Author’s Biographical Note
Elizabeth Philipose, Assistant Professor, Women’s Studies, California State University Long Beach. Her research interests are in critical race, feminist theory, militarism and the role of emotions in global politics. This article was completed while she was the Woodward Chair in Women’s Studies, Simon Fraser University.
Correspondence to Liz Philipose may be sent to: Department of Women’s Studies, California State University Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Boulevard, Long Beach, California. 90840-1603; phone: 562-985-2605; fax: 562-985-1868.
Email ephilipo@csulb.edu.
This article discusses a political theory course design, “Humanity” and the Atlantic Slave Trade”, that contextualizes political theory within its colonial presumptions about race, humanity and the good political community. I argue that political theory needs to be “raced”, that is, unpacked and contextualized in ways which make visible the racialized interests present within concepts of the “good life” or “good community”, concepts that are reflective and productive of “whiteness”. Such an approach highlights the subjectivity of political theory and potentially demonstrates the ways that subjectivity is central to situating political theory in its moral and intellectual context. In tandem with feminist critiques and multicultural approaches that might include authors as critics of Enlightenment ideals or which expand the actors involved in the making of political theory, the approach I suggest considers what we already know (the canon) in relation to things we do not normally consider; that is, the race of political theory.
The problem with political theory
This article discusses a pedagogical approach and course design that aims to contextualize political theory, and in particular, liberalism, within its colonial presumptions about race, humanity and the good political community. As it is, the study of political theory in English-speaking universities is almost entirely confined to the Euro-American intellectual tradition, one that has not incorporated a colonial reading of political theory in significant ways. The field of political theory privileges the Occidental development of concepts such as democracy, rights, individualism, freedom and humanity and the authors from the trajectory that runs between Plato and Rawls. There is some sense to this focus given that the idea of political theory itself is derived through European philosophical preoccupations and is the prevailing set of ideas that shapes our sensibilities about politics in Western locations. However, the problem arises when concepts of political theory are presented as objective and universal, or as Donna Haraway (1991) states , as simultaneously “views from nowhere” and “views from everywhere”.1 Absent of social location, historical and cultural specificity, Eurocentric political theory is presented through the turn of what Haraway (1991) calls the “god-trick”, the omnipotent view of enlightened agents in a world of primitive and backwards preoccupations. As such, our comprehension of the extent to which colonial preoccupations infuse the concepts we grapple with today is limited.
In response to the omissions and exclusions of western political theory, political theory scholars and critics have aimed to expand the field. Perhaps some of the most thorough critiques have been made from feminist perspectives that argue that the masculinist biases of political theory exclude the experiences of women. In excluding their experiences, feminists argue that in practice, women are denied access to the freedoms and equalities that are granted to men.2< Several implications derive from these critiques. One is that political theory is forced to reconcile its claims about universality and objectivity by either including the experiences of women or offering caveats to the omissions of political theory, thus limiting claims to universality and objectivity. Another implication is that because the omissions and exclusions of political theory are systemic and integral in many cases, political theorists are compelled to note that the field depends upon certain exclusions to make claims about the conditions of belonging to political communities. This has been an exceedingly valuable insight of feminist critiques in that it becomes possible to interrogate further exclusions of political theory and to arrive at critiques which are “intersectional” (Crenshaw 1991), not only noting the sexism but also the classism, racism and other prejudices embedded in such concepts as “freedom”, “progress” or “autonomy”. This is, most often, toward reconceptualizing cherished ideas so that they might become more inclusive and thereby more democratic. There are great explanatory potentials that have been productively mined from the openings made by feminist critiques, and many of the foundational concepts of the course discussed here draw on these ideas.3
There are other movements to revise and recast the field of political theory. For instance, relatively new fields of comparative political thought adopt global perspectives about both the history of political ideas and contemporary political philosophy. Within this, we see trends to develop areas called “non-western political thought”, which aim to account for the ideas and questions of traditions other than European and American liberalism. Comparative or non-western political theory might include studies of Confucianism, Buddhism, Afrocentricism, Islam or Hinduism, or the generalized category of “Asian values”, which appears not only under the category of political thought but also in the study of international relations. Further, there are a number of US Political Science programs that offer courses on African American Political Thought, or Comparative Global Political Thought, including ones at CUNY and Princeton. A recent job posting for a political theorist at University of California Riverside asks for an expert in Comparative Political Thought to potentially teach Confucius in relation to Plato, Gandhi compared with Thoreau or Oakeshott compared with Maruyama. There are well-considered and thoughtful reasons for stretching traditionally Eurocentric fields of study in these ways, and there are also pitfalls to be negotiated while doing so. For instance, Arif Dirlik (1997), notes the problematic ways that concepts such as “Asian values” and other claims about non-western knowledge are approached, suggesting that including non-western theory in curricula has to be accompanied by revised epistemologies, if the aim is field transformation.
