This article examines how care functions as a critical feature in decolonial political theory and the politics of refusal. In recent years, political theorists have emphasized how refusal challenges the legitimacy of settler colonial government, asserts indigenous presence, and fuels decolonial politics. Care, I argue, plays a significant and under-examined role in the politics of refusal. I look, first, to the writings of William Apess to better examine the cruelty of settler colonial care and to highlight how indigenous reworkings of (...) care enact political presence and agency. I then examine how care has been taken up by contemporary indigenous activists in the Idle No More, Standing Rock, and Walking with Our Sisters movements. Care – expressed in online and on-the-ground grieving, social mobilization around environmental and health concerns, and teach-ins and healing practices – draws on affective intensities to build indigenous community, enact indigenous liberation, imagine and pursue radical alternatives, and create allied networks of support. In these examples, affective responses of joy, outrage, and mourning are not simply incidental accompaniments to the politics of refusal; they explain why refusal matters and how refusal in turn can challenge settler memory and pursue transformative decolonial politics. (shrink)

The article proposes a new way of thinking through truth commissions by discerning the manner in which they usher in new political configurations through voices and vocalizations. It contributes to our understanding of truth commissions by way of proposing a pragmatic ontology of bonds between the body, voice, and testimony by elucidating the central features that make them vocal assemblages, composed of five sub-institutional capacities: they affect and are affected by bodies in a complex topological relation; they are driven by (...) an apology, which itself proffers a non-human body of transformation; they potentiate reconciliation through spontaneous vocalizations; they are ontogenetic openings that reassemble national pasts, presents, and futures; and they are temporally experiential predecessors to political action. While victim testimony is taken as a historical crowning of the edifice for nations seeking to mend their past injustices, I contend that public reparation flourishes only if the state is open to the alternative orientations the voice proffers—that is, following recent observations of transitional justice, truth commissions have the potential to seek out alternative context-specific forms of justice in place of a universal law of reconciliation. By way of a brief discussion of Aboriginal artist K.C. Adams’ diptych series, Perception, the article proposes that voices pose a nuanced figuration of auto-affection as a communicative possibility towards the presentation and invention of the self. (shrink)

This paper contrasts three non-skeptical ways of explaining and reconciling political struggles: monologue, instrumental dialogue, and a comparative dialogical approach promoted by Charles Taylor and James Tully. It surveys the work of Taylor and Tully to show three particular family resemblances: their emphasis on practice, irreducible diversity, and periodic reconciliation. These resemblances are evident in the way they employ dialogical approaches to explain struggles over recognition and distribution. They describe these as dialogical actions, and suggest that a form of dialogical (...) comparison might reconcile their various contested demands. (shrink)

Indigenous peoples encounter restrictions on their modes of reasoning and account-giving within democratic sites of negotiation and deliberation. Political theorists understand these restrictions as forms of exclusion related to what theorist Iris Young has called the ‘internal exclusion’ of subordinated perspectives and theorist James Bohman has referred to as the ‘asymmetrical inclusion’ of such perspectives. ‘Internal exclusion’ refers to ways in which actors are formally accepted into decision-making processes, only to find their perspectives disqualified due to informal but no less (...) pervasive criteria of exclusion. ‘Asymmetrical inclusion’ refers to the undue burdens placed on marginalized peoples to persuade dominant communities. It is argued in light of these problems that more inclusive institutions as well as the cultivation of an ethos of receptivity will be necessary for genuine inclusion. I argue that this focus on enriching dialogue can mischaracterize the nature of disagreement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.Disagreement does not only arise between opinions or discourses that can be articulated and judged, but also at a deeper level, between the background assumptions against which practices of articulation and judgment are understood. Territorial state sovereignty, I argue, is a background understanding that can render sites of democratic negotiation inhospitable to Indigenous claims. I conclude that when thinking through Indigenous equality and autonomy, theorists should be attuned to the sites and conditions of dialogue that might serve to reinscribe relations of domination and exclusion. (shrink)

