We open with a myth of origins, since all origins are, by necessity, a myth.

The myth is one of many, the myth is not the map, the map is not the topic, and the
topic is not the ocean. Our ocean is not your ocean – our ocean is the ocean of the
dayunsi and the Choctaw, not the map and the sword.
Weaver 14 (Jace, Franklin Professor of Native American Studies and the Director of the Institute of
Native American Studies at the University of Georgia, The Red Atlantic, The University of North Carolina
Press, March 17,)
In the 1850s, Pitchlynn told a story of the Choctaw people’s origins to an American traveler named Charles Lanman. As recorded by Lanman,
Pitchlynn related, “According to the traditions of the Choctaws, the first of their race came from the bottom
of a magnificent sea. Even when they first made their appearance upon the earth they were so numerous as to cover the sloping and
sandy shore of the ocean, far as the eye could reach, and for a long time did they follow the margin of the sea before they could find a place
suited to their wants.” But sickness and death visited them on the coast, and their chief, “a prophet of great age
and wisdom,” told them to march north. “Their journey lay across streams, over hills and mountains, through tangled forests, and over
immense prairies. They were now in an entirely strange country.” They continued their migration away from the coast until they reached a
“great highway of water.” They crossed the river and found a land of perfect climate, “surpassing loveliness,” and “the greatest abundance.”
There they settled and remained.22 Lanman’s retelling of Pitchlynn’s account was included by anthropologist John Swanton in his 1931 report
to the Bureau of American Ethnology. Swanton states that, according to Lanman, the bodies of water alluded to in the “legend” are the Gulf of
Mexico and the Mississippi River. The anthropologist also notes that Pitchlynn’s account is the only version known to him in which the Choctaw
the Choctaw have multiple origination stories—or creation
emerge from under the ocean.23 Like many Native nations,
myths24—which may not always be easily recIntroduction 13 oncilable with each other. Another such
tribe is the Cherokee, also from what is today the American Southeast. The most commonly recited
Cherokee creation myth is what is known as an earthdiver myth. Such stories, among the most
prevalent protology stories for American Indians, follow a common pattern, which again involves a sea.
In the time before time , the entire world was covered by water . The human beings and the animals—the other-
than-human persons—all lived above the vault of the sky. That realm became crowded, and the creatures looked for a place to go. Someone
asked about the watery realm below. Someone else offered that was fine for the finned people, but others needed something solid upon which
dayun’si, Beaver’s Grandchild, the water
to stand. Finally, according to the Cherokee telling, the most insignificant among them,
beetle, stepped forward and offered to investigate. Descending to the earth’s watery surface, the
water beetle dived down into the primordial sea . Deeper and deeper he went. At last, he could hold
his breath no more. He passed out and floated back to the surface, but he had reached the ocean floor
and a little bit of mud clung to his leg. When he reached the surface, the mud on his leg spread out and
formed all the lands of the world. This “earthdiver” myth is the most commonly told and discussed Cherokee origin story. Yet
the Cherokee also preserve a migration story, relating that the people came to their historical home after a journey across the “great water.”
Some interpret this myth as about migration across the Bering Strait land bridge that at the time of the last ice age spanned Siberia and Alaska.
Others see it as a distant memory of a time when the Cherokee lived in the lake-filled north, much closer to their cousins the Iroquois. It is said
that in the migration, five of the twelve clans of the Cherokee were lost (the Cherokee today being seven clans), and the great quest of the tribe
is to find their missing brethren and reunite all the People. There is, however, a different Cherokee migration myth and an interpretation that
more directly involves the Atlantic. Some hundred and fifty years after Peter Pitchlynn discussed Choctaw origins with Charles Lanman, Hastings
Shade, a former deputy principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, told Cherokee scholar Christopher Teuton the story of “The journey of the Four
Directions,” a story preserved, particularly, by the traditionalist Keetoowah Society. 14 Introduction In that time before time, all the Cherokees
lived on an island “surrounded by water that was undrinkable.” One day, the island began to shake. The mountains opened up with fire. Then
the island started to sink beneath the water. They sent out seven detachments, corresponding to the seven clans of the Cherokee, to migrate to
eloh’egwa, the “main island.” It took a long time, but on the fourth day, they reached the top of a tall mountain. They looked back and saw
their island sink beneath the waves. Shade’s account continues, “And that’s when the journey to the cold started. They didn’t say ‘north,’ they
says [sic] ‘cold.’ And they say they journeyed north, you know, this group. Some of them stayed, some came on, and they found a place, you
know, of barren lands and fertile lands. Some stayed, some came on. That’s the way this migration happened as they headed toward the
cold.”25 Here is a story not of nomadic big game hunters following prey across the Bering Strait land bridge, nor of Natives moving either
purposefully or in inadvertent drift away from a northern core population. Shade’s origin story tells of the necessity of abandoning an island
home in the Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico in the face of volcanic eruption to seek safety in what became known as traditional Cherokee country.
Pitchlynn’s and Shade’s stories thus parallel each other, separated by a century and a half: one for the Choctaw and the other for the Cherokee.
 I want to posit a
Both speak of origins in the Atlantic, though historically neither tribe was associated with that watery body. In this book,
historical reality that 1 have already invoked several times in prior pages related to this great body of water. I want to
discuss the “ Red Atlantic.”

The “development” developed Europe at the expense of indigenous peoples. The

historic root of the topic is a legacy of genocidal violence that our scholarship must
address
Weaver 11
(Jace, Franklin Professor of Native American Studies and the Director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia,
The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, Summer 2011, online: The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and
the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927, March 17, online:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_indian_quarterly/v0315/35.3.weaver01.pdf)

It is certainly true, as I have written before, that all of us, as scholars and as human beings, have our own particular blinders. It begs saying,
however, that in the processes of colonization and empire, it was not only “Indians” who were slaughtered, Asians not the only ones
indentured, and Africans not the only ones enslaved. Gilroy may not mention Diallo, but he does reference Crispus Attucks “at the head of his
‘motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars’” at the Boston Massacre.4 Yet he fails to note that
Attucks was Native, his mother a Massachuset. In 2001 historian David Armitage wrote: Until quite recently, Atlantic history seemed to be
available in any color, so long as it was white. To be sure, this was the history of the North Atlantic rather than the South Atlantic, of Anglo-
America rather than Latin America, and of the connections between North America and Europe rather than of those between both Americas
and Africa. The origins of this history of the white Atlantic have been traced back to anti-isolationism in the United States during the Second
World War and to the internationalism of the immediate postwar years, when historians constructed histories of “the Atlantic civilization” just
The Atlantic Ocean was the Mediterranean of a
as politicians were creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
western civilization defi ned as Euro-American and (for the fi rst time, in the same circles) as “Judeo-
Christian.” It was therefore racially , if not necessarily ethnically, homogeneous. Such uniformity was
the product of selectivity. Like many genealogists, these early proponents of Atlantic history overlooked
inconvenient or uncongenial ancestors. Students of the black Atlantic, from W. E. B. Du Bois to C. L. R.
James and Eric Williams, were not recognized as fellow practitioners of the history of the Atlantic world,
just as Toussaint L’Ouverture’s rebellion was not an event in R. R. Palmer’s Age of Democratic
Revolution.5 The development of Armitage’s “white Atlantic” history thus parallels the Cold War origins of
American studies with its mission to defi ne and promote “American culture” or “American civilization.” Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, published
nearly fi fty years later, served as a necessary corrective. Armitage’s statement leads his review of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s
important The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. In the piece, he refers to
the “red Atlantic,” by which he means “red” as in radical.6 In Native American/American Indian studies, I have been identifi ed, both by others
and by self-profession, as a “nationalist.” In this essay, without abandoning, rejecting, or betraying my nationalism in any way (and I’ll return to
this in my conclusion), I want to take a cosmopolitan turn. I want to posit and discuss the “Red Atlantic.” Gilroy subtitles his monograph
Modernity and Double Consciousness. It has long ago become a commonplace—though a much contested one—that the year 1492, with the
Catholic monarchs’ expulsion of the Moors (and subsequently Jews) from the Iberian Peninsula, the resultant rise of the nation-state, and
Columbus’s fi rst voyage, marks the beginning point of modernity.7 There is a reason, as much as some passionately argue to reject the term,
that the Americas were called the “New World.” For those who came to the Western Hemisphere from Europe, it was, to borrow a Disney-
musical expression, “a whole new world.” Today, almost half of the world’s table vegetables originated in this hemisphere and were cultivated
and eaten by indigenes of the Americas. Algonkian Indians had to show English colonists how to cultivate corn (one of those vegetables). Incans
had to perform the same service with potatoes for Spanish conquistadors. And there were twenty-pound lobsters washing up on New England
beaches as the Pilgrims starved until Indians showed them how to eat them. (But as I always tell my students, the Pilgrims contributed melted
butter, so it was a fair cultural exchange.)8
Beyond fruits and vegetables or foodstuffs more generally, America’s peoples provided chocolate and
tobacco, to which Europeans adapted themselves in great number. The looted American wealth fueled
the development of a resource-depleted Europe. Not only colonists but those who remained in the
newly minted “Old World” came to defi ne themselves by comparison with, and in opposition to, the
indigenous Other . While Natives were not part of a Triangle Trade, as were black Africans, and while
they experienced nothing in transoceanic shipment as horrifi c as the Middle Passage, they were
nonetheless enslaved and shipped abroad in numbers that are startling to most. Many died in the
process. And the Atlantic became a multilane, two-way bridge that American indigenes traveled back
and forth in surprising numbers.
In his book Indians in Unexpected Places, Phil Deloria discusses “expectations” and “anomalies.”
Focusing on the non-Native expectations at the turn of the twentieth century, he asks “how we might
revisit the actions of Indian people that have been all too easily branded as anomalous. . . . I want to
make a hard turn from anomaly to frequency and unexpectedness.” 9 While I appreciate this
interpretative maneuver, I want to go further and suggest that from the earliest moments of European/
Native contact in the Americas to 1800 and beyond, Indians, far from being marginal to the Atlantic
experience, were, in fact, as central as Africans. Native resources, ideas, and peoples themselves
traveled the Atlantic with regularity and became among the most basic defi ning components of
Atlantic cultural exchange.

