Read Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) Online

Authors: Glen Sean Coulthard

Tags: #SOC021000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / Native American Studies

Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (34 page)

71.
Alfred,
Wasáse
, 53.

72.
Taiaiake Alfred, “Restitution is the Real Pathway for Justice of Indigenous Peoples,” in Aboriginal Healing Foundation,
Response, Responsibility, and Renewal
, 179–87; Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox,
Finding Dahshaa: Self-Government, Social Suffering, and Aboriginal Policy in Canada
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009). These two texts embody both of these criticisms.

73.
Irlbacher-Fox,
Finding Dahshaa
, 33.

74.
Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
, 89.

75.
Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development,
Gathering Strength: Canada’s Aboriginal Action Plan
(Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 1998).

76.
Ibid., 1.

77.
Irlbacher-Fox,
Finding Dahshaa
, 106–8.

78.
Sam McKegney, “From Trickster Poetics to Transgressive Politics: Substantiating Survivance in Tomson Highway’s
Kiss of the Fur Queen,

Studies in American Indian Literatures
17, no. 4 (2005): 85.

79.
Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development website, “Notes for an Address by the Honourable Jane Stewart, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, on the Occasion of the Unveiling of
Gathering Strength—Canada’s Aboriginal Action Plan
,” Ottawa, January 7, 1998,
http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100015725/1100100015726
.

80.
Aboriginal Healing Foundation,
FAQs
,
http://www.ahf.ca/faqs
.

81.
Alfred,
Wasáse
, 152.

82.
Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development,
Gathering Strength
, 11.

83.
Bonita Lawrence,
Fractured Homeland: Federal Recognition and Algonquin Identity in Ontario
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012), 71. Lawrence offers a discussion of “alternative” comprehensive claim options.

84.
Kulchyski,
Like the Sound of a Drum
, 100.

85.
Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development website,
The Government of Canada’s Approach to Implementation of the Inherent Right and Negotiation of Self-Government
(Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1995),
http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100031843/1100100031844
(emphasis added).

86.
Michael Asch, “Self-Government in the New Millennium,” in
Nation to Nation: Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Future of Canada
, ed. John Bird, Lorraine Land, and Murray MacAdam (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 2002), 70.

87.
R. v. Van der Peet,
(1996), Supreme Court Ruling, 507, 539.

88.
Lisa Dufraimont, “From Regulation to Recolonization: Justifiable Infringement of Aboriginal Rights at the Supreme Court of Canada,”
University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review
, 58, no. 1 (2000): 1–30.

89.
Prime Minister of Canada, “Statement and Apology.”

90.
Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 388.

91.
Ibid.

92.
Jefferie Murphy, “Moral Epistemology, the Retributive Emotions, and the ‘Clumsy Moral Philosophy’ of Jesus Christ,” in
The Passions of Law
, ed. S. Bandes, 152, quoted in Brudholm, “Revisiting Resentments,” 13.

93.
Paulette Regan,
Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 7.

94.
Alfred, “Restitution Is the Real Pathway to Justice for Indigenous Peoples,” 182–84.

5. The Plunge into the Chasm of the Past

1.
Sonia Kruks,
Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 88; Azzedine Haddour, “Sartre and Fanon on Negritude and Political Empowerment,”
Sartre Studies International
2, no. 1 (2005): 286–301.

2.
David Caute,
Fanon
(New York: Fontana, 1970), 21–31; Irene Grendzier,
Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study
(New York: Vintage, 1974), 44; David Macey,
Frantz Fanon: A Life
(London: Granta, 2000), 186.

3.
Jock McCullock,
Black Soul, White Artifact: Fanon’s Clinical Psychology and Social Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 36.

4.
I attribute this third interpretation to Nigel Gibson,
Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination
(Cambridge: Polity, 2003); Robert Benasconi, “The Assumption of Negritude: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and the Vicious Circle of Racial Politics,”
Parallax
8, no. 2 (2002): 69–83; Lou Turner, “Marginal Note on Minority Questions in the Thought of Frantz Fanon,”
Philosophia Africana
4, no. 2 (2001): 37–46 ; and to a slightly lesser extent, Anita Parry, “Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance or Two Cheers for Nativism,” in
Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue
, ed. Nigel Gibson, 215–50 (Amherst, Mass.: Humanity Books, 1999). Within this third approach authors tend to situate Fanon more in line with the “subjectivist” conception of negritude advanced by Césaire—which conceptualizes black subjectivity as a “construction” representing “the colonized condition and its refusal”—as opposed to the “objectivist” notion promulgated by Senghor, where negritude is aligned with a “biologically determined notion of blackness as a distinctive mode of being and collective identity” (Parry, “Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance,” 230).

