Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition by Glen Sean Coulthard (review)

COULTHARD’S FUNDAMENTAL INSIGHT is that we urgently need a new theory and practice of settler decolonization. What we have is profoundly insufficient, and while everyone knows that dysfunctional indigenous communities need something, Coulthard’s merit is to be absolutely clear about what is required: decolonized futures arising from a revolutionary rupture. This is not a proposition without consequence, because for thinking the intimate relationship linking decolonization and revolution there’s nothing better than returning to Frantz Fanon. This is indeed not a book without consequence, and Coulthard delivers a veritable decolonizing manifesto. Red Skin, White Masks begins with a systematic criticism of what we have, the liberal “politics of recognition” and their normalizing universalism premised on one-way processes of inclusion within Western liberal epistemes, processes that in many fundamental respects look very much like old-style assimilation processes, and ends with what we need to accomplish: a capacity for indigenous self-affirmation that will ultimately enable “Indigenous resurgences” (unlike Coulthard, but in a very Coulthardian move that also rejects the politics of recognition, I recommend using “indigenous” in its lowercased form: as indigenous claims are premised on specific relationships to place, there is more decolonizing strength in the adjective that in the noun—nouns, after all, are eminently moveable). And for thinking the self-affirmation of colonized subjectivities there is nothing better than returning to Fanon.

Red Skin, White Masks is too important an intervention to be summarized in 750 words, and readers should not be content with a descriptive outline of its constituent parts. Rather than attempting a summary of the ways in which Coulthard arrives at his conclusions, in the following remarks I aim to engage with its achievement.

I referred above to “what we need to achieve.” It is in this formulation that lies my (partial) disagreement with Coulthard’s theory of settler decolonization. I am a settler and I know I am on indigenous land even when I am home, but I think there’s still a “we” in a decolonizing future. If Coulthard’s insight is that indigenous “resurgences” are necessarily premised on the self-affirmation of indigenous subjectivities, and that this self-affirmation must be independent of settler recognition, my suggestion is that under settler colonialism it is the settler that is affected by profound psychopathologies. This latter notion is not aimed at displacing Coulthard’s focus on indigenous self-affirmation, but should parallel it. Policy has traditionally focused in settler polities on changing indigenous communities, their behavior, and their relationship with surrounding social milieus or with settler institutional settings. It is time we begin thinking about ways to change the settler and his way of being (I use “his” advisedly: as settler colonial regimes are especially about the reproduction of one sociopolitical body in the place of another, they are inevitably profoundly gendered). Reverting the focus of settler policy is needed as much as indigenous resurgence.

Similarly, the “we” contained in “what we need to achieve” questions Coulthard’s vision of indigenous–settler relationships. Under settler colonialism the settler demand has consistently been for the indigenous “problem,” or for the indigenous person, to disappear. In fundamental ways, the settler imagination of unproblematic futures has always aimed at the ultimate discontinuation of indigenous–settler relationships. Coulthard’s neglect of the settler beyond welcoming them as potential “allies” looks very much like that discontinuation. Decolonized futures should be futures where the indigenous–settler relationship remains meaningful and ongoing. In other words, if indigenous communities need “resurgences,” and they do, settlers need therapy (for this, one may even return to Fanon, after all he was a gifted psychiatrist). I am not saying something particularly new. No usurper copes well with a reminder of his ultimate illegitimacy and foreclosure is not a viable or sustainable option—everyone knows that what is foreclosed sooner or later comes back to haunt.

The decolonization of settler colonialism as a mode of domination should proceed, I believe, on...