These areas of study appear on curricula as “alternative” or “multicultural” political theory, and along with feminist, Marxist and other critiques of liberalism, are meant to address the omissions of western political theory. They also intend, in part, to make the concepts of political theory more inclusive of and relevant to the experiences of previously marginalized populations. These developments suggest that political theory as a discipline is expanding and that any claim of universality is necessarily deferred until the strategic omissions of political theory are addressed.
These are welcome developments in political theory and serve important purposes of democratizing the idea of political theory and expanding our concepts of what it means to be human, what it means to live in communities and what we mean by “the good life”. However, there are some institutional limitations to the kinds of disciplinary transformations we might anticipate with the inclusion of feminist, multicultural or global approaches to political theory teaching. That is, including alternative approaches does not necessarily disrupt canonical curricula. Feminist, non-western or global political thought is often presented as alternative or additional to the core of political theory, meant to add on the concerns of the marginalized perhaps, or to bring new perspectives on core ideas. This is problematic because conventional authors and concepts are left as the canon, undisturbed in many ways, and all non-canonical theory occupies a secondary place in the imaginations of both students and instructors. This is especially the case in those instances where the majority of political theory teaching is not engaged in feminist or decolonizing pedagogical practices. In these instances, there may only be one or two courses in a program that provide feminist and anti-colonial perspectives on the subject of political theory.
The question arises: how might we teach political theory in ways that are attentive to core concepts and authors while also expanding the relevance of political theory to understanding the larger social and political world from whence it came? Further, how might those who wish to teach political theory ‘against the grain’ make productive interventions with limited opportunities to do so and limited intellectual support from the institutions and departments? One way to approach the problem is to teach the ‘race’ of political theory, that is, to unpack and contextualize theory in ways which make visible the racialized interests present within concepts of the “good life” or “good community”, concepts reflective and productive of “whiteness”. Such an approach highlights the subjectivity of political theory and potentially demonstrates the ways that subjectivity is central to situating political theory in its moral and intellectual context. That is, political theory reflects the embodied subjectivity of the authors and constructs the subjectivities of the Euro-American subject in tandem with the production of racialized and/or colonized subjectivities, all within the European imagination of a hierarchy of humanity. In concert with multicultural approaches that might include authors as critics of Enlightenment ideals or which expand the actors involved in the making of political theory, the approach I suggest considers what we already know (the canon) in relation to things we do not normally consider; that is, the race of political theory. The production of whiteness, ultimately, is inseparable from the production of a notion of humanity and its related concepts of freedom, autonomy, equality, progress, rationality and individuality. This approach offers students ways to critically analyze claims to objectivity and universality, the power of making such claims and overall, recasts political theory and in particular, liberalism, in a context that offers them tools to continuously raise questions of material they might encounter in other venues.
Some might argue that if traditional knowledges are so infused with exclusions and biases and prejudices, perhaps we are better to stop studying “dead white men” and replace them with more progressive thinkers. At the same time, however, there are sound arguments to support the continued teaching of traditional canons. One reason is that political theory exists as the central core of political thinking in Western traditions. Individual instructors, students or even programs might choose to not engage the field in all of its traditions, yet for the most part, the traditional field remains definitional of what counts as political theory.
Another reason to teach the traditional core of political theory is that students ought to comprehend the ideas that shape their subjectivities and political locations to understand their sense worlds through relevant explanatory language. It is also the case that without comprehending the ideas that shape us in our political locations, we are without the necessary language to challenge and disrupt the continued institutionalization of traditional concepts and ideals. For instance, it can be argued that the production of “whiteness” is inseparable from the production of a notion of humanity and related concepts of democracy, freedom, autonomy, rationality and individuality. Without a foundation in core political theory authors and concepts, it would be quite impossible to understand the ways that racial identity matters. Further, the racialized hierarchies of political theory have ideological and material effects in determining the lines between those who are excluded (from humanity) and those who are included and/or representative of humanity. Thus, the debate is not only academic but resonates throughout political communities that adhere to liberalism’s central concepts. Edward Said argues similar points in relation to Orientalist literature and the production of the Oriental subject:
…there is no avoiding the fact that even if we disregard the Orientalist distinctions between “them” and ”us”, a powerful series of political and ultimately ideological realities inform scholarship today. No one can escape dealing with, if not the East/West division, then the North/South one, the have/have not one, the imperialist/anti-imperialist one, the white/coloured one. We cannot get around them all by pretending they do not exist; on the contrary, contemporary Orientalism teaches us a great deal about the intellectual dishonesty of dissembling on that score, the result of which is to intensify the divisions and make them both vicious and permanent (Said, 1979, pg 327).
