The Colonial Gaze

Joshua Krueger #3042188

CRS/IDS 4910 – Conflict and the Construction of the Other

Richard McCutcheon; November 21, 2011

Think Piece #9: The Colonial Gaze

Colonialism, it seems, has not been purged from our ideologies. Though I would like to think that our current generation is one based more on understanding, or at least toleration, it seems that our present is not very far removed from our history. Staring into our contemporary colonial mirror of the Middle East, it is tempting to explain away the brutal realities as spawning from complex geopolitical factors that need to be understood within rigorous frameworks. The situation is not simple, but it is also not beyond a reasonable comprehension. The difficulty remains in allowing ourselves to see past the amputations of facts given as truth and the racist, ethnocentric knowledge that supports such illogical claims.

                Derek Gregory attempts to “recover the histories of Britain and the United States in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq;”[1] histories that have either been denied by colonial amnesia or dismembered by colonial nostalgia. He reminds us “to recall the part we are called to play – and continue to play – in the performance of the colonial present.”[2] Our part is not the overt violence of firing weapons or controlling predator drones but the simple task of accepting doctrine and subsuming questions such as ‘why do they hate us?’ Until we realize that we have become a Victor Frankenstein of history, stitching together useful pieces of reality to create an unnatural abomination, we will not be able to remove ourselves from the discursive power of such questions. It is our responsibility to show how our lives are more intertwined than we would like to admit, even though we are given the luxury of being able to deny that fact.

                The ability to deny our worldwide connection and shared humanity is contained within the way we are taught to look at the Other. Derek Gregory commonly uses the word gaze. This colonial gaze, sanctioned by might, is the ability to give meaning to all things. Not only does it have the ability to represent Baghdad as an urban fortification of dangers to American troops, but it can also instantly reproduce Baghdad as the home of a grateful and liberated people. Meanwhile, American troops are transformed from the brute force of an illegal invasion into “universal soldiers fighting for a transcendent Good.”[3] The true power of the colonial gaze though, is the ability to seamlessly switch between each ‘objective’ representation, completely erasing any previous reality and remaining unfazed as to explain any connection between each representations. With the colonial gaze a corporeal object – like Baghdad or the Iraqi people – is only the canvas on which a number of different realities can be created.

                Some might think that this gaze is just another example of the normal affects of war on truth, with its ability to distort and hide, but the colonial gaze is a stronger force. In a horrifying example, Derek Gregory shows how the logic of this gaze, which has painted all Iraqi’s as either savages or docile villagers, allows Britain’s Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon to reasonably deny the evidence of a coalition massacre by stating an argument that requires Iraqis to be far less than human.[4] Only the colonial gaze, with its foundation of Orientalism and tradition of dehumanization,  can callous a person enough to see the actions of human compassion and directly reinterpret them for proof of evil, or allow a politician to publically state that they will “not lose sleep over” the fact that innocent civilians have been turned into “pink mist.”[5] The colonial gaze is not a simple tool of war propaganda, but an entire mode of seeing that not only justifies war but sanctions it.

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[1] Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 10.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present, 235.

[4] Ibid, 211.

[5] Ibid.

"We Teach Life, Sir"

I found this video today. I watched it three times already, despite the fact that I have been working on an essay for about 14 of the last 17 hours. Please watch it. Also, please think of this video when you read my latest think piece that I will post in a day or two.

Racist Identity

Joshua Krueger #3042188

CRS/IDS 4910 – Conflict and the Construction of the Other

Richard McCutcheon; November 14, 2011

Think Piece #8: Racist Identity

I have heard the myths before. They go something like this: Out in the world there are people who wish to do us harm for some unnatural reason. We must defend ourselves from these people, for though we have never seen them, we know that their savagery and fierceness will overtake us if we do not prepare. We keep our standing forces strong, not only so that we may repel them from our own house, but so that we may protect others who are besieged by them. In this day and age, our duty includes the responsibility to go overseas to save docile populations from leaders born of their own flesh and blood. To perform this honourable mission we need strong men; men who understand that war always requires a tensioned balance between what is right and what is necessary. We need men who are willing to endure the necessary stresses of war, even if it commits them to permanent damage. It is through these men, whose experience can never be understood, that proud nations like Canada uphold their burdens for worldwide democracy and freedom.

