National citizenship and postcolonial racism

Abstract

In the decisive shift from imperial-states to nation-states after World War Two, two related processes took place. There was a wide scale effort to delegitimize racist ideologies. At the same time, state sovereignty across the world was being nationalized. Nationalist ideologies were rendered not only legitimate but practically mandatory in politics. This talk charts this history in order to understand how racism is organized, practiced, and resisted in an era of postcolonialism (i.e. an era when national sovereignty is the hegemonic state form and when the social and juridical distinction between 'national' and 'migrant' are widely accepted). I examine the growing autochthonization of politics and how nationalisms the world over are increasingly reconfiguring the 'national' as an autochthon, i.e. a 'native' of the national 'soil'. Through a discussion of various autochthonous movements I analyze the double move wherein historic colonizers are re-presented as 'migrants’ and today's 'migrants' are made into 'colonizers'. Such a move, I argue, is made possible by postcolonial racisms: the historic articulation between ideas of 'race' and 'nation' wherein ideas of national soil are racialized and racist ideas of blood are territorialized.