The history of the indigenous has been silenced, their languages wiped out, through
the domination of transatlantic modernity and renders them an ahistorical other.
CONFRONTATION with this historical reality DISRUPTS linear notions of progress and
offers a SURVIVAL strategy in the face of GENOCIDE
Flint 09 (Kate, Provost Professor of English and Art History at USC, The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930,
Princeton University Press, pages 23-25)
Nineteenth-century transatlantic studies are a huge and complex terrain, and their importance is
increasingly being acknowledged, despite the disciplinary binarization that takes place on both sides of the
Atlantic. Too frequently, the internal organization of our national academies has meant that British and American studies have been
regarded as separate entities, failing to enter into sufficient dialogue with one another. This book adds to the calls that have already been made
by Joseph Roach to pay full attention to the "amplitude of circum-Atlantic relations,"51 and by Paul Giles to acknowledge how "conceptions of
national identity on both sides of the Atlantic emerged through engagement with - and, often, deliberate exclusion of - transatlantic
imaginary."52 Focusing on the figure of the Native American in this context brings a number of advantages with it. In the first place, it grants
Indians a part not previously fully acknowledged in relation to the field.53 They have the important roles as subjects of fascination, as figures of
dread, and as symbol of a difference that is complicated and sometimes contradictory amalgam of national and racial components. From a
British point of view, the fact that narratives made them particularly malleable figures. As this book seeks to show, the national Indian could be
readily adapted, in a number of disparate contexts, to demonstrate a great range of clichés, presuppositions, considered analyses, and
hypotheses about the nature both of the United States and the Americas more broadly. Most frequently, the Indian served the role of
an ahistorical Other against which various narratives of modernity could readily be written.
But examining transatlantic relations from the single forms only part of my project, for Indians had
a varied and significant presence in Britain and were analytical, commentating voices in their own right. They not only provided a
particular slant, or slants, on British society, but were living proof that, in their capacity to react and respond to modern life, they refused to be
cosigned to the role of the mythical and prehistorical that was so frequently assigned them. Despite the frequent and familiar need of the
modern to erect ideas of the temporal Other against which it could define itself, this Other was also undergoing a process of transformation. Of
course, this is, in broad terms, a point made very familiar through contemporary histories of postcoloniality. But there are some significant
differences. Native American contacts with British culture in the Victorian period demonstrate not only transformation on the part of the
Indians, but also well-articulated resistance to the process of appropriation and assimilation that equate with cultural genocide. These
Indians are quite definitely not allowing themselves to be cosigned to oblivion, nor to occupy the mythical
status of the time-less, but see themselves as members of a race that has every intention of surviving.
Engagement in this transatlantic contact zone is unequivocally a two-way process, unfolding in a way that
disrupts those apparently neat binaries of "traditional" and "modern" on which conventional narratives of
national progress have depended. Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic,54 explores how at a slightly later
date, in the context of African American culture, we see modernities evolving on several fronts
simultaneously and at several, nonsynchronic speeds.55 Looking at the Victorian period, we see how in
what we may call the space of the Red Atlantic, the process is already well underway.
White supremacy homogenizes all oppressed people through the construction of a
black-and-white binary. The reduction of the Settler to the Slave constitutes one of its
ideological foundations. This is constituted under US policies towards these others.
Shohat 11 (Ella, Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University; In 2010, she was awarded a Fulbright
research/lectureship at the University of Sao Paulo. Race in Translation p. 2-3)//AA
Our invocation of a “Red,” “Black,” and “White” Atlantic is not meant to detract from the work performed under the
rubric of the “Black Atlantic,” but rather to place that blackness within a relational spectrum that also embraces the metaphorical
“redness” of indigenous America and, in a very different way, the metaphorical “whiteness” of Europe and Euro-America.
Colonialism and slavery completely transformed racial, national, and cultural identities in what might be called the “Rainbow Atlantic.” Colonial
conquest turned an extremely heterogeneous group of indigenous peoples—formerly defined as Tupi, Carib, Arawak, Mohawk, Peguot, and so
forth—into generic “Reds” and turned an equally heterogeneous group of Africans—formerly named Kong, Hausa, Yoruba—into generic
“blacks,” all under the domination of a motley crew of Europeans—Spanish, English, Dutch, French—now turned into generic Whites, thus
The cultures of the Atlantic are thus
forging the constitutive Red/White/Black demographic triad typical of the Americas.
not only Black and White; they are also figuratively Red. Even slavery was “Red” in that in the
Americas the indigenous peoples were kidnapped and enslaved before the Africans. In Brazil, both
Red and Black groups were called “negros”: enslaved natives were “Negros da Terra” (Blacks from the Land) as opposed
to “Negros da Guinee” (Blacks from Guinea, Africa). At times, one enslaved group was used to replace another, as
when bandeirantes from Sao Paulo enslaved one hundred thousand “indios” to compensate for the loss of
enslaved Africans during the suspension of the slave trade between 1625 and 1650. Colonialism, conquest, slavery,
and multiculturality are thus inextricably linked. The Atlantic world became syncretic and hybrid
precisely because of these violent transcontinental processes. As tropes of color, the concepts of a “Red,”
“Black,” and “White” Atlantic cast a prismatic light on a shared history. While “Black Atlantic” evokes the Middle Passage and the African
diaspora, the notion of a “Red Atlantic” registers not only the dispossession of indigenous peoples by Europeans but also the impact of
indigenous ideas on European thinking. The
settler colonialism that dispossessed the “Red” and the racial
slavery that exploited the “Black” were the twin machines of racial supremacy. Yet the relations
between Red and Black and White were always unstable. Red and Black could ally against White or collaborate with White against the Black or
the Red.
White supremacy, as David Roediger puts it, “situated itself at some times in opposition to a ‘red’
other and at others to a ‘black’ one.”2 Stances on imperialism were also conjunctural. A French observer such as Alexis de
Tocqueville could urge French imperialists in Africa to look not to the U.S. treatment of the Black but rather to U.S. treatment of the Red as a
model. During the Conquest of Mexico, American racists would argue about whether Mexicans were Black or Red; what was important to the
racists was that they not be White.

