(no subject)
I write like
Vladimir Nabokov
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
Ahaha I got Wodehouse for my sosc paper on violence and colonialism, though.
ETA
It is a B+ paper and that is painfully obvious but I also wrote it in one sitting from 7pm to 7am an never looked back, so that's a thing.
Caroline Crouch
Power, Identity and Resistance
Kate Franklin
11 June 2010
Violence and the ‘Other’ in the Liberal West
The concepts of a universal humanity and the inalienable rights of this humanity percolate through the western, liberal world and yet remain at odds with the violent expansion upon which liberalism rests. In order to reconcile these two liberal tenets, much effort is put into the construction of an Other, who is dehumanized in political discourse and can therefore be the object of state violence with no threat of a moral quandary on the part of the liberal democracy. Fanon, Gandhi, Asad, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X all perceive the various ways in which the object of state violence and injustice is othered and made a fitting target within the liberal framework, whether through the practical experience of colonialism or through theoretical discourse, and how the objects of this violence can remake their identities.
Fanon concerns himself with the practical dehumanization of the colonized subjects. He sees the colonial world as one decidedly compartmentalized and split in two, where “the dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police line” (Fanon 1963, 3). These markers are ones that associate themselves with violence, and, indeed, Fanon declares the “legitimate agent” of the colonizing people to be the solider (Fanon 1963, 3). The state’s use of violence is total and unmasked when dealing with the colonized subject and, more than that, it is the first and ultimate method.
This divided world is not composed of complementary sectors, but two groups in complete opposition. On a purely physical level, the colonist’s world is one of plenty, full of possessions and well built. The sector of the colonized natives, on the other hand, is dirty and hungry. Fanon makes clear, however, that the economic distinction, which seems to be the major division between the two groups, is secondary to the human reality of the division. What really divides the two parts of the colonized world is “first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to” (Fanon 1963, 3). The economic infrastructure is also the ideological superstructure; whiteness and richness are bound together.
This existential divide is maintained not only by strict physical segregation but by the deconstruction of the colonized people into “a kind of quintessence of evil” (Fanon 1963, 6). The natives are considered to be violent and destructive, and totally without any ethical system, and in this way an absolute evil set against the colonists. This constructs a Manichean reality, a reality based on the fundamental distinction between absolutes, within which no rational discourse is possible. The colonists use violence as their sole implement of enforcement and general interaction with the colonized, and this is justified by the Manichean reality. Such a dichotomy sometimes “reaches its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the colonized subject. In plain talk, he is reduced to the state of an animal” (Fanon 1963, 7). Once the colonized subject has been thoroughly rejected as being human in the same way the European colonist is human, the use of violence against the natives ceases to be a crime.
The colonized subjects must, then, react with violence, as violence is the only means through which they can reconstruct themselves as human beings. Violence is the ultimate means, in fact, through which the native can reconstruct history through the process of decolonization. The natives “intuitively believe that their liberation must be achieved and can only be achieved by force” because they understand the extreme nature of their situations, and they have been created as objects by the constant violence of colonial regimes (Fanon 1963; 33). The colonized then, know that the only way they can interact with their colonizers is through violent means.
Gandhi, too, realizes the overarching use of violence by colonial forces, but he sees violence as an entirely Western idea, and constructs the Indian and the Indian way of life as completely opposed to Western concepts and ideology. He believes Indian civilization to be the best of all world civilizations, even though the popular Western conception of India holds that is has no history. Gandhi rejects the Western idea of history, preferring “to be guided by myths rather than history” along with the progress adored by European nations (Nandy 1992; 147). Gandhi instead defines civilization as “that mode of conduct which points out to a man the path of duty” and decides that “India, as so many writers have shown, has nothing to learn from anybody else, and this is as it should be” (Gandhi 1909; 108).
What truly sets Gandhi apart from Fanon in his understanding of the colonists and the colonized subject is his construction of the Indian identity. For Fanon, the native is dehumanized and made into an evil for the colonists to persecute without guilt, and these oppressed peoples must violently overthrow the colonists and create their own sense of identity. Gandhi’s India, in contradistinction, has already existed for hundreds of years without requiring the progress that the West considers civilization. Due to this rejection, Gandhi himself sets up the Indian and Indian civilization as something completely separate from and superior to the Western, liberal democracy espoused by colonists.
However, Gandhi chooses to redefine history using passive resistance rather than violent means. He believes that this passive resistance taps into “the force of love” or “the force of the soul or truth” while history as held by the English as “a record of the wars of the world,” and that India is thus a nation without history (Gandhi 1909; 110). This love-force, Gandhi holds, is clearly more powerful that the history-driving forces of war, since humanity still exists. Passive resistance uses soul-force because it involves self-sacrifice. Rather than violently overturning the laws of the English, passive resisters accept the penalties they receive for denying the law.
Within his actual person Gandhi embodies the rejection of all Britishness, both on the concrete level of a passive resister and on an ideological level, where he found the technism and secularism of the West immoral. This devotion to his ideal was found admirable by many of the British officials in India, and the tension this created was most noticeable in the trial during which Gandhi was convicted for publishing anti-colonial materials. The Viceroy of India “was under great pressure…to place Gandhi under arrest, but hesitated to do so until Gandhi should commit some overt act” because he “had considerable respect for Gandhi” (Menon 1922; 197). Even though this respect made even the judge loathe to sentence him, Gandhi insisted on receiving the full sentence. He even stated that he “wishes to endorse all the blame that the learned Advocate-General has thrown on my shoulders in connection with the Bombay occurrences, Madras occurrences and Chauri Chaura occurrences” (Gandhi 1922; 201).
