‘The other’. From savage minds to ethnic identities. (original) (raw)
Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter nose than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea--something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.
Publié dans International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2008, Elsevier Glossary Ethnocentrism: the propensity of a group (in-group) to consider its members and values as superior to the members and values of other groups (out-groups) Exotic: belonging to a faraway, foreign country or civilization and thus demarcated from the norms established in and by the West Exotism: characteristic of exotic things/places/people Exoticism: a taste for exotic objects/places/people Other: member of a dominated out-group, whose identity is considered lacking and who may be subject to discrimination by the in-group Othering: transforming a difference into otherness so as to create an in-group and an out-group Otherness: characteristic of the Other In-group: a group to which the speaker, the person spoken of, etc. belongs Out-group: a group to which the speaker, person spoken of, etc. does not belong Abstract Otherness is due less to the difference of the Other than to the point of view and the discourse of the person who perceives the Other as such. Opposing Us, the Self, and Them, the Other, is to choose a criterion that allows humanity to be divided into two groups: one that embodies the norm and whose identity is valued and another that is defined by its faults, devalued and susceptible to discrimination. Only dominant groups (such as Westerners in the time of colonization) are in a position to impose their categories in the matter. By stigmatizing them as Others, Barbarians, Savages or People of Color, they relegate the peoples that they could dominate or exterminate to the margin of humanity. The otherness of these peoples has notably been based on their supposed spatial marginality. In addition, certain types of spatial organization, like segregation or territorial constructions, allow the opposition between the Self and the Other to be maintained or accentuated. Although it seems that the Other is sometimes valued, as with exoticism, it is done in a stereotypical, reassuring fashion that serves to comfort the Self in its feeling of superiority.
In the Name of Civilization: War, Conquest, and Colonialism
Pléyade (Santiago)
At its inception, the idea of civilization was imbued with a sense of progress, peace, and optimism. The historical record, however, belies much of this sense of optimism. Somewhat paradoxically, civilization has come to be closely associated with conflict and conquest. In the two-hundred-and-sixty years since the term was coined, many things have been done in the name of civilization; sadly, among them are such grave matters as war, conquest, and colonialism.
Introduction: Whiteness, coloniality, and the Anthropocene
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
In his essay 'The Souls of White Folk', written generations before the International Stratigraphy Committee would begin debating the Anthropocene concept, W.E.B. Du Bois (1920: 29) made an observation which remains as pertinent today as it was when he wrote it 1920. 'I am given to understand', he wrote, 'that whiteness is the ownership of the Earth forever and ever, Amen'. Although Du Bois' famous line is in reference to the imperial origins of the First World War, it nevertheless anticipates one of the core themes of this special issue on 'race' and the Anthropocene, that lurking just beneath the surface of the Anthropocene concept is a racialised narrative about white Earthly possession. The 'Anthropocene' is a term used in both popular and scientific discourse to designate a unit of geological time in which humanity, anthropos, is said to be leaving its own stratigraphic signature on Earth's geology. The recent popularisation of the term is credited to Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer and their article in 2000 in the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Newsletter which Crutzen followed up with a piece in Nature in 2002. As Michael Simpson illustrates (p. 53), there is a longer discursive history of an 'age of man' within European scientific circles (see also Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016), but it was only after the publication of this article that the term would gain popular notoriety and come to be considered a credible epochal label. In 2008, the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was the first to recommend official consideration of the inclusion of the Anthropocene into the Geological Time Scale. The International Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was formed shortly thereafter to report to the International Union of Geological Sciences on this possibility. Throughout the 2000s the term entered popular discourse as a signifier of environmental crisis (see Kolbert, 2006),
Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism by Anthony J. Hall
2012