A crucial axis for Native identity is control over language – and the rejection of the
legal method of Definitions and Limits is key to resist Genocidal assimilation and
Rhetorical Imperialism
Lyons 00
Scott Richard Lyons (Ojibwe/Mdewakanton Dakota) teaches communication at Leech Lake; Tribal College on his home reservation in northern
Minnesota. He is also a Ph.D. candidate at Miami University of Ohio, currently completing a dissertation on American Indian rhetoric. Rhetorical
Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing? Author(s): Scott Richard LyonsSource: College Composition and Communication,
Vol. 51, No. 3 (Feb., 2000), pp. 447-468Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/358744
These arbitrary, meaningless names were selected by students who were given a pointer by the teacher; the chosen name was then written on
cloth and sewed on the back of each student's shirt. Standing Bear recalls how the first boy to choose a name looked back at the others "as
much as to say... 'Is it right for me to take a white man's name?' " (Sioux 137). But Standing Bear himself "took the pointer and acted as if I were
about to touch an enemy" (Sioux 137), counting coup on the text, so to speak, and probably eliciting laughter in support of his mock bravery
from the other kids. "Soon we all had names of white men sewed on our backs" (Sioux 137). That laughter, which is not in Standing Bear's book
but remains my guess, my de-sire, would nonetheless be short-lived, as is known by anyone familiar with the board-ing school story. As David
Wallace Adams tells it in Education for Extinction, this tale "constitutes yet another deplorable episode in the long and tragic history of Indian-
white relations"-specifically, the development of education designed to promote "the eradication of all
traces of tribal identity and culture, replacing them with the commonplace knowledge and values of
 white civilization " (336, 335). This forced re-placement of one identity for another, a cultural violence
enabled in part through acts of physical violence, was in so many ways located at the scene of writing.
More horrific than most scenes of writ-ing, however, the boarding school stands out as the ultimate
symbol of white domination, even genocide, through as- similation in the American Indian
experience. And although Standing Bear and others would recall multiple forms of Indian resistance,
from torching schools to run-ning away to counting coup on the Western text, the duplicitous
interrelationships between writing, violence, and colonization developed during the nineteenth-cen-
tury-not only in the boarding schools but at the signings of hundreds of treaties , most of which were
dishonored by whites-would set into motion a persistent dis-trust of the written word in English , one
that resonates in homes and schools and courts of law still today. If our respect for the Word remains resolute, our faith in the written word is
compromised at best. What do Indians want from writing? Certainly something other than the names of white men sewn to our backs. And for
its part, resistance to assimilation through the acts of writing should entail something more than counting coup on the text (or for that matter,
torching the school). I suggest that our highest hopes for literacy at this point rest upon a vision we might name rhetorical sovereignty .
Sovereignty, of course, has long been a contested term in Native discourse, and its shifting meanings over time attest to an ongoing struggle
between Americans and the hundreds of Indian nations that occupy this land. Our claims to sovereignty entail much more than arguments for
tax-exempt status or the right to build and operate casinos; they are nothing less than our attempt to survive and flourish as a people.
Sovereignty is the guiding story in our pursuit of self-determination, the general strategy by which we aim to best recover our losses from the
ravages of colonization: our lands, our languages, our cultures, our self-respect. For indigenous people everywhere, sovereignty is an ideal
principle, the bea-con by which we seek the paths to agency and power and community renewal. Attacks on sovereignty are attacks on what it
enables us to pursue; the pursuit of sovereignty is an attempt to revive not our past, but our possibilities. Rhetorical sovereignty is
the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires
in this pursuit, to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse .
Placing the scene of writing squarely back into the particular contin-gency of the Indian rhetorical situation, rhetorical sovereignty requires of
writing teach-ers more than a renewed commitment to listening and learning; it also requires a radical rethinking of how and what we
teach as the written word at all levels of schooling, from preschool to graduate curricula and beyond. In what follows, I hope to sketch out some preliminary notes
toward the praxis that is rhetorical sovereignty. I begin with a discus-sion of the concept of sovereignty, followed by a dialogue between the fields of composi-tion
and rhetoric and Native American studies, concluding with some very general recommendations for expanding our canons and curricula. My argument is motivated
in part by my sense of being haunted by that little boy's backward glance to those other In-dian children: Is it rightfor me to take a white man's name? Sovereignty
is (also) rhetorical Sovereignty, as I generallyu se and understandt he term, denotes the right of a people to conduct its own affairs, in its own place, in its own way.
The concept of sovereignty origi-nated in feudal Europe, and as a term it arrived to the English language by way of France; souverain signified a ruler accountable to
no one save himself or God (Duchacek 47). Early modern European monarchs employed the language of sovereignty to secure their grip on state power in the face
of a threatening nobility and papacy. A declaration of one's right to rule, a monarch's claim to sovereignty "stood as a ringing assertion of absolute political authority
at home, one that could imply designs on territory abroad" (Fowler and Bunck 5). As modern nations and states underwent their various forms of development, the
con-cept was consistently deployed to address not only domestic authority at home but a state's relative independence from and among other Rhetorical
sovereigntyist h ei nherentrig ht and abilityof p eoplesto d eterminethe iro wn communicativeneed s andd esires. states; thus, sovereignty came to mean something
systemic and relational. A sovereign's power was generally a force understood in relation to other sovereigns in the emerging in-ternational scene; hence, "a
sovereign was to respect the sovereignty of its peers" (Fowler and Bunck 6). As political institutions continued to develop under modernity, the mean-ings of
sovereignty changed with them, signifying such matters as the right to make and enforce laws, notions of political legitimacy and international recognition, and
national self-determination. While the meanings of sovereignty have shifted and continue to shift over time, the concept has nonetheless carried with it a sense of
locatable and rec-ognizable power. In fact, the location of power has depended upon the crucial act of recognition-and vice versa. From the early moments of first
contact on this continent, the construction of In-dian and non-Indian senses of sovereignty was a contested and contradictory process. It was also a rhetorical one.
Although there is no possible way to describe its many and complicated logics in necessary detail here, we can see that for at least two centuries fol-lowing
Columbus, "European states were compelled to recognize and engage Indian na-tions as political actors in their diplomatic activities" (Berman 128). They did this in
large part through making treaties with Indian nations, a process that created a relationship between groupso f"ani nternationalr athert han internalc haracter":'
even in sites of severe colonizing activity (Berman 129). This acknowledged sense of Indian national sover-eignty was so strong among.European states that it
actually became a means of legit-imizing European claims to new world resources; a territorial dispute between the English and the Dutch, say, might be settled by
one side producing a treaty with the sov-ereign nation who actually owned the land (Berman 132). After the American revolu-tion, the United States maintained the
practice of treaty-making with Indian nations begun by European powers, and "from the beginning of its political existence, recog-nized a measure of autonomy in
the Indian bands and tribes" (Prucha, Treaties 2). Dur-ing the years 1778-1868, the U.S. signed and ratified some 367 treaties with Indian nations, all of which
presumed a sense of sovereignty on the part of Indian groups. About two-thirds of those treaties were land deals, and as Prucha points out, "cession of Indian lands
... was an indication of Indian sovereignty over those lands, and the recog-nition by the United States of Indian ownership to the lands remaining strengthened the
concept" (Treaties 4). You can't give up what you don't own, after all; nor can you buy what's already yours. However, the Americans would gradually assume a
dominant stance in Indian-white relations, leading to an erosion of Native sovereignty that Prucha credits to over-whelming American military strength, growing
Indian economic dependence on white goods, and treaty provisions that left stipulations to be carried out by Congress (Prucha, Treaties 6-7). After the American
revolution, it wasn't long before the nation-to-nation stance Indians and their interlocutors had operated from was simultaneously attacked and affirmed in a
couple of landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases concerning the Cherokee of Georgia facing removal in the early nineteenth century. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia
(1831), Chief Justice John Marshall's famous pronouncement of the Cherokees as a "domestic dependent nation" constituted the United States' first major,
unilateral reinterpretation of Indian sovereignty, one further tinkered with a year later by the same court in Worcester v. Georgia (1832). In the former opinion,
Marshall deemed the Cherokees limited in their claim to sovereignty, seeing them as a nation not-quite-foreign, but suggested nonetheless that the Cherokees still
formed "a dis-tinct political society, separated by others, capable of managing its own affairs and governing itself" (Prucha, Documents 58). This somewhat glaring
contradiction was explained in the latter decision, where Marshall opined that "Indian nations had always been considered as distinct, independent political
communities, retaining their original natural rights, as the undisputed possessors of the soil, from time immemorial, with the single exception imposed by
irresistible power" (Prucha, Documents 60; emphasis mine). In other words, while recognizing Indian sovereignty in terms we can fairly describe as eternal and
absolute, the Supreme Court's decisions on the Cherokee cases ulti-mately caved in to what would become a persistent, uniquely American, and wholly imperialist
notion of recognition-from-above. The United States could limit Cherokee sovereignty simply because it could, and it could because it is the United States.
American exceptionalism won the day, thanks to its "irresistible power," and while U.S. plenary power
wouldn't become fully articulated in a legal sense until United States v. Kagama in 1886, it found its
rhetorical groundwork laid solidly in the Chero-kee cases of the 1830s. In a sense, these cases
exemplify what we might call rhetorical imperialism : the ability of dominant powers to assert control
of others by setting the terms of debate. These terms are often definitional -that is, they identify the parties
discussed by de-scribing them in certain ways. Take, for example, Marshall's rather self-reflective analy-sis of the language of sovereignty in his
Worcester v. Georgia opinion: ... 'treaty' and' nation' arew ordso f ouro wnl anguage, selectedi n ourd iplomatica ndl eg-islativep roceedings.. .
havinge acha definitea ndw ell-understoodm eaning. Weh avea p-pliedt hemt o Indians, as we havea ppliedt hemt o the othern ationso f the
earth.T heya re appliedt o all in the sames ense.( Prucha, Documents 60) In short, Indians are defined here as fellow nations requiringt reaties.Y
eti n CherokeeN a-tion v. Georgia, Marshall wrote that "the term foreign nation" wasn't quite applicable to Indian nations, suggesting instead
that the Cherokee Nation's "relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian."T his was because Indians-"savages" newly
arrivedo n "civilization's"fr esh path-were "in a state of pupilage"( Prucha,D ocu-ments 59). More than an agonistic legal contest over
sovereign rights, the language of this decision shows Indian people being completely redefined by their interlocutors: a ward or pupil-that is,
a child-is quite a different animal than a fellow nation in the TheU nitedS tatesc ouldli mitC herokee sovereigntysim ply becauseit could,an d it
couldb ecauseit ist heU nitedS tates. community of sovereigns. As the exercise of rhetorical imperialism, Marshall's meta-phors effectively
paved the way for the United States to assume a position of politicalpa-ternalism over Indian nations that has thrived up to this very day-chalk
one up for the "GreatW hite Father." The lesson here seems obvious:n amely,h e who sets the terms sets the limits. And likewise the
rewriting of Indian sovereignty would continue over time. As Pruchap oints out, the word "tribe"in creasinglyc ame to replace" nation"in
treaties,s ub- stituting one highly ideological European word for another, and with the Abolition of Treaty-MakingA ct of 1871, a powerfull ittle
ridert acked on to an Indian appropriations bill that formallye nded the practice of treaty-making," treaties"h enceforth came to be called
"agreements"by the authoringA mericans( Prucha,T reaties4 , 211-13). From" sov-ereign"t o "ward',"fro m "nation"to "tribe:'a nd from "treaty"t
o "agreement," the erosion of Indian national sovereignty can be credited in part to a rhetorically
imperialist use of writing by white powers , and from that point on, much of the discourse on tribal
sover-eignty has nit-picked, albeit powerfully, around terms and definitions.

Through the disappearance of “redness” in our analysis, the Indigenous are subject to
genocide, creating an epistemological extinction.
Carocci & Pratt 12 (Max, co-director of World Arts and Artefacts at the University of London, and
Stephanie, associate professor of Art History at the University of Plymouth, Native American Adoption,
Captivity, and Slavery in Changing Contexts, Palgrave MacMillan, page 7)
As some scholars have often remarked, the purposeful reclassification of the Native Americans as
"black" or "people of color" resulted in a "bureaucratic genocide" that today renders difficult that
reconstruction of a widespread and prolonged history of Native American slavery, bondage, and
serfdom (Herndon and Sekatau 199&). The bureaucratic erasure of Indians from the records of history that have
been trapped in a dualistic framework that has hampered the construction of a more realistic version of the lives of those who
experienced the facts of slavery during colonial times. The unprecedented level of interethnic relations occurring in
the colonial contexts is as important for a reassessment of issues of adoption, captivity, and slavery
across ethnic classifications as are the large movements of peoples that occurred as a result of
European governments' policies, their colonies' own economic development, and individual entrepreneurship. All this gave rise to
a complex web of relocations, resettlements, barter of people, and involuntary migrations that crisscrossed the northern American hemisphere
led to the dissolution of
and the Caribbean area throughout the eighteenth century. Both large- and small-scale movements often
ancient nations, and the creation of new social groupings that invite us to rethink entirely the notion of
"extinction" of peoples. All this had a deep impact on ethnic an group identity as many of the Caribbean and North America enclaves
such as the Westo (Chapter three in this volume) emerged and then "disappeared " from the geohistorical's map during this turbulent times. As
is evident from the essays in this collection, adoption practices became more widespread as colonial powers dissolved entire populations and
shipped the remnants to overseas colonies. The rarely explored population dynamics referred to in this volume call attention to unexpected
centers of human exchange around which developed distinct local and distant peripheries. This is a perspective that can
potentially disrupt a conventional version of economic and political geography generally concerned
with the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade.

