Post on 11-Apr-2023
“Discovering” Minority DiscoursesHistoriographical and Theoretical Approaches to Race, Religion and Colonization
By
Mark A. DeYoungRice University
May, 2015
By the end of the twentieth century, (mainstream, white) historians had begun begun to critically
reexamine and challenge triumphalist accounts of the “discovery” and settlement of the so-called
New World.1 There is now a consensus that Columbus did not “discover” a New World so much
as he inadvertently arrived in a place where human civilizations had flourished for millennia;
similarly, the British settlers in North America did not transform a barren wilderness into an
agricultural land of plenty so much as they barely survived there precisely by learning from the
indigenous people who had already cultivated an agricultural landscape for centuries. Less
obvious, however, is the fact that a similar kind of belated “discovery” of things long since
known, documented and critiqued has occurred within academic scholarship and historiography.
In this essay, I engage with such scholarly “discoveries” about the ways in which race and
religion helped to create and sustain the modern world in the wake of the fateful summer of
1492, in order to situate them within critical “minority discourses” (to borrow Sylvia Wynter’s
appellation) and theoretical perspectives that have not been so late on the scene.
While academics had begun re-interrogating the legacy of colonialism in the 1960s and
1970s—themselves influenced by the critical momentum created by the Civil Rights, Black
Power and American Indian movements—their arguments had been largely relegated to the
margins until the five hundred year anniversary of Columbus’s voyage in 1992. At the center of
this new wave of critical historiography was David Stannard’s American Holocaust: Columbus
1 Indeed, Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), puts forth evidence that Native Americans had made transatlantic voyages to Europe as early as 50 BCE and that Africans had perhaps also traveled to the Caribbean and Central America prior to 1492.
and the Conquest of the New World, published that same year.2 Stannard’s then quite
controversial charge of genocide in the Americas (all the more controversial because of his
appropriation of the word “Holocaust”) was significant not only because of its scathing critique
of what he saw as a dangerously repressed historical memory, but also because he dealt
extensively with the ways in which religious and cultural factors helped to create the racist
discourses that encouraged and legitimated colonial violence and slavery. Once the Columbus
debates receded from public view, however, the issue of colonial genocide was once more
pushed back to the academic margins.3 This focus differed substantially from the writings
coming out of another early 1990s academic trend: whiteness studies. The seminal texts of that
movement, such as Alexander Saxton’s The Rise and Fall of the White Republic and David
Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, came out
of the academic left and consequently tilted heavily toward economic analysis and class conflict
models.4 While clearly valuable critical works, this kind of analysis tended to marginalize
religious and cultural factors under the banner of an “ideology” that was deployed to prop up an
essentially economic mode of exploitation and domination; in this light, racism is deployed by
the elite to create enmity between poor and working class whites and poor blacks to prevent them
from forming an alliance to combat their exploitation. Neither was this class-based account of
racism a particularly new discovery, as black leftists had been making essentially the same
2 David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). While a similar analysis of other historical works would be beneficial, I limit my investigation to this text in order to sketch in detail the broader limitations of historiographical methodology.
3 For a thorough survey of academic work on indigenous genocide see Andrew Woolford et al., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
4 Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, (New York: Verson, 1990); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, (New York: Verso, 1991).
argument since the 1930s and 1940s.5 What was “new” was the fact that white scholars were
beginning to turn the critical anthropological gaze back upon whiteness itself, creating a much
wider discursive in which these issues could be discussed.
Another key difference is that where whiteness studies had been focusing on the
nineteenth century as the site for the emergence of modern racism, Stannard traces a much longer
historical arc—a feat he is able to accomplish precisely because of his focus on religious, sexual
and aesthetic traditions in addition to political and economic factors. As far back as pre-Christian
Rome, he notes, sex in particular was already becoming a key issue: Athena was both the
goddess of war and a virgin, and Cicero had contended that what had distinguished civilized
“man’s nature, above that of the brutes and all other creatures” was that the latter were
“insensible to everything but pleasure.” Cicero further extolled “how noble it is to live with
abstinence, with modesty, with strictness, and sobriety,” whilst the “mere pursuits of sensual
gratifications are unworthy the excellency of man’s nature, and…[are] to be despised and
rejected.”6 Stannard notes that Augustinian theology picked up on this motif through the doctrine
of original sin and the notion that the flesh, and by extension nature, is corrupt: “At its heart,
Christianity expressed a horror at the tainting of godliness with sexuality.”7 Citing examples of
denigrating and prejudicial language from the Roman period and into medieval times, Stannard
argues against historians (like Saxton and Roediger, among others) who contend that race was an
eighteenth or nineteenth century invention. Instead, he posits that “social constructions of race
(sometimes based on skin color, sometimes with reference to other attributes)” which were
5 See Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, [1941] (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
