Projects

Settler-colonialism is a self-perpetuating racist system – one under increasing pressure, from its  populations that are in general decreasingly racist, to justify, conceal, and disavow its racist  nature.  These efforts and the resistance they provoke have accelerated deployment of discursive  resources and strategies by settler states within and against the discourse of decolonization.  This  case study focuses on a specific event within this broader constellation of discursive activity,  namely, Francois Legault’s sustained denial of systemic racism’s existence in Québec.  Legault’s  persistent denialism is remarkable from a discursive-theoretical perspective, examining these  events through the intersection of language and power.  From this perspective, my analysis of  this ‘Legault case’ applies Luvell Anderson’s theory of the hermeneutical impasse (2017) in  order to understand and contextualize the premier’s utterances.  Given the extreme quantity and  clarity of the evidence demonstrating the existence of systemic racism in Québec – over and  above its preexisting widespread recognition and being experienced daily by Indigenous peoples  and other racialized groups, I argue that Anderson’s theory can make sense of the Legault case in  all its particularities and simultaneously shown it to be representative of institutional and public  discourses under the larger discursive and political structures of the settler-colonialism from  which it emerged and to which it in turn contributes.

Popularly defended conceptions of academic freedom have in recent decades frequently taken on relatively absolutist forms.  For such absolutists, the sole legitimate constraints on academic freedom admitted of have been the more or less unavoidable legalistic impositions consequent to the situation of our institutions within nation states, their broader network of institutions, and their constitutive frameworks of laws and regulations.  In contrast to this absolutist view, Haudenosaunee scholar David Newhouse has asserted that the academic freedom attending membership in the university speech community is, for himself as an Indigenous person, complemented by academic responsibilities that issue from belonging to the Indigenous speech community (2021, p.233).  This is implicitly a recognition that academic responsibility appears to be completely absent from the understanding of academic freedom as developed in the context of settler universities.  While there is a limited and obsolete sense in which academic responsibility has appeared in past discourse on academic freedom, I shall refrain from defensively disputing this claim by rehabilitating it, and from simply appropriating Newhouse’s Indigenous concept of academic responsibility.  Rather, in this paper I argue that non-Indigenous scholars should take this as a challenge to develop our own robust concept of and commitment to academic responsibility as a necessary complement to and prerequisite for a sustainable and ethical form of academic freedom.

Within the study and theory of settler colonialism, and the closely related theory and practice of  decolonization, the notion that we must not restrict ourselves to the cultural or psychological  dimensions of colonization and decolonization, nor reduce our understanding of settler  colonialism to its causes and effects within this artificially delimited sphere of concern – at the  expense of the underlying concrete social-material realities – has justifiably reached something  like consensus status.  It has also thankfully not been accompanied by a corresponding neglect of  those cultural and psychological dimensions.  Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, in their seminal  essay Decolonization is not a metaphor (2012), aptly and succinctly captured the threat posed by  such a reductionist tendency as that of “[allowing] conscientization to stand in for the more  uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land”.Detailed at greater length, their position is:   

We agree that curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to aid people in  learning to see settler colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology,  and set aside settler histories and values in search of ethics that reject domination  and exploitation; this is not unimportant work. However, the front-loading of critical  consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of  teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can  feel like it is indeed making change. Until stolen land is relinquished, critical  consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism.  (Tuck & Yang 19) 

 My intent is not at all to contest this position,   There may be, however, as-yet underexplored  connections between cultural production in settler societies and those associated underlying  realities, ones potentially occluded by an otherwise largely-productive deemphasization of such  cultural concerns, which can be understood as socially-materially connecting such critical  consciousness with the disruption of settler colonialism and relinquishment of stolen land that  are the ultimate object of decolonization.  By way of Cree legal scholar and author Tracey  Lindberg’s novel Birdie (2015), I intend to establish that Indigenous literature(s) facilitate the  goals of non-metaphorical decolonization by engaging the settler population in dialogical  2  relationships with Indigenous life and peoples, while supplanting the predominating  monological, objectifying and Otherizing representations of Indigenous peoples by settler  colonizers.