Anthony Hall's voluminous Earth into Property is an epic offering, weaving together the stories of various figures, moments and ideas that informed the global development of colonialism and capitalism as well as decolonization movements. In this volume, the second in a series entitled The Bowl with One Spoon, Hall develops a twinned history of globalization, informed not only by the commodifying and exploitive drive of capital but equally by the development of confederacies to defend the commons. Hall broadens the metaphor of the bowl with one spoon, a treaty depicting territory shared among the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabe peoples, as a powerful Indigenous conception of the possibility for international confederation against colonial dispossessions and aggression. Hall deploys this image of the commons as a contrast to the master parable of the West, that of property and capital protected by force of arms. Hall constructs an account of dispossession as a formative and enduring feature of capitalism that also continues to be a central node of resistance. Rather than following a strict chronology, Earth into Property braids together themes, connecting the interests of industrial and financial capital to the development of the military–industrial complex. The breadth of the book is admirable, traversing the period of European imperialism and the rise of American empire, carrying the narrative forward to the financial crisis of the late 2000s. Hall exposes how the Cold War and subsequently the War on Terror extend the trajectory of conquest originating in the colonization of the American continent. Hall is unfortunately prone to drawing overstated parallels in repetitious prose, and his treatment of different episodes often serves polemical and mythopoetic ends that obscure the complex social forces involved. This is aggravated by his propensity to read key figures, such as Henry Ford or Tecumseh, metonymically as representatives of larger social movements. Nonetheless, the breadth of his reading presents a pattern of historical development and contestation often neglected in more nuanced post-structural studies. Although Hall elucidates the genocidal consequences of imperialist globalization, he does not eschew the Enlightenment rationalities that spawned it. Rather he attempts to recuperate an alternative globality, an Indigenous globality grounded in respect for cultural and ecological diversity. Rather than an empire built through conquest, Hall envisions a global confederacy of law. For Hall, the Enlightenment put forward the promise of protecting and promoting human dignity; but the overemphasis on the individual above the collective, and the denial of the value of cultural diversity, subverted the promise of the Enlightenment. Thus in Earth into Property, the legacy of empire represents the distortion of law as a tool of the powerful, selectively embraced to advance elite interests. Against this, Hall counterposes a competing lineage of law, at once more pluralistic and more universal, emerging from the hybrid marriage of revolutionary ideas and traditional identities in myriad pan-Indigenous, pan-African, and international confederacies. Aspects of Hall's history parallel Hardt and Negri, who position the exclusion of Aboriginal peoples as the negative foundation of the American constitution. However, rather than a progressive unfolding of history that produces new dialectical tensions, Hall suggests that the formative contradiction between recognition and abjection of the Indigenous Other continues to animate the present. For Hall, Anglo-American imperialism is a contested lineage, characterized both by the violence of colonial dispossessions and the mutualities of trade and peace treaties between the Crown and Aboriginal nations. While the imperial sovereignty of the British Crown exploited Aboriginal labour through mercantile relationships, it also conditioned its exercise of authority within the terms of alliances with Aboriginal peoples. However, the revolutionary sovereignty of the United States, rather than developing a robust treaty federalism, gave broader expression to Locke's seminal ideal that the primary purpose of government was to legitimize and protect private property. Centering settler territorial designs, the United States justified the projection of ever-expanding American frontiers through the abjection of Indigeneity. Thus, America created a vehicle to remodel corporate power unbound from the prior obligations of the European sovereign, eventually translating into the growth of transnational corporations. In Hall's transnational account, however, the dynamic process of privatizing land and wealth has been and continues to be resisted by a lineage of struggle for the commons extending from treaties to the New Deal, from anti-colonial movements to the contemporary struggle for the recognition of Aboriginal rights to self-determination. Hall admirably refuses the containment of national histories, and refuses to separate the anti-imperial movements of Africa and Asia from the political assertions of Aboriginal peoples submerged within North American states, but his transnational and interdisciplinary approach is marked by significant gaps. His work draws heavily upon political histories and studies of political