The Boomerang Effect of Decolonization: Post-Orientalism and the Politics of Difference 9780228015420

Citation preview

The Boomerang Effect of Decolonization

The Boomerang Effect of Decolonization Post-Orientalism and the Politics of Difference

Edited by Maurice Jr. Labelle

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 ISBN 978-0-2280-1438-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-1542-0 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-2280-1543-7 (ePUB) Legal deposit first quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: The boomerang effect of decolonization : post-orientalism and the politics of difference / edited by Maurice Jr. Labelle. Names: Labelle, Maurice, Jr., editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220407193 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220407282 | ISBN 9780228014386 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228015420 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780228015437 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: Said, Edward W. | LCSH: Orientalism. | LCSH: Decolonization. | LCSH: Anti-racism. Classification: LCC DS61.85 .B66 2023 | DDC 303.48/2182105 – dc23

This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design in 11/14 Minion Pro.

Dédicacé à Lofti

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: The Boomerang Effect of Decolonization Maurice Jr. Labelle

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Part One: Anti-Orientalism in Canada before Edward Said’s Orientalism 1

Dr Howard Adams’s Halfbreed Histories of Canadian Colonialism: An Indigenous Paradigm for Decolonization 25 Allyson Stevenson

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Boomerang Epistemologies: Indian Health Services, the Sioux Lookout Project, and Colonially Entangled Knowledge 42 Mary-Ellen Kelm Part twO: Edward Said’s World and the Formation of His Critique of Orientalism

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Authenticity and Renewal in Jacques Berque’s Critique of Orientalism 79 Sung-eun Choi

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Edward Said and the Politics of Race Yasmeen Abu-Laban

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Contents

Exodus or Revolution: “World Turned Inside Out” vs “World Turned Upside Down” in a 1980s Exchange Lorenzo Veracini

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Part three: Post-Orientalism after Edward Said 6

Can the Subaltern of the Subaltern Speak? A Post-Orientalist Reading of Sayyid Qutb’s Notion of Hierarchy 141 Rachad Antonius

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The Challenges and Demands of Allyship through the Public Intellectual Platform 164 Mira Sucharov Contributors Index

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Acknowledgments

This edited volume (and its preceding international workshop) greatly benefited from the generous support of Ian McKay, Maxime Dagenais, and the team at McMaster University’s L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History. In addition to chapter authors, it also reaped from the insights of workshop participants Virginia Aksan, Mark Philip Bradley, Brittany Luby, Laura Madokoro, Sean Mills, Todd Shepard, Abed Takriti, and Mohammed Turki. Finally, this volume would not have been possible without the Labellians: Katie, Zeke, Enaïs, and Beau. Je vous aime infiniment.

The Boomerang Effect of Decolonization

I n t rO duc t I O n

The Boomerang Effect of Decolonization Maurice Jr. Labelle

Edward Said’s relationship with Orientalism – the book, the imperial institution, its proposed way of thinking, and mode of domination – did not end in 1978. It was only the end of the beginnings of his anti-Orientalist critique. Orientalism (the book) made anti-Orientalism a lifelong, decolonial project for the Palestinian-American intellectual, as well as others across the globe.1 As Said travelled with the dynamic conversations that denounced imperial culture and its politics of difference, post-Orientalism became integral to the refinement of his practice. Like other conceptual “posts,”2 a post-Orientalist approach entangles itself with Orientalism’s continuities after Said’s Orientalism and engenders reciprocal transformations. How did the anti-Orientalist critique change after the publication of the 1978 book? How did it adapt and reorient itself when faced with myriad roadblocks? How did, have, and should such decolonial travels (in)form approaches vis-à-vis the imperial politics of difference, be they past, present, and/or future? At first, more than forty years ago, Said’s publication of Orientalism best represented an instance whereby a person of “colonized” heritage intercepted what Aimé Césaire earlier described as “the boomerang effect of colonization.” In 1978, Said threw this boomerang with all his intellectual and emotional might in the opposite direction, mainly toward those with “colonizer” backgrounds, acting in solidarity with disparate like-minded peoples. When writing Orientalism, he felt and understood that imperialism – as Martinique’s anti-imperial leader