This EXPLORATION of the Atlantic depths is the ONLY stasis point. The TIME and
SPACE of the MIDDLE PASSAGE is a map of MOURNING – of BODIES sunk to the
bottom of the Atlantic. OCEANIC EXPLORATION materially embodies the only
ALTERNATIVE to the homogenization of TIME and CONTINUATION of SLAVERY.
DeLoughery 10
Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity Author: Elizabeth DeLoughrey
Source: PMLA, Volume 125, Number 3, May 2010, pp. 703–712 (10)
Keywords: English Caribbean literature; 1900-1999; Twentieth Century; poetry; fiction; Atlantic Ocean; waste; modernity; slavery; American
literature
DOI: 10.1632/pmla.2010.125.3.703 ISSN: 0030-8129 e liz A beth deloughre y , an associate professor in the e n glish department at the u
niversity of c alifornia, l os Angeles, is an editor, with r enée g osson and g eorge h andley, of Caribbean Literature and the Environment:
Between Nature and Culture ( u of Virginia p , 2005). s he is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures
( u of h awai‘i p , 2007), a book that focuses on the trans oceanic imaginary in postcolonial mari time literatures, and she recently coedited, with
g eorge h andley, a forthcoming col lection to be titled Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment ( o xford up
A POEM THAT RENDERS THE SEA AS PEDAGOGICAL HISTORY, LORNA GOODISON'S “ARCTIC, ANTARCTIC, ATLANTIC, PACIFIC, INDIAN OCEAN”
depicts Caribbean schoolchildren learning “the worlds waters rolled into a chant” After shivering through the “cold” Arctic and Antarctic, the
class “suffered [a] sea change” in the destabilizing Atlantic, abandoning the terrestrial stability of their

benches to enter an ocean in which only their voices orient them in time and space as they “call out across / the
currents of hot air” In fathoming what Derek Walcott has called “the sea [as] history, ” their “small bodies” are
“borrowed / by the long drowned” (Goodison). While colonial narratives of maritime expansion have long

depicted the ocean as blank space to be traversed, these students enter Atlantic stasis , a place occupied
by the wasted lives of Middle Passage modernity . This Atlantic is not aqua nullius, circumscribed and mapped by the student
oceanographer, but rather a place where the haunting of the past overtakes the present subject. Edouard Glissant
has described the Atlantic as a “beginning” for modernity, a space “whose time is marked by... balls and chains
gone green” (Poetics 6): a sign of submarine history and its material decay . Thus, Atlantic modernity becomes
legible through the sign of heavy water, an oceanic stasis that signals the dissolution of wasted lives. After the poems
irruptivc consonance of the “bodies borrowed,” the vowels lengthen to mimic a “long drowned” history of the Atlantic, and the narrative is
transformed. Reminding us that the Middle Passage “abyss is a tautology” that haunts ocean modernity (Glissant, Poetics 6),
the poem traps the students (and readers) in the violent corporeal history of the Atlantic . Instead of moving on
to the next ocean of the lesson, the class repeats the word “Atlantic, as if wooden pegs / were forced between our lips; Atlantic, as teacher’s /
strap whipped the rows on.” Only in the last two lines of the poem do we catch a glimpse of other oceans, trapped as we are in “learn[ing] this
lesson: / Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific and then Indian.” Goodison’s poem foregrounds the process of naming global space ( A is for Atlantic)
and our epistemological limits in recording the immensity of ocean history, which, paradoxi cally, is depicted in the
condensed chrono tope of the belly of a slave ship. 1 This tension between the infinity of the sea’s horizon and the
contained “hydrarchy” of the ship (Line baugh and Rediker 143) is a constitutive trope of what I have elsewhere called the “trans­ oceanic
imaginary” (1–44). The poem suggests that rehearsing the
list of the world’s oceans, as they have been partitioned and mapped
through European expansion, does not lead to geographic mastery over space . These “melancholic transatlantic
crossings” require a different epistemology of the ocean (Glis sant, Poetics 6). Constricted by the violence of Atlantic
history, trapped in an abyss that invokes the “tortured sense of time” of the postplantation Americas
(Glissant, Caribbean Discourse 144), the students cannot fathom a world ocean, one that, in nature, flows into the “Pacific
and then Indian” oceans. In learning what Gaston Bachelard has described as the “metapoetics of . . . heavy wa ter” (11, 56), Goodison’s
students never emerge from the violence of the Atlantic to reach a “pacific” space. Here I adopt Bachelard to
 Atlantic inscriptions rupture the naturalizing flow of history , foregrounding a now - time
de scribe how
that registers violence against the wasted lives of modernity in the past and the present. As Zygmunt Bauman argues,
moder nity is constituted by the boundaries erected between the normative and the disposable, re
sulting in an enormous surveillance industry dedicated to policing the borders between citi zens and refugees. He
characterizes our “liquid modernity” as “a civilization of excess, redun dancy, waste and waste disposal” (97), one that
produces
human refugees as “the waste products of globalization” (66). As I’ll explain, this concept of patrolling heavy

waters is vital to interpreting historical and contemporary representations of Atlantic modernity waste, understood as a
material residue of the past as well as the lost lives of transoceanic subjects. Lorna Goodison’s poem condenses many
of the ideas circulating in Caribbean cultural production that imagine the Atlantic as a cathected space of history and a “sea

[of] slavery” (D’Aguiar 3). What David Scott terms the “conscripted modernity” of transatlantic slaves is
distinct from the cosmopolitanism associated with transoceanic travelers who represent the ocean as
aqua nullius , a space of transit in which the sea is barely present , subsumed by the telos of masculine conquest and
adventure. Since the ocean is in perpet ual movement and cannot be easily localized, representations of heavy water
problematize movement and render space into place as a way to memorialize histories of violence and to rupture notions
of progress . These nar ratives merge the human subject of the past and the present, establishing an intimacy
Bachelard associates with the dissolving qual ities of the ocean (6) and a process in which one might salvage the
metaphysical waste of human history. Goodison represents fathom ing the violence of Atlantic history as
leading , not to a liberating mobility, but to the cessa tion of movement across space , an immersion in the
heavy waters of history. When the sea is rendered as slavery, vio lence and mourning are symbolized
by spa tial stasis . Aquatic stasis reflects temporal depth and death ; in fact, water is an element “which
remembers the dead” (Bachelard 56). Moreover, human depth “finds its image in the density of water” (12). Goodison’s poem
invokes the Sargasso Sea, famously inscribed by Jean Rhys as an oceanic morass, an aporia between British and Caribbean ways of know ing and
epistemologies of space. This is like the depiction of Middle Passage stasis in John Hearne’s novel The Sure Salvation ,
where time is distorted, “tricked, frozen by violence” as a slave ship , trapped in the Sargasso, remains for much of the novel
at the “still centre of a huge stillness: pasted to the middle of a galvanized plate that was the sea” (47, 7). While maritime literature generally
depicts movement across ocean space as a trope to generate narrative time, most representations of Atlantic slav ery —from
Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno to Hea r ne’s Sure Salvation — decouple space from time . Narratives of ocean stasis
provide a vital critique of progressive models of capitalist time in which the movement of eighteenth - century

ships on Atlantic slave routes created the mea surement of longitude and , by extension, the homogenization
of global tim e. Representa tions of trans oceanic slavery offer an alter native modernity to counter the

naturalized mobility associated with masculine fraternities working at sea and with nineteenth - century maritime novels,
which largely overlooked the greatest demographic body of transatlantic mi grants: African slaves (DeLoughrey 51–95)

Therefore, we advocate that the United States federal government should endlessly
explore the oceans as a site of the Red Atlantic. This statement doesn’t define limiting
borders of our advocacy – we affirm the resolution, but as a crosscurrent, not a
monument.
Our counter-monumental embraces polyvocal relationships to history that animate
the past without attempting closure. This is the Framework that allows us to Register
Dissent and maintain the possibility for Debate.
Luciano 07
(Dana, Georgetown English Professor Dana Luciano. "Melville's Untimely History: 'Benito Cereno' as
Counter-Monumental Narrative” ." Arizona Quarterly 60.3 (2004

In its most severe form, however, this refusalto give space to public memorial does not fully liberate the present from the
tyranny of the past. Rather, it tends to disperse and atomize memory, making critical dialogue about the past
impossible. Anti-monumental refusal does not erase, but merely displaces monumental history; rather than
desacralizing the power of the past, it melancholically denies it. The counter-monument, however, deploys the
critique of the monument differently, resisting both monumental amnesia and anti-monumental
melancholia. Described by James Young as "brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces . . . conceived to challenge the very premises
of their being" (Texture of Memory 27), counter-monuments refuse to "tell people what they ought to think " about
the past and thus to relieve them of the burden of thinking it (Shalev-Gerz and Gerz, qtd. in Young, Memory's Edge 130).5
Instead of orienting the viewer to an already-agreed upon understanding of the past and its significance, the counter-monument disorients its
audience, disallowing
the self-consolidating security of standing outside a completed history tidily
packaged for mass consumption and emphasizing the observer's implication in an historical narrative that
remains unresolved. In its effort to restructure the terms of audience response, the counter-monument seeks forms that allow a certain
liveness in memorial depictions of the past. It supplants the symbolic appeal of the traditional monument, which severs present
from past on the quotidian level in order to unite them on the transcendent level of timeless truth, with the
destabilizing effects of allegory, which links past and present without collapsing them and disperses meaning across time rather
than gathering it in a single transcendental instant. Recent European Holocaust countermonuments, for example, project the working of
memory against the passage of time, emphasizing displacement and/or evanescence in order to highlight the damaged intersections of space
and time sustained during and after the event.6 The narrativity of the forms employed in these installations suggests that traumatic
history is most effectively engaged not in the transcendence of a single symbolic image but from moment to
moment, as one struggles to move through the memorial site or watches its appearance and disappearance.7 The turn to allegory in
Holocaust counter-monuments reflects a desire to find ways of negotiating the relationship between past and present that depend
neither on linear emplotments of time nor on its collapse into timelessness. Because allegory always stresses the
temporality of the relationships it enfolds, referring insistently to a prior set of meanings with which it can never fully coincide but without
which it loses its significance, it has proven a powerful tool at moments in history when the question of history itself engenders a temporal
crisis. The use of allegory tends to arise, as Bainard Cowan has argued, whenever a people or group finds itself unable either to accept the past
or to abandon it. This experience of being "called in two opposing directions, by an allegiance to its history and by an allegiance to truth"
(Cowan 11) is expressed in allegory's gestures toward a referential relationship that is both arbitrary and necessary. The
tension between history and truth is explored in Walter Benjamin's writings on allegory, which highlight the ways that allegory resists the
symbol's flight from time: "Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly realized in the light of
redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the fades hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about
history that . . . has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face-or rather in a death's head" (Origin 166). Allegory, in
Benjamin's reading, is a "powerful" pleasure because it exposes
the incompleteness of objects. The functional
instability of allegory's semiotic reveals history as a "script," as a set of meanings superimposed over the debris of human
existence; as in the ruin, in the allegory "history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay"
(Origin 177). It is, in particular, allegory's resistance to idealization and redemption that counter-monumentalism, in its desire to
engage with the way past traumas continue to shape the present, attempts to harness. The resultant
emphasis on death, decay and transience does not mean that its desire to engage history and truth are wholly nihilistic.
Rather, the broken and uncertain forms of counter-monumentalism express, while not a blithe optimism, something like a
hesistant faith in the possibility of the engaged critical dialogue it hopes its allegorical gestures will provoke. For if allegory
is a mode in which, as Benjamin notes, "any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else" (Origin 175), then it
emphasizes the necessity of making meaning of (rather than receiving meaning from) the counter-monument, a process that will, like allegory
itself, necessarily be dispersed across time. Counter-monumentalism resists the liberal/sentimental fantasy of the public as a boundless and
timeless totality, merged in a unanimity of automatic response. Instead, drawing on dispersed and disruptive allegorical forms to seek
disparate, dissenting reactions, it conceives of its audience as a space of interpretation: a space in which something
like a
critical public might continue to inform, reform and reinvent itself and its relations without subsuming dissent to
the demand for reverence and unity emphasized in monumental history.

