RACE AND COLONIALITY Amal Abu-Bakare POLI-3515-WA Lakehead Winter 2016 Week 9: (March 1 & 3 )

PREVIOUSLY • Empire • Global Terrorism • State of Exception • Biopolitics and Necropolitics • Humanitarianism and International Law • Gender and Inequality

What do these topics share? Critiques of •  Sovereignty and the nation state • Imperialism, Eurocentrcism, (Neo) Colonialism

• Discussions of power and the ‘ ‘normative’ • Positioning and Authority The way the world is vs. the way the world should be

What is Race? •  Is it Biology? Is it Social?

•  Pre Colombus era- raza –a defect or a coarseness in fine cloth, or a defect in poetic speech

•  The early 17th century raza also referred to the branding of purebred

horses

•  Human lineage defined especially by Jewish or North West African Muslim ancestry.

•  As time goes on- 15 century Christian Europe, diverse references to

raza start to share a common notion:

Raza demonstrates a sense of defectiveness + a non-Christian and/or non-European (“heathen”) heritage.

Commodification of Race •  The connecting of Europe, Africa and the Americas to form the “Atlantic

world” resulted from the European colonial project that began in 1492.

•  Spanish Conquistadors laid claim to the Americas in the early 1500s

•  Problem: the inhabitants of the Americas did not appear in the Bible.

•  Naked appearance suggested that they should be incorporated into the Christian world as animals.

•  Religious reasoning used to justify dispossessing indigenous peoples of their land

•  “Defenders of indigenous peoples” (i.e. Bartolomé de las Casas) argued in favour of their humanity, claiming that their living practices demonstrated an ability to reason – a key competency of humanity.

•  Therefore indigenous people could not be enslaved.

•  In 1672 the Royal African Company received a monopoly over English trade with West Africa in…..

•  “redwood, elephants teeth, negroes, slaves, hides, wax, guinea grains, or other commodities” (Mtubani 1983: 71)

• Designated as ‘live stock’ due to the dissimilarities to the Caucasian physical form

•  Legal ownership allows for the literal and sovereign power of life or death over them.

•  1510s: Beginning of systematic trafficking of enslaved Africans to the Americas by Spanish and Portuguese interests.

•  1605: Africans runaway from slave-masters and form the “Quilombo dos Palmares” in Brazil, a self-governing political entity that lasts for almost one hundred years before being destroyed by the Portuguese military.

•  1640s: Dutch Brazil demonstrates the lucrative potential of sugar plantations.

•  1640-1670: Introduction of sugar cane into British and French colonies in the Caribbean by Dutch agents.

•  1791-1804: The Haitian Revolution. •  1807: Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (Britain). •  1833: Slavery abolished in British Caribbean colonies. •  1848: Abolition of slavery in French and Danish Caribbean colonies. •  1865: After a bloody civil war the USA abolishes slavery with the 13th

amendment to the constitution. •  1886: Slavery abolished in Cuba. •  1888: Slavery abolished in Brazil.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (DuBois 1961: 23 )

The Creator of this Chart? • STEM GENUS: white brunette.

•  First race, very blond (northern Europe).

• Second race, Copper-Red (America).

•  Third race, Black (Senegambia).

•  Fourth race, Olive-Yellow (Indians).

Connection: Racialisation Q- What is Racialisation? A- The exercise of ascribing racial identities to social practices or groups (Garner 2009:19) • Historically classification of non-Western peoples went

hand in hand with the hierarchisation and racialisation of cultures.

•  The ideological or discursive process by which understandings, expressions and actions are expressed through racial, cultural and ethnic symbols and signifiers (Goldberg, 1993)

This Week: • Colonialism: implies a material political and economic

relationship/process in which the sovereignty of a nation state is imposed by a colonizing institution, people or entity

• Addressing both colonialism and coloniality entails an analysis of geopolitical, cultural and economic domination, and the struggles waged against these structures of domination

• Such concepts entail discussions of decolonization and the eventual re-indigenization of political discourse

“Colonial rule is enmeshed with a system of representation and, as an apparatus of power, its [colonial rule’s] discourse constructs a knowledge of subject peoples through which it variously authorizes that rule, installs racial differences, and produces the colonized as entirely knowable (Childs & Williams, 1997:123)

Decolonization: What does it mean to decolonize? •  To uncover (i.e. Franz Fanon)

•  To dismantle ( Orientalism)

•  To acknowledge ( Spivak and Epistemic Violence) •  To resist ( Black Lives Matter)

Decolonial Research Methods

“[Research refers to] processes of understanding how Western discourse about the Other is supported by ‘institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles’” (Smith,1999)

Decolonization & Orientalism Orientalism describes an…. 1. Epistemology 2.  Interdisciplinary discussion 3. Political Project

•  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZiyXEF1Aas

Coloniality and Violence •  Decolonization is important not just for demonstrating

orientalist underpinnings and for further understanding how imperialist structures are reinforced

•  Reinforcement often occurs through violent means/ends

•  If and when somebody is defined as the enemy ‘Other’, they no longer are human anymore

•  “it has become a beast to be eliminated to gas chambers or by atom bombs” (Harle, 2000:4)

•  Epistemic Violence

Epistemic Violence • Coined by Spivak (1994) in her acclaimed work

• Can the Subaltern Speak? • Describes the devastating effect of the routine silencing of

marginalized peoples that results from a purposeful dismissal of alternative knowledge due to the privileging of Western epistemic practices

• Results in the denial of non-western and racialized testimony, experience, and reality

To what extent have supposed ‘Others’ fallen outside the category of human and how do our cultural frames for thinking set limits on the kind of [human] losses we can avow as loss?” (Butler, 2004:32)

BLACK LIVES MATTER

•  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlIlM03SDHA

White Privilege II •  “White privilege” refers to the differential treatment and the

social advantages that accrue to white/european persons due to their transparent competence and humanity

•  Describes a systemic state of being not ‘physical’ or ‘material’

•  Is contextual ( i.e. Irish 1960s and Italians 19th C) but generally structurally and empirically consistent

•  Theorists of race describe the structural conditions that uphold white privilege as “white supremacy”.

•  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sjhU2t9ocA

Decolonization Impact Important questions to consider:

Is it possible to decolonize institutions of colonial power (such as the academy, government, etc.), but, further, is it possible to decolonize through them?

Understanding Re-Indigenization •  "The contours of the terrain itself being defined between

(neo)colonial and anti-colonial legacies of interactions, that are of practical implications in the context of identity politics (or what Charles Taylor refers to as a politics of recognition ), and hitherto what follows in ties and claims by those self-identifying as indigenous in relation to ‘land, nation, autonomy, sovereignty, and the right to self-determination..."