                I do not believe these tempting and totalizing myths and neither does Sherene H. Razack. His presentation of the Somalia Affair shows a different world were all people are actually believed to be equal, rather than starting with “the argument that the natives will understand little else but force.”[1] Razack shows the self-promoting racism deep within a Canadian psyche that wants to see itself as a good country. This racism is perverse because it is not a direct intention, but merely the un-thought conclusion to culturally assumed givens: Canadians are nice, Canadians are pleasantly naïve and Canadians want to help. Since we tightly hold onto these qualities, we also catch the savagery and racism that is necessary. Our virtues “achieve coherence only if we stand outside history and within a racial story of civilized and savage peoples.”[2] What other reason would there be to bring soldiers half way around the world if they did not carry with them the light of civilization – to be shared selflessly. In order “for Western subjects to feel whole and to understand their presence in that space as necessary and justified, Black savagery had to exist.”[3] Fortunately, it is not even a problem if that savagery has to be baited with food and water,[4] because “the home front never understands what life is like in the colonies.”[5] This narrative of native savagery is so strong that not even the example of Botswanan soldiers[6] or the parallel case of Yugoslavia[7] is enough to dislodge it.

                In this way, racism becomes a by-product of identity. Most Canadians are not heartless, but all of them were asked by the official Inquiry to understand themselves as the true victims of the Somalia affair,[8] rather than the dead Somalians or their families. This epistemological categorization and systematic denial of Somanians as true persons is so pervasive that even within the Inquiry only professionalized and external sources of knowledge – treating the Somalians as objects of study – was allowed; Somalians were denied the ability to speak for themselves under the justification that their knowledge would be ‘emotional.’ This is not a new problem and one that cannot be wished away. The same logic maintained the holocaust. We cannot respect or relate to people who only need our help just as we cannot stop the killing of a destined inferior race. Each form of totalitarianism trains the mind until it becomes impossible to think – morally or critically – outside its confines. This point is maybe best proven by the fact that it takes a person of colour, marginalized outside the dominant identity, to deconstruct the racist assumptions of Canada’s peacekeeping and national myths.

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[1] Sherene H. Razack, Dark Threats & White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 39.

[2] Ibid, 119.

[3] Sherene H. Razack, Dark Threats & White Knights, 69.

[4] Ibid, 77.

[5] Ibid, 85.

[6] Ibid, 54.

[7] Ibid, 131.

[8] Ibid, 144.

Power, Identity & Politics

Joshua Krueger #3042188

CRS/IDS 4910 – Conflict and the Construction of the Other

Richard McCutcheon; November 7, 2011

Think Piece #7: Power, Identity & Politics

If it is true that “with no state of their own, and without even the desire for one – a condition both unique and unfathomable, then as now – [Gypsies] had to be in the service of some foreign country or sovereign,”[1] then the Gypsies have perfectly followed their historical destiny. Unlike the Jewish people, who even during their years of statelessness gained an international identity, Gypsies have been unable to find recognition, never mind reparation. International Jewry has been able to fight against their externally demonizing representations by invoking sympathy through a victim identity; what then of the Gypsies, whose identity and survival strategy has placed value on separation from the world through hidden integration into the margins of it. The Gypsies are an example of what happens to a people when they are unable to, or abstain from, providing a counter narrative or identity to the external representations that have been placed upon them. It is only when there is no voice for a people that we can ask: “But who is going to complain?”[2]

The transformative power of representation has affected the Gypsies to the point that they cannot be addressed without stereotype. While Fonseca refrains from creating a romanticised Gypsy history or an idealized Gypsy identity, she shows how this external pressure – though it is unheeded by the Gypsy’s themselves – spotlights the Gypsies as stranger. In this light, their customs are not only misunderstood, but their meaning is completely transformed. A people group whose children escape and travel 3.5 km from a Nazi camp to visit their families is deemed asocial; men who manage to find and purchase German cars that can be sold at a profit in a matter of days are sentenced to survival training; nomadic people who do not subscribe to the idea of boarders or care about other nationalities are branded as spies and enemies of the state. As post-colonial writers have articulated it, Fonseca shows how the power fed representations recreate the Gypsies. Historically forced into servitude, the accompanying justifications for their mistreatment created an overarching representation of Gypsies as an intrinsic “social class: the slave caste.”[3]

                It is quite a thought experiment to imagine what would happen if it were possible for the positions of power to be reversed. Gypsy would move through the countryside, scoffing at the strangeness of the Germans for rooting themselves to one place. One could imagine that legislation would need to be set up to prevent the Germans from starving in the winter, considering their foolish action of planting crops where the horses always passed through. It might even be necessary to set up special places for these “Earth Harmers” to live in their backwards ways, to protect the integrity of the migration routes.