economy, and neglects many of the important developments in cultural studies. As a result, some of Hall's most central and important claims, such as the vitality of Aboriginal traditions as an active force within movements for global justice, are under-theorized. Aside from gestures to Edward Said, Hall also accords little attention to post-colonial and post-structural theory. His analysis of the exclusion of Aboriginal peoples from the benefit of law would have benefited from further engagement with legal theorists such as Elizabeth Povinelli or Giorgio Agamben. In the end, Hall's Manichean meta-narrative is simply too neat. From the birth of America and forced relocations of Indigenous peoples, through American corporate support of Nazi Germany as a bulwark against communism and the reconstruction of post-war America as the bastion of free enterprise, to the current War on Terror and massive corporate bailout, Hall presents an account of the growth of corporate power and the military–industrial complex that, while often compelling, suffers from over-stretch. Hall regularly conflates not only socialist and Keynesian attempts to defend the commons, but also often parallels these traditions with those of anti-imperialism and Indigenism. However, the policies that benefit industrial workers cannot be assumed to serve Aboriginal peoples. Similarly, his conflation of post-colonial societies in Africa with Aboriginal peoples in America at times neglects important differences between their encounters with imperialism, neo-colonialism, and settler colonialism. In simplifying historical events, Hall also has a predilection for conspiracy theories that overemphasize the role of particular individuals and, correspondingly, understate the importance of social forces. Suspicions of elite conspiracies, such as government malfeasance in the events of 9/11, often overstate the degree of competence and coherence of the state and economic elites, and underestimate the extent to which elite consensus is structurally produced rather than planned. While Hall proposes an alternative world, flush with diversity, his historical narrative is, ironically, homogenizing, organized by the monolithic categories of imperialism and resistance. This over-simplified model of power relations as elite manipulations and resistance as broadly inclusive but far too uncomplicated better suits the conventions of movement propaganda than academic literature. Hall neglects the complex and substantive tensions between various constituencies of the common (white settlers, different Indigenous nations, industrial labour, etc). Earth into Property highlights the importance of interrogating the imbrication of capitalism and colonialism, and provocatively questions the parameters of current scholarship; however, it will remain for future scholars to more fully integrate the insights of contemporary theorizing, particularly on the complex workings of power, to extend Hall's project.
In 1542, the Spanish Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas published his Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, in which he describes the horrors and atrocities of the conquest of the Americas. Las Casas had arrived in Santo Domingo in 1502 and witnessed the invasion and conquest of the New World. He accompanied the conquistador Diego Velázquez, and in his Short Account he describes the massacres of Velázquez in Cuba, of Hernán Cortés in Mexico, and of Francisco Pizarro in Peru. According to Las Casas, the conquistadors engaged not only in wholesale slaughter of the predominantly peaceful indigenous population but took pleasure in the most gruesome mutilations and torture. He describes how the conquerors would kill and maim the civilian population or burn them alive; how they would kidnap and abduct entire groups into slavery and bondage; and how they would drench the land in a sea of blood and misery. Among the things that stand out in Las Casas's descriptions is that he does not use the term "conquest". Indeed, Las Casas explicitly refuses to call the seizure and subjugation of the Americas by the name of "conquest". He refers to "massacres" and "atrocities," yet he insists that, even though they typically "go under the name of 'conquests'" 1 the term should not be used to describe the slaughter and dispossession of an innocent population-"gentle lambs" upon whom "the Spanish fell like ravening wolves […] or like tigers and savage lions." 2 The term conquest, he writes, is "abusive, improper, and infernal." 3 But why this odd rejection of the idiom of conquest? What is it about the term 'conquest' that makes it, in Las Casas's view, inappropriate and abusive? Why is it significant to mark the butchery and massacres of the Spaniards in the New World as different from conquest? What does "conquest" signify, what ideological work does it perform, such that Las Casas is so concerned to distance the "unjust, cruel, [and] bloody" war in the West Indies from this concept? 4 Forty years later, in 1585, the English writer Richard Hakluyt characterized the three objectives of the colony of Virginia as "to plant Christian religion, to traffic, to conqueror." 