6 Quoted in Stannard, American Holocaust, 154.
7 Ibid., 155.
hierarchically ranked with respect to “disposition and intelligence, were in use in Europe at least
a thousand years before Columbus set off across the Atlantic.”8 While this is a valid point that
enables him to trace the deep-seated roots of modern racism, most historians are not as opposed
to this argument as Stannard portrays. Rather, they tend to argue either that the specific term
“race” was not used in the modern sense until the late eighteenth century (even as it inherited the
inflection of the earlier paradigms of difference and aversion that Stannard cites), or they contend
that “racism” as a systematic institutionalization of doctrines, policies and philosophies distinct
from the simple denigration of difference did not arise until the beginning of the modern period.
Stannard’s own evidence indicates how close he himself is to this position. While he
shows how Christian discourses justified violence against Jews and fighting and enslaving
Muslims (the first massacre of Jews and the First Crusade having both begun in the eleventh
century) by labeling them as demonic, hypersexual or worldly, he admits that this aversion was
religious and cultural rather than racial in the strict sense: “That is, both Jews and Muslims were
human; they were ‘civilized’...they were capable of conversion...for all its savage ferocity,
Christian ideology did not encourage campaigns of extinction against human creatures who had
souls that might be saved.”9 To be sure, racist and even genocidal attitudes toward Jews and
Muslims would come later on, further illustrating the slippage and conflation between religious
and cultural difference and racism. For Stannard, all the strands come together in Spain in 1492:
in January, the Muslims in Granada surrender in their first defeat in what would culminate with
the expulsion of the Moors; in March, Spanish Jews were given an ultimatum to convert or be
likewise expelled; and in August, Columbus and his three ships set sail for the Canary Islands,
8 Ibid., 164.
9 Ibid., 183.
“representing a nation that was not much better than destitute and a Church that was in
disgrace...off on its imperial and holy mission.”10
By this account, the emergence of race as a fixed, immutable category of hierarchical
differentiation had everything to do with both religion and the economic particularities of
slavery, but not exactly in the classic Marxian religion-as-opiate-ideology sense. Rather, amidst
Christendom’s battles with Jews and Muslims, and upon learning that the latter were trading
Christian slaves, the prospect of holding fellow Christians in bonds came into disfavor. Stannard
notes that the Church’s commitment to spreading the faith and its simultaneous economic
dependence on the slave trade (the European labor force had just been decimated by the “Black
Death”) raised the fundamental problem of what to do when a “legally enslaved infidel”
converted. To free all such converts would have been economically disastrous and the precedent
would have clearly made conversion a rather strategic move such that its sincerity would be
impossible to evaluate (not that the Inquisition was any better a guarantor). Thus, in 1366,
conversion of slaves was subordinated such that “all slaves of infidel origin...from the land and
race of the infidels” could be legally held whether they converted or not. And a century later,
Spain implemented the policy of limpieza de sangre in order to preclude Jews from holding
public office since they could not prove themselves Christian by “purity of blood.” These two
acts indicate that race was something that permanently fixed ‘heathen’ status to the blood and
body such that religious conversion could only have bearing in the afterlife.11
After thoroughly detailing the conquistadores’s atrocities, the religious legitimations
thereof, and the moral debates about these (mis)deeds raised by Bartolome de las Cassas,
10 Ibid., 192.
11 Ibid., 207-08.
Stannard surprisingly proceeds to subvert the classic English depiction of Spain’s imperial
brutality (the so-called Black Legend) by arguing that Spain’s “destruction of whole societies
generally was a byproduct of conquest and native enslavement, a genocidal means to an
economic end, not an end in itself. And therein lies the central difference between the genocide
committed by the Spanish and that of the Anglo-Americans: in British America extermination
was the primary goal, and it was so precisely because it made economic sense.”12 Note here,
however, that he has now lapsed back into the conventional economics-dominated narrative in
which racism becomes, to cite Stannard’s own quite Marxian language, “a dialectic of ongoing
mutual reinforcement between ideology and [economic] institution” and is thus both the
ideological cause and effect of the economic viability of race-based slavery.13 I am not arguing
that both Spain and Britain did not have clear economic interests and motivations for slavery,
racism and genocidal acts. Rather than reduce the difference between the two to economic
benefit, however, I would point out that settler colonialism was the decisive difference. Both
nations clearly sought the wealth that would come from enslaving and exploiting native peoples
and lands (or importing African slaves), but the British sought to live there permanently—in
those “degenerate” and degenerating landscapes, surrounded by “heathen” black and brown
bodies—rather than to simply extract wealth. While conquistadores came as single men and thus
sought (and violently raped) indigenous women, creating the future mestizo inhabitants of Latin
America, and where Spanish missionary efforts resulted more in the syncretism of Catholic,
native and African beliefs than in “pure” conversion, the British brought their families and built
homes that had to remain domesticated and kept “pure” from the dangers of intermixing races