Gandhi embraces this role as the opponent and resister of all British influence in India because he perceives the same clear divide, based on the division between human and sub-human, between the colonist and the colonized that Fanon does. While serving in South Africa, Gandhi “discovered that as a man and an Indian I had no rights. More correctly, I discovered that I had no rights as a man, because I was an Indian” (Gandhi 1922; 202). Though he served the British for years, believing that “it was possible by such services to gain a status of full equality in the Empire,” though he was eventually disabused of that notion, and turned to passive resistance and a rejection of the Western way (Gandhi 1922; 203).
In America the situation as seen by both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X bears a great deal of similarity to the situations in Africa and India, thought the language is markedly different. Colonist and colonized, native and imperialist, can no longer be used to describe the societal superstructure. Malcolm X sees no actually distinction between the case of black Americans and those of subjects under imperialism, and his response echoes those of Fanon and Gandhi in its rejection of the white morality and the construction of the black identity as completely opposed to this system. King, on the other hand, sees the striking divide between white Americans and blacks as something abhorrent to God and the American constitution. In that respect, he stands apart from all other thinkers who also saw a structure of white power.
Malcolm X, in his “Message to the Grass Roots,” explicitly connects the struggles of the blacks in American and the colonized blacks in Africa, and makes clear that what binds these groups together is the fact that they have a common enemy: the white man. What he feels this situation necessitates is a revolution and “you don’t have a peaceful revolution…Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in the way” (Malcolm X 1963; 9). This violent revolution is intended to establish a black nation, one separate from the white America, because Malcolm X sees the American government not as the government of the black people, but as an oppressor.
He declares, in 1964’s “The Ballot or the Bullet,” “I am not an American, I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism” (Malcolm X 1964; 26). He responds as Fanon’s natives do to the white man as oppressor, as one who was degraded and dehumanized and othered the black man, by calling for the creation of an identity for these people, one which must be created through violence. He notes that the ballot is not accessible for the black man, due to the Jim Crow voting laws, and that votes for the Democratic Party serve only the Dixiecrats, whom the Northern Democrats never removed from the party. He refers to the black man’s vote as “your vote, your dumb ignorant vote,” and clearly believes that the white structure of power uses the idea of the ballot to beguile and further oppress blacks in America. As an alternative to the power of the vote he offers the bullet, though he qualifies this statement by explaining that he doesn’t mean, “go out and get violent, but at the same time you should never be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence,” and Malcolm X’s rhetoric shows he finds nothing nonviolent in white treatment of blacks in America (Malcolm X 1964; 34). Malcolm X calls for black nationalism, black self-determination in the realms of economics and politics, with enforcement through violence if necessary, because he sees this oppression as completely destructive of black identity. He even calls the civil rights issue not merely a civil rights issue, but a human rights issue, worthy of being brought before the United Nations.
King, too, views the black struggle in America as an issue of human rights, but he takes a wildly different tack from any other writer addressing the situation of the oppressed man. King calls for integration, which he marks as different from desegregation because “desegregation is eliminative and negative…Integration is the positive acceptance of desegregation and the welcomed participation of Negroes into the total range of human activities” (King 1962; 118). King demands the recognition of blacks as human beings with the same worth as any other, as established by God and the American constitution, and strives for this recognition and acceptance to occur within the existing framework of the American state, the same state which Malcolm X saw as violent and oppressive.
King, more than any other thinker, believes in the universality of humanity and human rights, as liberal doctrine purports to, as well. When listing the ethical demands for integration, he includes “recognition of the solidarity of the human family” (King 1962; 121). While he finds this view reflected in the American constitution, he is not so naïve as to believe that the system will resolve itself. King adheres to Gandhi’s practice of nonviolent resistance, and though his language is different, he has Gandhi’s reasons for employing the tactic. Namely, it exalts and improves the practitioner as well as the one practiced upon. The resisters is identity is constructed through the act of passive resistance to unjust laws in the same way Malcolm X or Fanon describe identity as being constructed through violent opposition.
Talal Asad does not address the plight of the other so much as he discusses the West’s need to construct an other at all, and where this need fits in with liberalism’s basis in violent expansion. In discussing the creation of terror as an epistemic object Asad finds that the liberal, Western, democratic states still need to other and dehumanize their opponents in order to justify the use of force. In that respect, modern American warfare finds its precursor in the imperialist regimes that Fanon and Gandhi resisted. The major theoretical reason for the war in the Middle East that liberal thinkers off up is “clash of civilizations” theory, which Asad rejects, because “there are no self-contained societies to which fixed civilizational values correspond” (Asad 2006; 12). By insisting that Islamic culture has no common ground with Western liberalism, modern liberal thinkers draw the same types of lines that were drawn in colonialism between colonist and native.
Drawing these lines forces terrorist out of the frame of the liberal state and completely illegitimates their use of violence, which allows the liberal thinker to frame the terrorist as immoral and even evil, much in the same way the native was painted as evil. Unique to this more modern conflict, at least as subject of debate, is the torture of captives. While the efficiency and usefulness of torture are heavily debated, “what it certainly does do is produce two categories of human being: torturables and nontorturables” (Asad 2006; 32). These classifications are combined with the idea of two different civilizations, which quickly degenerates into a civilized versus uncivilized dichotomy, to produce the exact same situation experience under colonialism. Liberalism requires the separation of the object of force from the liberal framework in order to justify its violence.
Liberalism holds the universality of humanity and universal human rights up as two of its founding tenets, yet is also founded on violent expansion, which necessitates a Schmittian distinction between friend and enemy, us and them. In all situations where the sate uses violence, whether abroad or domestically, the objects of this violence must be dehumanized and pushed outside the realm of the liberal state, so that violence towards them does not defy the principals of a universal humanity. These oppressed people ultimately must redefine their identities, whether through the seizing of force as their own means, or through the rejection of force as something belonging to the oppressor.