Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition by Glen Sean Coulthard (review)

Abstract

RED SKIN, WHITE MASKS: Rejecting Colonial Politics of Recognition. By Glen Sean Coulthard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2014.In her 2005 essay, Recognition, Joanne Barker concludes that the point of indigenous sovereignty struggles is get outside political legacies of plenary power doctrines, colonialism, and racism and to reimagine possibilities for Native governance and social relationships (155). Her sense that federal of tribal and tribal citizenship serves to shore up white privilege and power over Native lands and bodies gives lie, of course, to notion that liberal takes place between equals. In his first monograph, Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) takes up where Barker's essay leaves off by not only further developing a critique of recognition, but also by arguing for the role that critically revitalized traditions might play in (re)construction of decolonized Indigenous nations (148).Coulthard begins by interrogating temporality of reconciliation, demonstrating that structure of present-day settler-colonialism remains untouched by reconciliation's focus on past harms of state. In this reading, reconciliation appears as an alibi for ongoing extraction of indigenous land, labor, and resources, as does its counterpart, recognition. Coulthard situates this important critique in relation to Marx's notion of so-called primitive accumulation, arguing that primitive accumulation's temporality is ongoing, and that there is nothing historically beneficial, let alone inevitable, about it. While this reworked version of primitive accumulation is not especially original to indigenous and settler-colonial studies, it serves usefully to illustrate Coulthard's commitment to be in critical dialogue with a tradition of European political philosophy.And it works well to situate Coulthard's key intervention, which is to lay out theoretical alternatives to liberal in what Coulthard calls a resurgent of recognition based in a grounded normativity, or place-based ethics (53). In Coulthard's view, this reorientation toward land and toward principles of reciprocity, nonexploitation, and respectful coexistence (12) would provide alternatives, on one hand, to commodified forms of relation, and on other hand, to essentialist conceptions of indigenous subjectivity.In original and provocative ways, Coulthard develops meanings of such a resurgent politics by retooling Fanon's critique of in contexts of Coulthard's own Dene Nation (Chapter 2), potential exclusions of essentialist (Chapter 3), Canadian state's reconciliation discourses during 1990s (Chapter 4), and finally, in a genealogy of Fanon's anticolonialism (Chapter 5). …