K - Settler Colonialism Supplement - CNDI 2024

Settler Colonialism Kritik Supplement – CNDI 2024
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TOP – Byrd
Liberal democracy and US sovereignty deterritorialize indigenous land claims, constituting Nativeness as the constitutive outside of citizenship in order to impose juridical and territorial order onto the colony – recourse to rights-based models and the legal system in order to biopolitically manage populations through law-making violence, mystifying settlement and annihilating the Native through assimilation.
Byrd 2011(Jodi A. “Killing States Removals, Other Americans, and the “Pale Promise of Democracy” Book Title: The Transit of Empire” Published by: University of Minnesota Press. (2011) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv97j.10//ajoseph pg189-194
The second goal of this chapter is to reframe Japanese American internment and the concomitant “yellow peril” that traps Asian Americans in a third space between immigrant threat/model minority, within those distortive parallactic effects that have been used to disrupt and deny indigenous sovereignty. By focusing on the internment of Japanese Americans at Poston and the role that John Collier, the father of the Indian Reorganization Act of , played in promoting Japanese American wartime relocation as an experiment in self-governance toward assimilation, I hope to deepen our understandings of how U.S. colonial policies targeting indigenous nations inform the assumptions of multicultural liberal democracy that now exemplify current U.S. preoccupations with race and diaspora and serve to deterritorialize indigenous prior claims. And finally, I will draw upon Gerald Vizenor’s work in Hiroshima Bugi to consider American Indian participation in and disruptions of conviviality within the transits This content downloaded from 45.36.152.108 on Wed, 13 May 2020 08:13:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 190  KILLING STATES of empire. Vizenor’s unmapping of the nineteenth-century voyager and half-Chinook Ranald MacDonald’s travels through the Pacific and into Ainu territory in Japan troublingly parallels, for Vizenor, the consequences of the atomic weaponry that violently ended World War II. Giorgio Agamben links the political power of U.S. sovereignty to a series of states of exception that track how martial law and discourses of emergencies have led to the consolidation of executive power and its subsequent expansion into the legislative sphere. Agamben’s theorization of sovereignty as that which determines and enacts the state of exception— understood as that which breaks the law to enforce the law—demonstrates the degree to which Western democracies exist in a dialectic with totalitarian regimes. Though Agamben typically theorizes sovereignty within Greco-Roman and European contexts, his State of Exception marks a notable shift. In his diagnosis of U.S. sovereignty and its deployment of the state of exception as a “conflict over sovereign decision” arising from a “dialectic between the powers of the president and those of Congress,” the first example Agamben gives of a U.S. president appropriating dictatorial powers is Abraham Lincoln, who violated the law to suspend habeas corpus in  and then, on his sole authority, declared the emancipation of slaves in .¹³ The second president Agamben cites as an example is Woodrow Wilson, who during World War I appropriated even broader powers to the office of the presidency when Congress passed a series of espionage acts between  and . Agamben notes that “because the sovereign power of the president is essentially grounded in the emergency linked to the state of war, over the course of the twentieth century the metaphor of war becomes an integral part of the presidential political vocabulary.”¹⁴ By deploying the linguistic logic of waging war, according to Agamben, Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to appropriate extraordinary powers to deal with the economic crisis of the s, and the New Deal represents Agamben’s third example of the U.S. presidency locating in itself the ability to declare the state of emergency. The final example Agamben gives us is Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order  that Agamben describes as “the most spectacular violation of civil rights (all the more serious because of its solely racial motivation) [,which] occurred on February , .”¹⁵ Roosevelt’s order, which authorized the secretary of war and the military commanders he might designate to “prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the Military Commander may determine, from which any or all perThis content downloaded from 45.36.152.108 on Wed, 13 May 2020 08:13:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms KILLING STATES  191 sons may be excluded,” directed the U.S. war machine to define and enforce “regulations for the conduct and control of alien enemies.”¹⁶ Though it did not name them or any other ethnic communities specifically, and in fact allowed the secretary and those military commanders to exclude “any or all persons,” the order interpellated Japanese American citizens of the United States particularly as “alien enemies” to be evacuated to relocation centers in the name of national defense. Poston, Arizona, functions as a temporal and spatial site within these states of exception not least because it was one of the camps that represented “the most spectacular violation of civil rights.” The state of exception as first theorized by Carl Schmitt and later developed by Agamben depends upon the sovereign’s ability to order space as “not only a ‘taking of land’ (Landesnahme)—the determination of a juridical and a territorial ordering (of an Ordnung and an Ortung)—but above all a ‘taking of the outside,’ an exception (Ausnahme).”¹⁷ This ordering of space begs a question, however: Why doesn’t Agamben theorize the state of exception in relation to American Indians in the first place? It is striking, if not unanticipated, that all three of his presidential examples played a significant role in ordering the historical landscape that stretched beyond the text of Roosevelt’s executive order instituting internment camps that in itself serves as exemplary exception within Agamben’s text. The Colorado River Indian Reservation was created by an act of Congress signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in , and on November , , President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order remapping the boundaries of the CRIR to steal , acres for miners and cattlemen in the region.