Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (9 page)

But the above examples confirm only one aspect of Fanon’s insight into the problem of recognition in colonial contexts: namely, the limitations this approach runs up against when pitted against these overtly structural expressions of domination. Are his criticisms and concerns equally relevant to the subjective or psycho-affective features of contemporary colonial power?

With respect to the forms of racist recognition driven into the psyches of Indigenous peoples through the institutions of the state, church, schools, and media, and by racist individuals within the dominant society, the answer is clearly yes. Countless studies, novels, and autobiographical narratives have outlined, in painful detail, how these expressions have saddled individuals
with low self-esteem, depression, alcohol and drug abuse, and violent behaviors directed both inward against the self and outward toward others.
81

Similarly convincing arguments have been made concerning the limited forms of recognition and accommodation offered to Indigenous communities by the state. For example, Taiaiake Alfred’s work unpacks the ways in which the state institutional and discursive fields within and against which Indigenous demands for recognition are made and adjudicated can come to shape the self-understandings of the Indigenous claimants involved. The problem for Alfred is that these fields are by no means neutral: they are profoundly hierarchical and as such have the ability to asymmetrically govern how Indigenous subjects think and act not only in relation to the recognition claim at hand, but also in relation to themselves, to others, and the land. This is what I take Alfred to mean when he suggests, echoing Fanon, that the dominance of the legal approach to self-determination has over time helped produce a class of Aboriginal “citizens” whose rights and identities have become defined more in relation to the colonial state and its legal apparatus than the history and traditions of Indigenous nations themselves. Similarly, strategies that have sought independence via capitalist economic development have already facilitated the creation of an emergent Aboriginal bourgeoisie whose thirst for profit has come to outweigh their ancestral obligations to the land and to others. Whatever the method, the point here is that these strategies threaten to erode the most egalitarian, nonauthoritarian, and sustainable characteristics of traditional Indigenous cultural practices and forms of social organization.
82

Self-Recognition and Anticolonial Empowerment

The argument sketched to this point is bleak in its implications. Indeed, left as is, it would appear that recognition inevitably leads to subjection, and as such much of what Indigenous peoples have sought over the last forty years to secure their freedom has in practice cunningly assured its opposite. Interpreted this way, my line of argument appears to adhere to an outdated conception of power, one in which postcolonial critics, often reacting against the likes of Fanon and others, have worked so diligently to refute. The implication of this view is that Indigenous subjects are
always
being interpellated by recognition, being constructed by colonial discourse, or being assimilated by colonial power structures.
83
As a result, resistance to this totalizing power is often portrayed as an inherently reactionary, zero-sum project. To the degree that
Fanon can be implicated in espousing such a totalizing view of colonial power, it has been suggested that he was unable to escape the Manichean logic so essential in propping up relations of colonial domination to begin with.
84

I want to defend Fanon, at least partially, from the charge that he advocated such a devastating view of power. However, in order to assess the degree to which Fanon anticipates and accounts for this general line of criticism, we must unpack his theory of anticolonial agency and empowerment.

As argued throughout the preceding pages, Fanon did not attribute much emancipatory potential to Hegel’s politics of recognition when applied to colonial situations. Yet this is not to say that he rejected the recognition paradigm entirely. As we have seen, like Hegel and Taylor, Fanon ascribed to the notion that relations of recognition are constitutive of subjectivity and that, when unequal, they can foreclose the realization of human freedom. On the latter point, however, he was deeply skeptical as to whether the mutuality envisioned by Hegel was achievable in the conditions indicative of contemporary colonialism. But if Fanon did not see freedom as naturally emanating from the slave being granted recognition from his or her master, where, if at all, did it originate?
85

In effect, Fanon claimed that the pathway to self-determination instead lay in a quasi-Nietzschean form of personal and collective
self-
affirmation.
86
Rather than remaining dependent on their oppressors for their freedom and self-worth, Fanon recognized that the colonized must instead struggle to work through their alienation/subjection against the objectifying gaze and assimilative lure of colonial recognition. According to Fanon, it is this self-initiated process that “triggers a change of fundamental importance in the colonized’s psycho-affective equilibrium.”
87
According to this view, the colonized must initiate the process of decolonization by first recognizing
themselves
as free, dignified, and distinct contributors to humanity. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Fanon equated this process of
self-recognition
with the praxis undertaken by the slave in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit
, which Fanon saw as illustrating the necessity on the part of the oppressed to “turn away” from their other-oriented master-dependency, and to instead struggle for freedom on their own terms and in accordance with their own values.
88
I would also argue that this is why Fanon, although critical of the at times bourgeois and essentialist character of certain works within the
negritude
tradition, nonetheless saw the project as necessary.
89
Fanon was attuned to ways in which the individual and collective revaluation of black culture and identity could serve as a source of
pride and empowerment, and if approached critically and directed appropriately, could help jolt the colonized into an “actional” existence, as opposed to a “reactional” one characterized by
ressentiment
.
90
As Robert Young notes in the context of Third World decolonization, it was this initial process of collective self-affirmation that led many colonized populations to develop a “distinctive postcolonial epistemology and ontology” which enabled them to begin to conceive of and construct alternatives to the colonial project itself.
91