12 Ibid., 221.
13 Ibid., 220.
and religions. Evidence for this can be found in Stannard’s contention that British-native
relations soured over time in large part because the colonizers realized that the natives were
persiting in their own religious and cultural ways rather than fully converting or assimilating to
British Christian ‘civilization.’ Furthermore, he notes that “probably never before in Christian
history had the idea that humankind was naturally corrupt and debased reached and influenced
the daily lives of a larger proportion of the lay community” than in Puritan New England.14
Limitations of Historiographical Method
Although Stannard objects to what he sees as a eurocentric bias in historiography
(whiteness studies included) which tends to gloss differences among the multitudes of cultures
and peoples collectively lumped under the categories of “Africans” or “Indians” even while
making nuanced distinctions between European groups, it is not clear that he is able to avoid the
same pitfall. Indeed, while he carefully establishes points of continuity and contrast between the
Spanish and Anglo-American conquests, one is not left with an overall sense of the particularities
among the indigenous people they conquered or the African slaves they imported; he does not
even clearly differentiate between these two categories, much less among them.15 The source of
this problem as black scholars like Charles Long and Sylvia Wynter have long been pointing out,
has to do with the modern universal conception of the human (the “figure of Man” as will be
discussed below) and the epistemology it ushered in, which these scholars historicize within the
specific local-cultural context of (post)Christian Europe.16 What these scholars are able to show
14 Ibid., 230-31.
15 Ibid., 151.
16 Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1986), 90. See also Foucault, The Order of Things, chapter 9.
is that secularization and rationality, while culturally specific discourses that are directly tied to
their emergence from European medieval Christendom, are able to mask themselves as universal
and what Wynter calls “acultural” even as they are founded upon and defined against what Long
calls “empirical others.”
Writing several years before Stannard, Long makes a similar argument about the way in
which Europe’s cultural past primed them for their problematic categorization of the cultures and
peoples they would come into contact with in the “New World.” Long brings together Richard
Bernheimer’s history of the European mythology of “wild men” and Michel Foucault’s history of
madness to argue that these discourses and practices of imaging and treating “empirical others”
would ultimately come to constitute “the basis for the symbolic and mythological languages used
to describe and interpret new worlds discovered by Europeans since the fifteenth century.”17 The
bodies of these “others” were thought to be “pathological and irrational” and were associated
with animality depicted in terms of their supposedly uncontrollable (because not restrained by
modest rationality and/or Christian piety) desires for human flesh—both sexually and
cannibalistically, as both unfounded charges would resurface in countless missionary writings
and travel accounts. Thus, for Long, the Europeans already had epistemological and taxonomical
categories into which their encounters with “new” peoples could be fit. While Stannard’s long
historical arc portrays this process of fitting new phenomena into old categories in a relatively
smooth and linear fashion, Long’s methodology is better able to hold different sub-narratives and
contingencies in tension. He notes that ‘civilization’ as a term was coined in the eighteenth
century in an always implied counter-distinction to the primitive/savage empirical other, but he
17 Long, 91-92.
highlights the fact that primitivity was far from a monolithic concept. Contrasting images of
“noble savages” and beastly “wild men,” Long argues, “come to fruition through a combined
fertilization of theological-philosophical, economic-political, artistic-literary, and scientific
concerns,” the semantic range of which “indicates the speculative arena in which these images
took shape.”18 To navigate these tensions, Long calls for a method that goes beyond the simple
hermeneutics of cultural and religious discourses in order to expose and critique the very
epistemological assumptions and a priori categorizations in which these discourses are
deployed.
At its best, then, Stannard’s normative historiographical method can only provide an
adept hermeneutic of the European religious and cultural discourses that primed them
economically, politically, psychologically and culturally for genocidal acts. The value of this
approach is that it does help to theorize particular religious dynamics from a European
perspective. He significantly notes how the Puritans came to see the natives as impervious to full
conversion and thus inherently sinful as a “permanent racial condition. And to tolerate known sin
and wickedness in their midst would be to commit sin and wickedness themselves.” This kind of
analysis points to the ways in which religion plays in to the “assemblages” of racialization and
colonization I discuss below. Stannard observes that “from the earliest days of settlement the
British colonists repeatedly expressed a haunting fear that they would be ‘contaminated’ by the
presence of Indians, a contamination that must be avoided lest it become the beginning of a
terrifying downward slide toward their own bestial degeneration.”19 Thus, quite ironically, while
they were literally contaminating native peoples with diseases that would kill vast portions of