5 Just as Las Casas was a fierce critic of the Spanish conquest, Hakluyt was a lifelong promoter of its English counterpart. He advocated English settlement in North America, serving as director of the Virginia Company and as adviser to the East India Company. For Hakluyt and other 16th century English colonialists, conquest was a spiritual journey: it was connected with an evangelizing mission, with commerce and trade, and it consisted in imposing order onto chaos and in consecrating a New Jerusalem. For 16th and 17th century English settlers, conquest amounted to subjugating the American wilderness, triumphing over the fierce and savage forces they encountered in the form of untamed nature and hostile Indian tribes. The trope of the ferocious wilderness allowed conquest to become mythologized as an organizing and generative force, one through which generations of Puritans came to define their relationship to the New World. 6 Las Casas and Hakluyt occupied opposite perspectives in the emerging European discourse on conquest. Yet despite their diverging political, theological, and moral views, they share a set of common assumptions about the concept of conquest. Neither of them pretends that the term 'conquest' is a neutral descriptor. Las Casas's rejection and Hakluyt's embrace of the terminology of 'conquest' indicates that starting in 16th century European legal and political discourse, the word 'conquest' was not merely a label that designated a practice of acquiring territory, of defeating or overthrowing a political order, and of subjugating a population. Surely, if this is all that 'conquest' had meant, Las Casas would not have been so adamant to deny it. Instead, conquest was intimately 8/28/12 CONQUEST : Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 2/18 www.politicalconcepts.org/2011/conquest tied not only to the empirical fact of military defeat and subjection, but to a legal and moral claim, to a legal title to rule. 7 Conquest was a legitimate mechanism of acquiring territory and subjugating populations from the 16th through the 20th century. But how did a type of political violence that forcibly establishes a relation of domination become a juridical institution, codified in early modern European law and widely recognized as a valid mode of acquisition? Historically, this process has to be contextualized in a larger story that precedes the European colonization of the New World by at least 500 years. As the historian Robert Bartlett has shown, the story of conquest and colonization does not begin with the European discovery of the Americas but with the expansion of Latin Christendom in the High Middle Ages. In Bartlett's account, the practices, discourses, and cultures of conquest were constitutive of the expansion and consolidation of Latin Christianity throughout Southern Italy and Sicily, the Iberian peninsula, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, the Baltic, and the eastern Mediterranean. 8 "The European Christians who sailed to the coasts of the Americas, Asia and Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came from a society that was already a colonizing society. Europe, the initiator of one of the world's major processes of conquest, colonization, and cultural transformation, was also the product of one. 9 According to Bartlett, medieval Europe developed not only an "expansionary mentality" but an entire "terminology and rhetoric of expansionary violence" that celebrates the heroism and mythologizes the violence and brutality of conquest. 10 Most importantly, the conquerors-whether it was the Norman conquerors of Sicily or the crusaders in the eastern Mediterranean-derived their political rights and authority directly and explicitly from the fact of conquest. 11 Even though conquest was not yet formalized in any juridical sense, by the 11th and 12th centuries, it was already more than merely the rule of force. Conquest was seen as a foundational moment, a political and legal caesura that ruptures customary rights and obligations and institutes a new order.
Monstrous Anthropology: The Appearance of Colonisation
Third Text, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2017.1403754 The following article attempts to track the points where the imaginings of indigeneity emerged from their colonial context in the form of discursive practices or concepts. The argument is that the origins of these imaginings are located in our shared history of colonisation at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century. The main aim of this article is to problematise Western aesthetic discourse and briefly show how contemporary Indigenous art problematises this discourse. This article shows that the mechanism used to assemble these imaginings was configured by an aesthetic of ugliness, particularly of the monstrous. This depiction, constituted by historical processes, established the first discursive rules of the formation of the European conceptualisation of ‘indigeneity’: 1) terror, horror and tragedy, 2) capturing and enslavement, 3) similarity and anthropocentrism, and 4) conquest. These discursive formation processes provide part of the blueprint of the Western imaginings of indigeneity.
