Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (7 page)

Although it is true that the normative dimension of Taylor’s project represents an improvement over Canada’s “past tactics of exclusion, genocide, and assimilation,” in the following section I argue that the logic informing this dimension—where “recognition” is conceived as something that is ultimately “granted” or “accorded” a subaltern group or entity by a dominant group or
entity—prefigures its failure to significantly modify, let alone transcend, the breadth of power at play in colonial relationships.
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I also hope to show that Fanon, whose work Taylor relies on to delineate the relationship between misrecognition and the forms of unfreedom and subjection discussed above, anticipated this failure over fifty years ago.

Frantz Fanon’s “Sociodiagnostic” Critique of Recognition Politics

In the second half of “The Politics of Recognition” Taylor identifies Fanon’s classic
The Wretched of the Earth
as one of the first texts to elicit the role that misrecognition plays in propping up relations of domination.
29
By extension Fanon’s analysis in
The Wretched of the Earth
is also used to support one of the central political arguments underlying Taylor’s analysis, namely, his call for the cultural recognition of sub-state groups that have suffered at the hands of a hegemonic political power. Although Taylor acknowledges that Fanon advocated “violent” struggle as the primary means of overcoming the “psycho-existential” complexes instilled in colonial subjects by misrecognition, he nonetheless insists that Fanon’s argument is applicable to contemporary debates surrounding the “politics of difference” more generally.
30
Below I want to challenge Taylor’s use of Fanon in this context: not by disputing Taylor’s assertion that Fanon’s work constitutes an important theorization of the ways in which the subjectivities of the oppressed can be deformed by mis- or nonrecognition, but rather by contesting his assumption that a more accommodating, liberal regime of mutual recognition might be capable of addressing the power relations typical of those between Indigenous peoples and settler states. Interestingly, Fanon posed a similar challenge in his earlier work,
Black Skin, White Masks
.

Fanon’s concern with the relationship between human freedom and equality in relations of recognition represents a central and reoccurring theme in
Black Skin, White Masks
.
31
As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, it was there that Fanon convincingly argued that the long-term stability of a colonial system of governance relies as much on the “internalization” of the forms of racist recognition imposed or bestowed on the Indigenous population by the colonial state and society as it does on brute force. For Fanon, then, the longevity of a colonial social formation depends, to a significant degree, on its capacity to transform the colonized population into
subjects
of imperial rule.
Here Fanon anticipates at least one aspect of the well-known work of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who would later argue that the reproduction of capitalist relations of production rests on the “recognition function” of ideology, namely, the ability of a state’s “ideological apparatus” to “interpellate” individuals as subjects of class rule.
32
For Fanon, colonialism operates in a similarly dual-structured manner: it includes “not only the interrelations of
objective
historical conditions but also human
attitudes
to these conditions.”
33
Fanon argued that it was the interplay between the structural/objective and recognitive/subjective features of colonialism that ensured its hegemony over time.

With respect to the subjective dimension,
Black Skin, White Masks
painstakingly outlines the myriad ways in which those “attitudes” conducive to colonial rule are cultivated among the colonized through the unequal exchange of institutionalized and interpersonal patterns of recognition between the colonial society and the Indigenous population. In effect, Fanon showed how, over time, colonized populations tend to internalize the derogatory images imposed on them by their colonial “masters,” and how as a result of this process, these images, along with the structural relations with which they are entwined, come to be recognized (or at least endured) as more or less natural.
34
This point is made agonizingly clear in arguably the most famous passage from
Black Skin, White Masks
where Fanon shares an alienating encounter on the streets of Paris with a little white child. “Look, a Negro!” Fanon recalled the child saying, “Moma, see the Negro! I’m frightened! frightened!”
35
At that moment the imposition of the child’s racist gaze “sealed” Fanon into a “crushing objecthood,” fixing him like “a chemical solution is fixed by a dye.”
36
He found himself temporarily
accepting
that he was indeed the subject of the child’s call: “It was true, it amused me,” thought Fanon.
37
But then “I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects.”
38
Far from assuring Fanon’s humanity, the other’s recognition imprisoned him in an externally determined and devalued conception of himself. Instead of being acknowledged as a “man among men,” he was reduced to “an object [among] other objects.”
39

Left as is, Fanon’s insights into the ultimately subjectifying nature of colonial recognition appear to square nicely with Taylor’s work. For example, although Fanon never uses the term himself, he appears to be mapping the debilitating
effects associated with
mis
recognition in the sense that Taylor uses the term. Indeed,
Black Skin, White Masks
is littered with passages highlighting the innumerable ways in which the imposition of the settler’s gaze can inflict damage on Indigenous societies at both the individual and collective levels. Taylor is more or less explicit about his debt to Fanon in this respect too. “Since 1492,” he writes with
The Wretched of the Earth
in mind, “Europeans have projected an image of [the colonized] as somehow inferior, ‘uncivilized,’ and through the force of conquest have been able to impose this image on the conquered.”
40
Even with these similarities, however, I believe that a close reading of
Black Skin, White Masks
renders problematic Taylor’s approach in several interrelated and crucial respects.