18 Ibid., 99.
19 Stannard, 232 (my emphasis).
their population (sometimes by knowingly giving them blankets that were infested with
smallpox), the Puritans engaged in the rather wicked and “bestial” behavior of exterminating the
natives in order to prevent precisely that “degeneration” from civilized humanity which those
very behaviors ensured—as is the case with autoimmunity, when the immune system begins to
attack itself in a effort to purify the body of pathogens.20 While Stannard helps us to arrive at this
functional understanding of religious discourse, his failure to probe the overarching episteme in
which it is deployed and to connect the function of religious/cultural discourses to the scientific
ones that would later emerge from the same religio-cultural matrix leaves us in a rather
problematic position. It becomes all too easy to simply blame the heinous acts of Spaniards and
Englishmen on their irrational religiosity, failing to sufficiently interrogate the ways in which we
continue to subscribe to the same epistemological assumptions about the nature of humanity
(albeit with a more ‘secular’ scientific veneer) and to deploy discourses with similarly
problematic auto-immunitary effects. In the end, this analysis re-inscribes a eurocentric bias by
failing to probe the ways in which Natives and Africans in the Americas both participated in and
resisted against these discourses in varying and complex ways, engaging in practices and
perspectives which open up the very possibility for critical theorization. Furthermore, the
psychoanalytic focus on de-repressing the historical memory of genocide can tend to reinscribe
the auto-immunity of whiteness by seeking absolution through owning up to its past, while
simultaneously sealing indigenous people within that past as historical fossils, killed or erased by
the genocidal process itself. After all, this is not a memory that indigenous people have forgotten
20 See Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The ‘Two Sources’ of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar, (New York: Routledge, 2002). While space precludes a fuller interrogation of the trope of autoimmunity, Derrida’s use of it to theorize both religious and scientific/rational discourses would be a particularly useful way to situate the religious within the theoretical frameworks of racialization and colonization I discuss below.
as they are still living with its consequences, displaced by the very progeny of “settlers” who are
finally “discovering” a repressed memory half a millennia after the fact.
Minority Discourses: “Discovering” Critical Theoretical Possibilities
Though often neglected both outside of and within black studies, the interdisciplinary
work of literary scholar Sylvia Wynter raises new possibilities for theorizing the connections
between discourses of race, religion and the human in making the modern world. She begins by
opening up the lacuna in Foucault’s insight about the sixteenth century invention of “the figure
of Man,” which he argues is of pivotal significance in establishing the “order of things” in the
modern episteme; Foucault fails to discuss the way in which race and colonialism served as the
very ground upon which such a particular historically and culturally conditioned conception of
the human (hereafter rendered as Man) could be articulated.21 For Wynter, Man (first as the
Cartesian rational Man, then rearticulated in the nineteenth century as the evolutionary biological
organism Man) is a “direct transformation” of the white, Christian identity of medieval Europe.
While the initial transformation from an explicitly Christian belief structure to the rational Man
of Renaissance humanism is easily graspable, she suggests that because of our (late modern
academic) disciplinary frames of reference, “the parallel linkage is not normally seeable in the
case of Man as the now purely secularized variant of Christian.” She elaborates that this is
because we do not tend to see this “purely secularized” concept of “Man” as a culturally specific
identity within the matrix of a “secular” belief system or “Grand Narrative of Emancipation, that
is itself the transformed analogue of the religious belief system and Origin Narrative of feudal-
21 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), chapter 9.
Christian Europe, Man is conceived of as an acultural mode of being.”22 Furthermore, “By the
nature of our shared response to the meaning of the word secular, we are therefore already
responding within the terms of a specific cultural field, as enacted by the formal rules of a now
global and purely desupernaturalized variant of...Christian culture of Western Europe.”23
Invoking Foucault, Wynter suggests that we have been so thoroughly “disciplined” into this
particular episteme that we can no longer recognize it as a part of the same “narrative schema” as
that of Christian redemption and thus we assume “that we are not in a culture at all, and that our
native model of reality is reality-in itself, [such that] the term ‘culture-systemic categories’
cannot...make sense for us within the Foucauldian ‘regime of truth’ of our present order of
knowledge and its disciplinary paradigms.”24 In this way, a culturally specific concept of “Man”
comes to be conflated with, and to stand in for, the category of the human itself, “as if its culture-
systemic ‘world’ were the new ‘Church,’ its ground of actuality, supracultural...and alone
experiencable as true.”25
Wynter’s critical project is to expose and diagnose the discursive and narrative
formations which cement the figure of Man and its surrounding episteme in order to decenter it
and envision other “genres” or modes of being human. In her prescriptive article “On
Disenchanting Discourse,” she goes a step further by bringing together the discursive and the
biological in striking ways. Here, she outlines how narrative discourse constitutes a “rhetorical
22 Sylvia Wynter, “Africa, the West and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text after Man,” in Symbolic Narratives / African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image, ed. June Givanni, (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 30.