Further, when considering the roots of intellectual developments such as feminism or critical race studies, they are located within hegemonic traditions of knowledge, situated both as oppositional to and simultaneously drawing from hegemonic traditions for their points of opposition. Critiques of knowledge that are not familiar with traditional disciplines would be too abstract and removed from the object of criticism. Further, their claims would likely be utopic and fantasy-based, as though prevailing knowledges did not wield power or establish parameters of legitimacy or authorize some to speak and others to be silent. Most oppositional knowledges – feminism, critical race theory, class analysis and others – derive their basic sets of concepts from dominant disciplines and frameworks, including very often the methodological and epistemological frameworks of prevailing knowledge. For these reasons, it is crucial that alternative knowledge or critical analysis are developed from knowing very well what is, to develop new ways of thinking what ought to be. As such, having students understand the concept of humanity as it figures in political theory is one part of the puzzle to understanding the ways that political theory is raced, toward decolonizing the political theory classroom altogether.
As a temporary lecturer in the Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, Canada, I was offered the opportunity to teach a senior “contemporary themes in political theory” seminar. Since I had been teaching courses on colonial and postcolonial theory in global politics to fairly receptive students, it was an ideal opportunity to develop a course that placed political theory in its racial and colonial context. Further, because it was a senior seminar, students had enough preparation to be able to consider the field they already knew and to interrogate the ‘race’ of the field. This was the first course in the department to approach political theory from a ‘decolonizing’ perspective and the only course at the time to do so. As such, I designed the course to take advantage of the location and the population, which I discuss later in the paper. I was also aware that as a singular opportunity to offer this material, it would be most effective if connected with the material students were learning in other classes. The class had about fifteen senior political theory students, many of whom were familiar with my classroom approach and political commitments. The course put Enlightenment authors such as Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, Johann Blumenbach, and later thinkers like John Stuart Mill, in conversation with slave narratives from Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, anti-colonial texts by Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James, Toni Morrison’s literary representation of Margaret Garner in Beloved, and claims from both historical and contemporary reparations (for slavery) movements. “Humanity” is the key concept of the course, and throughout the material was the question of how subjectivity, a central presumption of what it means to be human, was denied to the colonized and the enslaved by dominant knowledges. At the same time, we noted that those who were colonized and enslaved were continuously possessed with and expressive of self-knowledge and selfhood. The course material showed that contrary to common assumptions, the enslaved and the colonized were active resistors who could and did speak and write on their own behalf.
A key question that frames the course is: under what conditions could philosophers formulate ideas about universality, liberty, equality and justice while in the same moment justifying the enslavement of Africans? Since the concept of “humanity” is at the center of contemporary reparations debates about the Atlantic Slave Trade, that is, groups seek to have the Atlantic Slave Trade declared a “crime against humanity”, another question is: how is it that populations can be restored to a sense of humanity after suffering inhumane violence when at the inception of a notion of humanity, Africans were deliberately excluded?4 Further, if the Western notion of humanity is formulated with deliberate exclusions, what does that say about our membership or the means to formulating a more inclusive notion of membership? Finally, in terms of pedagogy, the guiding inquiry was: what might students gain in their understanding of political theory as a result of racing political theory and decolonizing the classroom?
The next section discusses the context and demographics of the University of Victoria, British Columbia Canada, where the course was taught in the Department of Political Science. The following sections discuss the theoretical frameworks of the course, several of the course texts and the rationale for their use. The article concludes with some reflections on the value of an embodied pedagogy as a means of decolonising the classroom.
Canadian nationalism is infused with many commitments, as all nationalisms are, thus making the topic quite complicated to engage in this short space. However, there are three prongs of Canadian nationalism that are relevant to a discussion of decolonizing knowledge. The first prong that is encountered is the enduring core commitment to be distinct and unique from Americans. The task for a “middle power” to carve out a unique identity and global presence when so proximate to the imperial US is an enormous one, and one that consumes much of Canadian cultural and political debates.
