RP4: Coloniality, Colonialism, and Mignolo

Colonialism saddens me, and in a large scheme Mignolo does not support the idea that coloniality is permanent; however, when applying his theory to our daily lives, I have a hard time understanding the ways in which colonialism can be entirely dismantled.  I understand that there are methods which can be applied to anti-colonialism to render its effectiveness, but on a large scale I think that the demolition of colonialism is impossible.

Unfortunately, I am working from a limited perspective and I do not yet have the scope to conceive of the abolition of colonialism.  Considering the ways in which the land of The People has been historically* misused, it will be difficult to adjust all of the structures which were quickly assembled, but built to last and endure.  To an extent, colonial structures were built with a form of survivance in mind.  Once one group is colonized, it almost seems as though the quickest form of reconciliation or retribution is through the colonization of another group of people.  Now, is this to say that I am assuming colonization can only be dismantled in a matter of years?  No.  It is to say that I believe that coloniality will take decades to erase, and I do not see the lifespan of humanity occupying the same lengthy lifespan.

To reiterate, my perspective is limited.  I began reading with the idea that the lifespan of humanity after 2014 is waning.  This limited view constricted me and did not allow me to completely agree with Mignolo's theory.  Although I agree that colonialism is the the "hated little sister" which the family attempts to disguise as modernization, or progress, or development, and I partially agree that "the decolonization of knowledge and subjectivity through the imagination of alternatives to capitalism and alternatives to the modern state and its reliance on military power... is taking place" (Mignolo, 85); however, I do not believe it has garnered sufficient support to be considered ultimately successful.  I also do not believe there is a way for these movements to be greatly successful until all of colonialism is disbanded.

Now this post is not in any way a means to say that I have the answer to ending colonialism.  It is also not not an attempt to say that Mignolo's theory was not brilliant.  Instead it is to say I do not entirely agree with his theory.

*the use of the term historical is not to confine this text to the European, Greco Abrahamic linearity of time, but merely to contextualize my thoughts through a method that is familiar.

RP4: Tense Matters

"Although critical theory has focused much attention on the role of frontiers and Manifest Destiny in the creation and rise of U.S. empire, American Indians and other indigenous peoples have often been evoked in such theorizations as past tense presences. Indians are typically spectral, implied and felt, but remain as lamentable casualties of national progress who haunt the United States on the cusp of empire and are destined to disappear with the frontier itself. Or American Indians are rendered as melancholic citizens dissatisfied with the conditions of inclusion" (Byrd xx).

I’ve been thinking about this quote a lot this week—especially in conjunction with what Dr. Gómez asked us to talk about on Tuesday: How might the terms of the current academic and political debates change  if the responsibilities of the very real, lived conditions of colonialism was prioritized? To help me think about this question, I had to think about the ways in which the real and lived conditions of colonialism are not prioritized—a clear, succinct, direct idea was necessary, not just rhetorical and broad statements of frustration. This idea was well described in the quote above.  The lived conditions of colonialism have been so pushed aside, not prioritized, that the groups who have lived and live in those conditions are evoked in the past tense and as “lamentable casualties of national progress.” The most common reference to indigenous communities is though stereotype—specifically a historical stereotype: The ‘Noble Savage” with long dark hair, acting as one with the universe, the image of the stoic yet dangerous man wearing little clothing, a feathered headdress , and war paint. These are dominant images of a group of people lumped into the easy title of Native Americans. These images are everywhere from advertisement to children’s entertainment.

The popular Disney movie, Peter Pan, begins in the orderly, civilized, real world that seems to include only wealthy white people. It then moves into a fantasy world that includes boys who have no parents, pirates, and Indians who sing “What makes the Red man Red.” The characters enjoy their stay in this fantasy world, but in the end, the children have to return to the real world…where apparently these groups don’t exist? No, actually orphans, piracy, and Indians do exist in the real world—they simply do not have the same levity as portrayed in Peter Pan’s Neverland. The simplification of what is means to be Indian, both in the film and in the broader portrayal of Indians, is firmly placed in a historical stereotype and as a past tense presence. It relies on the already-stereotypical and simplifying image of how Europeans viewed Indians when white man first “discovered” the Americas. It does not recognize the current presence of indigenous communities and how they might be different from that historical image. It does not acknowledge the history of genocide and imperialism of indigenous communities and how that might have forced them to change and adapt in order to survive.

