Glen Sean Coulthard

Dzieła

• 2014Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Czerwona skóra, białe maski: odrzucenie kolonialnej polityki uznania)

  Dlaczego uznanie przez państwo osadnicze nie dekolonizuje – i dlaczego rdzenny opór czerpie z ziemi jako systemu relacji.

Stanowisko

Coulthard’s starting point is the turn in Canadian politics since the 1970s towards recognising Aboriginal rights, land claims and self-government, and its best-known philosophical defence, Charles Taylor’s essay “The Politics of Recognition” (1992). With Fanon, who observed that what the master wants from the slave is “not recognition but work”, he argues that recognition granted by a colonial state does not free the colonised; it leads them to identify with the terms on which they are recognised, and so reproduces the power it was supposed to transform. He applies the same objection to Nancy Fraser’s model of recognition. Against an orthodox reading of Marx he proposes a “place-based” version of primitive accumulation: in settler colonies the decisive relation is not the making of wage labourers but the ongoing dispossession of land. Following Vine Deloria’s contrast between spatial and temporal world views and the Dene struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, he describes “grounded normativity”, the ethical frameworks that come from land-based practices and knowledge, in which land is a system of reciprocal relations and obligations. Negotiated land claims, he argues, turned a struggle informed by land as relationship into a struggle for land as property. He defends Indigenous resentment against an official language of reconciliation, examines the gendered politics of self-government, and ends with theses on Indigenous resurgence drawn from Idle No More (2012–13). Brian Burkhart objected in 2017 that Coulthard locates the change from land as relationship to land as property only in the power of the state, not in Western concepts of land and being; reviewers have also noted that the argument is worked out mainly for Canada.

Życie i kontekst

Glen Sean Coulthard was born in 1974 and is a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation in the Northwest Territories of Canada. He studied at the University of Victoria, first in its Indigenous Governance programme, and then in political science, where James Tully supervised his doctorate (2009). He teaches Indigenous studies and political science at the University of British Columbia. His article “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada” (2007) won the annual prize of the journal Contemporary Political Theory. He is a co-founder of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a land-based university programme in the Northwest Territories, where he has spent part of each teaching year since 2015. Red Skin, White Masks (2014) received the C. B. Macpherson Prize of the Canadian Political Science Association and the Frantz Fanon Award of the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada” (Contemporary Political Theory, 2007)
• Introduction to George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (new edition, 2019)