The practical relationship between feminist philosophy of science and the broader feminist commitment to emancipatory politics may not always be straightforward or obvious.  However, a significant new contribution to the theoretical discourse concerning that relationship from Ayelit Shavit makes the case that a direct connection between them is entailed by the pluralist interactionism of Helen Longino.  In Longino’s ‘Interaction’ leads to activism, Shavit argues that Longino’s philosophy of science is “at its core, also an activist and involved type of political philosophy”  because her “interaction-based research perspective necessarily directs attention to seek injustice, and necessarily requires scientists – qua scientists – to reduce injustice if detected” . In this paper I take up that radical conclusion and argue that the predominant nationalistic mode of directing, funding and regulating scientific inquiry – scientific nationalism, in short – constitutes a highly relevant form and source of injustice that feminist scientists, philosophers, and philosophers of science are well-poised to detect and reduce in accordance with that imperative, and that there are major epistemic benefits to doing so.

This paper is the result of a semester-long process of developing a pedagogy which aims to facilitate the abolition of settler colonialism and its myriad attending relational structures of oppression through the process of non-metaphorical decolonization for Indigenous liberation on Turtle Island, through a transformation of institutional education from a tool of the state into a tool of resistance.  This entails the development of ways of teaching that equip students and teachers alike with the knowledge, respect, and courage necessary to challenge settler hegemony and uphold Indigenous sovereignty, to forgo the comfort of settler privilege and freely choose to ally themselves with the struggle for Indigenous futurities and against white supremacy.

Over and above any number of disagreements on the specific shape and features that distributive justice should take on, there is an effective consensus amongst theorists working in the Rawlsian tradition that the distributive form of justice, at the domestic or intranational level identified by Rawls, has something like a universal scope of applicability and both can and should be addressed prior to matters of international or global justice.  That this is the case can be seen in the fact that Rawls himself left this matter of international justice until the end of his career, and in the tacit agreement by others following his lead in prioritizing domestic justice and either neglecting or postponing consideration of international justice.  I herein endeavour to establish that matters of international or global justice must in fact be instantiated prior to any enactment of domestic justice as traditionally conceived.  The principle reason for affording such priority to international matters is that any given domestic situation is necessarily situated within a complex matrix of ongoing historical relations amongst peoples, relations all too frequently characterized by forms of gross injustice, the ignorance of which inevitably reproduces those ongoing and historical forms of injustice in a way that precludes the achievement of justice, distributive or otherwise, at the domestic level for the majority of countries inhabited by theorists of distributive justice and that they implicitly or explicitly dealt with in their theories.  

Despite Carol Gilligan’s initial positioning of care as a distinct alternative ethical perspective to  the hegemonic ‘justice perspective’ (1987, p.20), the question of justice has since remained  prominent within the development of care-ethical theory.  Narayan (1995), Hamington (2001),  Gould (2008), and Tronto (2017) among others have established the need for a ‘politics of care’  to contend with hegemonic social structures that restrict and act against collective forms of care.   Largely missing however in these generally excellent theories is a reckoning with settler  colonialism.  In this paper I make the case that, under settler colonialism, decolonization is a  prerequisite or “enabling condition” of the kind identified by Narayan (1995, p.139) for  theorizing, practicing, and instituting an ethics of care that is neither parochial nor paternalist in  ways cautioned against by Narayan (1995, pp.134-137), Held (1995, pp.129-130), Hamington  (2001, pp.110-113), and Tronto (2017, p.38).

[A presentation corresponding with my award-winning essay The    Decolonial    Dialogical    Potentials    of    Fiction:     Examining    the    power    and    significance    of    Indigenous     literature(s)    through    Tracey    Lindberg’s Birdie (2021) ,] 

´As a settler colonial society, in so-called ‘North America’ what is at stake is the perpetuity of white settler domination of Indigenous lands and peoples, and the forms of sovereignty constructed by settlers that constitute and justify this domination while erasing Indigenous life and sovereignty. Settler Fragility, I claim, revolves around the fragility of settler sovereignty conferred by its basis in systematic distortion and denial of its genocidal origins. 

Settler fragility is related to and significantly coextensive with Tuck’s & Yang’s (2012) notion of settler moves to innocence6. Unlike that concept, settler fragility includes reactions where settler culpability is essentially acknowledged but disavowed as unimportant, insignificant, irrelevant. It thus includes explicit forms of white supremacism, in and as specific reactions and as a wider phenomenon that is, as Dallas Jokic has argued7, predictably produced in settler colonial societies.

