Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (22 page)

If this were not enough to raise concern, since negotiating the 2007 Residential School Settlement Agreement and offering the 2008 apology, the federal government has intensified its colonial approach to dealing with Indigenous peoples in practice. This intensification is most evident in the federal government’s recently passed omnibus Bill C-45, otherwise known as the Jobs and Growth Act. Bill C-45 is a nearly 450-page budget implementation bill that makes significant changes to Canada’s Navigable Water Act, the Indian Act, and the Environmental Assessment Act, among other pieces of federal legislation. Of concern to Indigenous people and communities in particular are
the ways that Bill C-45 unilaterally undermines Aboriginal and treaty rights by making it easier for First Nations’ band councils to lease out reserve lands with minimal community input or support, by gutting environmental protection for lakes and rivers, and by reducing the number of resource development projects that would have required environmental assessment under previous legislation.

Bill C-45 thus represents the latest installment of Canada’s longstanding policy of colonial dispossession. This has led Indigenous people from all sectors of Indian Country to organize and resist under the mantra that we are “Idle No More!” Through social media, the Idle No More movement emerged with force in December 2012 as a result of the initial educational work of four women from the prairies—Nina Wilson, Sylvia McAdam, Jessica Gordon, and Sheelah McLean. Then, on December 11, Chief Theresa Spence of the Attawapiskat Cree Nation began a hunger strike to protest the deplorable living conditions on her reserve in northern Ontario, which she argued was the result of Canada’s failure to live up to the “spirit and intent” of Treaty No. 9 (signed in 1905). Building on the inspirational work of these women, what originally began as an education campaign against a repugnant piece of federal legislation has since transformed into a grassroots struggle to transform the colonial relationship itself.

Drawing off the insights of Fanon, I have argued two points in this chapter. First, I claimed that Indigenous peoples’ anger and resentment can generate forms of decolonized subjectivity and anticolonial practice that we ought to critically affirm rather than denigrate in our premature efforts to promote forgiveness and reconciliation on terms still largely dictated by the colonial state. And second, in light of the failure of Canada’s approach to implement reconciliation in the wake of RCAP, I suggest that critically holding on to our anger and resentment can serve as an important emotional reminder that settler-colonialism is still very much alive and well in Canada, despite the state’s repeated assertions otherwise.

In the next chapter I return to Fanon, although in a more critical light. I argue that although Fanon saw colonized people’s anger and resentment as an important catalyst for change he nevertheless remained skeptical as to whether the rehabilitated forms of Indigenous subjectivity constructed out of this anger and resentment ought to inform our collective efforts to reconstruct decolonized relationships and communities. In contradistinction to Fanon,
I argue that insofar as these reactive emotions result in the affirmation and resurgence of Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices, they ought to be seen as providing the substantive foundation required to reconstruct relationships of reciprocity and peaceful coexistence within and against the psycho-affective and structural apparatus of settler-colonial power. In my concluding chapter I defend this claim in light of the recent Idle No More movement.

5

The Plunge into the Chasm of the Past

Fanon, Self-Recognition, and Decolonization

This chapter begins to sketch out in more detail the alternative politics of recognition briefly introduced at the end of chapter 1. As suggested there, far from evading the recognition paradigm entirely, Fanon instead turns our attention to the cultural practices of critical individual and collective
self-recognition
that colonized populations often engage in to empower themselves, instead of relying too heavily on the colonial state and society to do this for them. This is the realm of self-affirmative cultural, artistic, and political activity that Fanon associated largely but not exclusively with
negritude
. The negritude movement first emerged in France during the late 1930s as a response to anti-black racism. Although negritude constituted a diverse body of work and activism, at its core the movement emphasized the need for colonized people and communities to purge themselves of the internalized effects of systemic racism and colonial violence by rejecting assimilation and instead affirming the worth of their own identity-related differences. In this sense, it has been argued that negritude represents an important precursor to contemporary “identity politics” in the United States and elsewhere.
1

However, despite the extensive commentary that Fanon’s relationship to negritude has generated, no clear consensus has been reached regarding the
extent to which he ought to be read as a critic or supporter of the movement’s claims and achievements. For example, some commentators, such as David Caute, Irene Grendzier and David Macey, have suggested that where Fanon can be read in his early work (particularly
Black Skin, White Masks
) as more sympathetic to certain aspects of negritude’s objectives, over time he eventually came to stress the movement’s limitations, either seeing it as representing, at best, a “transitional” stage in the dialectic of decolonization (following the position of Jean-Paul Sartre discussed below), or worse, as having little substantive value whatsoever.
2
Other critics, however, have advanced a near-opposite reading. As Jock McCullock writes with reference to Caute and Grendzier: “If the substance of these critiques are examined in detail, it is apparent that Fanon became
more
rather than
less
sympathetic to negritude with the passing of time.”
3
And yet other commentators have refused to draw a sharp distinction between early and late Fanon’s views on negritude altogether, instead arguing that, although the specifics of Fanon’s complex views altered as his analysis moved from the Antilles to the Algerian contexts, he nevertheless always remained simultaneously a rigorous critic and critical advocate of certain features (and certain proponents) of the negritude movement.
4

The interpretation advanced below is indebted to this third reading of Fanon. I demonstrate that although Fanon always questioned the specifics of negritude based on its, at times, essentialist and bourgeois character, he nevertheless viewed the associated practices of individual and collective self-recognition through the revaluation of black culture, history, and identity as a potentially crucial feature of the broader struggle for freedom against colonial domination. This potential hinged, however, entirely on negritude’s ability to transcend what Fanon saw as its retrograde orientation towards a
subjective
affirmation of a precolonial
past
by grounding itself in the peoples’ struggle against the
material
structure of colonial rule
in the present
.