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explained in his 1955 work Discourse on Colonialism – “dehumanizes even the most civilized man … [T]he colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing another man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.”3 And so, through “a study in critique,”4 Said’s Orientalism contributed to nascent postcolonial efforts in “decolonizing the mind” of so-called Western and Eastern humanists alike.5 As Said stated in an interview on the eve of the book’s appearance, he was “an Oriental writing back at the Orientalists, who for so long has thrived upon our silence.” Equally important, he explained that he was “also writing to them, as it were, by dismantling the structure of their discipline” and disclosing its “ideological biases.”6 Together, Edward Said and his 1978 book represented a key historical episode in what I am calling the boomerang effect of decolonization. The boomerang metaphor, thanks particularly to Césaire, has an important place within the histories of decolonization and anti-imperial critiques. It stresses the historically circular flow of ideas generated within the global phenomenon of decolonization itself. Through Orientalism, Said tried to unsettle – and consequently humanize – in a relational way that ideally further empowered decolonial processes that aimed to transform everyone, regardless of both imagined and real differences, for the betterment of all.7 Upon its release, Orientalism immediately “attracted a great deal of attention.”8 In his preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, published the year of his passing, Said expressed his belief “that Orientalism has had a place in the long and often interrupted road to human freedom.”9 Indeed, it did, has, and will continue to do so. Orientalism and its multidirectional travels have been – and will continue to be – central to decolonization. Why Edward Said’s Orientalism more so than other decolonial writings? Why the “Orientalism” in post-Orientalism? This volume offers an answer by focusing on how different shades of the anti-Orientalist critique travelled with peoples, cultures, and other ideas. Such travels and their comings together were integral to Orientalism’s canonization. The style of anti-Orientalist critique that Said made at a specific point in time, as well as in a particular place and language, had the effect of powering the globalization of decolonial “worldmaking” from the ground up, eliciting “transnational knowledges” and “nonrepressive” practices like few others before and after.10 And so, how did diverse

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peoples, in different places and at different times, experience and attempt to push against what Said called Orientalism in a humanizing way? How did his critique of imperial culture (in)form both individual and collective decolonial practices and processes in the world? And how have such relationalities impacted the imperial politics of difference? Consequently, this edited volume asks: how has post-Orientalism coexisted with ongoing imperial difference-makings?

• Lotfi Ben Rejeb, a Tunisian student from the small town of Sidi Bou Saïd, encountered Edward Said’s critique for the first time within a year of Orientalism’s publication. Ben Rejeb – the recipient of a prestigious Fulbright Bicentennial scholarship and in the midst of his doctoral work in American studies at Indiana University (IU), Bloomington campus – recalls going through “traumatising times” back then. The Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis that followed brought antiArab and anti-Muslim racisms to the forefront in the United States. A bewildered and frustrated Ben Rejeb remembers experiencing “a side of the United States that he did not know.”11 “For the first time on campus, in the elevator of [his] residence,” Ben Rejeb “encountered words that [he] had never heard before, nor read.” Racializing epithets like “ragheads.” To the deep discomfort of both him and his Iranian friends, IU fraternities flew flags that read: “Save Oil, Burn Iranians.” In response, Ben Rejeb told himself: “I have to document this damn thing.” He immediately put his first, newly purchased camera to good use. What struck him most was what the African-American writer W.E.B. Du Bois called “double consciousness.” Like many other Arabs and Muslims in the United States at that time, Ben Rejeb witnessed first-hand “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”12 That is, he lived with the politics of difference and their entanglement between individuals, the misrepresentations that purportedly represent them, and misrepresenters, directly and indirectly. It was in this context that the Tunisian doctoral student in American studies read Said’s newly released book, Orientalism. Ben Rejeb was immediately touched. Said eloquently explained an imperial structure that he felt so strongly about at the time but had difficulties spelling out. According to Ben Rejeb, who was well versed in the anti-imperial