The politics of temporality – our orientation to the past - are a PREREQUISITE to a

liberatory discussion. Our pedagogy reclaims the invisible past instead of orienting
toward a hypothetical futurity that subordinates history. The IMPOSITION of futurity
was the FIRST MOVE of COLONIALITY that enacted genocide against indigenous
peoples
Vasquez 8/31/09
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/14/4/7.html Rolando Vázquez is assistant professor of Sociology at the Roosevelt Academy of the University of
Utrecht in The Netherlands. He teaches Latin American ideas. His research circles around the critique of the modern notion of time and its
relevance for both de-colonial thinking and an extended critique of modernity. Vázquez, Rolando. "Modernity coloniality and visibility: the
politics of time." Sociological Research Online 14.4 (2009): 7.
This paper presents the problem of the mediation between modernity and coloniality; and it explores the usefulness of the question of time to
address this mediation. How can we think the simulation of modernity together with the oblivion of coloniality?
The text brings the critique of time to the centre of the modernity/ coloniality debate. It shows that
chronology, chronological narratives are at the heart of the modern/ colonial systems of oppression;
and that the movements of resistance against 'hegemonic globalization' are not only questioning the
material structures of oppression, but also the universality of the modern idea of time . It is an
invitation to think about the politics of time that are at play in modernity/ coloniality.
Here, the modernity/ coloniality tandem is seen as the institution of a politics of time that is geared
towards the production of specific economic and political practices oriented to sever the oppressed
from their past, their memory. The ensuing temporal discrimination makes invisible all that does not
belong to modern temporality. Under this light, it is possible to see how the practices of resistance to
the modernity/ coloniality project embody a different politics of time, one that rescues memory as a
site of struggle , one that involves the possibility of inhabiting and rescuing the past . These practices
of resistance are thus seen as fights against temporal discrimination: fights against invisibility.
By addressing the imposition of modern time we can better understand the widespread injustice and
violence of modernity/ coloniality . Furthermore, the question of time can help us to bridge the gap
between the simulacra of modernity and the oblivion of coloniality.
This paper responds to the need of bringing the critique of time to the centre of the modernity/
coloniality debate. It shows that chronology, chronological narratives are at the heart of the
modern/ colonial systems of oppression; and that the movements of resistance against 'hegemonic
globalization' are not only questioning the material structures of oppression, but also the universality
of the modern idea of time. In other words, this paper is an invitation to think about the politics of time
that are at play in the struggles against oppression.
1.2 Here, the modernity/ coloniality tandem is seen as the institution of a politics of time that is not
only geared towards the control of historical narratives (Chakrabarty, Fanon, Mignolo), but also towards
the production of specific economic and political practices oriented to sever the oppressed from their
past, their memory. It is a politics that promotes modern temporality as a strategy of domination. It
imposes the universal claim that the present is the only site of the real, while dismissing the past as
archaic. The past is represented as a fixed entity with only documentary value. This analysis will show
that the imposition of modern time is coeval to the widespread injustice and violence of modernity/
coloniality. The question of time is used to address the open question of the mediation between the
illusion of modernity and the oblivion of coloniality. This text exemplifies how the practices of resistance
to the modernity/ coloniality project embody a different politics of time, one that rescues memory as a
site of struggle, one that involves the possibility of inhabiting and rescuing the past.
1.3 In an effort to break with the grammars of argumentation that reproduce the modern notion of
time, the text moves in a fragmented way. It presents a series of quotations in order to illuminate rather
than explain. This method aims to open images of thought instead of building up a single line of
argumentation.
Oblivion, invisibility and the politics of time
2.1 'We are without face, without word, without voice'[1]. A Zapatista said that this is the reason for
wearing the balaclava. The Zapatista balaclava has turned oblivion into a sign of rebellion. Their fight can
be seen as a fight for visibility. With these words we want to enquire how oblivion has been a
constitutive part of modernity's politics of time.
2.2 The forms of oppression that characterize modernity or more precisely, modernity/ coloniality
cannot be sufficiently understood only through its material process without taking into account
oblivion , invisibility. Modern systems of domination are not just about material exploitation; they are
also about a politics of time that produces the other by rendering it invisible, relegating the other to
oblivion. There is an intimate connection between oblivion and invisibility. The destruction of memory,
as a result of the modern politics of time produces invisibility. In turn, invisibility is tantamount to de-
politicization . In this context it is possible to say that the struggles for social justice are struggles for
visibility. The oppressed can succeed in their fight against invisibility by bringing the claims for justice
into the light of the public, and thus becoming political[2].
2.3 The use of the term 'visibility' signals the close relation that there is between the material means
of oppression and epistemic discrimination, violence . I propose to approach the modernity/ coloniality
compound and its social production of oblivion[3] through the question of time. Through the critique of
modern time we see how modernity and hence coloniality means the imposition of a time that
dismisses the past, turns the future into the teleology of progress and holds the present to be the
only site of the real. Under the light of the critique of time, the modernity/coloniality compound shows
its double face. On the one hand we have the hegemony over visibility in the spectacle of modernity, the
phantasmagoria of modernity, and on the other, we have coloniality's strategies of invisibility, which
impose oblivion and silence and erase the past as a site of experience. The condition of possibility of
these strategies over the visible, the monopoly of the sense of the real, is grounded on the modern
notion of time and constitutes under this perspective the politics of time of the modernity/ coloniality
compound.
Modernity, coloniality and the question of their mediation
2.4 The growing literature around the modernity/ coloniality research agenda[4] teaches us that we
cannot speak of modernity without speaking of coloniality. We cannot see the ideas of progress,
modernization, universality, and the like, without thinking of exploitation, violence, and segregation. The
scholars of the modernity/ coloniality research program have made large efforts to re-write the history
of modernity so that modernity is only seen in and through its relation with coloniality. 'The "discovery"
of America and the genocide of Indians and African slaves are the very foundations of "modernity'
more so than the French and Industrial Revolutions. Better yet, they constitute the darker and hidden
face of modernity, 'coloniality'' (Mignolo, 2005, p. xiii).
2.5 There is still a large effort that is needed to solve the theoretical problem that emerges from the
hiatus that separates the narratives of modernity from those of the postcolonial perspective. In other
words, there is a need to elucidate the mediation between the 'progress of modernity' and the 'violence
of coloniality'.
2.6 Coloniality is not a derivative or an unintended side effect of modernity, it is coeval and thus
constitutive of modernity. Coloniality is referred to as the dark-side, the under-side of modernity. We
then can speak of the modernity/ coloniality tandem to address the current social problems. 'Imperial
globality has its underside in what could be called � global coloniality, meaning by this the heightened
marginalisation and suppression of the knowledge and culture of subaltern groups' (Escobar, 2004, p.
207).
2.7 Let us stop for a moment and look at how the modernity/ coloniality tandem appears in two
illustrations of Mexico City published in the 1930 edition of the National Geographic in an article called
North America's Oldest Metropolis.
'A tattered old Indian came shuffling up to sell me a tiny terra-cota mask. � "Who made it?" I asked. '
La Gente Olvidada' (The Forgotten People)" (Simpich, 1930, p. 81).
2.8 Further down the reporter presents us with another image:
'On billboards, in street cars, in news papers, and on theatre curtains the well-known illustrations for
American made toothpaste, typewriters, motor cars, and toilet soaps give gaudy welcome to visiting
Yankees, and bring that sense of security which comes from contact with familiar things in far places'
(Simpich, 1930, p. 83).
2.9 For us the coupling of these images signals the same pressing question, namely that of the mediation
between modernity and coloniality. How can we mediate between the 'forgotten people' and the
'billboards' full with 'American' brands? How can we make sense of the invisibility of the people and the
visibility of the commodity? Is this not an essential question that arises in the midst of the modernity/
coloniality tandem?
2.10 Is it not that the phantasmagoria of modernity, unveiled by critical thinkers such as Walter
Benjamin (1999), Guy Debord (1994), Jean Baudrillard (1983) among others, is part and parcel of the
economy of oblivion that hides the 'colonial wound', that assures the continued silencing of
oppression[5]?
2.11 If from the perspective of the critique of time, modernity is seen as the age that is geared towards
an unattainable future, we could venture to say that coloniality signals the movement of the rejection of
the past as a site of experience.
2.12 A useful mediation between modernity and coloniality can be found in the notion of a modern
politics of times that expresses itself in a threefold hegemony : a) the rejection of the past , b) the
future-oriented mentality and c) the objectivity of the present . a) Coloniality comes to view as a set
of practices and technologies of oblivion, of temporal discrimination that have contributed to making
'the other' invisible. b) Modernity is seen as a race towards an unattainable future, the race of the
'phantasmagoria of modernity'. c) The objectivity of modernity affirms the history of western
metaphysics, the ontology of presence, it affirms the present as the only site of the real .
The critique of time
2.13 The critique of modern time shows that modernity is the time that rejects the past, affirms the
present as the site of the real, and construes the future in the semblance of a teleology. Core ideas of
modernity, such as progress, history, universality, individuality they all correspond to this conception
of time.
2.14 In modernity, the present is affirmed as the site of the real, it is the site of objectivity, it designates
the space of power. Michel de Certeau (1988) shows how modern domination is exercised through
appropriating and defining its 'proper place', thus the enterprises of discovery, of map making, the
scriptural economy of science, the modern city can all be read as strategies to define and appropriate
space. Modernity can hence be characterized as the age that designates space as reality, and space is
the site of power. What is important for our analysis is to realize that in modernity space coincides with
presence, it is the expression of the present . The present and presence come together in the modern
notion of time to constitute the site of the real [6].
2.15 Benjamin's thinking of the 'empty present' of modernity helps us bring further this reflection as it
shows that the affirmation of the present as the site of the real cannot be separated from the cult of
the new and the illusion of the commodity . Modernity, Benjamin says, is the time haunted by its
phantasmagorias. The modern objectivity of the present is wedded with the simulation of the
future. The modern hegemony over visibility is a hegemony over the illusions of an objective present
and a utopian future.
2.16 On the other hand, coloniality comes to light, as the movement of oblivion, of the rejection of the
past. It is the expression of a time that praises the present as the site of the real and the future as
the horizon of expectation and the ultimate source of meaning. This notion of the future corresponds
to the one-dimensional mind and its rational utopias. The violence of modernity and coloniality has
constantly been justified in the name of these rational utopias. The chronology of historical necessity
underlies the ideologies from right and left that flourished in the twentieth century and that
systematically suppress the other , fostering the devaluation of political alternatives , and of
alternative narratives. 'Historical determinism has been a costly and bloodstained fantasy' [7](Paz,
1991, p. 28).
Practices of oblivion and temporal discrimination
2.17 It is precisely because the suffering belongs to the past that it is rejected as non-objective, non-
valuable. The suffering of the oppressed is erased. Memory is historicized, the age of museums is the
age of institutions that have reduced the past into a proper place, the past has been confined /
objectified within the grips of history as institution, as a discipline. The past is confined to the objectivity
of the present. History ceases to be a relation to the past, to acquire the semblance of a museum.
'From the beginning of the sixteenth century onward, the histories and languages of Indian communities
"become historical" at the point where they lost their own history' (Mignolo, 2005, p. 26). The making of
the past into an object of knowledge, 'the proper place' of history as a discipline, means negation of
the past as an open realm of experience . This corresponds to the temporal hierarchy imposed by the
modern notion of time and the hegemonic notion of history. '[F]or nineteenth-century intellectuals,
statesmen, and politicians, "modernity" was cast in terms of civilization and progress' (Mignolo, 2005, p.
70). And '[t]he present was described as modern and civilized; the past as traditional and barbarian'
(Mignolo, 2005). The terms barbarian and then primitive, traditional, backward become key words in
the vocabulary of discrimination and the production of otherness. Societies were placed 'in an
imaginary chronological line going from nature to culture, from barbarism to civilization following a
progressive destination toward some point of arrival' (Mignolo, 2005). Modern Europe was established
as the present, the past was the other (Mignolo, 2005). This type of temporal discrimination is clearly
shown in the Zapatistas' claims. 'We are not your past, but your contemporaries' this is what a group of
Zapatista women said to a group of European feminists that came to help them 'liberate'[8] themselves.
The analysis of Walter Mignolo shows how modernity/ coloniality came with the instauration of
temporal discrimination. 'By the eighteenth century, when "time" came into the picture and the
colonial difference was redefined, "barbarians" were translated into "primitives" and located in time
rather than in space. "Primitives" were in the lower scale of a chronological order driving toward
"civilization"' (Mignolo, 2005, pXX).