Although Fanon saw the critical revaluation of Indigenous cultural forms as an important means of temporarily breaking the colonized free from the incapacitating effects of being exposed to structured patterns of colonial misrecognition, he was decidedly less willing to explore the role that these forms and practices might play in the construction of
alternatives
to the oppressive social relations that produce colonized subjects in the first place. This has led Katherine Gines to correctly conclude that while Fanon recognized the importance of affirming cultural difference as a form of individual and collective
self-empowerment, he was less clear as to whether these differences ought to be substantively retained in the course of decolonization.
5
In this specific sense, then, it will be shown that Fanon clearly shared Sartre’s view that negritude’s emphasis on cultural self-affirmation constituted an important “means” but “not an ultimate end” of anticolonial struggle, even though both authors arrived at this analogous conclusion via different paths.

This chapter is organized into two sections and a conclusion. In the first section, I sketch the theory of intersubjective recognition that Sartre develops in
Being and Nothingness
,
Anti-Semite and Jew
, and “Black Orpheus.” As Sonia Kruks and others have noted, Fanon’s work was “for better and for worse” deeply influenced by Sartre’s philosophical and political writings, particularly as these writings pertain to issues of recognition, reciprocity, and freedom.
6
Thus, to fully understand what I characterize as the limited
transitional
function that Fanon attributes to practices of self-recognition and cultural empowerment in the course of anticolonial struggle, we must first unpack Sartre’s earlier views on these and similar matters. In the next section, I examine the instrumental relationship Fanon draws in his work between cultural self-recognition and projects of decolonization. This discussion will pave the way for the argument I lay out in my concluding chapter, which examines the substantive relationship forged between self-affirmative practices of cultural regeneration and decolonization by theorists and activists of Indigenous
resurgence
working in the settler-colonial context of Canada.

From the Particular to the Universal: Jean-Paul Sartre, Identity Politics, and the Colonial Dialectic

Sartre’s
Anti-Semite and Jew
provides an analysis of the nature of French anti-Semitism in the wake of World War II.
7
Although many scholars have since criticized Sartre’s hyper-constructivist account of Judaism and Jewish identity as a mere
effect
of anti-Semitism—reflected in Sartre’s famous assertion that it is the anti-Semite “who creates the Jew”
8
—in the following section I want to bracket these well-warranted criticisms. Instead I want to focus on the logic underwriting Sartre’s argument in order to demonstrate the transitional role he attributes to the recognition and self-affirmation of identity or difference in the struggle for freedom and equality on the one hand, and the ways in which Fanon simultaneously adapts and critiques this position in his writings on decolonization on the other.

Sartre’s project in
Anti-Semite and Jew
is best read as a practical reworking of his prior engagement with Hegel’s dialectic of recognition in
Being and Nothingness
, only this time cast, like Fanon’s later intervention in
Black Skin, White Masks
through the lens of European racism. In stark contrast to Hegel’s “optimistic” portrayal of intersubjective recognition in the
Phenomenology of Spirit
,
9
Sartre’s rendition of the master/slave relation in
Being and Nothingness
denies the possibility of reciprocal relations of affirmative recognition. Although Sartre, like Hegel, acknowledges the role played by recognition in constituting subjectivity, unlike Hegel, Sartre portrays this constitution as a theft, as objectification, and as such the “death of [one’s] possibilities.”
10
For Sartre recognition constitutes a form of enslavement, of being “fixed” by “the look” of another.
11
As Sonia Kruks observes, “the Other,” in Sartre’s account, “is always a threat to my own experience of self, having the power to objectify me and to cause me to flee into self-objectification.”
12
According to Sartre, the only way out of this situation is for the objectified to make the other into the object of
one’s own look
, to “turn back” the gaze, thereby reversing the process of objectification.
13
At the heart of Sartre’s theory of intersubjectivity, then, is the notion that recognition is forever mired in a power struggle, “a constant unending conflict between subjects who seek to make each other objects of the gaze as the precondition of reclaiming their inner freedom.”
14
Conflict thus constitutes the core of Sartre’s account of “being-for-others.”
15

However, when applied to the concrete situation of the Jew in an anti-Semitic society, the option of reversing the gaze and thus one’s objectified status is denied by Sartre. This is because the Jew is not only objectified in the ontological sense of “being-for-others”—as the condition of his or her “fundamental relation” to others—but also
as a Jew
. This is what Sartre means when he states that the Jew “is overdetermined.”
16
Overdetermination fundamentally undermines the Jew’s ability to cast the gaze back. Anti-Semitism thus constitutes a relationship in which the gaze works unilaterally between the one who objectifies (the anti-Semite) and the one who is objectified (the Jew).