Maintaining a single narrative and image that originated six hundred years ago removes the effects of colonialism on this country and the people who have lived here and been subjected to this coloniality. What does recognizing this lived condition look like? Because for me, before I can think about what effects that might have on academia and politics, I need to think about what form prioritizing the lived conditions of colonialism would take. I think it would take changing norms; it would take changing what we see as standard and normal for “Indian.” The best way to do this is through art and media. Change the way we talk about Indian-ness and the way indigenous people are portrayed and talked about. Distinguish between different groups, recognize the land we stand on, strive to understand the current condition of colonialism rather than naming it as past lamentable casualties. Stop talking about people in the past tense when they are here. Speak in present tense.

Week Nine: The Transit of Empire: Jodi A. Byrd

 

1.     Transit:  “to be in motion, to exist liminally n the ungrievable spaces of suspicion and unintelligibility. . .to be made to move.”  p. xv

2.     “might be more suited to diaspora studies and border-crossing than to a notion such as indigeneity that is often taken as rooted and static, located in a discrete place.” p. xvi

3.     Chickasaw sovereignty and movement p. xvi

4.     “To be in transit is to be active presence in a world of relational movements and countermovements.  To be in transit is to exist relationally, multiply.”  p. xvii

5.     What are our ongoing conversations about sovereignty, power and indigeneity?  NB:  p. xvii

6.     “consider how ideas of “Indianness” have created conditions of possibility for U.S. empire to manifest its intent.”  p.  xvii

7.     the coercion of struggles for social justice…into complicity with colonization p. xvii (i.e., Occupy Wall Street)

8.     What are alternatives to the entanglements of race and colonialism?  p. xviii

9.     “the Derealization of the ‘Other’” p. xviii

10. NB p. xix and what happens when “diaspora collides with settler colonialism”

11. “How might the terms of current academic and political debates change if the responsibilities of that very real lived condition of colonialism were prioritized as a condition of possibility?”  p. xx

12. How racialization and colonization work:  p. xxiii

13. Impossible choices for social justice activists:  p. xxiv

14. How do we engage in a “critical reevaluation of the elaboration of these historical processes of oppression…”? p. xxv-xxvi

15. What is the alternative to “a historical aphasia of the conquest of indigenous peoples?” p. xxvi

16.  What would it mean to see the colonization of the Americas as unresolved? p. xxvi

17.   How do we read the cacophonies of colonialism?  p. xxvii

18. Haksuba:  p. xxvii-xxviii

19. “Being Indigenous”  Alfred and Corntassel p. xxix-xxx

20. Manichean allegories:  foreign/native, colonizer/colonized p. xxix

21. Centering indigenous epistemologies p. xxix

22. What does transformative accountability look like?  p. xxx

23. “Indigenous critical theory might, then, provide a diagnostic way of reading and interpreting the colonial logics that underpin cultural, intellectual, and political discourses.  But is asks that settler, native and arrivant each acknowledge their own positions within empire and then reconceptualize space and history to make visible what imperialism and its resultant settler colonialisms and diasporas have sought to obscure.”  p. xxx

24.  How people view the field (think back on your view of ES, and our discussions of alternative models of teaching ES): p. xxxi

25. “the dialectics of genocide” p. xxxiv

26. moving from vertical to horizontal interactions:  p. xxxiv

27. “transform how we approach these issues, in ways that reflect the best of our governance and diplomatic traditions.”  p. xxxv

28. binary colonial logics:  p. xxxvi

29. dynamics of colonial discourses:  p. xxxvi

30. “I also want to imagine cacophonously, to understand that the historical processes that have created our contemporary moment have affected everyone at various points along their transits with and against empire.”  p. xxxix

31. “provide possible entry points into critical theories that do not sacrifice indigenous worlds and futures in the pursuit of the now of the everyday.”  p. xxxix

Making Hegemony and Dominance not mutually exclusive

Making Hegemony and Dominance not mutually exclusive

             

            The fact that hegemony and dominance are not mutually exclusive is a concept that I believe can only be fully understood when colonization is considered.  When researching the definition of hegemony the term dominance is often used within the definition and in colloquial speech they quite often used interchangeable. This truth points to the ever-impressive power of language as a tool of oppression, which is often only combated in intellectual settings. That is why it is so influential that as Mignolo points out “with the Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Andean movements, knowledge is increasingly the key site of struggle.” (Mignolo, 115) Those fighting must use the tools of language to combat misunderstandings and re-evaluate our definitions of words whose meaning has the power to misconstrue the freedom and governance of a nation. “The awareness, however, that what is dominant is not necessarily hegemonic is awakening; and hegemony like the stock market, is becoming diversified.” So much of how colonization is able to survive is based off of misplaced understandings of hegemonic control.  Numbers twisted and spun in order to calculate an understanding of “the majority group” when the definitions that divide are being constructed by those in the dominant position of control.  Until we fully separate hegemony and dominance, colonization will continue to be the narrative of governance in most of the world. 

