly unrelated and, more importantly, should remain so.
The pervasiveness of such autochthonous discourses leads us to question how they are related to political and social transformations shared across the spaces where they are, or are rapidly becoming, prevalent. Global flows, after all, are certainly not new. Many (most?) places across the world have long experienced the movement of people. As capitalist social relations have truly become a global phenomenon, however, it seems that the presence of "foreigners" has taken on even greater urgency and generated increasingly heated controversies. As we shall argue below, the expansion of the category of "settler colonizer" to include all "non-Natives" emerged within the context of the political consolidation of neoliberalism in the late 1980s and the related rise of neo-racist ideologies of incommensurable "differences" among "cultures" imagined as separate and distinct (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2005: 125; Balibar, 1991b; Mamdani, 1998; Geschiere and Nyamnjoh, 2000).
Though we will clearly depart from Lawrence and Dua on various key questions--including on who constitutes a settler colonist, on migration, and on nationalism--we do share certain of their arguments. For example, it is important to attend to the specificities of the oppression of people constituted as indigenous in any struggle against racism; a civil rights approach clearly does not pose a fundamental challenge to colonialism; and a forceful critique of liberal discourses of "democracy" and multiculturalism is needed since they do not challenge colonial relationships. We therefore conclude with a consideration of ways to undo the divide between "indigenous" people and "migrants" by working toward practices of decolonization that are fundamentally antiracist and toward an antiracist politics fully cognizant of the necessity of anti-capitalist decolonization. From this standpoint we reject the de-linking of antiracism and anti-colonialism that is fundamental to Lawrence and Dua's argument, and seek rather to renew the historical linkage with colonialism made in the best of antiracist thought and practice. We are especially interested in liberatory strategies of critique and practice that do not reproduce the ruling strategies of colonial modernity, the colonial...
|