A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies, 2017
understanding biology and its tendency to view the human body as pre-programmed by genes that are transmitted from parent to offspring. In this view racialism is pred icated upon a rather inflexible idea of biology, one that underscores the role of inherited traits to denote an individual' s racial identity at birth (Hannaford 1996; Appiah 1990). In such theories, a person' spcial identity-delivered biologically-is an aspect ofhis/her nature that cannot be changed. Such understandings of difference are conditioned by a rather rigid divide-even an opposition-between the concepts of nature and culture. Although cultural differences might serve to express one' s racial or ethnic identity, modern ideologies do not afford culture the power to alter or shape racial identity. In this view culture is "superficial" or "skin deep;' while race, bound to nature, is a permanent marker of difference that pervades the body at a deep level. Attentive to this modern ideology of difference, despite its dubious claim to scientific rigor (Venter 2007; Gould 1996; Fields and Fields 2012), historians have argued that pre-Enlightenment societies have not been bearers of"racial ideologies" in this modern sense (Bartlett 1993; Kidd 2006; Banton 2000). Rather, as they have compellingly argued, earlier eras-Medieval or early modern-have leaned more heavily on accounts of cultural practice to theorize human difference, suggesting that the lines dividing one population from another are more flexible in earlier eras and therefore fundamentally at a remove from modern ideologies. Speaking of the Medieval period, for instance, Robert Bartlett has argued: "To a point, therefore, medieval ethnicity was a social construct rather than a biological datum ... When we study race relations in medieval Europe we are analyzing the contact between various linguistic and cultural groups, not between breeding stocks" {1993, 197). Still more compellingly, Bartlett, quoting Isidore of Seville, a famous schoolmaster of the Middle Ages, observes: "Races arose from different languages, not languages from different races, or, as another Latin author argues, 'language makes race' (gen tem lin g ua Jacit)" (1993, 198). Implicit in this observation is the premise that culture precedes and instates nature in the earlier periods in ways that cease to be possible for modernity. And yet, the view of these historians has been called into question by critics who observe resemblances, connections, and relations between modern and pre-modern forms of race thinking, in large part due to a growing suspicion that "the bifurcation of'culture' and 'nature' in many analyses of race needs to be questioned" and that we need to "query the very boundaries between these categories" (Loomba and Burton 2007, 8, 25.) (For the Medieval period see Heng 2011 and Nirenberg 2007). If that is true of all periods-since nature and culture always "develop in relation to one another" (Loomba and Burton 2007, 8)-it is absolutely crucial for analyzing pre modern cultures. For the noun "culture" that appears in modern vocabularies to describe the endeavors of distinct human populations was never used in the same way in the earlier period, a point whose significance to the study of early modern race cannot be overstated. As Raymond Williams long ago argued, culture was not a thing so much as "a noun of process" in the early modern period, an activity that exerted a shaping force on any aspect of nature-human or otherwise-whether a
Malleability of the theory of 'the Other' in neo-imperialism writings
2018
The theory of ‘the Other’ serves the role of justification in writing about neo-imperialisms. That is to say, if neo-imperialisms writing is concerned with the colonial expansion of European, American and Japanese powers for the sake of capitalism, then the theory of ‘the Other’ is what enables the expansion. The relevance of such a relationship, where “relevance” can be understood as significance or merit, would be unveiling to the reader the triviality of the concept to begin with. The vast applicability of the theory of ‘the Other’, coupled with its ever-changing subject throughout neo imperalisms writings, undermines its legitimacy. Consequently, Warren Cariou’s short story ‘An Athabasca story’, Evelyn Reilly’s poem ‘A Key to the Families of Thermoplastics’ and Jeff Vandermeer’s novel Annihiliation will be looked at to trace the Other in order to explore its ever-changing nature. This inconsistency of the Other, or shape-shifting, rather, proves to show the concept’s ability to be manipulated and used for self-interest, reinforcing human nature’s selfish tendencies. All three texts make light of this through manipulating the theory within their work; the essay will first elaborate on the theory, and then apply it to Cariou’s to Reilly’s to Vandermeer’s work, in order of growing triviality of the Other.