                This is difficult to imagine, and I wonder if such an organization is even possible. Is there some inherent power and natural progress in a lifestyle that values staying in one spot and tries to master nature rather than the lifestyle that values a journey of coexisting with it? In this way, the Gypsies do seem like an outdated memory of the past. Even they know that they must evolve past their usual response and “redefine themselves as an ethnic problem – rather than a social one.”[4] While it is not my point here to muse on theories of history or progress, it is important to note that the “Gypsy question” was the fact that they did not fit into the neat boxes that were necessary for nationalization, communism or capitalism. It is important to remember that “the legislation of the past few years will likely erode traditional Gypsy life more seriously than the Industrial Revolution eroded it.”[5] In a different world order the Gypsies could have continued to live as resourceful and valuable human beings, but the progressing world order was not beneficial to the Gypsies. Instead of letting ‘progress’ take place, forcing the Gypsies to adapt or disappear (an important moral question in itself), the powers fostered a proper representation of the other to remove their requirement to acknowledge the Gypsy’s humanity while making them beneficial tools as passive scapegoats for ideological warfare.

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[1] Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 227.

[2] Ibid, 275.

[3] Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing, 179.

[4] Ibid, 297.

[5] Ibid, 234.

Authority of Discourse

Joshua Krueger #3042188

CRS/IDS 4910 – Conflict and the Construction of the Other

Richard McCutcheon; October 31, 2011

Think Piece #6: Authority of Discourse

Homi K. Bhabha discusses the power of the novel as cultural form of power for the colonizer. In his piece, he uses the example of the Bible to bring out the concept of hybridity. Using India as his backdrop, and proselytizing as the reason for the encounter, the question of authority quickly arises. In this case the Bible represents each, and at the same time, the authority of God distinct from humanity and the power of the English through the ability to present the word of God. This hybridity becomes apparent with the unconscious cultural associations that the English missionaries attach to their gospel that become nonsensical to the Indians. With such strange and foreign customs as the Eucharist, the coloniser is seen not only as other, but as cannibal. This is how the Indians can boldly respond with, “how can the word of God come from the flesh-eating mouths of the English?”[1] While the Bible is a special case because of its inherent impossibility to be claimed solely by the English as their own, this type of mixing happens within all forms of symbolic power and “other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority – its rules of recognition.”[2] Hybridity, a natural result of the collision of two different cultures, actually becomes the tool to dismantle cultural symbols of authority as authority, leaving the colonial authority in a place where it “must continually be re-presented in the production of terror or fear.”[3] It is from this place of acknowledged hybridity that allows the native to begin to carve out a new space of colonial discourse while still remaining within the civil boundaries of colonial sources of power. Instead of placing their resistance solely within the field of nationalism, the questioning of colonial authority – such as those questions directed at the divine authority of the English as gospel providers – become a defensive tactic for the native and a site of civil disobedience. Paradoxically, the symbols of power and authority for colonialism, once transposed into the native and its culture, eventually breed the sites for coercive resistance.

While Bubba brings forward how hybridity can bring another voice to the colonized, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her aptly named piece “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, shows how the questions that are formed around a discourse can limit the voices that can be heard. As Spivak shows continuously in her piece, the subaltern can clearly speak and resist, but can they be heard? Bluntly, she states no, using Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide and the following misunderstanding of her actions as only the latest step in the ladder that post-colonial theorists have used to climb away from reality. Her meaning, like her style of rhetoric, is deeper than surface level though. Just as it is only possible to see Bhadrui’s act as “absurd, a case of delirium rather than sanity”[4] without the proper context, Spivak’s entire article can only be fully understood as a subaltern woman intentionally writing in a mode as difficult as those she commentates on. Spivak is demanding to be heard, not necessarily by everyone, but by those who claim to be working in the same field as her, as they simultaneously pass over her as an epistemological category that is unable to speak and unworthy to listen to.

These two intellectuals present the challenges and struggles that face such a simple and consuming task as attempting to work around and through the discourses of power around the issue of representations and authority.