The second and related prong of Canadian nationalism is “official multiculturalism”, instituted during the government of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau in the late 1970s. Complex and multiple ideological functions were imagined for the new policies, all toward specific nation-building impulses. In some aspects, official multiculturalism was designed to quell Quebec separatist and “distinct society” desires through promoting the idea of Canada as an inclusive yet difference-respecting nation that promises unity without homogenization. In other aspects, it was a plan to help lubricate local populations already accustomed to Euro-derived immigration to accept increasing numbers of non-European immigrants in the workforce. This came as European immigration declined while Canadian economic projections demanded continued high levels of immigrant labour. Further, multiculturalism policies promote Canada as an inclusive, tolerant and thereby sophisticated nation primed for participation in the global marketplace. Finally, official multiculturalism suggests that because Canada is inclusive, tolerant and capable of ‘unity through diversity’, racism and related bigotries are minimized.5
The third aspect of Canadian nationalism at stake is the fact that Canada is not an imperial nation. This means that the state has more investments in peacekeeping versions of militarism, humanitarian missions, development projects, and the promotion of human rights than it does in high-stakes militarism. Canadian nationalism, then, revolves around the self-image of being peaceful, cooperative and rights-respecting in conjunction with the idea of multicultural maturity. 6
Further complications and opportunities derive from the small West Coast city of Victoria that is on Vancouver Island, a two-hour ferry ride from the Canadian mainland as well as the US mainland. Victoria was founded by British settlers who felt that Britain was losing its charm by the presence of too many people from the colonies, including British colonists returning from outposts, indentured labourers and freed persons after the slave trade. The fantasy of Victoria was to be more British than Britain had ever been, “a little piece of England”, and the founding ideas resonate to mark Victoria as a safe haven for whiteness. 7
Victoria began as a place of escape and it continues to be that as people move to the area to escape the hardships of other cities, including harsh winters and large migrant/racialized populations. Further, even though there are and have been many racialized people in the area, from indigenous peoples to waves of non-European immigrants from India, China and Japan, there is a way that their presence is effectively disappeared by the hegemony of British fantasy culture. Not surprisingly then, the student population at the University of Victoria, a small research and teaching institution with a student population of about 16,000 students, is disproportionately white, fairly affluent and relatively parochial. The Department of Political Science has a reputation for its commitment to teaching social, cultural and political theory, and for the most part, a relatively progressive view of domestic and global politics.8
The first problem of teaching about race in Canada is the problem of moving students past the mental barrier to thinking that racism is something the US invented and perfected and thus, not something endemic to Canadian life. The nationalist effort to distance Canadians from the US means that to talk about race, we are compelled to first bring to consciousness students’ own nationalist subjectivities and investments in Canadian mythology and Eurocentric concepts. Following from this, the task is to unravel the ideologies that mystify the very real relations of power, racial hierarchies and related bigotries that infuse Canadian society. Certainly, there are profound differences between the US and Canada in terms of political culture. However, as in any ‘white settler’ state, race matters a great deal to the organization of belonging and community in Canada, beginning with the displacement of Aboriginal peoples and extending those violent exclusions to all “non-white” peoples over the history of the nation (Dua, 1999). Sherene Razack describes the way that the mythology of the origins of Canada mystifies relations of racialized power, exactly the mythologies that have to be disrupted for students to understand their own racialized subjectivities:
When we think of mythology, or stories that are told about a nation's origins and history, we first need to consider the cast of characters in the story. A snowy, Northern land that is empty has few Aboriginal peoples. We can easily see the characters that make the story come to life: the first fur traders, explorers, and so on. In fact, the first Europeans. Europeans who are at home in snow and wilderness are nearly always men. If we see anybody at all in this snowy landscape it would have to be an intrepid man paddling a canoe, surrounded by decaying totem poles (Emily Carr), big trees and magnificent lakes (the entire group of Seven), or wide expanses of snow (Lauren Harris) …The original inhabitants, a Nordic race able to vanquish the cold, have the first claim on the land. When the Others come, they pollute the pristine landscape; they flood it and make it "foreign." This story is the one we see repeated over and over again in racist immigration laws, in the courts when the claims for justice of Aboriginal peoples and people of colour are considered. It effectively shuts them out of the national story, and thus out of any claims for equal citizenship (Razack, “In Conversation”).
Given the national and local context, there is much classroom work to be done to first bring to consciousness the ways that race, nation and culture shape perspectives and knowledge, and to then show how it is that the unique situation of the University of Victoria in the country of Canada creates particular kinds of subjectivities as well. Victoria is an excellent place to highlight the European and imperial influences that impact Canadians because of the city’s history and culture. The traces are not too difficult to find. Thus, the national and municipal locales serve as very useful pedagogical supplements to the course material itself.
Colonial knowledge refers to the philosophical thought that accompanied the period of modern European colonialism and the European experience of colonial administration, imperial rivalries and nation-building, abroad and at home. Most of liberalism, modernist philosophy and Enlightenment thought were developed in tandem with the European experience of modern European colonialism. As such, much of the preoccupation of European philosophers of the time was with determining what it was that constituted “ Europe” and the “European”, particularly in relationship with non-Europeans. Edward Said’s key point in Orientalism -- that knowledge of the superiority of a European Self was derived through the construction of a lesser non-European Other -- highlights the relationship between Self and Other that resonates throughout European philosophy (Said, 1979).
In the framework of colonial knowledge, when Man is invoked as the highest achievement of human life, Man refers to European Man. Further, European Man is propertied, heterosexual, of appropriate lineage, well mannered and in control of his emotions and passions. In this way, “whiteness” is defined. Not merely descriptive of skin colour, the concept of “whiteness” captures an overall sensibility about moderation, self-control and reason that makes the bearer of the sensibility “white”. Part of the liberal argument suggests that it is a struggle for humans to achieve whiteness, that is, for humans to achieve mastery of reason over emotion, and thus, it is a lifelong project to keep aspiring to liberal moderation and control. We see this kind of argument in John Stuart Mill’s (1859) discussion of utilitarianism and the good society. A good society is one that facilitates the possibility of citizens to evolve so that they choose “higher pleasures” which include moderation, reason and sedate endeavors, over “base” pleasures, which include excesses of all kinds and immediate bodily desires. Similarly, Sigmund Freud’s (1930; 1923) divided self is a clash of superego and id as the internal rationality of the superego struggles to gain supremacy over the primal instinct-driven emotional id. The superego must continuously control the id; otherwise, it would not be possible to live in societies that approximate “civilization.
