Introduction: The Politics of the North American Colonial in 2009

Abstract

The common sense of empire is increasingly embedded in local, national, and international epistemologies. Counter-hegemonic discourse must increasingly confront and challenge dominant paradigms, research, policy, and practice. To do so requires a perspective that recognizes current discourses of “difference” and “resistance.” Across much of the planet in disparate sites, ground-up resistance is in motion. As colonial relations are variegated, extended, and intensified, so must our resistance to these relations. In the fall of 2006, I attended a conference in El Paso, Texas, and had the opportunity to meet a number of local activists engaged in various radical (anti)border initiatives, who were articulating their struggles as a response to the ongoing colonial encounter: anticolonial struggle on North American soil. It seemed at the time that the anticolonial idea, or the anticolonial moment, was generally identified as happening elsewhere and in another time — basically in Africa from the 1950s through the 1970s and in Latin America up until the 1980s. While Canada and the United States in particular are frequently and accurately understood as colonial forces, the rise of anticolonialism within these two nations has been too often overlooked, despite the ongoing struggle of First Peoples for survival, autonomy, and justice which constitute the oldest social movements in both countries. There are, of course, anticolonial resistance, theorization, and even movements in the North American context, particularly if we read the notion of the “colonial” broadly. Anticolonial and antiracist education theorist Dei (2006) argues for a radical and important reconsideration of the notion of the “colonial.” He writes: “[Colonial] refers to anything imposed and dominating rather than that which is simply foreign and alien” (p. 3). This is a departure from previous conceptions of colonialism constituted simply as various forms of territorial imperialism, or of state or cultural control through direct and/or indirect mechanisms. This radical reformulation allows for the recentering of objective assessments of power relations, of the myriad ways which colonialism has shed its skin only to reemerge in a new form — shape shifting to accommodate the needs of the colonizer (newly and broadly conceived). It is this reformulation that allows for a recentering of the agency of the colonized, alongside the accountability of the colonizer: the two pronged aim of this collection.