summer reading notes 6: tuck and yang

Eve Tuck: Associate Prof of Critical Race & Indigenous Studies at UToronto & works on education; indigenous Alaskan

K. Wayne Yang: Associate Prof, UC San Diego Ethnic studies, focuses on community/place and 'ghetto colonialism'. 

Link to the paper: here.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang, 'Decolonisation is not a metaphor', Decolonisation: Indigeneity, Education, and Society, 1:1 (2012), pp. 1-40.

• Hegemony of settler-colonial framework
• Superficial adoption of 'decolonise' into education and humanities - it is not interchangeable with any other social justice ideal
• Erasure of indigenous people and history
• "When metaphor enters decolonisation, it kills the very possibility of decolonisation; it recenters whiteness, it recenters theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future." (3)
• "Solidarity is an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict." (3)
• 2 main forms of colonialism: external (exogenous/exploitation) = the extraction of resources to feed First World; internal = within 'domestic' borders of imperial nation - control, policing, "both structural and interpersonal" (5)
• Settler colonialism is both: total appropriation
• Within settler colonisation, the most important thing is land
• Involves disappearing indigenous and use of slavery (people without land whose bodies/selves are property, who can exploit the land)
• Settlers are not immigrants: they become the law, but immigrants adapt/assimilate
• "Each of the features of settler colonialism in the US context -- empire, settlement, and internal colony -- make it a site of contradictory decolonial desires." (8)
• "Decolonisation as a metaphor allows people to equivocate" these (8)
• Settler moves to innocence -- avoiding culpability
• Eg claiming to have Native ancestry: misunderstanding of Native racialisation as subtractive, disappearing with each generation from 'authenticity'
• "An anti-colonial critique is not the same as a decolonising framework: anticolonial critique often celebrates empowered postcolonial subjects who seize denied privileges from the metropole. This anti-to-post-colonial project doesn't strive to undo colonialism but rather to remake it and subvert it." (19)
• Paulo Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Liberation found in the mind of the oppressed -- unlike Fanon, not specifically situated in colonial framework
• "Fanon positions decolonisation as chaotic, an unclean break from a colonial condition that is already over-determined by the violence of the coloniser and unresolved in its possible futures." (20)
• Decolonisation "is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of 'helping' the at-risk and suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes. (...) Decolonisation specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life" (21) ie material demands
• Curriculum reform is more like settler harm reduction/white harm reduction -- only a stopgap
• Us-based calls for redistribution of wealth ignores the wealth/land originally belonged to Natives and isn't for giving away
• eg Occupy movement
• Settler moves to innocence = reconciliation ≠ decolonisation = guiding towards unsettling innocence
• Incommensurability: we don't need to answer to/satisfy settlers. This is about Indigenous futures.