In these formulations of the good citizen, of course, women are excluded, as are non-Europeans, non-propertied peoples, working classes, non-heterosexuals, those who express their emotions publicly, those who admit or act upon their lust or desire or appetites and those whose gender, class, race and demeanor confound their ability to achieve whiteness in their public status. These are shifting designations that are reworked and re-invoked to suit different political purposes. In western philosophical traditions especially of the modern European colonial period, whiteness, inclusive of masculinity, is in part defined as the capacity to hide or control ones’ emotions, desires and the more primitive impulses in favour of the exercise of reason and rationality. Several feminist authors on the subject of western knowledge and the place of the feminine (usually understood as juvenile or primitive), including Elizabeth Grosz 1993; Sandra Harding 1993; Sara Ruddick, 1995; Susan Bordo 1995; make these points. Their analyses demonstrates that certain and quite common aspects of human existence are coded as gendered, classed, and racialized. To be a Man, and thus to be fully human, is to be white.9
David Theo Goldberg’s book Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning is part of the inspiration for the course. Goldberg argues that liberalism plays a foundational part in the process of normalizing racial dynamics and racist exclusions. He states that “(r)ace is one of the central conceptual inventions of modernity” (the period emerging between the 16th century and the formulation of the ‘West’ as a self-conscious entity) and that the invention of race is tied to the universalistic claims of Man and related concepts (Goldberg, pg. 6, 1993). His argument traces the work of canonical political theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Bentham, the Mills, Von Hayek, Nozick and Rawls among others, and shows that the commitment to a core set of ideas about individualism, universality, progress, equality and human nature was accompanied by two key claims. One claim is that race is a morally irrelevant category. This is the familiar idea of neutrality that infuses liberal societies, the idea that structures and institutions and particularly the market are neutral mechanisms, and that individuals are successful through their gifts and talents and efforts to achieve.
The other simultaneous and contradictory claim these authors and others share is in their assumptions about racial hierarchies. Goldberg offers a few examples:
Kant, citing with approval David Hume’s likening of learning by ‘negroes’ to that of parrots, insisted upon the natural stupidity of blacks. John Stuart Mill, like his father, presupposed nonwhite nations to be uncivilized and so historically incapable of self-government. Benjamin Disraeli captured the sensibility of the mid-nineteenth century by declaring the only truth to be that ‘all is race’. The basic human condition – and so economic, political, scientific, and cultural positions – was taken to be race determined. By the turn of the century, Cromer and Balfour, the most important –some would say greatest – British colonial administrators, took it as a matter of course that Europeans (and the British in particular) were the master race, all others were ‘subject races’. More recently we have come to witness the expression of racism by other means… (sociobiology, socioscience, genetic dispositions for crime, intelligence; or overt concerns about immigration, welfare, unemployment, work habits) (Goldberg, 1993, pg.6).
Given that the authors associated with Enlightenment and liberal ideas stated their racial ideas overtly and since they wrote during the time of widespread slavery and colonialism, surely race matters to how they think about politics. However, philosophical commitments to universality and equality mean that liberalism regularly denies its own racist exclusions and therefore gives the appearance of being structurally neutral. This serves to individualize the lack of (market) success in social institutions that many might face, and since the highest rates of poverty in Western industrialized nations is amongst the racialized (and most often female), the appearance is that there are racial inferiorities at work rather than systemic exclusions. As Goldberg states:
The irony of modernity, the liberal paradox comes down to this: As modernity commits itself progressively to idealized principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, as it increasingly insists upon the moral irrelevance of race, there is a multiplication of racial identities and the sets of exclusions they prompt and rationalize, enable and sustain. Race is irrelevant, but all is race. The more abstract modernity’s universal identity, the more it has to be insisted upon, the more it needs to be imposed (Goldberg, 1993, pg. 6).
Racist Culture is an excellent foundation for a course that aims to ‘race’ political theory because of the thoroughness of Goldberg’s analysis, the in-depth readings of authors familiar to political theory and the contextualizing of concepts such as equality, democracy and freedom within the landscape of racial culture. The point is made carefully and thoroughly - that political theory depends upon certain racial exclusions to be able to claim universal applicability. As such, students are encouraged to think about racial thinking in Hegel’s ‘master-slave’ dialectic, or JS Mill’s ideas about progress, or Marx’s ideas about ‘barbarous nations’, or Kant’s arguments about the physical geography of moral worth, at the same time that they gain some insight into the formulation of political theory as a discipline of study. Goldberg’s text is paired with Race and the Enlightenment: The Reader, edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze. In this text, there are a number of useful excerpts that illuminate and expand on Goldberg’s analysis, including Carl von Linné on “The God-given Order of Nature”; David Hume, “Negroes…naturally inferior to the whites”; Johann Freidrich Blumenbach, “The Degeneration of Races”, and Hegel, ”Colonialism in the Internal Logic of Capitalist Modernity” (Eze, 1997). These texts illustrate very clearly that political theorists had strong commitments to racial distinctions as the basis of defining the nature of the European and thus, the nature of the highest form of humanity. As such, key concepts of political theory are shown to be raced.