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[1] Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” in Critical Inquiry 12 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 158.

[2] Ibid, 156.

[3] Ibid, 158.

[4] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretations of Culture, Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 308.

To Join the Human Race

Joshua Krueger #3042188

CRS/IDS 4910 – Conflict and the Construction of the Other

Richard McCutcheon; October 24, 2011

Think Piece #5: To Join the Human Race

Even if it is not identical to our internalized version, it is startling to catch a glimpse of the doxa: the unquestioned assumptions of our thoughts and theories. One is struck dumbfounded, yet also humbled, by the notion that J.A. Hobson’s major critique of Imperialism, even with its bravery, is not at all against the concept of inferior races,[1] or how both T. E. Lawrence and Louis Massignon – men described by Said as having “genuine empathy” – could not see another solution than dividing the Arab world between France and England, “for the Arabs.”[2] It is not at all surprising then that colonists and their books authoritatively declared natives as lazy, blind to the fact that these humans were defying their subjugation.[3] How can such beliefs, with their ties to power, be overcome?

Enter Yeats, a poet presented by Said as a conscious warrior on a cognitive battlefield. In the process of decolonization and the very real struggle for land, Yeats’ work is in direct contact with the doxa of the settlers and their assumptions to the land. In attempting to splinter it and remove the pressures of their beliefs from the mind of his own people, Yeats forms the narrative in which the land can begin to be recovered through the imagination.[4] In the same mode as Yeats is Fanon, who writes not only of the direct physical confrontation between settler and native, but of the doxa that links imperialism and orthodox nationalism.

With Edward Said’s guidance I agree that Fanon is more than an angry subaltern rousing the masses for violence, and needs to be read as pushing past the phase of national consciousness and “independence to the theoretical domain of liberation.”[5] I also agree that his final position is one that “bind[s] the European as well as the native together in a new non-adversarial community of awareness and anti-imperialism,”[6] but Edward Said does not seem to mention his opinion on the necessity of Fanon’s view of violence as “the synthesis that overcomes the reification of white man as subject, Black man as object.”[7] How can the movement towards liberation and mutual community continue without smashing this reification? If so, must we follow Fanon into battle against Empire in a “protracted political, cultural, and sometimes military struggle”?[8]

Though this is an interesting question, it is a question that is afforded to me by my comfortable place within the empire. Maybe the important aspect is not if there is physical violence or not, but that there needs to be a struggle. Either way I am intrigued to thinking holistically through the process of decolonization. As Yeats provides a first step of impetus by unchaining the imagination, is the next step liberating violence and national independence – both of which much be eventually overcome – that builds up a people to the point that they can begin the true process of liberation as equals with all races of the earth? Culture and Imperialism’s final chapter is an excellent critique of compartmentalized identity and the nationalized educations that build such identities, but are those identities not also a necessary step to prevent oneself from being subsumed by the culture of another nations?[9] If this is true and we ignore it, is there a risk of pushing nations into subordinate roles by demanding that they espouse nonviolence and temperance? Or are these identities problematic enough that we can call into question the very necessity of nation states? Either way, Edward Said’s work has shown me that I can no longer afford to be an infant and depend on the antagonistic identity that has been prepared for me, but that I must remove my fear and prejudice and join the human race.

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[1] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 241.

[2] Ibid, 263.

[3] Ibid, 254.

[4] Ibid, 225.

[5] Ibid, 268.

[6] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 274.

[7] Ibid, 270.

[8] Ibid, 207.

[9] Japan’s cultural dependence on American despite its economic dominance is a good example presented on pages 329-30. 

Design or Destiny

Joshua Krueger #3042188

CRS/IDS 4910 – Conflict and the Construction of the Other

Richard McCutcheon; October 17, 2011

Think Piece #4: Design or Destiny

In my second Think Piece, Aimé Césaire allowed me to ask the question of where I had subsumed the invention of the barbaric negro. While I am hesitant to say that Edward Said has answered that question, his book Culture and Imperialism brings the ambiguity surrounding the question into a calm look of action and reaction. I do not wish to reduce Said’s work, but I understand his argument as showing the relationship of consequences that we take for granted in many other settings. Why do more baseball players come from the United States and hockey players come from Canada? It is not because Canadians are more genetically suited for hockey or because Americans are afraid of ice, but it might have something to do with the fact that American youth, through their upbringing in the US, are much more likely to know the career statistics of Babe Ruth than those of Wayne Gretzky. Furthermore, with the amount of money that can be made by a professional athlete, and a culture that equates money with value, there is an underwritten assumption that becoming a baseball player is a much higher calling than being an office worker. This is the same logic that imperialist culture whispered to their young men and women: being a soldier or a colonial adventurer is a more honourable position than being a farmer.

