H04(a) - Decolonization #3: Indigeneity and Settler Colonialism
Date: Jun 12 | Heure: 01:45pm to 03:15pm | Salle: 680 Sherbrooke St. West 395
Chair/Président/Présidente : Sylvain Bérubé (Université d'Ottawa)
Decolonization, Realism, and the Force of Morality: a Comparative Approach: Caleb J. Basnett (Mount Allison University)
Abstract: This paper examines the relation between morality, ethics, and politics by bringing two disparate groups of scholars into productive dialogue: Indigenous theorists of decolonization; and political theorists who adopt ‘realist’ approaches to politics. Recent work by Indigenous scholars on the idea of decolonization in North America has often placed morality and ethics at the centre of this political project, such that decolonization that does not reflect Indigenous moral values and ethical practices is not considered decolonization at all. However, for many counted among the recent contributors to realist political theory, prioritizing morality or ethics in a political project is a grave error which risks ignoring how power enables/obstructs political goals. This error amounts to what realists have pejoratively called ‘idealism’ and ‘utopianism.’ For many realists, it follows that decolonization ought to focus on what is politically possible given established relations of power, not on moral or ethical guidelines. This paper asks: Are moral/ethical theories of decolonization susceptible to the realist critique of ‘idealism’ and/or ‘utopianism’? This paper draws comparatively on diverse theoretical sources to argue that the moral and ethical dimensions of decolonization are not perniciously idealist or utopian. Rather, the place of morality and ethics in decolonization highlights how ethics and morality relate to politics more generally, thus helping to clarify this relation and some of the confusion it has often presented in realist political theory. In this way, consideration of the moral/ethical dimensions of decolonization makes possible a more nuanced and persuasive account of realism in political theory.
“A Cursed Line of Mestizos and Tremendous Whores”; Theorizing the Indigenous Politics of Cultural, Political, and Ethnic Mixing: Yann Allard-Tremblay (McGill University), Elaine Coburn (York University)
Abstract: In early 17th century Peru, the Quechua nobleman Don Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala challenged the mixing of Indigenous Andean and Colonial Spanish societies, writing of “a cursed line of mestizos” that would lead women to become “tremendous whores.” We suggest that Guamán Poma’s pronouncement constitutes an initial statement of the fears produced by the mixing of cultures and ethnicities in colonial contexts and reflects an Indigenous desire to resist such mixing as leading to the elimination of Indigenous peoples and cultures. Guamán Poma’s vividly conjured horror and aversion to mixing persist, in attenuated but enduring forms, in the relationships among peoples in settler colonial contexts.
We strive to carefully disentangle aspects of what we term the Indigenous politics of cultural, political, and ethnic mixing to better understand and negotiate ongoing political issues concerned with Indigenous identity and cultural and political preservation. We differentiate legitimate concerns for the revitalization, resurgence, and recentering of Indigenous lifeways from more problematic, often gendered, forms of policing of identity through the disqualification of cultural and ethnic hybridity. While differences between lifeways can methodologically be emphasized for political and theoretical purposes, and while the discourse of métissage can be used to disavow ongoing Indigenous differences, political actors need to be careful about not consolidating essentializing criteria of authenticity regarding identity and culture. Such criteria easily seep into a disciplining and exclusionary politics that harmfully deny what Métis scholar Chris Andersen terms the “density” of concrete identities and existences.