It is an easy assumption to make that because we do not read or hear the voices of the enslaved or the colonized in traditional political theory courses, that they are not capable or able to speak on their own behalf or to resist or reflect on their status. As such, material such as slave narratives and anti-colonial writings both demonstrate the active intellect and subjectivities of enslaved peoples. It also expresses the violence of being denied the claim over one’s own subjectivity. Subjectivity is a crucial aspect of what political theorists understand to be human – the ability to contemplate a self with an interior existence and interpretive capacity, to know oneself as a thinking being with a sense of past and future, a sense of self as a mortal being – these are, in part, attributes that distinguish humans from animals. Alerting students to the fact of subjectivity contributes to a multifaceted decolonization process in that they are encouraged to think about their own interior selves and interpretive frameworks while contemplating the role that subjectivity plays in colonization and decolonization. Several of the course texts spoke to these claims, including Frantz Fanon’s text Black Skin, White Masks (1967); Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1994), alongside some journalistic narratives about Margaret Garner, slave woman; and slave narratives such as: Olaudah Equiano, an 11-year old Ibo from Nigeria remembers his kidnapping into slavery, the Middle Passage and arrival in the New World (West Indies) (1789); Frederick Douglass resists a slave breaker (1845) and Margaret Garner kills her daughter rather than see her returned to slavery (1876). 10
Frantz Fanon relates in Black Skin White Masks the subjectivity of a man, a human, which is confronted by the failure of the French to recognize him as a man.
Black Skin, White Masks is a text that embodies the pain of being read as non-human and against the grain of his own subjectivity. The text is brutal and visceral. The basis of the problem outlined by Fanon is that he has been excised from the category of humanity and thus torn from his own humanity, by being interpellated into the social world as a black man, one who could only be known in contrast to the superior white man. He states: “For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man” (Fanon, 1967: 110). He asks: “What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?” (Fanon, 1967: 112). He concludes: “At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man” (Fanon, 1967: 8).
There are a number of issues raised by Fanon’s text that are useful to unpacking some political theory concepts. For instance, Fanon is describing the clash of his subjectivity with the external world and the shock and pain of knowing himself to be human and being categorized as non-human or merely Negro. He recounts the experience of being interpellated as a black man:
“Dirty nigger!” Or simply, “Look, A Negro!”
I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects” (Fanon, 1967: 109).
Fanon’s risky statement – “the black is not a man” (Fanon, 1967: 8), is an observation of the way that humanity, defined by Europeans in their own self-image, was not inclusive of the black man, a fact that Fanon challenges throughout the text. Interesting, however, is that Fanon does not challenge the concept of humanity to expand its definition and include him. Rather, Fanon offers contrary characterizations of what it means to be human, based on aspects of human existence that are seen to be a problem for the good political community – emotions, the body and poetry. He states:
Yes, we are – we Negroes – backward, simple, free in our behaviour. That is because for us the body is not something opposed to what you call the mind. We are in the world. Besides, our men of letters helped me to convince you; your white civilization overlooks subtle riches and sensitivity. (quoting Léopold Senghor) “Listen: Emotive sensitivity. Emotion is completely Negro as reason is Greek” (Fanon,127).
Instead of claiming to be every bit as rational as Man and thus worthy of inclusion within humanity in this passage, Fanon turns the formulation on its head to suggest that it is the fact of emotions themselves that makes humans human. Fanon continues:
I made myself the poet of the world. The white man had found a poetry in which there was nothing poetic. The soul of the white man was corrupted, and, as I was told by a friend who was a teaching in the US, (Léopold Senghor) ‘the presence of the Negroes beside the whites is in a way an insurance policy on humanness. When the whites feel that they have become too mechanized, they turn to the men of color and ask them for a little human sustenance.’ At last I had been recognized, I was no longer a zero (Fanon, 129).
Here too, Fanon takes issue with the rationality/emotion dualism of European philosophy. Rather than demand that he be seen as a human in the tradition of European philosophy, Fanon instead suggests that there are in fact other ways of being human and that to be emotional, poetic and embodied is to be the sustenance of a human existence, qualities that are necessary even to the white man. 11
Fanon’s formulations are useful in classroom discussions as they highlight some of the narrowness and lack of variation of our prevailing concepts of humanity. They also offer contrary explanations and perhaps open the conversation to more imaginative ways of thinking. Finally, they offer some openings for thinking about decolonization projects in political theory, and the practice of decolonizing subjectivity altogether. These are some of the outcomes of reading Black Skin White Masks in the context of the course.