2.18 Next to the reduction of the past by the 'scriptural machine' (de Certeau 1988) of the historian and
the social scientist, and the forms of temporal discrimination prevailing in modern narratives, there have
been other practices, politics of time, oriented to sever the past from the realm of experience,
strategies of erasure. Enormous resources and political capital have been invested in the destruction of
the links with the past. In the Mexican Codex of Tlaxcala there is an image of Franciscan monks burning
the cloths, the manuscripts, burning the gods (Figure 1). This pictorial example is just a token of the
endless history of a politics of time oriented towards the destruction of memory .
2.19 In 1894 during the attack of the Dutch in Indonesia, 'When the colonial soldiers conquered the
Lombok kingdom a lot of cultural artefacts were ransacked .... when soldiers need[ed] something to
warm-up their bodies .... a shelf of "old" books from [the] king's library [were] burnt' (Subangun, 2008,
p. 2) .... During the British colony in India the colonial rulers organized bonfires to burn the traditional
cloths[9]. In 1614 The Archbishop of Lima ordered the burning of the quenas and all other musical
instrument from the indigenous people. ... In 1562 Fray Diego de Landa burnt all the Maya books,
burning eight centuries of knowledge. In 1888 in Rio de Janeiro, the emperor Pedro II burnt the
documents narrating three hundred Years of slavery in Brazil (Galeano, 2009, pp. 76-77)[10].
2.20 "Colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a
dominated country. � By a kind of perverse logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and
distorts, disfigures and destroys it" (Fanon in Mignolo, 2005, p. 84)[11]. These practices distinguish
coloniality by a politics of time, driven to erasure. The objects, the instruments, the written knowledge
were systematically turned into ashes. This shows an economy of destruction that is not reducible to
be a side effect or a necessity of economic exploitation . What distinguishes these acts of destruction of
the past from pre-modern acts of cultural destruction is that these acts came together with the
imposition of modern temporality.
Memory as resistance
2.21 However the memory of suffering cannot be burnt down, it cannot be totally erased by these
practices. This highlights the value of the oral tradition as a strategy of resistance in many rebellious
movements. The suffering of the past remains. '[N]othing that has ever happened should be regarded as
lost to history' (Benjamin, 2003, p. 390).
2.22 The consciousness of the suffering of the previous generations is the source of strength for a
politics of time of liberation . The liberation from the modern politics of time is a fight for 'a memory
that looks for the future against western oblivion'[12]. The rescue of memory is not a conservative
move, the possibility to experience the past is not essentialist, but rebellious. 'I am sorry, I object the
term "nostalgia". Nostalgia is the waltdisneyization of the past. It is very different from the memory that
doesn't idealize nor disguise' (Pacheco, 2009)[13]. The Mexican poet's warning shows that we should
not turn memory into a utopia; if we turn memory into utopia it is not memory anymore. Memory is
the past as a site of experience it is a rebellion against the future oriented reason of modernity ,
against the reason that idealizes and disguises. Memory stands up against the rational utopias that
have brought oblivion and violence .
2.23 As Walter Benjamin says the strength of rebellion, the spirit of sacrifice is nourished 'by the
image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren' (Benjamin, 2003, p.
394).
2.24 The coming into visibility of the movements of resistance speaks of their capacity to break with
the continuity of the processes of oppression, a continuity where chronology is synonymous of
oblivion. They break away from the modern �empty time� that has been imposed upon them. 'The
Mexican revolution of 1910, says Octavio Paz, was a popular upheaval that brought to light what was
hidden. That is why it is not just a revolution but a revelation' (Paz, 1991, p. 54)[14]. The event clashes
with the linear history of modernity and brings to visibility what was up until then marginalized out of
the light of the public. Orfeo 'goes to rescue, not to conquer: he has to receive, not to posses' (Mujica,
2004, p. 25)[15].
2.25 The postcolonial critique of modern time, seeks to transform our relation to time. The critical
thinker of time does not want to conquer time, but rather she seeks to rescue, to salvage our
relation to time, to the past , to memory, to history; she must receive, not possess. The manner of
appropriation of the historian is replaced by a more humble reception, by listening, by experiencing
time. We can then realize that the linear history of modernity , its universal chronology is continually
being called into question by a history based on difference , where the present is constantly
interspersed by the past. 'The silences and absences of history are speaking their presence' (Mignolo,
2005, p. 157).
Conclusion
3.1 Let us note that the critique of time , by recognizing the violence of the simulation of modernity
next to the violence of oblivion, is able to thematize the problem of those that are in the abyss, in-
between the paradigms of the subaltern subject and the modern subject. By revealing the connection
between modernity and coloniality, the critique of time brings to light all those who live in modernity's
spaces of exclusion, no longer with an indigenous language, name or identity, those who live in the lost
'cities of modernity' and which remain largely unseen by the literature that presents
modernity/coloniality as an unmediated dichotomy.
3.2 So far we know that modernity cannot be thought without coloniality, that the spread of the ideas
of progress and universality cannot be sundered from the spread of marginality and violence . Let this
text serve as an initial provocation to explore the hiatus that divides modernity and coloniality by raising
the question of their mediation. How can we think a modernity of simulacra that holds hegemony over
the visible next to a coloniality of violence, oblivion and invisibility? How can we think together
simulation and oblivion? Our proposal is to explore this mediation through the question of time, by
taking seriously the politics of time that are at play next to the economic and political systems of
exploitation. We suggest, for instance, looking at the illusion of the future in the practices of
commodity consumption, at the notion of the present as being the site of the real in the institutional
practices of powe r over places and knowledges and at the oblivion of the past in the practices of
destruction of memory. Simulation and oblivion can be thought together when we see the politics of
time that is at play in modernity/ coloniality.
We contest the search for a single root cause, our aff, is a genealogical exploration,
not a teleological modernity
Rich 85 (Adrienne Rich is a poet, essayist, and feminist, “A politics of locations, http://www.medmedia.it/review/numero2/en/art3.htm)
Begin though, not with a continent or a country or a house, but with the geography closest
in-the body. Here at least I know I exist, that living human individual whom the young marx called "the first premise of all human
history."2 But it was not as a Marxist that I turned to this place, back from philosophy and literature and science and theology in which I had
looked for myself in vain. It was as a radical feminist. The politics of pregnability and motherhood. The politics of orgasm. The politics of rape
and incest, of abortion, birth control, forcible sterilization. Of prostitution and marital sex. Of what had been named sexual liberation. Of
prescriptive heterosexuality. Of lesbian existence. And Marxist feminists were often pioneers in this work. But for many women I knew, the need
to begin with the female body-our own-was understood not as applying a Maxist principle to women, but as locating the grounds from which to
speak with authority as women. Not to transcend this body, but to reclaim it. To reconnect our thinking and speaking with the body of this
particular living human individual, a woman. Begin, we said, with the material, with matter, mma, madre, mutter, moeder, modder, etc., etc.
Begin with the material. Pick up again the long struggle against lofty and privileged
abstraction. Perhaps this is core of revolutionary process, whether it calls itself Maxist or Third World or feminist or all three. Long before
the nineteenth century, the empirical witch of the European Middle Ages, trusting her senses, practicing her tried remedies against the anti-
material, anti-sensuous, anti-empirical dogmas of the Church. Dying for that, by the millions. "A female-led peasant rebellion"?-in any event, a
rebellion against the idolatry of pure ideas, the belief that ideas have a life of their own and float along above the heads of ordinary people-
women, the poor, the uninitiated.3 Abstractions severed from the doings of living people, fed back to people as slogans. Theory-the seein of
patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees-theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth
over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for the earth.
The absolute necessity to raise these questions in the world: where, when, and under what conditions have women acted and been acted on, as
women? Wherever people are struggling against subjection, the specific I wrote a sentence just now and x'd it out. In it I said that women have
always understood the struggle against free-floating abstraction even when they were intimidated by abstract ideas. I dont't want to write that kind
of sentence now, the sentence that begins "Women have always..." We started by rejecting the sentences that began "Women have always had an
instinct for mothering" or "Women have always and everywhere been in subjugation to men." If we have learned anything in these years of late
twentieth-century feminism, it's that that "always"
blots out what we really need to know: When, where, and
under what conditions has the statement been true?
subjection of women, through our location in a female body, from now on has to be addressed. The necessity to go on speaking of it, refusing to
let the discussion go on as before, speaking where silence has been advised and enforced, not just about our subjection, but about our active
presence and practice as women.We believed (I go on believing) that liberation of women is a wedge driven into all other radical thought, can
open out the structures of resistance, unbind the imagination, connect what's been dangerously disconnected. Let us pay attention now, we said, to
women: let men and women make a conscious act of attention when women speak; let us insist on kinds of process which allow more women to
speak; let us get back to earth-not as paradigm for "women," but as place of location.
Perhaps we need a moratorium on saying "the body". For it's also possible to abstract "the" body. When I write "the body," I see nothing in
particular. To write "my body" plunges me into lived experience, particulary: I see scars, disfigurements, discolorations, damages, losses, as well
as what pleases me. Bones well nourished from the placenta; the teeth of a middleclass person seen by the dentist twice a year from childhood.
White skin, marked and scarred by three pregnancies, an elected sterilization, progressive arthritis, four joint operations, calcium deposits, no
rapes, no abortions, long hours at a typewriter-my own, not in a typing pool-and so forth. To say "the body" lifts me away from what has given
me a primary perspective. To say "my body" reduces the temptation to grandiose assertions.
This body. White, female; or female, white. The first obvious, lifelong facts. But I was born in the white section of a hospital which separated
Black and white women in labor and Black and whita babies in the nursery, just as it separated Black and white bodies in its morgue. I was
defined as white before I was defined as female. The politcs of location. Even to being with my body I have to say that from the outset that body
had more than one identity. When I was carried out of the hospital into the world, I was viewed and treated as female, but also viewed and treated
as white-by both Black and white people. I was located by color and sex as surely as a Black child was located by color and sex-though the
implications of white identity were mystified by the presumption that white people are the center of the universe. To locate myself in my body
means more than understanding what it has meant to me to have a vulva and clitorins and uterus and breasts. It means recognizing this white skin,
the places it has taken me, the places it has not let me go.
The body I was born into was not only female and white, but Jewish-enough for geographic location to have played, in those years, a determining
part. I was a Mischling, four years old when the Third Reich began. Had it been not Baltimore, but Prague or Lódz or Amsterdam, the ten-year-
old letter writer might have had no address. Had I survived Prague, Amsterdam, or Lódz and the railway stations for which they were deportation
points, I would be some body else. My center, perhaps, the Middle East or Latin America, my language itself another language. Or I might be in
no body at all.But I am a North American Jew, born and raised three thousand miles from the war in Europe.
Trying as women to see from the center. "A politics," I wrote once, "of asking women's questions." 4 We are not "the woman question" asked by
somebody else; We are the women who ask the questions. Trying to see so much, aware of so much to be seen, brought into the light, changed.
Breaking down again and again the false male universal. Piling piece by piece of concrete experience side by side, comparing, beginning to
discern patterns. Anger, frustration with Marxist or Leftist dismissals of these questions, this struggle. Easy now to call this disillusionment facile,
but the anger was deep, the frustration real, both in personal relationships and political organizations. I wrote in 1975: Much
of what is
narrowly termed "politics" seems to rest on a longing for certainty even at the cost of
honesty, for an analysis which, once given, need not be reexamined. Such is the deadendedness-for women-of Marxism in our time.5 And it
has felt like a dead end wherever politics has been externalized, cut off from the ongoing lives of women or of men, rarefied into an elite jargon,
an enclave, defined by little sects who feed off each others' errors. But even as we shrugged away Marx along with the academic Marxists and the
sectarian Left, some of us, calling ourselves radical feminists, never meant anything less by women's liberation than the creation of a society
without domination; we never meant less the making new of all relationships. The problem was that we did not know whom we meant when we
said "we".
Living for fifty-some years, having watched even minor bits of history unfold, I am
less quick than I once was to search
for single "causes" or origins in dealings among human beings. But suppose that we could
trace back and establish that patriarchy has been everywhere the model. To what choices of action does that lead us in the present?
Patriarchy exists nowhere in a pure state; we are the latest to set foot in a tangle of oppressions grown up and around each other for centuries.
This isn't the old children's game where you choose one strand of color in the web and
follow it back to find your price, ignoring the others as mere distractions. The prize is life itself, and
most women in the world must fight for their lives on many fronts at once.
We... often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives
they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression
which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual... We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless
workers but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. This is from the 1977 Combahee
River Collective statement, a major document of the U.S. women's movement, which gives a clear and uncompromising Black-feminist naming