¹⁸ In  Roosevelt appointed John Collier to the Office of Indian Affairs to implement the “Indian New Deal” in the form of the Indian Reorganization Act, and on February , , his order set the stage for the Colorado River Indian Reservation to house an internment camp through which Collier planned to wage his war for democracy in the form of the doctrine of self-governance that was the basis for his administration over colonized indigenous nations. Linking Japanese American experiences of the state of exception that was internment to American Indian history allows us to scrutinize the theoretical blind spots within critical philosophy and postcolonial theory and identify the discourses of colonialism that facilitated the violation of Japanese American civil rights. The bare life that the internment camps reveal is the life of U.S. colonialism laid bare in all its settler/native dialectical glory. Such an observation allows for a reordering of the colonial This content downloaded from 45.36.152.108 on Wed, 13 May 2020 08:13:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 192  KILLING STATES logics that underpin the United States’ internment of Japanese Americans and locates its source in the prior colonization of indigenous peoples. As both captives and settlers, interned Japanese Americans are forced to play out in an abridged trajectory the U.S. frontier discourses, in which the only way to become “true” American citizens is to first go native and then carve democracy out of the wilderness. That Japanese American labor is used by Collier to tame the desert and make it productive allows the United States to enforce the frontier as the site of exception that proves the norm for U.S. colonial democracy and at the same time enacts in microcosm the progessivist history that leads civilization out of savagery. But the problem of the sovereign is not necessarily just the state of exception but the project of democracy itself. Agamben hints at this in Homo Sacer, when he implies that “Western politics is a biopolitics from the very beginning, and that every attempt to found political liberties in the rights of the citizens is, therefore, in vain” and that observation supports Wendy Brown’s critique of liberal politics that seek, through injury, recourse from the state and in the process serve to negate the originary violence in Benjamin’s delineation of law-making and law-preserving violence.¹⁹ Collier has come to epitomize the ambivalent colonial administrator whose efforts to reform the government-to-government relationship that provides the basis for the continued U.S. occupation of indigenous lands mark a fundamental shift in U.S. colonial administration. According to Vine Deloria Jr., John Collier was “probably the greatest of all Indian commissioners,” and much of the scholarship about his role as commissioner of the Office of Indian Affairs tends to frame Collier as a liberal prophetic politician who embodied the social welfare vision of Roosevelt’s administration—though in Deloria’s case, that praise may be faint given that most Indian commissioners were devastating to indigenous nations.²⁰ Even Ruth Okimoto came to appreciate Collier and found his decision to use Japanese American internment to realize his plans for the Colorado River Indian Reservation to be a “brilliant organizational move.”²¹ John Collier was ultimately contradictory in his fundamental support of indigenous communities and peoples. On the one hand, he greatly esteemed indigenous cultures, communities, and spiritual traditions, especially in the Southwest; on the other, he thought that there was a vacuum in indigenous governance in most communities that needed to be redressed through the imposition of democratic and bureaucratic structures.²² FunThis content downloaded from 45.36.152.108 on Wed, 13 May 2020 08:13:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms KILLING STATES  193 damentally, Collier, in his own words, believed American Indian democracies to be deeper and thicker democracies than those of the West, that they represented “the long hope” for humanity. “They had what the world has lost,” Collier wrote at the beginning of his  Indians of the Americas, “they have it now. What the world has lost, the world must have again, lest it die.”²³ That lost ingredient for Collier was “the power for living” in the face of bare life, and he advocated that “if the modern world should be able to recapture this power, the earth’s natural resources and web of life would not be irrevocably wasted within the twentieth century, which is the prospect now. True democracy, founded in neighborhoods and reaching over the world, would become the realized heaven on earth. And living peace—not just an interlude between wars—would be born and would last through ages.”²⁴ In many ways, then, this sentiment of “true democracy” that arises out of “the power for living” is what led Collier to address Japanese American internees at Poston Camp on June , , and speak of a “pale promise of democracy” that would spark real Democracy out of the shadows of struggle and endurance. This pale promise resided in Collier’s administrative vision and idea that the U.S. could manage difference best and most benignly by deploying self-management and indirect, bilateral colonialist regimes to construct a permanent security state to manage indigenous peoples, internal minorities, and overseas territorial holdings.²⁵ With only eight years separating the implementation of the Indian Reorganization Act from Roosevelt’s Executive Order , Collier expanded his vision of colonial administration to include indigenous and racial minorities alike as he advocated for reconsideration of self-government as a tool for assimilative incorporation. Collier’s vision for the IRA, which provides the cornerstone for the federal recognition and nation-to-nation status of indigenous nations colonized by the United States, reveals the syllogistic fallacy at the heart of such policies, that because the IRA reestablished the language of self-governance, the act recognized indigenous nations as sovereign entities rather than as racial, ethnic communities who would one day be assimilated into the U.S. body politic. The implications for American Indian studies and our reliance on the Indian Reorganization Act to provide the language of government-to-government sovereignty and self-determination are profoundly eclipsed by the intersection of colonial and racist agendas that collude to oppress on the one hand and offer This content downloaded from 45.36.152.108 on Wed, 13 May 2020 08:13:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 194  KILLING STATES the seductive recognitions that maintain state hegemony on the other. The intersection of Collier’s administrative colonialism with his affirmation of self-government served the larger agenda of furthering liberal democracy that sought to bring the world into U.S. alignment. And as Justice Robert Jackson observed in his dissention to the Korematsu decision that upheld the constitutionality of Japanese American relocation, the loaded weapon in the law created in part by the juridical principle of stare decisis, which Robert A. Williams Jr. defines as “like cases should be decided alike,” facilitates a transit of colonial subjectivities across which “Indianness” becomes a homology emptied of indigenous contexts and content.