The first problem has to do with its failure to adequately confront the dual structure of colonialism itself. Fanon insisted, for example, that a colonial configuration of power could be transformed only if attacked at both levels of operation: the objective and the subjective.
41
This point is made at the outset of
Black Skin, White Masks
and reverberates throughout all of Fanon’s work. As indicated in his introduction, although a significant amount of
Black Skin, White Masks
would highlight and explore the “psychological” terrain of colonialism, this would not be done in a manner decoupled from an analysis of its structural or material foundations. Indeed, Fanon claimed that there “will be an authentic disalienation” of the colonized subject “only to the degree to which things, in the most materialistic meaning of the word, [are] returned to their proper places.”
42
Hence the term “sociodiagnostic” for Fanon’s project: “If there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process . . . primarily economic; [and] subsequently the internalization . . . of his inferiority.”
43
In Fanon, colonial-capitalist exploitation and domination is correctly situated alongside misrecognition and alienation as foundational sources of colonial injustice. “The Negro problem,” writes Fanon, “does not resolve itself into the problem of Negroes living among white men but rather of Negroes being exploited, enslaved, despised by a colonialist, capitalist society that is only accidentally white.”
44

Fanon was enough of a Marxist to understand the role played by capitalism in exasperating hierarchical relations of recognition. However, he was also much more perceptive than many Marxists of his day in his insistence that the subjective realm of colonialism be the target of strategic transformation along with the socioeconomic structure. The colonized person “must wage war on
both levels,” insisted Fanon. “Since historically they influence each other, any unilateral liberation is incomplete, and the gravest mistake would be to believe in their automatic interdependence.”
45
For Fanon, attacking colonial power on one front, in other words, would not guarantee the subversion of its effects on the other. “This is why a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue,” Fanon would later write in
The Wretched of the Earth
.
46
Here, I would argue that Fanon’s “stretching” of the Marxist paradigm constitutes one of the most innovative contributions to classical Marxist debates on ideology. Unlike the position of, say, Georg Lukacs, who boldly claimed in
History and Class Consciousness
that there is “no problem” and therefore “no solution” that does not ultimately lead back to the question of economic structure,
47
Fanon revealed the ways in which those axes of domination historically relegated in Marxism to the superstructural realm—such as racism and the effects it has on those subject to it—could substantively configure the character of social relations relatively autonomously from capitalist economics.

Lately a number of scholars have taken aim at the contribution of recognition theorists like Taylor on analogous grounds: that their work offers little insight into how to address the more overtly structural and/or economic features of social oppression.
48
We have also been told that this lack of insight has contributed to a shift in the terrain of contemporary political thought and practice more generally—from “redistribution to recognition,” to use Nancy Fraser’s formulation. According to Fraser, whereas proponents of redistribution tend to highlight and confront injustices in the economic sphere, advocates of the newer “politics of recognition” tend to focus on and attack injustices in the cultural realm. On the redistribution front, proposed remedies for injustice range between “affirmative” strategies, like the administration of welfare, to more “transformative” methods, like the transformation of the capitalist mode of production itself. In contrast, strategies aimed at injustices associated with misrecognition tend to focus on “cultural and symbolic change.” Again, this could involve “affirmative” approaches, such as the recognition and reaffirmation of previously disparaged identities, or these strategies could adopt a more “transformative” form, such as the “deconstruction” of dominant “patterns of representation” in ways that would “change everyone’s social identities.”
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I think that Fanon’s work, which anticipates the recognition/redistribution debate by half a century, highlights several key shortcomings in the approaches
of both Taylor and Fraser. Taylor’s approach is insufficient insofar as it tends to, at its best, address the political economy of colonialism in a strictly “affirmative” manner: through reformist state redistribution schemes like granting certain cultural rights and concessions to Aboriginal communities via self-government and land claims packages. Although this approach may alter the intensity of some of the effects of colonial-capitalist exploitation and domination, it does little to address their generative structures, in this case a capitalist economy constituted by racial and gender hierarchies and the colonial state. When his work is at its weakest, however, Taylor tends to focus on the recognition end of the spectrum too much, and as a result leaves uninterrogated colonialism’s deep-seated structural features. Richard J. F. Day has succinctly framed the problem this way: “Although Taylor’s recognition model allows for diversity of culture within a particular state by admitting the possibility of multiple national identifications,” it is less “permissive with regard to polity and economy . . . in assuming that any subaltern group that is granted [recognition] will thereby acquire a
subordinate
articulation with a
capitalist state
.”
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Seen from this angle, Taylor’s theory leaves one of the two operative levels of colonial power identified by Fanon untouched.

This line of criticism is well worn and can be traced back to at least the work of early Karl Marx. As such, I doubt that many would be surprised that Taylor’s variant of liberalism
as liberalism
fails to confront the structural or economic aspects of colonialism at its generative roots. To my mind, however, this shortcoming in Taylor’s approach is particularly surprising given the fact that, although many Indigenous leaders and communities today tend to instrumentally couch their claims in reformist terms, this has not always been the case: indeed, historically, Indigenous demands for
cultural recognition
have often been expressed in ways that have explicitly called into question the dominating nature of capitalist social relations and the state form.
51
And the same can be said of a growing number of today’s most prominent Indigenous scholars and activists.
52
Mohawk political scientist Taiaiake Alfred, for example, has repeatedly argued that the goal of any traditionally rooted self-determination struggle ought to be to protect that which constitutes the “heart and soul of [I]ndigenous nations: a set of values that challenge the homogenizing force of Western liberalism and free-market capitalism; that honor the autonomy of individual conscience, non-coercive authority, and the deep interconnection between human beings and other elements of creation.”
53
For Alfred, this
vision is not only embodied in the practical philosophies and ethical systems of many of North America’s Indigenous societies, but also flows from a “realization that capitalist economics and liberal delusions of progress” have historically served as the “engines of colonial aggression and injustice” itself.
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My point here is that an approach that is explicitly oriented around dialog and listening ought to be more sensitive to the claims and challenges emanating from these dissenting Indigenous voices.
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