“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

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