Filed under: Book Reviews | Tags: National Subjects, Post-Colonial Theory, Racial Subjectivity, Violence
A version of this review will appear in the Canadian Journal of Sociology, vol. 33, no. 2 (June 2008).
Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. Sunera Thobani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2007. 384 pages.
Sunera Thobani’s Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada stands out as an important contribution to the burgeoning field of critical Canadian Studies. In it, Thobani develops an exciting theoretical framework for explicating the relationship between national and racial subject formation that productively builds on the works of well-established Canadian scholars such as Himani Bannerji, Sherene Razack, and Eva Mackey. What Thobani calls the ‘exaltation process,’ or the process delineating the specific human characteristics said to distinguish the nation and its national subjects from others, stands out as an innovative theoretical contribution to the fields of critical nationalism, race and post-colonial studies more broadly. As such, anybody conducting research or teaching in the fields of Canadian nationalism, and especially, the constitution of national subjects, will find this book provides a useful approach.
Thobani begins her study with a thorough introductory chapter that lays out her theoretical project. She explains, in clear language, that her work uses Foucault’s theorization of subject formation within modernity, premised on the dual process of subjection and subjectification. However, eschewing the full and enthusiastic embrace of Foucault that has long been in vogue in certain circles of contemporary social theory, Thobani plots out how Foucault’s understanding of sovereignty in relation to subject formation, for example, in such works as The History of Sexuality vol. I & II, must be re-worked in any analysis of colonial relations.
To illustrate, she productively draws on the work of Achille Mbembe and Frantz Fanon, whose accounts of colonial violence figure prominently in Thobani’s post-colonial theorization. In Mbembe’s work on sovereign power, what he calls ‘necro-politics’ over colonized populations is enacted through the capacity to dictate “who may live and who must die” (12). Thobani argues persuasively that this conception problematizes Foucault’s understanding of the self-constituting practices of the subject, since different modalities of force relations than those present within the European imperial centre, the site for much of Foucault’s historical work, govern colonized populations. “The colonial world,” Thobani explains using Fanon’s explication of the colonial encounter, “emerged as a world divided: on the one side, a world of law, privilege, access to wealth, status, and power for the settler; on the other, a world defined in law as being ‘lawless,’ a world of poverty, squalor, and death for the native” (38). Thobani demonstrates how in order to theorize such colonial governmentalities, one must engage in genealogical work that interrogates distinct colonial forms of power, a task Thobani sets out to accomplish throughout this study.
Filed under: Book Reviews | Tags: Colonial Violence, National Subjects, Peacekeeping
Dark Threats & White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism. Sherene H. Razack. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2004. 236 pages.
At the beginning of her analysis of Canadian peacekeeping, and particularly of what has come to be popularly known in Canada as the Somalia Affair, Sherene Razack uses a well-known poem by Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ to set the stage for her analysis:
Take up the White Man’s burden –
Send forth the best ye breed –
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child (xi).
This poem not only acts as an apt metaphor for Canadian peacekeeping in Razack’s analysis, but also serves to locate her discussion throughout this study. What Razack is arguing, quite convincingly following a very thorough look at a wide range of documents related to Somalia and Canadian peacekeeping more generally, is that the encounter between Canadian peacekeepers and peoples of the Global South, in this case in Somalia, but more recently in Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan is a colonial encounter that is, in her words, “overdetermined by race” (6). As a colonial encounter, it inserts itself into broader national narratives about the civilizing role of Canadians called forth to bring peace, order, and democracy to corners of the world that are decidedly inferior, and thus, in dire need of help. She suggests that, in fact, this de-historicized narrative makes violence inevitable, since it is through violence against subjugated bodies that this fanciful national myth is actually constituted. She also reminds us how Canadians have actually been produced as national subjects through the violence done against indigenous peoples and people of colour, and that this history has in turn shaped the peacekeeping encounter. In this way, the spaces of here and there are markedly linked.
Why then, should we look at peacekeeping, such a cherished symbol of Canadian kindness and decency, in these terms? Razack believes that the strength of thinking about peacekeeping violence as colonial violence is that in this way it implicates us all, since it is done in our names in the first place. It no longer becomes about a few bad apples tarnishing the entire bucket, as she explains, but it is about dismantling the national narratives that set out our innocence and benevolence, our innate abilities as humanitarians, by probing their productive functions.