While Fanon’s text is in a passionate voice, it is also a work of theoretical and interpretive psychoanalysis and philosophy and thus, a highly intellectualized set of emotions. Other kinds of texts communicate similar emotions but leave more of them to be interpreted by the readers themselves. For this reason, the course included Beloved as a text that expresses the subjectivity of the colonized, specifically the subjectivity of Sethe, a slave woman who kills her infant daughter to spare her from being enslaved. Some students questioned the inclusion of Beloved as a core text of the course since it is literature and not political theory. Literature, however, communicates precisely what political theory does not communicate, that is, the depth and complexity of affect and emotion, the interior consciousness of knowing and acting subjects. Many political theory concepts are relevant when reading Beloved, including the nature of reason and rationality, choice, freedom and most significantly, human agency.
The central character, Beloved, is the ghost of the infant that Sethe kills. She returns to be with her mother and in many literary interpretations, is the embodiment of the history of slavery that is described as haunting descendants of slaves today. In part, the story of Sethe is Toni Morrison’s version of the Margaret Garner story, one that is known mainly through journalistic accounts and court transcripts (Coffin, 1876). Margaret Garner was held for trial and a large element of her defense was on the grounds of her mental stability. The argument that derived sympathy for her was that she was not in her right mind and thus, could not be held responsible for the killing of her infant. However, the court ruled that in the case of escaped slaves, the question was not one of feeling as much as it was about property. Garner was returned to slavery and eventually drowned when the slave ship she was on capsized.
The novel and narrative accounts of the trial of Margaret Garner are useful ways of raising questions of agency and choice, as well as resistance and subjectivity. For instance, if we consider that Garner/Sethe are reasonable and rational in that they are capable of calculating their interests and seeking the means to achieve them, then killing one’s infant in a slavery context seems to imply sanity and a rational response to an irrational circumstance. Or, as Elliot (2000) argues, developing “black subjectivity” or a non-commodified sense of self is something that becomes possible for Sethe once she is no longer enslaved and in a communal context, hence she is able to resist surrender of her daughter to slave-holders. Similarly, the texts offer a way to discuss Western political theory ideas of rationality and sanity and peoples’ relationship to their context. Slave narratives offer similar avenues for discussing agency, choice, resistance and subjectivity in that those who are enslaved are well aware of the differences between being a slave in Africa and being a slave in Europe (Equiano,1789) or of the indignities of being treated less than the children of a household (Douglass, 1845 ) and of the injustice itself of being enslaved and denied subjectivity or autonomy. In conjunction with the other texts of the course, literary and first-person accounts of the experience of being denied subjectivity and thus, being denied humanity allows students to further explore the race of political theory. Further, simply reading first-person narratives of those imagined to be unable to express themselves is a itself a decolonizing move in that it challenges the singular and authorial claims of political theory about what it means to be human.
The content of political theory needs to be reconsidered to “race” political theory. It is also relevant to revise the pedagogical methods of delivering political theory to students. There are a number of trends to recognize the diversity of experience that students bring to a class and to adjust pedagogical methods to compensate. For instance, multicultural approaches to pedagogy suggest that teaching methods have to be revised in light of the diversity of student populations. The “multicultural classroom”, more often than not, is posed as a problem for educators and students alike, mainly as it poses barriers to teaching material that purports to be universally applicable and valid. The problem is usually framed as the need to reconcile differences between students while acknowledging the veracity of their differences as a means to overcoming the barriers to speaking in universal terms.
At the same time, particularly when discussing how we might teach political theory, it is fair to suggest that there is a subjectivity that is shared to some extent amongst students in Euro-derived states and at the meta-theoretical level of ideas about race, humanity, gender, sexuality, nation, freedom, democracy and autonomy. In this regard, the pedagogical approach being suggested is one that takes as central the production of the liberal self as raced, the production of students and instructors as raced and both as the micro-embodiments of liberalism itself. In doing so, the shared subjectivities are highlighted not as expressions of universally valid concepts and ideals, but as the results of being both subjects of and subject to liberal democratic relations of power. In this way, the universality of political theory is questioned and subjectivity becomes the site of students’ engagement with the material and their own ways of knowing.
