Wielding Words Like Weapons by Ward Churchill

Author:Ward Churchill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2017-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

Originally published in Jun Xing and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, eds., Reversing the Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender, and Sexuality Through Film (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003). It was and remains dedicated to Leah Renae Kelly, film student extraordinaire.

ELEVEN

Distorted Images and Literary Appropriations

Gretchen Bataille’s Native American Representations

That colonizing societies invariably produce self-serving (mis)representations of the “Others” they colonize has long been a theoretical commonplace. That such deliberate distortions of reality serve to dehumanize the colonially subjugated, rationalizing thereby the system of colonial domination and licensing the colonizers—in their own minds, at least—to indulge in whatever range of exploitative practices they desire, without regard to the well-being—or even survival—of the colonized, is by now equally well understood. Indeed, it has been pointed out that imposition of colonial order quite literally requires demolition of autochthonous existence among the colonized. Thus do we encounter Sartre’s 1967 equation of colonialism to genocide.1

While a great deal of work has been done since publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism with respect to the psychointellectual/literary “othering” at work within classic imperial processes,2 these have been undertaken from an all but exclusively “postcolonialist” perspective and have therefore focused upon the Third World contexts of Africa, Asia, and, to a significantly lesser extent, Iberoamerica. Comparatively little emphasis has been placed on North America—or places like Australia and New Zealand—in this connection, and almost none upon the planetary array of indigenous peoples composing what has been aptly referred to as a “Fourth” or “Host” World.3

The latter term seems especially appropriate insofar as each of the other three “worlds” have of necessity constructed themselves squarely atop the fourth. It follows that worlds one-through-three can be sustained only through exercise of a perpetual and “internal” sort of colonial dominion over the native peoples they’ve subsumed. This is the bedrock sociopolitical/economic arrangement defining not only settler states like the U.S. and Canada,4 but also such ostensibly decolonized Third World countries as India, Nigeria, and Brazil, each of whose borders were originally fixed by Europe’s imperial powers, and whose ongoing territorial integrity is entirely contingent upon usurpation/dispossession of the indigenous nations situated therein.5 The same can be said of nominally “anti-imperialist” Second World configurations like Vietnam and the People’s Republic of China.6

In substance, while decolonization has yet to be seriously attempted in any First World settler state, it remains for the most part dramatically incomplete throughout the second and third worlds, where colonialism did not so much “end” as it changed form because of the multitudinous “national liberation struggles” carried out from 1945 to 1975.7 Viewed from this perspective, notions of “postcoloniality” are truly insidious. In consigning colonialism itself to the past tense—that is, of denying its contemporary existence and consequent relevance—“postcolonial discourse” is not simply misguided or inappropriate (much less, “liberatory”). Rather, its function is hegemonic, reinforcing the conceptual apparatus by which colonialism in its present form(s) is naturalized and thus legitimated.8

The implications of all this in terms of representation are profound. Fortunately, a relative handful of activist/scholars—most but by no means all of whom are themselves “Fourth Worlders”—have lately begun to confront the matter head on.

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