                This relationship of mutual support, once it has been pointed out, is so straightforward and common to me that I wonder about the black hole that this knowledge has been kept in. In this sense Said’s work is tearing the veil and bringing down the structures that have conditioned my mind to believe in certain categories of specialness and limitation; categories that are pooled up like beads of sweat from the twisting marathon of economics and politics.

The point that still confuses me though, is how such a relationship began. I understand that once the system of imperialism and a basic level of cultural justification existed, both would naturally support each other, but I do not understand how this came to be. Did they both spring up together, or was there some agency by Western powers to adjust culture to their economic interests? On the other hand, Said quotes William Blake’s words: “Empire follows Art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose”[1]; does that mean that English artists designed the systems of imperialism and colonialism?

The part of Said’s argument that is so compelling to me is the fact that it coheres to the theory that all people justify evil because they think they are serving a higher good. In the case of empire, Said calls this, through the help of Conrad, the “self-confirming ideological motor.”[2] While I do think that humans would intentionally repair and refuel the machine[3] – because their entire identity in contained within the context of the machine – I doubt that there is one person or group that is evil (and powerful) enough to intentionally build that motor outside or before the power of its rationalizing context. Does that mean that there was another force, an inherent and inevitable evil within the West or within all of humanity that leads to such relationships of domination?

In another part, Said states that this relationship of culture and identity is present in all modern cultures, even suggesting that special experiences are “historically created and the result of interpretation.”[4] If all modern cultures use categories to include and exclude, what happens when we attempt to remove ourselves from the dominant categories our cultures provide for us? Is there a way to remove ourselves from the dehumanizing or limiting categories of our culture while still retaining useful frames of reference and a place to belong? Edward Said is very aware of the way that western culture marginalizes him and his experiences, but this position also seems to free him to criticize Western culture without the risk of losing his cultural support or immediate community. Can I reject certain categories and still relate to those who accept them? If I do need to remove myself more fully, to which group or culture can I belong? Is there the possibility of culture without such categories?

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[1] Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 13.

[2] Ibid, 60.

[3] One example presented by Said is Bernard Lewis defending the “Western Cannon” on page 37.

[4] Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 32.

Safe with the Other?

Joshua Krueger #3042188

CRS/IDS 4910 – Conflict and the Construction of the Other

Richard McCutcheon; October 3, 2011

Think Piece #3: Safe with the Other?

A simple view of Said’s critique of Orientalism and its synthesising power can be shown within his metaphor of a fierce tiger.[1] The metaphor shows how expectations can create reality about the object in our gaze, actually causing the object to become what we ‘know’ about it. It is what it is because it is, and it always will be. Not only does the metaphor dig out the years of Orientalist evidence, but it also leads itself towards one of the significant debates about how to deal with, or at least prepare for, the Other.

The debate around military might is often given in a framework where there is a major assumption about the Other. The assumption is a worldview that sees danger out in the world, born out of illegitimate reasons, that seeks to destroy the good. Military budgets then can be justified on the kneejerk reactions of safety and protection of the innocent. While there is no doubt that there is danger in the world, does the action of preparing and readying oneself for war make safety more or less likely? In Said’s example, he did not state that tigers were not fierce, but he did imply that they can be other than fierce. A tiger can kill a human being quite easily, but it has little reason to do so unless it is provoked or handled in a way that will actually “increase its fierceness.”[2] One could imagine an explorer who traps every spottable tiger to protect himself and the innocents, only having his suspicions confirmed when one breaks loose and attacks him. Would that explorer not be justified in killing baby tigers to prevent them from growing up to become blood thirsty terrors? Could it occur to the explorer that he could leave the tigers alone?

Is that what is happening in our world? I hear about these people, these Others, who want to destroy us and our way of life. While I am sure that these people have the natural ability to be dangerous – they have actually proved that they can be – is our ways of dealing with them making the world a more dangerous place? If yes, then do we need to give up our fascination with the darkness and embrace a ‘naive’ assumption that all human beings are good and peaceful? If we are wrong, will we die because of it?