The course “Humanity and the Atlantic Slave Trade” offered ways to see the investments of political theory in the creation of hierarchies, justified through the concept of humanity. Further, the course offered conceptual tools to understand the continuing relevance of these concepts as reflective of the vested interests to maintain the hierarchies derivative of colonial relationships in the contemporary world. Rather than leave concepts as timeless, universally valid or objectively true about the human condition, the aim of the course was to show how historically situated ideas reflect structural hierarchies and political investments of their authors. While there may be several potential consequences of this approach to teaching political theory, one that is pedagogically noteworthy is that casting political theory in relation to its historical context highlighted for students that political theory emanates from material lived realities and as such, is dynamic, alive and relevant to contemporary political life. Throughout the course, students were actively engaged, moved, disturbed and inspired, and several took seriously the task of ‘decolonizing the mind’ as a key element of decolonizing political theory. As both intellectual support and opportunities are limited, offering students critical concepts, recasting non-traditional material as political theory and contextualizing the ‘race’ of political theory are entry points that offer students a wider set of questions and a deeper sense of the often silent racial commitments of the field
This article is written with the intent to share a pedagogical experiment that aimed to productively mine the possibilities of a particular location, drawing on what could be seen as limitations (homogenous student population, strong nationalist commitments, limited intellectual and field support, temporary lecturer status) to make use of as strengths in the classroom. It would be too ambitious to suggest that a singular attempt to decolonize the political theory classroom such as this should change the lives of students or the trajectory of deeply entrenched intellectual disciplines, and too limiting to suggest that these are the only ways to evaluate the worth of a course. The process of rethinking the field and creatively recasting key concepts has intrinsic value, and there is value in the attempt when and where those of us with a pedagogical commitment to decolonizing political theory find opportunities. For me, designing, teaching and reflecting on this course has deepened and strengthened my commitment and strategies for communicating the ‘race’ of political theory in subsequent teaching and scholarship. The effects of introducing such questions to a field of study are yet to be known; the process however, is deeply rewarding. 12
1. This is a paraphrase of Donna Haraway’s characterization of universality and objectivity, in Haraway, 1991.
2 . A few of the many authors who have critiqued political theory from a feminist perspective include Carole Pateman 1988; Diana Coole 1988; and Susan Moller Okin 1979; Jean Grimshaw 1986; Jean Bethke Elshtain 1993; Mich èle le Doeuff 1991; and most recently Linda Alcoff 2006.
3 . There are few feminist interventions into political theory per se that draw out the colonial landscape in which gender, race, class and nation were reconceptualised. .Linda Alcoff 2006, is a notable exception to this claim. Outside of political theory are many feminist authors writing about the colonial bases of Euro-traditions, including Anne McLintock 1995; Anne Laura Stoler1995; Ania Loomba 1998; Chandra Talpade Mohanty 1991; and Himani Bannerji 2000. There are also authors who are not thought of as feminist but whose insights contribute to a gendered understanding of colonial frameworks, including David Theo Goldberg 1993; and Frantz Fanon 1967.
4 . Having an experience declared as a “crime against humanity” is not a straightforward task in that the charge speaks to a spiritual injury as much as it does to mass, gross and prolonged violence. That is, one instance of violence against a single individual could be designated a crime against humanity if it is determined to be of such a grievous nature that it injures the very humanity of the individual and therefore, injures the humanity of us all. The idea of what and who counts as “humanity” and what counts as an injury that does injury to the very spirit of humanity is at the core of the legal charge. Of course, it has been a matter of some debate since the charge was created for the Nuremberg Tribunal. See the following for a variety of interpretations: Egon Schwelb 1946; Dietrich Schindler 1982; Hersch Lauterpacht 1947; Yougindra Khushalani 1982; M. Cherif Bassiouni 1992.
5 . Several authors write extensively about the unique ways that Canadian nationalism and racial hierarchies collude, including Sherene Razack 2004; Himani Bannerji 2000; Sunera Thobani 2001; Davina Bhandar 2004; and Yasmin Jiwani 2002.
6 . This version of Canada has to be understood as nationalist ideology, the sort that infuses the mainstream imagination domestically and abroad. Despite the fact that Canada itself is not an imperial nation, it benefits from alliances with the US, its large military-industrial complex and its proclivity toward vampirish capitalism. Further, racial hierarchies and violence based upon them is not foreign to the Canadian way of conducting politics. Sherene Razack has argued very persuasively that peacekeeping traditions are enmeshed in precisely the same sorts of racialized masculinities that imperial militarism engages, and that Canadian forces perform their violent white supremacy while stationed in places like Somalia or Rwanda. See Razack, 2004.
7 . The History of Racialisation Group, formerly of the Department of History, University of Victoria, has created a marvelous pedagogical tool called “The Alternative Walking Tour of Victoria BC” which can be accessed at http://web.uvic.ca/~hist66/walktour/tour/index.html. Though the group has since disbanded, Professor John Lutz of the Department of History, UVIC, can be encouraged to take students on a highly entertaining and informative physical tour of the city. The key theme of the website and the walking tour is the imperial history of the city.
8 . The scholarly emphasis of the department is a source of regular contestation amongst faculty members and there have been some serious questions raised about the politics of the program at different times. In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, in comparison with most political science programs in Canada, it is a department that facilitates progressive politics and creative thinking.
9 . An expanded discussion of this reading of colonial knowledge appears in my forthcoming article entitled “Global Politics and the Politics of Pain”, International Feminist Journal of Politics .
10 .There are several electronic compendiums with archived slave narratives available. The best maintained source I have found is the UNESCO Slave Trade Project.
http://www.vgskole.net/prosjekt/slavrute/slavnarrative.htm.
11 . See Philipose (forthcoming), for a discussion of Fanon and emotions.
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