5.
Katherine Gines, “Fanon and Sartre 50 Years Later: To Retain or Reject the Concept of Race,”
Sartre Studies International
9, no. 2 (2003): 55–70.

6.
Kruks,
Retrieving Experience
, 98. Also see Azzedine Haddour, “Sartre and Fanon on Negritude and Political Empowerment,”
Sartre Studies International
2, no. 1 (2005): 286–301.

7.
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate
(New York: Schocken Books, 1974).

8.
Ibid., 69, 143.

9.
Jean Paul Sartre,
Being and Nothingness
(New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 324–29.

10.
Ibid., 362.

11.
Ibid., 340–400, 471–74.

12.
Sonia Kruks, “Sartre, Fanon and Identity Politics,” in
Fanon: A Critical Reader
, ed. Lewis Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renee T. White (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 124.

13.
Sartre,
Being and Nothingness
, 473. For a helpful discussion of Sartre’s “pessimistic” reading of Hegel, see Majid Yar, “Recognition and the Politics of Human(e) Desire,”
Theory, Culture and Society
18, nos. 2–3 (2001): 58–62. Also see Axel Honneth,
The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts
(Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1995), 145–59; Robert Williams,
Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 371–79.

14.
Yar, “Recognition and the Politics of Human(e) Desire,” 60–61.

15.
Sartre,
Being and Nothingness
, 475. For a less pessimistic account of Sartre’s theory of recognition, see T. Storm Heter, “Authenticity and Others: Sartre’s Ethics of Recognition,”
Sartre Studies International
12, no. 2 (2006): 17–43. Sartre scholars generally agree that Sartre eventually sought to establish the foundation for an existential ethics that recognizes, within the frame of authenticity, the freedom of others. To act authentically would under this formulation require that one respect the freedom of others. The beginnings of Sartre’s existential ethics are sketched in
Notebooks for an Ethics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

16.
Ibid. Sartre
, Anti-Semite and Jew
, 79.

17.
Ibid., 59–60.

18.
Ibid., 92.

19.
Ibid., 94.

20.
Ibid., 90–135.

21.
Ibid., 93.

22.
Ibid., 94–95.

23.
Ibid., 137.

24.
Ibid.

25.
Ibid., 138 (emphasis added).

26.
Ibid., 141.

27.
Ibid., 148.

28.
Ibid., 149.

29.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” in
Race
, ed. Robert Bernasconi (New York: Blackwell, 2001), 115–42.

30.
Ibid., 118.

31.
Ibid.

32.
Ibid.

33.
This distinction in Marx shapes Sartre’s views on the role played by negritude in the struggle against capitalist imperialism. The following is the most commonly cited passage by Marx that makes this distinction: “The economic conditions have in the first place transformed the mass of the people of the country into wage-workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass of people a common situation with common interests. This mass is already a class, as opposed to capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle . . . this mass unites, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests which it defends are the interests of its class. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle” (Karl Marx,
The Poverty of Philosophy
[New York: Prometheus Books, 1995], 188–89). Whether or not it is correct to read this distinction into Marx is a matter of debate. Edward Andrew, “Class in Itself and Class against Capital: Karl Marx and His Classifiers,”
Canadian Journal of Political Science
16, no. 3 (1983): 577–84.

34.
Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” 119.

35.
Ibid.

36.
Aimé Césaire and René Depestre , “An Interview with Aimé Césaire,” in
Aimé Césaire: Discourse on Colonialism
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 89–90.

37.
Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” 137.

38.
Ibid.

39.
Ibid. (emphasis added).

40.
Ibid., 89, 95, 97.

41.
Ibid., 89, 92.

42.
Ibid., 95 (emphasis added).

43.
Ibid., 90.

44.
Sartre,
Anti-Semite and Jew
, 93. For a discussion of the similarities between Sartre and Fanon on this matter, see Kruks, “Sartre, Fanon and Identity Politics,” 128–29.

45.
Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
(2008), 42, 157, 93.

46.
Ibid., 45.

47.
This is the main argument that Fanon develops in the chapter “The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized,” in
Black Skin, White Masks
. Here Fanon takes aim at Octave Mannoni’s
Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of the Colonized
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), in which Mannoni suggests that the tendency to accept colonial relations of dependency exhibited by some non-Western societies vis-à-vis their colonizers reflects an
inherent or natural
disposition of certain non-Western peoples to accept imposed forms of authority and rule.