                Either way, we are not the ones dying right now. The ones who have died and are dying – to confirm our suspicions about them – are the ones who are still human enough to consider that imperialism was a created inevitability of capitalism; that it was “a necessity like those today of the national liberation of people, the destruction of capital and the advent of socialism.”[3] This formulaic statement, welcome to the conscience of the West, pushes the fact that it was historically inevitable that two significant but diverse cultures were going to collide. While the statement does not place value on imperialism, it does bring up interesting questions about capitalism: Was it necessary? How did that system contributed to the caging up of the other? More importantly, does the formula of injury and repair apply to the damage that has been done by Orientalism? As inevitable as national liberation is to imperialism, is there an equally inevitable push for the natives to recontextualize the Other who has Othered them? Unlike the geographically lines of a country, what are the bounds that signify the shift from intellectual liberation to retaliatory attack?

The fundamental question as both Said and Clifford have highlighted is “how does one represent other cultures?”[4] In the effort to avoid “quick recourses to alternative totalities,”[5] they give us no distinct answer but their unique relationship is more informative than their contemplation. One man is part of a historically dispossessed and marginalized group while the other one enjoys the full range of social and economic support, yet they are able to engage and challenge each other without self-pity or rage.

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[1] Edward Said, Orientialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 93-4.

[2] Ibid, 94.

[3] Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory.” Revoluation in Buinea: Selected Texts By Amilcar Cabral (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 99.

[4] James Clifford, “On Orientalism.” The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 274.

[5] Ibid.

Who will define Civilization?

Joshua Krueger #3042188

CRS/IDS 4910 – Conflict and the Construction of the Other

Richard McCutcheon; September 26, 2011

Think Piece #2: Who will define Civilization?

How does one respond to the writers of colonial reality; to the ones who have been fed oppression and mercilessly respond with the truth? As a reader, watching the moral authority of my own civilization buckle as if it was the backs of those it has oppressed, I am filled with wonder and despair. Frantz Fanon calls for a complete reconstruction of the political and economic imagination and my feeble attempts to retain some handle on my reality through reasonable and balanced conduct is already countered by the words: “For the native, objectivity is always directed against him.”[1] My desire towards action is halted by my creeping thoughts that force me to compare my own independent beliefs against the indoctrination of the native bourgeoisie towards the system of western values. To Fanon, we are both complicit in defending the status quo by unconsciously pushing the conflict towards our own needs and sources of power, rather than for what is right. While I would prefer, because of my own personal taste and educational training, that conflicts should be lessened and even resolved, my guilt and horror paralyzes my mind to critically engage and all I can do is avert my eyes and agree with Fanon’s psychology of the native. In this place of deception, all that matters is bread and land; the native knows this and knows that the only way to get such concrete realities is through concrete actions. Therefore, there will be violence. 

                While I distress over the ease with which I can stray from my upbringing as a Mennonite pacifist, I cannot argue with the truth-tipped quotes presented by Aimé Césaire. Is there any more scathing attack to the western liberal than to be unhumorously compared to Hitler? To be shown in my own thoughts and education how racist even my indignation is. I confess that until this moment I did not understand that I too despised the “humiliation of the white man” more so than the “humiliation of man” as such.[2] Césaire pulls the curtain fully away to show that the great figures of the west are nothing more than barbarians and hypocrites, especially in comparison to the real black race who are “civilized to the marrow of their bones!”[3]

                How then did I come to believe these things? Did I choose to start believing in the invention of the “barbaric negro,”[4] or is my deterioration a necessary result of the manufactured “keel of evil and of mystery stabilizing the ship and course that is Western history?”[5] As Michael Taussig’s article explains, the production of rubber in the Amazon required the use of torture and terror – possible through colonization – to create the context of abstract labour necessary for capitalism.[6] For such a process to be sustainable in the human psyche, the Other needs to be constructed in a way that justifies and sanctifies the abuser. Maybe my entire being is only an extension of this unholy trinity between capitalism, racism and power.

                I find myself asking the question that has been asked before me: “What sort of understanding – what sort of speech, writing, and construction of meaning by any mode – can deal with and subvert that?”[7] With the storm of guilt hovering above me, how do I begin the process of cutting out the precepts of my identity – nevertheless the identity of a culture – that make it impossible to encounter the Other in any meaningful way? Or is it my responsibility, with fear and trembling, to step aside and humbly accept the role that my culture has forced upon the rest of the world and let the Other create the definition of civilization.