Razack uses national archives, popular media sources, testimony from the federal commission of inquiry into the Somalia Affair, various criminal and military trials, canonical literature (see Kipling and Conrad), and, of course, numerous academic sources to build her case. And while it might make for an at-times dizzying array of source material, in the end I would argue that she is able to use it all productively to dismantle several central myths in the contemporary making of Canada.
Among many other cases, Razack uses the example of General Roméo Dallaire, a well-known Canadian peacekeeper on the international stage, to illustrate her argument. Dallaire is the Canadian soldier who, at the height of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, was left with a skeletal UN force unable to quell the surrounding violence (recently captured in the film Hotal Rwanda, featuring Nick Nolte playing Dallaire). Powerless in the face of great evil, or so we are told, he returned to Canada a broken man traumatized and suicidal. Razack is not interested in exhaustively reviewing his role in the unfolding events or to probe the extent of his trauma, but instead focuses on how his story, and those of other traumatized peacekeepers like him who served in Somalia, has entered the national narrative. How, when violence travels from South to the North, is it largely “forgotten and forgiven, erased and de-raced” (7)? Razack suggests that it is in seeing Canadian soldiers as the victims of genocide, as overwhelmed by the absolute evil in places like Rwanda or Somalia, that this narrativized version of events takes place. This way, people from the South are rendered ‘speechless,’ an act that is accomplished because the horror is unthinkable and unknowable precisely because it takes place outside of history (22).
Filed under: Book Reviews | Tags: Anti-Conquest, Imperial Subject, Transculturation, Travel Writing
Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Mary Louise Pratt. London and New York: Routledge. 1992. 257 pages.
In the introduction to her thorough investigation of the ways in which travel writing helped to produce subject positions for diverse individuals within imperialism, Mary Louise Pratt relates two stories: the first, the story of her strange rural Canadian connection to Dr. David Livingstone, the infamous English missionary, through a letter hanging on her pharmacist’s wall; and the second, the story of the early 20th century discovery of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Quechua and Spanish-language 1,200-page political and historical manuscript to the King of Spain in the Danish Royal Archives in Copenhagen. At first glance, these two stories seem to hold little in common aside from a very broad relationship to imperial history. However, throughout this seminal work, Pratt manages to bring such disparate experiences of imperialism together to forge a meaningful engagement with and re-assessment of “the vast, discontinuous and over-determined history of imperial meaning-making,” (4) the major goal of her work. As such, she positions herself politically in the burgeoning movement to decolonize knowledge with a marked commitment to a de-centering of the Western eye and a rethinking of the relation between centre and periphery.
The starting point for the book is the mid-18th century, a moment, Pratt claims, that denotes a shift in European consciousness, when bourgeois forms of subjectivity and power were consolidated and a new territorial phase of capitalist expansion began. The theoretical lens she develops to accomplish this task is that of “transculturation,” a concept she borrows from ethnography. For her, this concept demonstrates how metropolitan cultures were shaped by the periphery: “…[the metropolis] habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis- beginning perhaps, with the latter’s obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and its others continually to itself” (6). This was undoubtedly a groundbreaking approach to the study of imperialism at the time of publication, since it promised to shed light on resistance and the productive nature of imperial discourses.
As such, this framework provides a meaningful encounter with the diverse forms of data Pratt tackles throughout this book. In particular, her discussion about the process of “creole self-fashioning” (113) that she develops in Part II stands out as a strong theoretical contribution and re-working of the relationship between the centre and the periphery, since it illustrates some of the ways in which the metropolis and periphery work in an unequally structured dialectic relationship. However, I would argue that overall, the concept of transculturation remains relatively under-developed. As an example, much of Pratt’s focus is on canonical European travel texts, an aspect of her work that limits her ability to engage with forms of resistance in the periphery and the constitutive dimensions of such configurations in forming European subjectivities. When she does explore such instances, as in the case of creole self-fashioning, she focuses primarily on European colonists’ influence on European subjectivities, thereby marginalizing the role of indigenous and African peoples’ resistance in reformulating the metropolis. I believe a more sustained focus on such counter-narratives, especially for their potential in contributing to Pratt’s goals of de-centering the European imperial eye, would have proven fruitful.
