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.