The aff is an assimilative practice which offers political and social rights for absolution.

When these two historical processes are so enmeshed that racialization in the United States now often evokes colonization as a metonym, such discursive elisions obfuscate the distinctions between the two systems of dominance and the coerced complicities amid both.15 The generally accepted theorizations of racialization in the United States have, in the pursuit of equal rights and enfranchisements, tended to be sited along the axis of inclusion/exclusion as the affective critique of the larger project of liberal multiculturalism. 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.16 As Kanaka Maoli scholar J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, White Earth Ojibwe scholar Jean M. O’Brien, and other indigenous scholars have noted, the conflation of racialization into colonization and indigeneity into racial categories dependent upon blood logics underwrites the institutions of settler colonialism when they proffer assimilation into the colonizing nation as reparation for genocide and theft of lands and nations.17 But the larger concern is that this conflation masks the territoriality of conquest by assigning colonization to the racialized body, which is then policed in its degrees from whiteness. Under this paradigm, American Indian national assertions of sovereignty, self-determination, and land rights disappear into U.S. terrioriality as indigenous identity becomes a racial identity and citizens of colonized indigenous nations become internal ethnic minorities within the colonizing nation-state. As civil rights, queer rights, and other rights struggles have often cathected liberal democracy as the best possible avenue to redress the historical violences of and exclusions from the state, scholars and activists committed to social justice have been left with impossible choices: to articulate freedom at the expense of another, to seek power and recognition in the hopes that we might avoid the syllogisms of democracy created through colonialism. Lisa Lowe provides a useful caution as she reminds us that “the affirmation of ethical moment before us is to comprehend “the particular loss of the intimacies of four continents, to engage slavery, genocide, indenture, and liberalism as a conjunction, as an actively acknowledged loss within the present.”19 In attempting to people the intimacies of four continents, Lowe activates the Chinese indentured laborer in the Caribbean just after Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 as the affective entry point into “a range of connections, the global intimacies out of which emerged not only modern humanism but a modern racialized division of labor.”20 Her turn to the colonial racialized labor force in the Americas helps to reveal the degree to which intimacy—here tracked through the spheres of spatial proximity, privacy, and volatility—among Africa, Asia, and Europe in the Americas has served as the forgotten and disavowed constitutive means through which liberal humanism defines freedom, family, equality, and humanity. In fact, liberal humanism, according to Lowe, depends upon the “‘economy of affirmation and forgetting’” not just of particular streams of human history, but of the loss of their geographies, histories, and subjectivities.21 In the indeterminacies between and among freedom, enslavement, indentureship, interior, and exterior, the recovered Asian contract laborer, functioning as historical site for Lowe, can reveal the processes through which liberalism asserts freedom and forgets enslavement as the condition of possibility for what constitutes “the human.” “Freedom was,” Lowe stresses, “constituted through a narrative dialectic that rested simultaneously on a spatialization of the unfree as exteriority and a temporal subsuming of enslavement as internal difference or contradiction. The ‘overcoming’ of internal contradiction resolves in freedom within the modern Western political sphere through displacement and elision of the coeval conditions of slavery and indentureship in the Americas.”22 But what seems to me to be further disavowed, even in Lowe’s important figuration of the history of labor in “the intimacies of four continents,” is the settler colonialism that such labor underwrites. Asia, Africa, and Europe all meet in the Americas to labor took place? Lowe includes “native peoples” in her figurations as an addendum when she writes that she hopes “to evoke the political economic logics through which men and women from Africa and Asia were forcibly transported to the Americas, who with native, mixed, and creole peoples constituted slave societies, the profits of which gave rise to bourgeois republican states in Europe and North America.”23 By positioning the conditions of slavery and indentureship in the Americas as coeval contradictions through which Western freedom affirms and resolves itself, and then by collapsing the indigenous Americas into slavery, the fourth continent of settler colonialism through which such intimacy is made to labor is not just forgotten or elided; it becomes the very ground through which the other three continents struggle intimately for freedom, justice, and equality. Within Lowe’s formulation, the native peoples of the Americas are collapsed into slavery; their only role within the disavowed intimacies of racialization is either one equivalent to that of African slaves or their ability to die so imported labor can make use of their lands. Thus, within the “intimacies of four continents,” indigenous peoples in the new world cannot, in this system, give rise to any historical agency or status within the “economy of affirmation and forgetting,” because they are the transit through which the dialectic of subject and object occurs. In many ways, then, this book argues for a critical reevaluation of the elaboration of these historical processes of oppression within postcolonial, critical race, queer, and American studies at the beginning of the twenty first century. By foundationally accepting the general premise that racialization (along with the concomitant interlocking oppressions of class, gender, and sexuality) causes the primary violences of U.S. politics in national and international arenas, multicultural liberalism has aligned itself with settler colonialism despite professing the goal to disrupt and intervene in global forms of dominance through investments in colorblind equality. Simply put, prevailing understandings of race and racialization within U.S. postcolonial, area, and queer studies depend upon an historical aphasia of the conquest of indigenous be white or black in the United States is inextricably tied to the dispossession of the original owners and the assumption of white possession.”24 Calls to social justice for U.S. racialized, sexualized, immigrant, and diasporic queer communities that include indigenous peoples, if they are not attuned to the ongoing conditions of settler colonialism of indigenous peoples, risk deeming colonialism in North America resolved, if not redressed, two cents for 100 billion dollars.