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writings of fellow North Africans Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon,13 Said “expressed in forceful words … what thousands of ‘Orientals’ and former colonial subjects have felt in their bones for years.”14 Ben Rejeb knew, like Said, that Orientalism’s decolonial critique was not new.15 Nonetheless, many felt that Said’s book best (re)presented the postcolonial phenomenon of “the wretched of the earth talking back.” The book “gave a serious answer back to a West that had never actually listened to or forgiven the Oriental for being Oriental at all.”16 It symbolized the boomerang effect of decolonization through its effort to humanize Westerners, their racialized perceptions of the Arab world, Islam, and the Middle East, as well as Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Easterners in the process. Amid reading Orientalism’s introduction and working on his dissertation, which examined how misperceptions of North Africans framed early US nationalism in the first decades of the nineteenth century,17 Ben Rejeb came across a special issue of Time dedicated to Islam.18 Much like the promenades and elevators of Indiana University, the US media was replete with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes. Time’s 16 April 1979 cover, as Said himself later described it in Covering Islam, “was adorned by a Gerome painting of a bearded muezzin standing in a minaret, calmly summoning the faithful to prayer.” Yet, “[a]nachronistically” in Said’s mind, “this quiet scene was emblazoned with a caption that had nothing to do with it: ‘The Militant Revival.’”19 Ben Rejeb wholeheartedly agreed. Inside, the popular US magazine published a review of Said’s book. The review opened by referring to Orientalism as “an attack on learned ignorance,” “angry,” and “provocative.”20 Time’s description of Orientalism, which employed the very Orientalist tropes that the Palestinian-American denounced in his important work, struck a chord with Lotfi Ben Rejeb, who in turn felt compelled to write to Said. Seeing continuities between the early nineteenth-century United States and his present, the non-practising Tunisian Muslim had been deeply moved by both Edward Said’s book and Time’s review, albeit for antithetical reasons. As Ben Rejeb avowed both then and now, Time made him “angry.” In his letter, the Tunisian sarcastically reprimanded Said: How could (rather, how dare you) be so “angry,” so “provocative,” so challenging? … Maybe it’s because you’re Palestinian … in which case everything becomes clear for the majority of

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Westerners: your anger is a logical result of your ethnic belonging and political beliefs – you are Palestinian, “Oriental,” Arab, therefore, angry, revengeful, uncivil if not uncivilized, and (who knows) maybe a potential terrorist.21 Putting sarcasm aside, he shared his “sincere admiration.” Ben Rejeb confided to Said: “for as long as I could discern my reality … I have been, whether the West likes it or not, very ‘angry.’ My anger is not a matter of youth, but a matter of history. It is, as I’m sure yours is too, a style, a discourse, a method of looking at the West in which many Westerners would not accept for obvious reasons.”22 Said later described the transnational anti-Orientalist “style” mentioned by Ben Rejeb in his letter as “a decentered consciousness.”23 The letter did not elicit a response; the Tunisian student did not expect one. However, Ben Rejeb and Said crossed paths in Tunis during the mid1980s. Said was in town to meet with the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which made the capital of Tunisia its headquarters after being forced to relocate from Beirut, Lebanon, in 1982. Sometime in between meetings with PLO leader Yasser Arafat and his entourage, Said was introduced to Ben Rejeb at an informal gathering organized by some of the Tunisian’s Palestinian friends. Their exchange was brief; it pertained to US–Middle East relations. Both men agreed that Arabs needed a more critically informed understanding of Americans and Westerners more broadly, especially their histories, cultures, and mentalité. Therein was a key ingredient to reconciliation between Orient and Occident.24 Ben Rejeb did not mention his 1979 letter.25 I discovered the Tunisian’s letter in the Edward Said Papers at Columbia University in early November 2016. Post-Orientalism’s boomerang effect of decolonization circled back in my direction and struck me like a thunderbolt: Lotfi Ben Rejeb was my undergraduate mentor and MA supervisor at the Université d’Ottawa. I was floored when, ten months after my research concluded in Upper Manhattan, I realized that “my” Lotfi Ben Rejeb penned this 1979 letter to Said – his name was transliterated differently in the 1970s; in the letter, it read: Lotfi Berjeb. I immediately emailed Lotfi, as he insisted that I call him following my MA graduation, and sarcastically asked him: Connais-tu ce Lotfi Berjeb? Commentaires? (Do you know this Lotfi Berjeb? Care to comment?)