23 Sylvia Wynter, “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, the Kind of Castile a Madman: Culture as Actuality, and the Caribbean Rethinking Modernity,” in The Reordering of Culture: Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada in the Hood, ed. Alvina Ruprecht and Cecilia Taiana, (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995),27.
24 Ibid., 29.
25 Ibid., 30.
motivation system, the analogue for humans of the genetic motivation system for organic
species…[which] functions to induce the collective set of behaviors of human subjects...into
autopoetic living existence.”26 In sum, the figure of Man is constructed in a way that excludes his
“ontological others” (non-whites) and that enculturates and functionally induces system-
maintaining behaviors much like “the neurophysiological/electro-chemical reward-punishment
apparatus of the brain,” thus defining rationality and the good as that which maintains this
“discursively constituted model of being, and evil as its antithesis.” For Wynter, the only way to
disenchant this dominant discourse is to infiltrate it with what she calls “minority discourse”—
that is, from the perspective of those excluded “ontological others”—which could scientifically
(and strategically) analyze these rhetorical devices in order to access “what controls reality...as
the object of a diagnostic, rather than merely exegetical, analysis.”27 It is, in a sense, a science,
and yet it goes beyond the sciences by exposing the rhetorical underpinning of their discourses.
“To disenchant discourse,” she writes, “will therefore be to desacralize ‘cultures’ and their
systems of rationality by setting upon our literary and cultural heritages and their orders of
discourse rather than by continuing to adapt to their generating premises and non-conscious
systems of inference as we do now.”28
Wynter’s key insight is that discourse systems function mechanically to induce and
enculturate the behaviors needed to realize “a specific mode of the human” in a way that can be
autopoietically replicated. While analogous to the automatic behavior-inducing function of
26 Sylvia Wynter, “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary Criticism and Beyond,” in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 454.
27 Ibid., 456-57.
28 Ibid., 467.
genetic motivation systems in organic species, the crucial difference is that for Wynter, the
“psychic unity of the human species” is constituted by “acquired/rhetorically coded, rather than
innate/genetically coded, motivation systems,” leaving them open to diagnostic intervention at
the cognitive level in a way that would not be possible within a purely biological and
neurochemical process. From its liminal perspective, then, minority discourse(s) are in a unique
position to take up this task because, as “ontological others” already excluded from the system’s
epistemological ground, its practitioners are already compelled to challenge that ground and to
question the “‘rhetorical a priori’ of the purely biological description of the human.”29 By
demonstrating that even purely biological and technoscientific discourses can be subjected to a
culture-specific rhetorical analysis, Wynter hopes that the barrier between “the culture of the
natural sciences and the culture of the disciplines dealing with our individual and social
behaviors” could be erased, enabling us to “move beyond the limits of the reductionist approach
of sociobiology and its recent clones.”30 Contesting the a priori reality of the human as a
universal biological organism before and beyond race, she points out that this purportedly
“objective truth” to which the modern episteme gives rise actually “depends for its objectivity
and truth on the systemic repression of a correlated series of perspectival standpoints, including
those of all non-White population groups.”31 By subjecting the modern technoscientific
epistemology to the same “laws that hold for all human cultures,” we can finally disenchant
modern discourses in a quest for “a new conception of causality as culture-systemic rather than
29 Sylvia Wynter, “Columbus, the Ocean Blue and Fables that Stir the Mind: To Reinvent the Study of Letters,” in Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding and Textuality, ed. Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 148.
30 Ibid., 146.
31 Ibid., 148.
as either supernatural or bioevolutionary/supracultural (i.e., autonomously inner-man
determined), that alone can lead us to the frontier of a new science of the ordo verborum, of a
science, therefore, rather than merely a technology of human behaviors.”32
Putting the Pieces Together: Racializing and Colonizing Assemblages
While Wynter, like Stannard, uses the pivotal events of 1492 and the quincentennial
debates which it sparked as an entry point into the theorization of race in modernity, her work
goes much further by opening the possibility of critiquing the epistemological grounds upon
which much historiography is itself founded. In his most recent book Habeas Viscus: Racializing
Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Alexander Weheliye seizes
this opportunity, offering one of the few sustained scholarly engagements with Wynter’s work.
