Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity by Mahmood Mamdani (review)

Abstract

Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.168 pp.In an intellectual climate where scholars are increasingly wary of catego- ries like tribal, and traditional, Mahmood Mamdani's lat- est work offers a satisfying unmasking of colonial constructions, and an antidote to their legal and political legacies. As a scholar whose work fre- quently straddles border between law, politics, and culture, Mamdani has a reputation for revealing rational bases for otherwise unconscio- nable histories. From his examination of Rwandan genocide in When Victims Become Killers (2001), to more recent works examining politics, identity, and terrorism such as Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, Cold War and Roots of Terror (2004) and Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and War on Terror (2009), Mamdani convincingly traces philosophical foundations of community, citizenship, and policy to evi- dence influence of colonial categories. His latest work stems squarely from this tradition, offering added value of comparative analysis, and demonstrating holding power of as a political identity in post-colonial world.Indeed, while decades of anthropological literature on technolo- gies, philosophies, and legacies of imperialism have located origins of racism in practices of colonial rule, Mamdani asserts that racism is only half story. Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity, Mamdani ar- gues that colonial from British India to Dutch East Indies was specifically based on two different axes of discrimination-race and tribe-through which natives and settlers were legally distinguished, differently ruled, and confined to separate social and political destinies. Mamdani further argues that shift from direct to indirect colonial rule, rather than lax control over colonized populations (which promises of non-interference might suggest), masked colonizers' vast ambitions to renegotiate native's subjectivity. Binding movement to indirect rule with parallel shifts-from civilizing missions to projects of protection, from assimilationism to a preoccupation with defining and managing dif- ference, and towards a new form of govern mentality dependent upon an emerging settler/native binary-Mamdani powerfully asserts that the native was creation of theorists of an empire-in-crisis (6). No longer under clear control of crown rule, colonial subjects became objects in need of stricter rule and, therefore, necessarily more subversive forms of subjugation.1Mamdani places colonial crisis point at 1857 Sepoy Mutiny in India: In reflection that followed crisis, Mamdani explains, the colonial mission was redefined-from civilization to conservation and from progress to (8). The movement culminated in 1858 with Queen Victoria's proclaimed doctrine of noninterference in India (8). While this doctrine superficially diluted colonial control of region by abandon- ing assimilationist projects in favor of protecting customary practices, Mamdani suggests that indirect rule achieved opposite, for the pre- rogative to define boundary, substance and of 'customary,' gave vast scope to powers of occupying authority (27). Combining political necessity of social order with an interest in conserving custom, administrators capitalized upon bureaucratic im- plications of indirect rule to emphasize differences that would keep masses divided among themselves.With great attention to colonial political history, Mamdani traces this movement from Indian subcontinent through reforms in British Malaya, Dutch East Indies, and several African colonies, arguing that colonial intellectuals undertook process of defining, and by extension trans- forming, race and tribe as academic and administrative shortcuts to gain- ing control of subject populations. …