Formations of United States Colonialism

Abstract

Alyosha Goldstein (ed.), Formations of United States Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 432 pages. ISBN 978-0-82235810-7. $27.95 USD paperback.Formations of United States Colonialism is an excellent collection of state-of-the-art essays that critically examine US colonial discourse and grapple with complexities of cultural decolonization.The front doors of Royal Ontario Museum, not far from where I work, have since 1933 borne proud inscriptions RECORD OF NATURE THROUGH COUNTLESS AGES and ARTS OF MAN THROUGH ALL THE YEARS. All of time and space, all of human history, are subordinated to what Arnold Itwaru, in 1994 book Closed Entrances: Canadian Culture and Imperialism, calls 'imperializing eye'. Having subordinated all of nature and humanity to itself, imperializing eye then performs a double gesture: it defines value and meaning of all things through this imperializing relation; and it defines itself as neutral, natural, objective: not a record, but record.The essays in Formations of United States Colonialism do a wonderful job of disrupting this naturalization. Every chapter draws on critical cultural theory, but core of each chapter is a detailed empirical examination of process by which a particular moment in colonial discourse has been constructed, and how it could have been constructed otherwise.This potential alterity is important because, as Vicente L. Rafael points out in volume's final chapter, it takes more than armies and bureaucracies to establish empires. It takes cultural hegemony: that colonization of imagination which makes it painfully difficult to think outside of existing social order. Colonial discourse doesn't just make specific truth-claims; it constructs basic categories of thought within which truth claims are made, debated, and judged. Disrupting these categories requires retracing process of their formation.The emphasis on discourse does not entail an exclusion of practical and material stakes of social struggles. On contrary, essays in this volume connect formation of discourse to historical or contemporary struggles for resources, rights, and self-determination. Each chapter is a history, but a 'history of present' in which even wild and forgotten rumours and infamous colonial forgeries bear tellingly on terms of current politics.The chapters in this volume range broadly in time and space, from Indian slaveholding in Antebellum south to translators in presentday Iraq and professional football recruitment in Samoa. Some identities appear in more than one chapter, viewed in terms of more than one struggle: Hawai'i appears as an object of apology and of multiculturalism; Navajo Nation appears as a site of 19,h-century colonial mapping and of 20,h-century gender politics; two very different trajectories of Hispanic nationalism are discussed. One chapter stands out from others as a critical examination of international law and grounds it provides for Indigenous self-determination. Alyosha Goldstein's introduction ties it all together, noting that the United States encompasses a historically variable and uneven constellation, not a smooth Euclidean but a rhizome.Each case study attends carefully to complexities, contradictions, and incoherence of events. If dominant narrative of colonizers constructs a binary opposition between emancipatory progress and oppressive tradition with colonizers on side of progress and Indigenous groups on side of tradition, a thorough decolonization of imagination does more than simply flipping who is on which side of divide: it disrupts dichotomy altogether. …