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Anxiously awaiting his response, I returned to our time together over a decade ago in Canada’s capital. Lotfi Ben Rejeb’s presence, brilliance, patience, and mentorship made me want to engage more deeply with Middle Eastern perspectives like his own. His passion fed my curiosity, which often circled back to the very troubling question that US president George W. Bush posed after 9/11: why do “they” hate “us”? Like Bush 43, I naïvely wanted to know why Arabs and Muslims were “angry” with the West. And Lotfi – an Arab teaching US history in North America – quickly became my intellectual compass, however problematic my approach was at the time. Upon reflection, I finally understood why Ben Rejeb was always so welcoming with me, despite my ignorance and prejudices. What mattered most then for Lotfi was the environment that he established with his students and the conversations that it generated. Lotfi re-presented relations between “East” and “West” to me, both in the flesh and on the chalkboard. This, at a formative time in my life, was decolonization in both theory and action. To put it differently, for me personally, Lotfi represented the boomerang effect of decolonization. Similar to the effect that Edward Said’s Orientalism had on many following its publication, Lotfi Ben Rejeb – and Lotfi Berjeb, for that matter – humanized me. Ben Rejeb’s timely response to my email was classic Lotfi: “Mon dieu, quel flashback!” (My God, what a flashback!)26 As decolonization’s boomerang directly affected me, I realized that these “interdependent histories” between Edward Said, Lotfi Ben Rejeb, and myself embody the phenomenal power of post-Orientalism. The value of a post-Orientalist approach, which builds off Orientalism (the book) itself and the continuous conversations that it generates, is not solely about challenging imperial ways of seeing and being, which remains vital. Transcending that, its importance lies amid how its decolonial style enables us (both historically and conceptually) to re-structure human affairs by bringing different peoples together as equals, in a relational way that does not exclude or oppress, without flattening individual distinctiveness. As a category of analysis, post-Orientalism examines situations and processes of decolonial humanization in context, including problematic ones. At its best, it critically frames “overlapping areas of experience” in ways that represent and re-present coexistence as something natural and normal.27 Those entanglements, engendered by the boomerang effect of decolonization and powered by the likes of Edward Said, Aimé Césaire,

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Lotfi Ben Rejeb, and many others, enable processes of re-orientation and humanization, like my own.

• This edited volume adds to the conceptualization of post-Orientalism by exploring relationalities in between imperial misrepresentations, the misrepresented, and misrepresenters in a decolonial way.28 The “mis” in misrepresentations, misrepresented, and misrepresenters should not be understood as fixed or being merely linked to the production of falsifications. What matters most within my suggested postOrientalist framework is their dehumanizing functions, connections to empire-makings, and consequences on perceptions of selves, others, and their powered relationships. Orientalism’s imperial misrepresentations, more specifically their “style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances,”29 need to be analyzed in relation with the boomerang effect of decolonization and the related experiences of different peoples involved. In this post-Orientalist vein, analyses of Said, Orientalism, and a changing anti-Orientalist critique should not be divorced from each other. Given their connections to ongoing race-makings and the politics of difference, nor should they be studied in isolation.30 Said’s canon cannot be forgotten as an anti-racist text, as Yasmeen Abu-Laban contends in this volume. By authoring Orientalism, Said situated himself in conversation with Orientalism, the imperial culture, and against its racializations. He explicitly did so, for instance, when commenting on nineteenth-century French writer Gustave Flaubert’s popular dehumanization of Arabs through the misrepresentation of a Syrian woman named Kuchuk Hanem.31 Said comments that, in Flaubert’s widely read travel account to Ottoman Egypt, Hanem “never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for her and represented her” in a way that harmed Arabs everywhere. The Palestinian-American intellectual then invoked the gendered relationship between Hanem and Flaubert as introductory evidence to reveal Orientalism’s “historical facts of domination.” He argued that “Flaubert’s situation of strength in relation of Kuchuk Hanem was not an isolated incident. It fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between the East and West, and the discourse about the Orient that it enabled.”32 In