to the experience of simultaneity of oppression.6 Even in the struggle against free-floating abstraction, we
have abstracted. Marxists and radical feminists have both done this.
To come to terms with the circumscribing nature of (our) whiteness. 7 Marginalized though we have been as women, as white and Western makers
of theory, we also marginalize others because our lived experience is thoughtlessly white, bacause even our "women's cultures" are rooted in
some Western tradition. Recognizing our location, having to name the ground we're coming from, the conditions we have taken for granded-there
is a confusion between our claims to the white and Western eye the woman-seeing eye,8 fear of losing the centrality of the one even as we claim
the other.
How does the white Western feminist define theory? Is it something made only by white women and only by women acknowledged as writers?
How does the white Western feminist define "an idea"? How do we actively work to build a white Western feminist consciousness that is not
simply centered on itself, that resists white circumscribing?
It was in the writings but also the actions and speeches and sermons of Black United States citizens that I began to experience the meaning of my
whiteness as a point of location for which I needed to take responsibility. It was in reading poems by contemporary Cuban women that I began to
experience the meaning of North America as a location which had also shaped my ways of seeing and my ideas of who what was important, a
location for which I was also responsible. I traveled then to Nicaragua, where in a tiny impoverished country, in a four-year-old society dedicated
to eradicating poverty, under the hills of the Nicaragua-Honduras border, I could physically feel the weight of the United States of North
America, its military forces, its vast appropriations of money, its mass media, at my back; I could feel what it means, dissident or not, to be part
of that raised boot of power, the cold shadow we cast everywhere to the south.
In the United States large numbers of people have been cut off from their own process and movement. We have been hearing for forty years that
we are the guardians of freedom, while "behind the Iron Curtain" all is duplicity and manipulation, if not sheer terror. Yet the lagacy of fear
lingering after the witch hunts of the fifties hangs on like the aftersmell of a burning. The sense of obliquity, mystery, paranoia surrounding the
American Communist party the Khrushchev Report of 1956: the party lost 30,000 members within weeks, and few who remained were talking
about it. To be a Jew, a homosexual, any kind of marginal person was to be liable for suspicion of being "Communist." A blanketing snow had
begun to drift over the radical history of the United States. And, thogh parts of the North America feminist movement actually sprang from the
Black movements of the sixities and the student left, feminists have suffered not only from the the buying and distortion of women's experience,
but from the overall burying and distortion of the great movements for social change. 9
A movement for change lives in feelings, actions, and words. Whatver
circumscribes or mutilates our feelings
makes it more difficult to act, keeps our actions reactive, repetitive:abstract thinking, narrow tribal loyalties, every kind
of selfrighteousness, the arrogance of believing ourselves at the center. It's hard to look back on the
limits of my understanding a year, five years ago-how did I look without seeing,hear without listening? It can be difficult to be generous to earlier
selves and keeping faith with the continuity of our journeys is especially hard in the United States, where identities and loyalties have been shed
and replaced without a tremor, all in the name of becoming "American." Yet how, expect through ourselves, do we discover what moves other
people to change? Our old fears and denials-what helps us let go of them? What makes us decide we have to reeducate ourselves, even those of us
with "good" educations? A politicized life ought to sharpen both the senses and the memory.
The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from East German novelist Christa Wolf. 10 But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further,
isn't there a difficulty of saying "we"? You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for us. Two thoughts: there
is no liberation that
only knows how to say "I"; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all
the way through. And so even ordinary pronouns beecome a political problem.
* 64 cruise missiles in Greeham Common and Molesworth.
* 112 at Comiso.
* 96 Pershing ii missiles in West Germany.
* 96 for Belgium and the Netherlands.
That is the projection for the next few years.
* Thousands of women, in Europe and the United States, saying no to this and to the militarization of the world.
An approach which traces militarism back to patriarchy and patriarchy back to the fundamental quality of
maleness can be demoralizing and even paralyzing... Perhaps it is possible to be less fixed on
the discovery of "original causes." It might be more useful to ask, How do these values and behaviors get repeated generation
after generation?11
The valorization of manliness and masculinity. The armed forces as the extreme embodiment of the patriarchal family. The archaic idea of
women as a "home front" even as the missiles are deployed in the backyards of Wyoming and Mutlangen. The growing urgency that an anti-
nuclear, anti-militarist movement must be a feminist movement must be a feminist movement, must be a socialist movement, must be an anti-
racist, anti-imperialist movement. That it's not enough to fear for the people we know, our own kind, ourselves. Nor is it empowering to give
ourselves up to abstract terrors of pure annihilation. the anti-nuclear, anti-military movement cannot sweep away the missilis as a movement to
save white civilization in the West. The movement for change is a changing movement, changing itself, demasculinizing itself, de-Westernizing
itself, becoming a critical mass that is saying in so many different voices, language, gestures, actions: It must change; we ourselves can change it.
We who are not the same. We who are many and do not want to be same. Trying to watch myself in the process of writing this, I keep coming
back to something Sheila Rowbotham, the British socialist feminist, wrote in Beyond the Fragments:
A movement helps you to overcome some of the oppressive distancing of theory and this has been a... continuing creative endeavour of women's
liberation. But some paths are not mapped and our footholds vanish...I see what I'm writing as part of a wider claiming which is beginning. I am
part of the difficulty myself. The difficulty is not out there.
My difficulties, too, are not out there-except in the social conditions that make all this necessary. I do not any longer believe-my feelings do not
allow me to believe-that the white eye sees from the center. Yet I often find myself thinking as if still believed that were true. Or, rather, my
thinking stands still. I feel in a state of arrest, as if my brain and heart were refusing to speak to each other. My brain, a woman's brain, has
exulted in breaking the taboo against women thinking, has taken off on the wind, saying, I am the woman who asks the questions. My heart has
been learning in a much more humble and laborious way, learning that feelings are useless without facts, that all privilege is ignorant at the core.
The United States has never been a white country, though it has long served what served what white men defined as their interests. The
Mediterranean was never white. England, northern Europe, if ever absolutely white, are so no longer. In a Leftist bookstore in Manchester,
England, a Third World poster:WE ARE HERE BECAUSE YOU WERE THERE. In Europe there have always been the Jews, the original ghetto
dwellers, identified as a racial type, suffering under pass laws and special entry taxes, enforced relocations, massacres: the scapegoats, the aliens,
never seen as truly European but as part of that darker world that must be controlled, evntually exterminated. Today the cities of Europe have new
scapegoats as well: the diaspora from the old colonial empires. Is anti-Semitism the model for racism, or racism for anti-Semitism? Once more,
where does the question lead us? Don't we have to start here, where we are, forty years after the Holocaust, in the churn
of Middle Eastern violence, in the midst of decisive ferment in South Africa-not in some debate over origins and
precedents, but in the recognition of simultaneous oppression?
I've been thinking a lot about the obsession with origins. It seems a way of stopping time in its tracks. The
sacred Neolithic triangles, the Minoan vases with staring eyes and breasts, the female figurines of Anatolia-weren't they concrete evidence of a
kind, like Sappho's fragments, for earlier woman-affirming cultures, cultures that enjoyed centuries of peace? But haven't they also served as
arresting images, which kept us attached and immobilized? Human activity didn't stop in Crete or Çatal Hüyük. We can't build a society free from
domination by fixing our sights backward on some long-ago tribe or city. The continuing spiritual power of an image lives in the interplay
between what it reminds us of- what it brings to mind-and our own continuing actions in the present. When the labrys becomes a badge for a cult
of Minoan goddesses,when the wearer of the labrys has ceased to ask herself what she is doing on this earth, where her love of women is taking
her, the labrys, too, becomes abstration-lifted away from the heat and friction of human activity. The Jewish star on my neck must serve me both
for reminder and as a goad to continuing and changing responsibility.
When I learn that in 1913, mass women's marches were held in South Africa which caused the rescinding of entry permit laws; that in 1956,
20,000 women assembled in pretoria to protest pass laws for women, that resistance to these laws was carried out in remote country villages and
punished by shootings, beatings, and burnings; that in 1959, 2,000 women demonstrated in Durban against laws which provided beerhalls for
African men and criminalized women's traditional home brewing; that at one and the same time, African women have played a major role
alongside men in resisting apartheid, I have to ask myself why it took me so long to learn these chapters of women's history, why the leadership
and strategies of African women have been so unrecognized as theory in action by white Western feminist thought. (And in a book by two men,
entitled South African Politics and published in 1982, there is one entry under "Women" [franchise] and no reference anywhere to women's
political leadership and mass actions.)12 When I read that a major strand in the conflicts of the past decade in Lebanon has been political
organizing by women of women, across class and tribal and religious lines, women working and teaching together within refugee camps and
armed communities, and of the violent undermining of their efforts through the civil war and the Israeli invasion, I am forced to think.20 Iman
Khalife, the young teacher who tried to organize a silent peace march on the Christian- Moslem border of Beirut -a protest which was quelled by
the threat of a massacre of the participants- Iman Khalife and women like her do not come out of nowhere. But we Western feminists, living
under other kinds of conditions, are not encouraged to know this background.
And I turn to Etel Adnan's brief, extraordinary novel Sitt Marie Rose, about a middle-class Christian Lebanese woman tortured for joining the
Palestinian Resistance, and read:
She was also subject to another great delusion believing that women are protected from repression, and that the leaders considered political fights
to be strictly between males. In fact, with women's greater access to certain powers, they began to watch them more closely, and perhaps with
even greater hostility. Every feminine act, even charitable and seemingly unpolitical ones, were regarded as a rebellion in this world where
women had always played servile roles. Marie Rose inspired scorn and hate long before the fateful day of her arrest.
Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise;
there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stone, to put up the pap, the coffee, the rice, to iron the pants, to
braid the hair,to pull the day's water up from the well, to boil water for tea, to wash the children for school, to pull the vegetables and start the
walk to market, to run to catch the bus for the work that is paid. I dont't know when most women sleep. In big cities at dawn women are traveling
home after cleaning offices all night, or waxing the halls of hospitals, or sitting up with the old and sick and frightened at the hour when death is
supposed to do its work. In Perù: "Women invest hours in cleaning tiny stones and chaff out of beans, wheat and rice; they shell peas and clean
fish and grind spices in small mortars. They buy bones or tripe at the market and cook cheap, nutritious soup. They repair clothes until they will
not sustain another patch. They... search... out the cheapest school uniforms, payable in the greatest number of installments. They trade old
magazines for plastic washbasins and buy second-hand toys and shoes. They walk long distnces to find a spool of thread at a slightly lower
price." This is the working day that has never changed, the unpaid female labor which means the survival of the poor. In minimal light I see her,
over and over, her inner clock pushing her out of bed with her heavy and maybe painful limbs, her breath breathing life into her stove, her house,
her family, taking the last cold swatch of night on her body, meeting the sudden leap of the rising sun. In my white North American world they
have tried to tell me that this woman-politicized by intersecting forces-doesn't think and reflect on her life. That her ideas are not real ideas like
those of Karl Marx and Simone de Beauvoir: That her calculations, her spiritual philosophy, her gifts for law and ethics, her daily emergency
political decisions are merely instinctual or conditioned reactions. That only certain kinds of people can make theory; that the white-
educated mind is capable of formulating everything; that white middle-class feminism can know for "all women";
that only when a white mind formulates is the formulation to be taken seriously. In the United States, white-centered theory has
not yet adequately engaged with the texts-written, printed, and widely available-which have been for a decade or more
formulating the political theory of Black American feminism: the Combahee River Collective stament, the essays and speeches of Gloria I.
Joseph, Audre Lorde, Bernice Reagon, Michele Russell, Barbara Smith, June Jordan, to name a few of the most obvious. White feminists have
read and taught from the anthology This Bridge Called My Bck: Writings by Radical Women of Color, yet often have stopped at perceiving it
simply as an angry attack on the white women's movement. So white feelings remain at the center. And, yes, I need to
move outward from the base and center of my feelings, but with a corrective sense that my feelings are not the center of feminism. And if we read
Audre Lorde or Gloria Joseph or Barbara Smith, do we understand that the intellectual roots of this feminist theory are not white liberalism or
white Euro-American feminism, but the analyses of Afro-American experience articulated by Sojourner Truth. W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-
Barnett, C.L.R. James, Malcom X, Lorraine Hansberry, Fannie Lou Hamer, among others? That Black feminism cannot be marginalized and
circumscribed as simply a response to white feminist racism or an augmentation of white feminism; that it is an organic development of the Black
movements and philosophies of the past, their practive and their printed writings? (And that, increasingly, Black American feminism is actively
in dialogue with other movements of women of color within and beyond the United States?) To shrink from or dismiss that challenge can only
isolate white feminism from the other great movements for self-determination and justice within and against which women define ourselves.
Once again: Who is we? This is the end of these notes, but it is not an ending.