What, then, are the options available to the Jew in the context of anti-Semitic racism? Here Sartre introduces two concepts fundamental to his existentialism: authenticity and inauthenticity. The most common response explored in
Anti-Semite and Jew
is represented by the actions of the
inauthentic
Jew. According to Sartre, the inauthentic Jew is one who chooses to
flee
from his or her
situation as a Jew
. For Sartre, the Jew’s
situation
is the “ensemble of
limits and restrictions”—social, economic, political, cultural—that “forms [the Jew] and determines his possibilities.” Yet the Jew’s situation is also given meaning through the choices he or she makes “within and by it.”
17
In short, the Jew’s situation is the inherited field within which he or she must act, make choices, and derive meaning—and this context is, whether one likes it or not, an anti-Semitic one. Sartre suggests that, when faced with the painful burden of living in this situation, the inauthentic Jew will choose to “run away” from it, to “deny it, or choose to deny their responsibilities” to positively act within it.
18
Sartre equates inauthenticity here with assimilation, the process whereby the Jew, suffering from an “inferiority complex,”
19
seeks to reject her or his particularity by either appealing to abstract universal principles (what today we might call “difference-blind” equality), or by trying to eradicate her or his particularity as such (through religious conversion, secularization, intermarriage, and so on).
20
Although Sartre’s portrait of the inauthentic Jew is not meant to cast “moral blame” on the Jew for his or her evasive actions, Sartre is nonetheless quick to suggest that these actions serve to double back and reinforce the anti-Semitic propaganda that prompted the evasive conduct in the first place.
21
In short, the inauthentic Jew “has allowed himself to be persuaded by the anti-Semites; he is the first victim of their propaganda. He admits with them that,
if there is a Jew
, he must have the characteristics with which popular malevolence endows him.”
22

Sartre then contrasts the conduct of the inauthentic Jew with the actions of the Jew who acts authentically in their situation. Faced with this situation the authentic Jew actively commits to
affirming
his or her Jewish identity against the objectifying gaze of the anti-Semite. The authentic Jew refuses to let the racist propaganda of the anti-Semite determine from the outside her or his actions, his or her being. Instead “he stakes everything on human grandeur [and in accepting] the obligation to live in a situation that is defined precisely by the fact that it is unliveable . . . he derives pride from his humiliation.”
23
It is through this gesture of self-affirmation that the Jew strips anti-Semitism of its discursive power and virulence. As Sartre explains: “The inauthentic Jew flees Jewish reality, and the anti-Semite makes him a Jew in spite of himself; but the authentic Jew
makes himself a Jew
, in the face of all and against all. He accepts all, even martyrdom, and the anti-Semite, deprived of his weapon, must be content to yelp at the Jew as he goes by, and can no longer touch him. At one stroke the Jew, like any authentic man,
escapes description
.”
24
For Sartre, then,
authentic self-affirmation provides an important weapon in the Jew’s fight against the objectifying and alienating effects of anti-Semitic overdetermination. But given that anti-Semitism is a
socially constituted
phenomenon, Sartre is quick to point out that, while authenticity may serve as an important means through which to work over the individualized effects of objectification, on its own it will do little to undercut the
social relations
constitutive of anti-Semitism as such. “The choice of authenticity
is not a solution
of the social aspect of the Jewish problem,” writes Sartre.
25
Rather, it “appears to be a
moral
decision, bringing certainty to the Jew on the ethical [or subjective] level but in no way serving as a solution on the social or political level.”
26
For Sartre, the transformative potential of affirming one’s difference will always be limited insofar as it leaves intact the generative conditions that serve to reproduce anti-Semitic conduct on the one hand, and the effects that this conduct has in shaping the subjectivity of Jews on the other. Ending anti-Semitism thus requires that existential self-affirmation be cashed out in a transformative engagement with these generative conditions; it requires that the Jew’s
situation
be transformed “from the bottom up.”
27
For the increasingly Marxist Sartre of the mid-1940s, the generative structures identified as most important in the fight against anti-Semitic racism were those associated with capitalism and class conflict. In Sartre’s (overly simplistic) formulation, anti-Semitism served to ideologically mask the root cause of class conflict by positing the Jewish community as the source of class antagonism instead of the capitalist mode of production. Seen in this light, anti-Semitism represents “a mythical, bourgeois representation of the class struggle, and [as such] could not exist in a classless society.” Following this logic, once the “social and economic causes” of anti-Semitism have been eliminated, the affirmation of Jewish difference will no longer be required; indeed, after the revolution has created a world stripped of the economic/social pluralism within which anti-Semitic racism flourishes, affirming Jewish difference would be at best redundant, or worse, it might serve to ideologically reproduce its own divisions and thus foreclose the possibility of a society free from conflict and social stratification.
28
Here the politics of difference is implicitly posited as an important
stage
in the struggle against anti-Semitic racism, but in no way should it be conceived as an end in itself.