Weheliye’s project is to wield the oft neglected insights of black feminist scholars like Wynter
and Hortense Spillers to critically reexamine the biopolitical theories of Foucault and Giorgio
Agamben that have come to dominate humanities discourse in the American academy. His stated
goal is to use the site of black studies, in dialogue with “other forms of racialized minority
discourse,” which he describes as “spaces of exception...within modern western humanity,” in
order to “usher in different genres of the human.”33 For Weheliye, the problem with Foucaultian
biopolitics and Agamben’s “bare life” is that both tend to “misconstrue how profoundly race and
racism shape the modern idea of the human,” and that the overdetermined appeal to these models
tends to “write off theorizations of race, subjection, and humanity found in black and ethnic
32 Ibid., 149.
33 Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3.
studies, allowing bare life and biopolitics discourse to imagine an indivisible biological
substance anterior to racialization.” In lieu of these shortcomings, Weheliye directs his attention
to what he calls “racializing assemblages” which, by contrast, describe race “not as a biological
or cultural classification but as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full
humans, not-quite-humans and nonhumans.”34
Thus, he appeals to Spillers and Wynter, among other black and ethnic theorists not only
because their work helps to “disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with
western Man,” but also because in spite of being a foundational source of critical cultural theory,
black and ethnic (and especially black and ethnic feminist) thought is constantly dismissed as
lacking rigorous scholarship.35 Weheliye’s frustration with the sheer prominence of Foucault and
Agamben in western theory stems from the fact that as white Europeans, the sociopolitical
context of their ideas are often elided as they are given “conceptual carte blanche,
while...minority discourse[s] that speak to the same questions are almost exclusively relegated to
the jurisdiction of ethnographic locality.”36 As such, their theories and concepts come to be
viewed as “transposable to a variety of spatiotemporal contexts because the authors do not speak
from an explicitly racialized viewpoint,” as opposed to the specific contextualization (and
academic/epistemological segregation) of “ethnic” scholars, and this in turn “lends their ideas
more credibility and, once again, displaces minority discourse[s].” To illustrate this, he argues
that 1960s French post-structuralism has been “deracinated” since it came to be “annexed by the
34 Ibid., 4.
35 Ibid., 5.
36 Indeed, Wynter, “On Disenchanting Discourse,” 460 n. 54, has highlighted this distinction by pointing out that while scholarly work on white Western society, religion and culture takes place within the disciplines of the “human sciences”—sociology, psychology and the like—the very same kinds of analysis of non-white, nonwestern racial, religious and cultural phenomena have been typically filtered into anthropology and ethnography.
U.S. academy in the 1970s and rechristened as ‘theory,’” obfuscating the fact that the crucial
historical impetus for post-structuralism’s now famous deconstruction of western thought and
subjectivity (in the work of Derrida, Bourdieu, Lyotard and others) was the Algerian War and the
widespread processes of post-WWII decolonization throughout the global south. As white
Europeans, these thinkers are too easily lifted out of this context into a mode of “acultural”
legitimacy (to borrow Wynter’s term), and segregated from the minority discourses which
coexisted with and in many cases preceded and/or directly influenced them (among others,
W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Eduouard Glissant, and C.L.R. James).37 Thus,
Weheliye criticizes Foucault and biopolitical theory more generally for neglecting these
“minority discourses” and for uncritically positing a distinction between biological and “ethnic”
racism, the deleterious effect of which is to leave “the door open for the naturalization of racial
categories and the existence of a biological sphere that is not always already subject to ethnic
racism.” Put simply, the distinction between biological and ethnic racism is flawed because “both
rely on the same tools of the trade: racializing assemblages.”38 The net effect of this discourse,
for Weheliye, is that it simply reifies racial difference as a natural category and seals it from
analytic inquiry by placing it into the universalized biological rendering of the figure of Man.
Even worse, Weheliye cites the recent work of Brady Heiner and Joy James, who have
demonstrated that Foucault was familiar with and clearly influenced by Black Panther members
Angela Davis and George Jackson, whom he visited in prison. They examine Foucault’s notes
from the visit in connection with the themes of incarceration, state-sponsored racism and
37 Weheliye, 9. For an extended discussion of these and other thinkers who are foundational for (black) critical theory, see Reiland Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory: Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition form W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, (New York: Lexington Books, 2010).