Utilizing social semiotic approaches, this article addresses how genetic researchers’ organizing narratives have involved extensive ontological and epistemological violence in their objectification Karitiana Indigenous people of Western Brazil. The paper analyses how genetic researchers have represented the Karitiana in the US and Canadian courts, post-9/11 forensic identification technology development, and patents. It also considers disputes over the sale of Karitiana cell lines by the US National Institutes of Health-funded Coriell Cell Repositories. These case studies reveal how the prominent population geneticist (...) Kenneth K. Kidd of Yale University and other genetics researchers have constituted the Karitiana as Extreme Other; liminal figures who define the boundaries of humanity. Originally sampled in 1987 by a Yale University epidemiologist, forensic genetic researchers have since utilized Karitiana cell lines to metonymically represent the Karitiana. The practices of objectification have imposed a genetically distinct special status upon the Karitiana that restricts recognition of their self-determination, rights and dignity, and which imposes onerous obligations to serve as research objects for the greater good of Humanity. The Karitiana are included as biological labour, but excluded from decision-making or asserting any other claims. Scientists have organized and maintained biotechnologically-mediated colonial relationships in which they and their institutions extract nearly all immediate and tangible benefits. The fusing of genetic research’s ontological and epistemological violence with the violence of state legal institutions raises important questions about the scope and practices of sovereignty, particularly in determining and enforcing states of exception through violence. (shrink)

In recent decades, group autonomy approaches to have gained kgitimacy within both academic and policy circles. This article examines the centrality of group autonomy in the multiculturalism debate, particuhrly in the highly influential approach of Will Kymlicka. I argue that his response to the dilemmas of liberd-democratic multiculturalism relies on an underdeveloped conceptualization of group autonomy. Despite presumably good intentions, his narrow notion of cultural group autonomy obscures the requirements of minority group members' democratic capabilities and thereby works against the (...) kind of transformative change that "accommodated" groups are seeking from the state. Although some critics (Young 1990; Benhabh 2002) have gone so far as to reject autonomy-based approaches to accommodation altogether (Young 1990,251) I suggest that this position goes too far. In response, I offer an intermediary position between those that defend and those that reject an autonomy-based approach. Instead of fully rejecting autonomy as a guiàng principle for multiculturalism, I devebp an ethics of care approach to group autonomy based on relationality, which addresses the inadequacies of the dominant approach to multiculturalism. Such an account of group autonomy is a vital step toward recondling multiculturalism with the necessary components of Uberd-democratic citizenship. (shrink)

This article both defines and shows the limits of settler shame for achieving decolonialized justice. It discusses the work settler shame does in “healing” the nation and delivering Canadians into a new sense of pride, thus maintaining the myth of the peacekeeping Canadian. This kind of shame does so, somewhat paradoxically, by making people feel good about feeling bad. Thus, the contiguous relationship of shame and recognition in a settler colonial context produces a form of pernicious self-recognition. Drawing on the (...) work of Sara Ahmed and Glen Coulthard, this article shows that a politics of recognition informed by settler shame has done little to actually see or hear Indigenous peoples on their own terms. Since settler shame is a self-directed emotion that seeks to be discharged through reconciliatory processes that are dependent on liberal recognition, it remains a mere optics of justice wedded to settler ignorance. The dependence on insufficient recognition renders the reconciliatory drive in Canada similarly insufficient, even harmful. Settler shame, then, is dangerous in relationship with recognition and reconciliation in Canada today, maintains settler colonialism, and forestalls Indigenous futurity and resurgence. (shrink)

A crucial imperative for decolonial praxis in the liberal settler colony is to radically delegitimise the prevailing social order. This is regarded as necessary to achieving genuinely decolonial forms of social transformation rather than merely the ongoing modification of colonial rule. I propose here, however, that such objectives depend not simply on delegitimising the colonial regime as such, but also on finding ways to expose and challenge its resources of legitimating power, that is, the capacity to shape and reshape perceptions (...) of legitimacy in the public sphere, and thus render legitimacy a moving rather than static target for opponents. I explore, here, the potential for a basic democratic grammar of contestation to be utilised in this task. The promise of such a grammar lies in its permanent availability to problematise rule arranging powers in the public sphere, and thus work to expose their unjustified nature. It also carries a threat, however, in that its public activation always arouses a broader array of normative forces, some aspects of which might oppose or undermine decolonial objectives. Whilst the democratic grammar holds promise for challenging liberal legitimating power, then, it must also be treated with caution from a decolonial perspective. (shrink)