Framing the geo-capitalism. Global racialization in the era of the Anthropocene
2018
The appropriation of nature under current capitalist conditions implies the intensification of processes of exploitation of labour, dispossession of peasants' lands, indiscriminate extraction of raw materials, and racialization of all these processes. These dynamics reveal a double process: from one side we are witnessing a global racialization generated alongside socio-ecological phenomena that are changing for the worse food, energy, land, water, and raw materials regimes. From the other side we are witnessing an imperious use of racist speeches, claims, public measures and violent practices aimed to galvanized the racial and racist spirit of European and American white populations against migrants and refugees driven by the underlying forces formerly recalled. These two dynamics are strictly interlinked. For a long time, researchers dealt with local dynamics and phenomena of racism often forgetting how global, large, planetary processes of exploitation, appropriation, and dispossession sculpt these dynamics at the local level. This article aims to deal with these processes of global racialization and racism by an analysis of the process of accumulation based on 'racialized unequal exchange' fostering the idea that that unequal ecological exchange bases on historical division of people in different subordinate races in line with the global neoliberal order.
Domination and Exploitation: The Primary Aims or the By-Products of Colonization?
2021
Domination and colonization are the terms closely related to each other as they are inseparable in the sense that when colonization comes into being, it either aims at domination or domination becomes the by-product of colonization itself. Hence, my paper will focus on the purpose of colonization and its inevitable outcome that is, domination that may or may not be the primary aim of colonization but without which colonization ceases to survive. Colonization, in general, comprised of people whose primary aim was to settle elsewhere, earn their livelihood and pass a better life there. To maintain these, again the colonizers become despotic and dominant over the colonized. Though the critics, historians and postcolonial theorists often characterize colonization as the means of subjugation of one race by the other, colonization was in fact a solution to a social problem which is to save large number of population in Europe in general and in United Kingdom in particular from an anticipa...
Chapter 8 Land, Technological Triumphalism and Planetary Limits: Revisiting Human-Land Affinity
With the onset of Anthropocene, we humans have come to exert substantial geological and meteorological impact on earth. Ironically, the power of such agency has also made us eerily aware of the cost and loss of the man-led conquests and achievements; we now have to reckon with the fact that the feat of human progress can cause backlash and negate what human agency has hitherto harnessed and reclaimed on earth. At the heart of the many environmental crises we face today lies the grave human error of the selective enlightenment (Nixon,. We have, in the name of civilizational progress, opened a "can of worms" that have not only aided the infectious spread of technological abuse, but worn down our wisdom in guarding against the partial and excessive use of instrumental reason. While regretting over our past oblivion of the planetary limits, we now face the ultimate impasse our modern progress has brought us to: our planet is rashly depleted in its resources and overly strained with its restorative balance due to unbridled human conquest of the natural world; we cannot but wonder as to how much longer and in what ways we can keep the engine of modern development running! Given the urgency of this crisis, we need to confront those unsettling yet deep-seated concerns: have we pursued a design of civilizational progress that is bound to overdraft and underpreserve the natural assets of the earth's biodiversity? Is this biotic richness, harnessed to cater exclusively to human demands, ever able to keep up with the ceaseless drive for market-driven pursuit of profits? In the end, we will have to question ourselves: are we going to co-exist with land, water, climate and other
Reversing the Gaze: "The Whiteman" as Other
International journal of business and social science, 2010
The tradition of anthropology is rooted in an effort to make sense of the “other.” In fact, the Western concept of the primitive is what makes anthropology intellectually possible. Anthropological literature literally abounds with “our” interpretations of “them.” For all its intentions of neutrality and objectivity, the anthropological gaze has generally traveled in only one direction. Rarely did researchers stop to consider that the objects of the gaze also have a tradition with which to make sense of their “others.” Perhaps my most radical contention in this article is also the most basic: they do to us what we do to them. The key difference, of course, is that perceptions of whites by Indians are not widely expressed, overt, and systematized but suppressed, covert, and internalized.
Decolonizing Conquest Consciousness
Center for Humans and Nature , 2020
This short essay/testimonial responds to the question, "How can we live respectfully with the land and one another?" posed by Julian Brave NoiseCat, Editorial Fellow with the Center for Humans and Nature in the fall of 2020.