By examining Kizuk’s titular concept of Settler Shame (Kizuk, 2020) and the “settler national  myth of Canada as peacemaker” which Anna Cook adopts from Taiaiake Alfred, through  Paulette Regan, in her formula of settler ignorance (Cook, 2018, pp.159-161) , I argue that an  expanded understanding of this myth, and similar settler colonial ideology and narratives, will  reveal further significance and considerations regarding the role played in the dynamics of settler  ignorance through the routes it creates for enacting settler moves to innocence (Cook, 2018,  p.62), according to the latter’s conception by Tuck & Yang as the typical settler response to  learning of the racialized oppression and violence inherent to the founding and futurity of settler  societies – as well as the facts of our collective complicity in these structures (Tuck & Yang,  2012).

The perhaps endless but by no means fruitless task of defining ‘tragedy’ or ‘the tragic’,  identifying their essential features, and the diagnostic application of those criteria for an  exclusive categorization of specific works, may from time to time distract us from questions  more readily pursued using a ‘naïve’ definition of tragedy along the lines of ‘you know it when  you see it’ – a tentatively inclusive decision, bracketing that question to freely examine and  interrogate what we intuitively ‘know’ to be tragedy, or at least tragic.  “What does tragedy come  from?”, in the sense of “what gave and gives rise to tragedy?”,  is one such question that initially  might not seem so distant, but it is not to be confused with the relatively settled geohistorical  question of where and when tragedy emerged; it asks, what is ‘going on’ socially that leads to the  cultural production of tragedy – and its secured re-production up to the present day.  Herein I  propose that this question finds an answer in two plays generally, if sometimes hesitantly,  considered tragedies – Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear.  It should be shown that, either by  design or coincidence, Lear and Hamlet dramatically figure a social origin for tragedy, rooted in  the intersecting power relations that inhere in the historically dominant forms of familial and  societal organization; the preeminence of relations of domination at the micro and macro scale  within class society systematically produces the conditions for ‘tragic reality’ and its mimetic  representation in theatre and other arts.

The notion of limitations to interpretation is generally and justifiably unpopular in the realm of  artistic criticism, be it literary, cinematic, visual, musical or any other medium.  The grounds for  and against such limitations have been largely theoretical, although there is the interpersonal and  moral dimension of the question of authorial intent; that interpretation is something we do not  just to a text but to its author, to whom we may or may not be said to bear some kind of  responsibility – ‘direct’ moral responsibility, in the sense of doing them an injustice by  disrespecting their intent or sensibilities , but also the less direct ‘intellectual responsibility’  which straddles theoretical and moral concerns, and involves a wider community of minds in  various forms of dialogue.  The extreme limitation of adherence to actual or perceived authorial  intent is, generally speaking, long gone.  This most basic form of interpretive ‘violence’ is  largely appreciated as negligible, at least in hegemonic western discourses, and is not the object  of the present inquiry.  The interpretive violence addressed herein describes the material and/or  ideological contribution to, or participation in, more visible, corporeal and undeniable forms of  violence and their justification before or after the fact.  In particular focus will be the political  violence of imperialism, and its expression and enabling through Orientalism.  This does of  course overlap with that primordially-understood form of violent interpretation, in so far as we  concern ourselves with texts that are not already implicit or explicit incitements to violence.  The  potential for desirable subversion of such ‘violent texts’ through some sort of ‘emancipatory  interpretive violence’ is a distinct matter and not presently of concern.  This paper attempts to  establish the existence of ethical limitations on interpretation in the form of a moral imperative  against committing and contributing to interpretive violence, with a corresponding responsibility  to address and resist such violence, including but not limited to the ongoing western imperialist  project and the military-industrial complex.

Decades now into postmodernity, in a world saturated by militarized technologization and firmly  immersed in innumerable manifestations of the sophisticated and discreetly operating less corporal forms of social control that Foucault theorizes in Discipline & Punishment, the outsized  centrality to Amerikan imperial bordering practices enjoyed by the ostensibly antiquated  ‘technology’ of walls and walling – that we have seen emerge in the highly technologized post 9/11 world of ‘national security’, reaching a head and ironic anticlimax under the Trump  administration and their addition of a relatively small extension of the wall and massive  expansion of circulating associating discourses – has provoked confusion and mirth along with  justifiable outrage, even among the empire’s most dedicated supporters, and raised the question:  what place does such a ‘medieval’ measure have in the hyper-technologized national security  state?   In this paper I intend to answer that inquiry by describing the practical function that crude  physical security plays even within systems of more sophisticated and subtle forms of power  characterizing postmodernity, and suggesting the interdependence of old and new forms of  biopower that manifest in our contemporary bordering practices.