The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been mandated to collect testimonies from survivors of the Indian Residential Schools system. The TRC demands survivors of the residential school system to share their personal narratives under the assumption that the sharing of narratives will inform the Canadian public of the residential school legacy and will motivate a transformation of settler identity. I contend, however, that the TRC provides a concrete example of how a politics of recognition fails to transform relationships between (...) Native and settler Canadians not only because it enacts an internalization of colonial recognition, but because it fails to account for what I call “settler ignorance.” Work in epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic oppression gives language to explain sustained denial and provide tools to further understand how settler denial is sustained, and how it can be made visible, and so challenged. For this task, Mills’s articulation of white ignorance should be expanded to a consideration of white settler ignorance. Over and above an account of white ignorance, such an account will have to consider the underlying logics of settler colonialism. This characterization of settler ignorance will show that the denial of past and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples, through the reconstruction of the past to assert the primacy of settlers, is not explainable in terms of a lack of recognition but is rather structural ignorance. (shrink)

In a global era of apology and reconciliation, Canadians, like their counterparts in other settler nations, face a moral and ethical dilemma that stems from an unsavoury colonial past. Canadians grew up believing that the history of their country is a story of the cooperative venture between people who came from elsewhere to make a better life and those who were already here, who welcomed and embraced them, aside from a few bad white men.on 11 June 2008, the Prime Minister (...) of Canada Stephen Harper made a Statement of Apology on behalf of the Canadian government for the Indian Residential Schools system : “The government now recognizes that the consequences of the Indian Residential... (shrink)

This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contemporary practice. This shift in approach to indigenous ways of knowing and being, historically derided under conditions of colonialism, is a reflection of the “ontological turn” in anthropology. Rather than seeing indigenous peoples as having an inferior or different understanding of the world to a modernist one, the ontological turn suggests that their importance lies in the fact that they constitute different worlds and “world” in a performatively different (...) way. The radical promise this view holds is that a different world already exists in potentia, the access to which is a question of ontology—of being differently: ‘being in being’ rather than thinking, acting and world-making as if we were transcendent or “possessive” modern subjects. We argue that the ontopolitical arguments for the superiority of indigenous ways of being should not be seen as radical or emancipatory resistances to modernist or coloni... (shrink)

In this article the author traces the limits of the philosophy and politics of recognition as manifest in colonial settler contexts. Forms of property ownership and ways of being, sutured by the racial body, are contained by a restricted economy of owning, knowing and being. Bringing the concept of plasticity to bear on the relationship between the body, property and the colonial, the author illuminates the ways in which practices of ownership that exceed the restricted economy of recognition exhibit a (...) temporal and spatial plasticity in the context of the Palestinian struggles over land in the West Bank. (shrink)

Although international law grants a distinct juristic personality to indigenous peoples, this subjecthood is premised on a hierarchical reading of ethnicity and indigeneity. Through illustrations of Adivasi experiences in India, this article interrogates the prejudices of the global juridical discourse that are reproduced by the domestic jurisdiction, exposing the voyeuristic performance of legality in constructing indigenousness.

Contemporary scholars routinely argue colonialism and imperialism are indistinguishable. In this essay, I challenge this argument. While it is true the “colonial” and “imperial” overlap and intersect historically, I argue there is a central thread of modern colonialism as an ideology that can be traced from the seventeenth century to mid-twentieth century that was not only distinct from—but often championed in explicit opposition to—imperialism. I advance my argument in four parts. First, I identify key ways in which the colonial can (...) be distinguished from the imperial, including most importantly the specific kind of productive power inherent in colonialism. Second, I examine how colonialism and imperialism evolve in meaning and are redefined by both champions and critics, in relation to each other in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Third, I examine the historical moment when colonialism and imperialism fully conflate after WWII through the UN process of decolonization as the “salt water thesis” delimits colonialism to mean foreign racialized domination, and it thus becomes synonymous with imperialism. I conclude with an analysis of why the distinction still matters in both theory and practice. (shrink)