Contemporary Anticolonialism: A Transhistorical Perspective

Abstract

Ours is a time of sophisticated empire on high. We need look no further than the US and Canadian military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan to see the blunt end of the colonial encounter. This is but a fraction of the colonial tale. The US invasions of Iraq have produced an extreme, although not unfamiliar, insideroutsider paradigm, one expressed physically in Iraq (by the division between the Green Zone in central Baghdad and the rest of the country) and discursively in the United States (by the division between those “for us” and those “against us”). Naomi Klein has described a “global green zone,” an idea which sees the world and its people divided into binary spaces, thus: those inside the green zone have adequate infrastructure, food, security, water, and other resources; those outside this zone do not (The Possibility of Hope 2007). When extended by the anticolonial approach, this analysis can be applied to discursive as well as physical spaces. All green zones are, of course, contested spaces — spaces constituted as much by that within their borders as by that which is absent therein. Contestation, conflict, resistance, and domination create such spaces be they physical or discursive. While residents of Klein's green zone enjoy food, water, and at least some ability to control their surroundings, residents/members of a discursive green zone enjoy epistemic entitlement and legitimacy as well as the ability to confer normative truths on their mental surroundings. As the child of conflict, the green zone is conflicted; it understands itself by virtue of what it is not, and exists in perpetual opposition to this absence. Further, the green zone and its surroundings are mutually constitutive, thus blurring the binary. The dynamic relations between center and periphery on the one hand, and the overlap of the two spaces on the other makes one impossible without the other and makes the two zones indistinguishable at times (e.g., certain residents of Baghdad's Green Zone face gender and ethnic oppression despite their insider status, while many living outside of the Green Zone enjoy greater material and immaterial comforts than those on the inside). Foundational anticolonial theorist Memmi (1965) as well as contemporary scholar Minh-ha (2000) point out that within each colonizer there is a colonized, and vice versa — the same overlap found in the green zones. Green zones are empty without notions of identity and history, yet they also create both identity and history. The struggles (both military and discursive) of the twenty-first century are colonial in nature. Today's wars are the well-endowed grandchildren of European colonialism — the continuation of the family business. Colonialism has not been alone in its journey through the ages, however; with it has come resistance, refusal, and the agency of the oppressed. With it has come anticolonialism.