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[1] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 77.

[2] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 3 http://www.rlwclarke.net/Theory/SourcesPrimary/CesaireDiscourseonColonialism.pdf (Accessed September 22, 2011).

[3] Ibid, 11.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Michael Taussig, “Culture of Terror--Space of Death: Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the

Explanation of Torture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, No. 3. (1984): 470 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0010-4175%28198407%2926%3A3%3C467%3ACOTODR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4 (Accessed September 22, 2011).

[6] Ibid, 479.

[7] Ibid, 470.

Imperialism and Madness

The following is called a Think Piece. It is a 600 word paper that I will need to write each week for a class called Conflict and Construction of the Other. This week's readings was A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Because of the limited word count, I took some liberties with assuming that the reader had already read the material. I will probably post my Think Piece's here because they should be polished writing and they might be interesting to check out. I welcome any questions or constructive criticisms.

Joshua Krueger #3042188

CRS/IDS 4910 – Conflict and the Construction of the Other

Richard McCutcheon; September 18, 2011

Think Piece #1: Imperialism and Madness

The books A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad both deal with the issue of imperialism. Reflecting on the effects of imperialism, both books have strong themes of deception and unreality. They both show how deceptive language and unchecked power allow a type of madness to take place; a madness that becomes normalized because it is constructed and supported by the manmade power of imperialism.

                As a removed native of Antigua, Kincaid is the only one able to see the madness that dominates the island. Even her vision is incomplete though, because she can only call on the language of her oppressor; the language that can “contain only the goodness of the criminal’s deed.”[1] From this subverted position, Kincaid still manages to seduce the reader by placidly wondering how a refrigerator can electrocute a man, or how a food importer can lend money to a government, while at the same time stating the stupidity of having a Minister of Culture, or forcing the reader to examine the connection between slavery and Hotel Training School. Kincaid shows us that these absurdities are accepted only because they exist. Just as the Barclay brothers might be visionaries for switching from physical slavery to economic slavery or how the nation of Switzerland can be considered neutral because it only deals with benign commodities such as money and time, reality is warped by power and ideas – for both the colonisers and the local inhabitants – that are then judged by fictional measures. Striding confidently with its military power, this madness is shielded through the imposed values of development and GDP.

                In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the theme of madness is personified in the character of Kurtz. Kurtz, a man who decorates his dwelling with the heads of those who resist his rule, is more than a simple character though, and his madness must be dealt with in the context of the madness around him. It would be tempting to simply take Conrad’s fantastical description of the Congo and write off Kurtz’s deterioration as a result of the impenetrable jungle and savage people of Africa, but this position ignores the madness that Kurtz is formed in. In fact, Kurtz’s madness is at least in part an exemplification of the savageness of the Company, and ultimately imperialism. As we follow Marlow’s journey towards Kurtz, we are struck by the “high and just proceedings” of imperialism. [2] These include the chaining of black ‘criminals’ and the digging of a hole “connected with the philanthropic desire of giving the criminals something to do,” along with the exceptional waste of human and material resources.[3] As the journey continues, the stupidity shifts to direct madness at the further inland Central Station where there is no more need for deceptiveness or false language to cover up the “desire to get...where ivory was to be had.”[4] In this context, the character of Kurtz is more than just a man but the result of the idea of imperialism put into a pressure cooker. “All of Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” in more than just the cosmopolitan sense; the mood of Europe, namely that “we must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings,” is stored in Kurtz’s being and becomes the catalyst for his madness. [5] It is only when Kurtz is forcibly removed from the manmade context that nurtures his delusions of moral and racial superiority that he realizes the horror of his actions.

                Neither of these books claims that the people who began the great game of civilizing the world were necessarily crazy, but they do point to the fact that madness is linked to the quest. One does not need to be mad to take up the seductive ideas presented by imperialism, but one does need to twist reality in order to sustain them. It is only once this madness is normalized – through the construction of an alternate reality legitimized by power – that the benefits of imperialism can be imagined.

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[1] Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 32.

[2] Joseph Conrad, Ed. Robert Hampson, Heart of Darkness (Toronto: Penguin Books, 2007), 19.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 29.

[5] Ibid, 61.