38 Ibid., 59-60.
disciplinary power that came to dominate Foucault’s later work to demonstrate that, while
unacknowledged, the critical insights these Black Panthers gained from the lived reality of state
racism, surveillance and incarceration were to some degree influential to Foucault’s thought. The
question they raise, then, is why the ideas of the black power movement have been relegated to
the academic dustbin while Foucault’s closely related “discoveries” have survived and
proliferated to the extent that he is continually among the most cited authors in academic
research? Weheliye contends that the reason is that the Black Panther Party’s ideas “are limited
to the concerns with ethnic racism elsewhere [than inside Europe or white society more
generally], they do not register as thought qua thought, and thus can be exploited by and elevated
to universality only in the hands of European thinkers such as Foucault, albeit without receiving
any credit.”39
The kind of vigorous debate that Weheliye’s challenge to academic orthodoxy invites is
precisely the kind of response that he hopes to elicit in order to place Wynter and Spiller’s work
back within the central scope of critical inquiry. But this scathing critique of (white western/
Euro-American) theory is only a starting point for Weheliye’s project, not its substantive content.
Rather, at the heart of his work is a push to move beyond historiography’s methodological
constraint within “grammars of comparison” between the particularities of black diaspora,
indigenous and other modes of “ethnic” studies, which problematically results in the
reinscription of “Man’s existent hierarchies.” By contrast, he envisages the role of minority
discourses as going beyond merely diagnosing the hegemonic discursive effects of the figure of
Man to design “novel assemblages of relation.” Comparison models tend toward the reductive
39 Ibid., 62-63.
goal of fostering recognition for marginalized groups within the still hegemonic frame of rights
and citizenship in western liberal democratic states (and this in itself only when or if these
models avoid the eurocentric conflation of all non-white perspectives under the categorical
banners of “African” and “Indian” as Stannard rightly points out). This framing, however, can
only grant access to a limited number of “exceptions” to the normative and always already
racialized domain of the fully human. For Weheliye, “This, in turn, feeds into a discourse of
putative scarcity in which already subjugated groups compete for limited resources, leading to a
strenghtening of the very mechanisms that deem certain groups more disposable or not-quite-
human than others. In the resulting oppression Olympics, white supremacy takes home all
winning medals.”40
His constructive aim, then, is to take Deleuze and Guattari’s term
“assemblages” (agencement in French) and apply it both to the problematics of the “racializing
assemblages” discussed earlier as well as to a more positive valence. Assemblages refer to the
“relational totalities” of networks comprised of different entities and their self-expression
through “acts and statements.” These different elements “become components only in their
relational connectivity with other factors” through which they become assemblages that “pivot
on both a vertical and a horizontal axis.” The hope is to conceive of different minority discourses
(diaspora, indigenous, feminist, queer, etc.) relationally, rather than competitively and
comparatively, as assemblages that are “inherently productive, entering into polyvalent
becomings to produce and give expression to previously nonexistent realities” such as new and
varying modes of being human or of defining the meaning of freedom.41 While black-indigenous
40 Ibid., 13-14.
41 Ibid., 46.
relations have a painful history precisely because of the different ways in which these groups
have been forced to compete for inclusion or recognition of their full humanity, this methodology
echoes a similar strain in recent indigenous critical theory which together open up the possibility
for precisely this kind of relationality-driven theorization of alternative conceptions of the
human.
For example, Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd’s efforts to (re)situate indigenous critical
theory within postcolonial discourse harmonizes well with Weheliye’s critiques and methods. In
terms that recall both Weheliye’s criticism of comparative models and inclusion and my critique
of Stannard’s historiography, Byrd contends, “As the liberal state and its supporters and critics
struggle over the meaning of pluralism, habitation, and enfranchisement, indigenous peoples and
nations, who provide the ontological and literal ground for such debates, are continually deferred
into a past that never happened and a future that will never come.”42 In this context, she argues
that “racialization takes the place of colonialism” as whiteness is the “proprietary domain for
citizenship and human rights…[such that] anti-immigration legislation, internments, and
incarcerations are not exceptions but the rule for U.S. liberalism inaugurated through
colonialism.”43 Like Wynter, Spillers and Weheliye, Byrd appeals to resources internal to
indigenous scholarship and to the wider epistemological debates in other ethnic studies
disciplines in order to reconfigure European and Anglo-American philosophical traditions and
raise alternative possibilities. She is also sensitive to the problem of competing for inclusion,
which she describes as liberal democracy’s still hegemonic multiculturalism that endeavors to
42 Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 221.