Through the hegemony the US itself has played in colonialism, it has created a state of
biopolitics in the representation of Indigeneity, and only through the praxis of
counter-histories to those of modernity, can a decolonial mindset arise through a
space of MOURNING.
Byrd 11 (Jodi A.; citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and assistant professor of American Indian studies and English at University
of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign; Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism; preface xii - xiii)
This book, then, is a journey of sorts, its method mnemonic as it places seemingly disparate histories,
temporalities, and geographies into conversation in the hopes that, through enjambment, it might be possible to
perceive how Indianness functions as a transit within empire. My method here suggests a reading praxis inspired by Blackfeet novelist Stephen
Graham Jones's Demon Theory, in which he delineates genre as mnemonic device in order to retell the Medea story through horror narrative.' The story of the new
To read mnemonically is to connect the violences and genocides of
world is horror, the story of America a crime.
colonization to cultural productions and political movements in order to disrupt the elisions of multi-
cultural liberal democracy that seek to rationalize the originary historical traumas that birthed settler
colonialism through inclusion. Such a reading practice understands indigeneity as radical alterity and uses
remembrance as a means through which to read counter to the stories empire tells itself.
Lumbee scholar Robert A. Williams Jr. has argued that "the American Indian emerges as a distinct problem in Western
legal thought," but I contend here that ideas of the Indian and Indianness—the contagion through which U.S. empire orders the place of peoples within its
purview—emerge as distinct problems for critical and postcolonial theories.' As a transit, Indianness becomes a site through which U.S. empire orients and replicates
itself by transforming those to be colonized into "Indians" through continual reiterations of pioneer logics, whether in the Pacific, the Caribbean, or the Middle East. The
familiarity of "Indianness" is salve for the liberal multicultural democracy within the settler societies that serve as
empire's constituency. In the wake of this transit, and indeed as its quality as colonialist practice, one finds discordant and competing representations of
diasporic arrivals and native lived experiences—what I call cacophony throughout this book—that vie for hegemony within the discursive, cul-
tural, and political processes of representation and identity that form the basis for what Wendy Brown has identified as the
states of injury and Foucault and others have termed biopolitics. Bringing indigeneity and Indians front and center to discussions
of U.S. empire as it has traversed across Atlantic and Pacific worlds is a necessary intervention at this historical
moment, precisely because it is through the elisions, erasures, enjambments, and repetitions of Indianness
that one might see the stakes in decolonial, restorative justice tied to land, life, and grievability.