RP3: “Tú ya estás muerto”

Watching El Norte, made me angry for many reasons. One, because this happens all the time, even though time changes it still keeps happening. When people immigrate or migrate to other places they still need to think how to assimilate, hot to survive without the ideas and beliefs that they carry. They must follow other ideas; conforming to the modern world in which they are living in because their world has been taken away from them. Second, I just don’t understand why it’s so hard for others to understand the different worlds of different people. Why is it that people need to be “superior” and those who are not are told that their land is worth nothing because it is not seen as “superior”? Finally, even our own people harm us, in every possible way. Those that believe that coloniality and modernity is the way of living are the ones that tell our story of how we are no longer alive, that our way of living is not “the right way”.

 This film had a lot of themes going on. The main ones that I kind of connected were colonization, ethnosuicide and assimilation. The way I define ethnosuicide is the killing of yourself and your people by accepting colonization. Colonization then is defined as “the idea that certain people do not belong to history”, from Mignolo’s reading, The Americas, Christian expansion, and the modern/colonial foundation of Racism. Reading Rabassa’s Elsewheres and the definition of ethnosuicide made me think of Nacha’s line in the film, “Tú ya estás muerto”. Why is it that Nacha tells Enrique, “Tú ya estás muerto”? Well first because he is forgetting his beliefs and traditions, ethnosuicide. By him accepting to assimilate it’s a way of saying, “I have to become somebody else to be accepted”. He believes that assimilating is the only way he is going to survive. Therefore, assimilating to a new environment will be to tell the story of how you became colonized and how you narrated your ethnosuicide.

When I think about Enrique and Rosas’s role in the film, the ideas that each one of them represents makes me think of assimilation. Rosa and Enrique, along with other characters in the film, were assimilating little by little. In some occasions it was by their choice and on others by force because it was implemented on them. In example, one of Rosa’s lines was “Qué diferencia hay en la forma que lo hago?” She is told that the way she does it is not the right way. That is the same idea that Europeans implemented on the people from colonized territories, specifically, the Aztecs and Incas. This brings me to the connection to modernity and how modernity and coloniality cannot be separated as how Mignolo defines it. “ You can not be modern without being colonial” (Mignolo, pg.6). Being Modern means that you have adopted an advanced and modern way of thinking and working, and this comes from the idea of becoming colonized. Therefore, the film shows colonization, assimilation and ethnosuicide at the same time, in which these three ideas intersect with one another and work together.

RP3: "How I Could Just Kill A Man"

The poem “They’re Always Telling Me I’m Too Angry” has been on my mind lately and when the song “How I could Just Kill a Man” came up, it definitely resonated with some lines of the poem. The line “I could easily kill several million random white folk just to feel a little balance on this poor earth” (Chrystos) stood out to me the first time I read the poem. I thought of it as too violent, too out there. As I read the rest of the poem and reread it several times, I didn’t have the same reaction to the line. I’m not necessarily agreeing with it, but I then had a better understanding of why that line is in the poem. I get why Chrystos said it, and it all has to do with the anger that the narrator has, but I thought it as, using the violence that the oppressors have used. Now that violence is not only from the oppressors to the oppressed, but even among the oppressed, “But I’ve known since I was little that no matter how many of us they kill it’s only ok for us to help them kill other brown folk or to cheat each other or hate each other.” The colonizers have taught us to turn on one another.

The song “How I Could Kill a Man” by the Hip Hop group Cypress Hill definitely made me think about it. I remember seeing the title of the song for the first time, and I didn’t even bother listening. This song came up again a few days ago and I automatically thought of Chrystos. The chorus for the song “ How I could Just Kill a Man” goes, “Here is something you can’t understand, How I could just kill a man.” For various reasons this violence is seen in various similar communities, which is violence within a community (or within people of color). The Chrystos poem has to do with the oppressed (predominately people of color) and it addresses that no one will ever know what another person experiences even if they try (and that goes for everyone), but it would be even more difficult to try to understand what an underrepresented person has gone through.

“How do you know where I'm at
when you haven't been where I've been, understand where I'm coming from.
While you're up on the hill in your big home
I'm out here risking my dome, just for a bucket or a faster ducket,
just to stay alive yo I got to say fuck it.
here is something you can't understand, how I could just kill a man.”
-“How I Could Just Kill A Man” by Cypress Hill