48.
Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
(2008), 188.

49.
Ibid., 157. Practices of desubjectification that tactically deploy “reverse” discourses as a means of disrupting a hegemonic field of power is discussed by Michel Foucault in
The History of Sexuality
(New York: Vintage, 1990), 1:101. The transformative potential of reverse discourse in the context of anticolonial “nativist” movements is critically endorsed by Benita Parry in “Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance,” 221–50.

50.
Robert Benasconi, “Eliminating the Cycle of Violence: The Place of a Dying Colonialism within Fanon’s Revolutionary Thought,”
Philosophia Africana
4, no. 2 (2001): 19.

51.
Gibson,
Fanon
, 81.

52.
Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
(2008), 89–119.

53.
Ibid., 95 (emphasis added).

54.
Ibid. (emphasis added).

55.
Ibid., 109.

56.
Ibid., 110.

57.
Ibid., 111.

58.
Ibid., 112

59.
Ibid., 117.

60.
Ibid., xviii, 113.

61.
Ibid., 95.

62.
Ibid., 19, 28, 132, 197.

63.
Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in
The Fanon Reader
, ed. Azzedine Haddour (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 108.

64.
McCullock,
Black Soul, White Artifact
.

65.
Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
(2008), 115.

66.
Léopold Senghor, “Negritude and Modernity or Negritude as a Humanism for the Twentieth Century,” in
Race
, ed. Robert Benasconi (New York: Blackwell, 2001), 144.

67.
Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
(2008), 150 (emphasis added).

68.
Ibid., 101–11.

69.
Ibid., xviii.

70.
Ibid., 199.

71.
Gibson,
Fanon
, 73–78. Fanon’s main charge was that Sartre had ignored or downplayed the importance of the
experiential
worth of negritude for blacks living under the gaze of colonial racism. Sartre had “intellectualized” the lived experience of blackness, and in doing so “destroyed Black zeal” and “impulsiveness.” See Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
(2008), 113–14. In this sense, Nigel Gibson suggests that Fanon’s main criticism of Sartre was that he had largely abandoned the insights of his phenomenological existentialism for a crude Marxist determinism.

72.
Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
(2008), 80.

73.
Ibid., 201.

74.
Ibid., 206.

75.
Frantz Fanon, “West Indians and Africans,” in
Toward the African Revolution
(Boston: Grove Press, 1967), 18.

76.
Ibid., 17.

77.
Ibid. (emphasis added).

78.
Ibid., 21–22.

79.
Ibid., 23, 26.

80.
Ibid.

81.
Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
(2008), 63.

82.
Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture,”
Toward the African Revolution
(Boston: Grove Press, 1967), 31–44. This essay was originally presented at the Paris meeting of the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956.

83.
Ibid., 32. For “culturalization of racism,” see Sharene Razack,
Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 60; Philomena Essed,
Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory
(London: Sage Publishing, 1991), 14.

84.
Fanon, “Racism and Culture,” 32.

85.
Fanon does not mean to suggest that racism’s crude biological variant has “disappeared,” however. To be sure, as Fanon continues, he points out that during his day organizations as prominent as the World Health Organization were still conducting studies that advanced “scientific arguments” in “support of a physiological lobotomy of the African Negro.” What Fanon is attempting to do, rather, is highlight the capacity of racial discourse to modify itself over time and context. In the early days of “pure”
exploitation, such as slavery, the biological articulation of racism served to justify the domination and exploitation of blacks just fine. But with the gradual advance of scientific and other evidence undermining assumptions about race-based inferiority and superiority, it became increasingly difficult to defend the exploitation of blacks in biological terms. As a result, such “affirmations, crude and massive, [gave] way to a more refined argument” which established a new means to “camouflage” the “techniques by which man is exploited.” Racism’s turn to culture provided this camouflage. See Fanon, “Racism and Culture,” 32.

86.
Ibid., 34.

87.
Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
, 158.

88.
Ibid., 154.

89.
Fanon, “Racism and Culture,” 148.

90.
Fanon,
Wretched of the Earth
, 170.

91.
Gibson,
Fanon
, ch. 6; Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
, 178–79 (emphasis added).

92.
Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
, 43.

93.
Leanne Simpson,
Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence
(Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Press, 2011), 32.

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