²⁶ These contexts are then, through the logics of settler colonialism, spatially, physically, and psychically mapped onto other arrivants and trajectories. Such processes lead to what Ruth Okimoto rightly recognizes as “a brief moment in history [in which] the Japanese American detainees experienced what the American Indians have endured for centuries” but absents why that might be.²⁷ And while many scholars locate those intersections in Dillon Myer’s reign first in the War Relocation Authority and then in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where he implemented policies of relocation and termination in the s, Collier shoulders his own responsibilities for implementing and advocating a process of “democratizing the enemy” that sought to layer the U.S. colonial administration of colonized Indian nations onto first Japanese American citizens and then Pacific Island holdings at the end of the war.²⁸ Next stop, the world. In other words, Collier intended to enact a third space of sovereignty that functioned as a state of exception, the establishing of the outside in order to facilitate its reincorporation, for indigenous nations, recent immigrants, and newly acquired territories at the end of the war that would allow not-quite-citizens to be formally recaptured through the maintenance of the colonialist logics that cohered U.S. territory into the nationstate. When Japanese Americans are forced by Collier into the third space of sovereignty, however, what happens to American Indians nations is an extension of the egalitarian processes that David Kazanjian has termed the colonizing trick, whereby Indians become colonists, Japanese Americans Indians.²⁹ And in the process, the entire territorial conquest that is the basis for U.S. hegemony is elided, and the colonization of indigenous peoples is then abjected outside the dialectics of settler/native and into a now movable and infinitely repeatable state of assimilation through exception.
TOP – Yusoff
The world itself has now become encompassed in a geological meta ontology that eliminates subaltern heterogeneity. A refusal to grapple with the material and representational excess of Empire is not neutral but remains integral for endless military interventions, rampant unchecked economic growth, and the dispossession of subaltern peoples across the world. You should reject this genocidal way of knowing the world in favor of a new geo-aesthetic: one that restructures our temporal and material affiliations through a decolonization of spatiality.
YUSOFF 17. [Kathryn Yussof, Reader in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on geophilosophy, political aesthetics, and the Anthropocene, “Epochal Aesthetics: Affectual Infrastructures of the Anthropocene” https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/121847/epochal-aesthetics-affectual-infrastructures-of-the-anthropocene/] //EJ
The Anthropocene renders visible new architectures of time and matter, both sedimenting existing genealogies of global-world-space and radically reorganizing an imagination of the scope and material duration of what the human is in and through time. The idealized architectures of social formations that have hitherto been thought of as purely “social” structures are now beginning to betray their subtended geologies. Unraveling the fantasies of growth without accumulation, the global effects of climate change and resource depletion suggest that there is no accumulation without dispossession in both social or geological worlds. This new vision of the geologic underpinnings of social formations suggests that the “standing stock” of matter was never a suitable means to theorize how the geo and social hook up, or come to matter, nor does it adequately account for the full reach of those geosocial formations into time and sub-surface matter. Ruination of the future, it seems, is as a much a product of the subtended infrastructures of architectural projects as it is of these interventions themselves. Or, to put it another way, what was once imagined and imaged as extraneous and external to the rational projects of materializing late modernity might now seem to have found it had a missing substratum. The substratum of the technosphere—the output of contemporary enterprise—has a central claim in accounts of the Anthropocene’s material geographies. Waste sites, mining shafts and extraction zones are imagined as the new museums of humanity, alongside the more affectual and accumulative material registers of pollution, toxicity and climate shifts. More than the by-products of social projects and industrial practices, such chemical and atmospheric modes of ruination are producing their own unique traces or architectural fossils in the Earth in the form of coral bleachings, plasticized rocks and carbon dioxide measurements. The accumulation of new mineralogical arrangements and organic-inorganic composites in the flow of geologic matter provides the evidential base for the Anthropocene. This new intemperate science of fossilization is generating the technofossils of the future. Everything from the occurrence of McDonalds, Dairy Queen and Walmart chains to changes in nitrogen and carbon cycles position the geologies of the present into interlocking geosocial architectures. We might imagine the term “architecture” to refer to the organization of the material structures of space and its temporal patterning; or, how the material mediation of space orders a specific temporal indexing. These new empirics of sedimentation, of rapidly destratifying and restratifying social, economic and mineral practices, are rearranging the global dynamics of the bio and geosphere. This suggests that the old artifacts of Earth that constituted the imagination of global-world-space are overly reliant on a stable material foundation and therefore a temporal location. In this sense, the Anthropocene as a new rendering of time, subjectivity and agency announces both a break in and consolidation of modernity’s te

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