I would argue that Fanon’s call in
Black Skin, White Masks
for a simultaneous turn inward and away from the master, far from espousing a rigidly binaristic Manichean view of power relations, instead reflects a profound understanding of the complexity involved in contests over recognition in colonial and racialized environments. Unlike Hegel’s life-and-death struggle between two opposing forces, Fanon added a multidimensional racial/cultural aspect to the dialectic, thereby underscoring the multifarious web of recognition relations that are at work in constructing identities and establishing (or undermining) the conditions necessary for human freedom and flourishing. Fanon showed that the power dynamics in which identities are formed and deformed were nothing like the hegemon/subaltern binary depicted by Hegel. In an anticipatory way, then, Fanon’s insight can also be said to challenge the overly negative and all-subjectifying view of interpellation that would plague Althusser’s theory of ideology more than a decade later. For Althusser, the process of interpellation always took the form of “a fundamental misrecognition” that served to produce within individuals the “specific characteristics and desires that commit them to the very actions that are required of them by their [subordinate] class position.”
92
Fanon’s innovation was that he showed how similar recognitive processes worked to “call forth” and empower individuals within communities of resistance.
93

This is not to say, of course, that Fanon was able to completely escape the “Manicheism delirium” that he was so astute at diagnosing.
94
Those familiar with the legacy of Fanon’s later work, for example, know that the “actional” existence that he saw self-recognition initiating in
Black Skin, White Masks
would in
The Wretched of the Earth
take the form of a direct and violent engagement with the colonial society and its institutional structure. “At the very moment [the colonized come to] discover their humanity,” wrote Fanon, they must “begin to sharpen their weapons
to secure its victory
.”
95
In Fanon’s later work, violence would come to serve as a “kind of psychotherapy of the
oppressed,” offering “a primary form of agency through which the subject moves from non-being to being, from object to subject.”
96
In this sense, the practice of revolutionary violence, rather than the affirmative recognition of the other, offered the most effective means to transform the subjectivities of the colonized, as well as to topple the social structure that produced colonized subjects to begin with.

Turning Our Backs on Colonial Power?

Before concluding this chapter, I want to briefly address an important counterargument to the position I am advocating here, especially regarding the call to selectively “turn away” from engaging the discourses and structures of settler-colonial power with the aim of transforming these sites from within. Dale Turner offers such an argument in his book
This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy
, in which he advances the claim that if Indigenous peoples want the relationship between themselves and the Canadian state to be informed by their distinct worldviews, then “they will have to engage the state’s legal and political discourses in more effective ways.”
97
Underlying Turner’s theoretical intervention is the assumption that colonial relations of power operate primarily by
excluding
the perspectives of Indigenous peoples from the discursive and institutional sites that give their rights content. Assuming this is true, then it would indeed appear that “critically undermining colonialism” requires that Indigenous peoples find more effective ways of “participating in the Canadian legal and political practices that determine the meaning of Aboriginal rights.”
98

For Turner, one of the preconditions for establishing a “postcolonial” relationship is the development of an intellectual community of Indigenous “word warriors” capable of engaging the legal and political discourses of the state. According to Turner, because it is an unfortunate but unavoidable fact that the rights of Indigenous peoples will for the foreseeable future be largely interpreted by non-Indigenous judges and policy makers within non-Indigenous institutions, it is imperative that Indigenous communities develop the capacity to effectively
interject
our unique perspectives into the conceptual spaces where our rights are framed. It is on this last point that Turner claims to distinguish his approach from the work of Indigenous intellectuals like Patricia Monture and Taiaiake Alfred. Turner claims that the problem with the decolonial strategies developed by these scholars is that they fail to propose a means of
effecting positive change within the very legal and political structures that currently hold a monopoly on the power to determine the scope and content of our rights. According to Turner, by focusing too heavily on tactics that would see us “turn our backs” on the institutions of colonial power, these Indigenous scholars do not provide the tools required to protect us against the unilateral construction of our rights by settler-state institutions. For Turner, it is through an ethics of participation that Indigenous peoples can better hope to “shape the legal and political relationship so that it respects Indigenous world views.”
99

The efficacy of Turner’s intervention rests on a crucial theoretical assumption reflected in his text’s quasi-Foucauldian use of the term
discourse
. I say quasi-
Foucauldian
because when he refers to the discursive practices of word warriors he assumes that these pack the “power” necessary to transform the legal and political discourses of the state into something more amenable to Indigenous languages of political thought. Here Turner assumes that the counterdiscourses that word warriors interject into the field of Canadian law and politics have the capacity to shape and govern the ways in which Aboriginal rights are reasoned about and acted on. The problem, however, is that Turner is less willing to attribute the same degree of power to the legal and political
discourses of the state
. This is what I mean when I claim that his use of the concept is
quasi
-Foucauldian. When Turner speaks of the legal and political discourses of the state, he spends little time discussing the assimilative power that these potentially hold in relation to the word warriors that are to engage them. Indeed, the only place he does briefly mention this is at the end of his final chapter, when he writes:

Here we reach a limit in Turner’s argument: there is little discussion of how Indigenous peoples might curb the risks of
interpellation
as they seek to
interpolate
the much more powerful discursive economy of the Canadian legal and
political system. Although Turner repeatedly suggests that part of the answer to this problem lies in the ability of word warriors to remain grounded in the thought and practices of their communities, in the end he spends little time discussing what this might entail in practice.