43 Ibid., 224.
merely “provisionally include those people othered and abjected from the nation-state’s origins”
in settler colonialism—an inclusion which is itself premised upon perpetuating the displacement
of native peoples. Thus, by failing to interrogate the conflated whiteness and coloniality of the
conception of the human that grounds liberalist discourse, struggles for inclusion result in a
“cacophony of moral claims” which, however much they may “challenge the state through loci
of race, class, gender, and sexuality,” can all too easily coerce “struggles for social justice for
queers, racial minorities, and immigrants into complicity with settler colonialism.”44
Bringing critical projects from black and indigenous, and other area studies together can
lead to a disciplinary cross-fertilization, yielding a wide array of theoretical possibilities for de-
centering the figure of Man and its epistemological ground and for alternative ways of being
human. While Weheliye, via Spillers and Wynter, perhaps goes further in diagnosing and
deconstructing the whiteness of western epistemology and concepts of the human as “racializing
assemblages,” Byrd probes deeper into the problems inherent in the conflation of racialization
and colonization: “such discursive elisions obfuscate the distinctions between the two...When the
remediation of the colonization of American Indians is framed through discourses of racialization
that can be redressed by further inclusion into the nation-state, there is a significant failure to
grapple with the fact that such discourses further reinscribe the original colonial injury.”45 As
black studies becomes a critical locus for exploring racializing assemblages, Byrd highlights how
indigenous critical theory is uniquely capable of identifying the “cultural, literary, and political
assemblages” of colonization and therefore of de-centering “the vertical interactions of colonizer
and colonized and recenter[ing] the horizontal struggles among peoples with competing claims
44 Ibid., xvii.
45 Ibid., xxiii.
to historical oppressions.”46 Byrd consequently devotes an entire chapter to negotiating the
inherent tension of these horizontal struggles with respect to the 2007 legal battle of the
descendants of black Cherokee freedmen to gain tribal recognition. She explores the possibilities
and limitations of the concepts of “internal racism” and “internal colonialism” in an effort to
counterbalance the implications of a Native American tribe who had enslaved and excluded
blacks on the basis of “blood quantum” laws against what she argues are problematic
implications of black theorists like bell hooks who, “By identifying slavery as the original sin of
the United States’ colonialist project,” creates a black/white binary racial framing that elides the
ongoing (not just historical) dispossession of the indigenous.47
Byrd’s reason for walking this intellectual tightrope is that she seeks to bring indigenous
studies and other critical perspectives into a collective and relational “decolonial” conversation
taking place in critical whiteness studies, postcolonialism, and critical race theory. While the
collaborative gestures theorists like Byrd and Weheliye are certainly encouraging signs of
potentially invigorating and even transformative academic and public conversations, in the short
term, they largely remain exactly that: gestures. Though clearly more a result of disciplinary
background than conscious intent, neither scholar engages extensively with the other’s field of
inquiry aside from broad statements of disciplinary inclusion or passing references. Instead, their
points of convergence remain largely confined to their mutual engagements with broader
academic currents within the humanities (postcolonialism and Spivak, post-structuralism and
Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida, etc.), confirming that for the time being, both black studies and
indigenous studies remain marginalized and segregated disciplines, able to interact and intervene
46 Ibid., xxxiv.
47 Ibid., 134.
in the central discourses of academia without being reciprocally engaged in kind. Furthermore,
as pivotal as Byrd’s insights into the assemblages of settler colonialism are, she never mentions
how they might be applied to the creation of a Jewish state in Israel and the ongoing
displacement and “settlement” taking place in the already constrained Palestinian lands. And
while both Weheliye and Byrd discuss aspects of post-9/11 foreign policy and responses to
terrorism, neither sufficiently interrogates how religious identity and discourse might fit into the
conflated assemblages of racialization and imperialism. As long as they remain fragmented and
marginal, the assemblages of “minority discourse” that Wynter envisaged, and which Byrd and
Weheliye build toward, will face an uphill battle to de-center the perpetually racializing and
colonizing aspects of normative discourses and epistemology. And as long as white western
academics refuse to join in these critical conversations of minority discourses, they will continue
to “discover” that which has already been found.
References
Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Derrida, Jacques. “Faith and Knowledge: The ‘Two Sources’ of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Forbes, Jack D. Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge Classics, 2002.
Long, Charles H. Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1986.
Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1991.
Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Verso, 1990.
Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Woolford, Andrew, Jeff Benvuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton, editors. Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. [1941] New York: Basic Books, 2008.
Wynter, Sylvia. “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary Criticism and Beyond.” In The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, edited by Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
_____.“The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, the Kind of Castile a Madman: Culture as Actuality, and the Caribbean Rethinking Modernity.” In The Reordering of Culture:
Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada in the Hood, edited by Alvina Ruprecht and Cecilia Taiana. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995.
_____.“Columbus, the Ocean Blue and Fables that Stir the Mind: To Reinvent the Study of Letters.” In Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding and Textuality, edited by Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.
_____.“Africa, the West and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text after Man.” In Symbolic Narratives / African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image, edited by June Givanni. London: British Film Institute, 2000.