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this case, through Orientalism, Said’s anti-racist intervention against Flaubert and the French Orientalist’s “influential model of the Oriental woman” positioned the misrepresentation, the misrepresented, and the misrepresenter in a larger process of decolonial humanization. The Palestinian-American’s relationship with Orientalism’s mode of domination, misrepresentations of Arabs like that of Hanem, and misrepresenters like Flaubert, along with his refusal to be silenced through the act of writing his 1978 book, represented a situation whereby he individually grappled with the boomerang effect of decolonization. Said openly said so in the final pages of Orientalism’s introduction (emphasis added): “Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an ‘Oriental’ as a child growing up in two British colonies … In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.”33 Like Lotfi Ben Rejeb, Said’s “disheartening” experiences with “the web” of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racisms (or “Orientalizations”) moved him to read deeply into Orientalism’s legacy, most notably its role in empire-making. The repressive circumstance that he felt in which “the almost total absence of any cultural position making it possible either to identify with or dispassionately to discuss the Arabs or Islam” led him to engage with Orientalism’s “dehumanizing ideology” and challenge the imperial politics of difference. Ultimately, he hoped to both politically and academically contribute to “a new kind of dealing with the Orient.”34 Said’s Orientalism did just that, presenting a damning critique of predominant Western perceptions of the Middle East, their boundless authors, as well as their borderless imprints. As a global age of formal decolonization wrapped up in Western imaginations,35 Said exposed empire’s cultural underbelly, along with its continuity, despite the end of direct imperial rule in most places. Orientalism, his 1978 book argues, is a “formidable structure of cultural domination” that makes and maintains empire. Said defines Orientalism as “several things”; in sum, its complex structure has a dizzying set of interdependent composites: “tradition,” “mode of discourse,” “style of thought,” “corporate institution,” “western style of domination,” “general group of ideas,” “will or intention,” “study of imperialism and culture,” as well as “political doctrine.” Consolidated in eighteenth-century Europe, these

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structural parts collectively form a global imperial system that remains connected to “modern political-intellectual culture” in the contemporary era. Orientalism, Said argues, “is a cultural and a political fact.”36 It is not necessarily cultural imperialism, more commonly referred to as Coca-colonization.37 Instead, it is the amalgamation of culture with empire-making. This crucial detail perhaps explains why he, at one point, suggested to his publisher the title of “On Imperialism and Culture” for the book that would be published as Orientalism.38 According to Said, Orientalism’s structure systematizes an imperial culture that moved Britain, France, and the United States’ influential involvement in the modern Middle East, from the late eighteenth century to the present. The Middle East has a “special place in European Western experience.” For Said, this unique situation and its significance to Western supremacy in the modern world justifies the linguistic inclusion of the Orient in Orientalism and warrants Orientalism’s synonymousness with imperial culture everywhere. Orientalism’s imperial way of seeing and being, which rapidly amassed itself in a voluminous corpus of European-led writings of quality, popularizes a racialized idea of an Orient that affirms the latter’s inferiority in relation to an always more superior Occident. In turn, this Western-based imagined relationality between Europe (and its settler colonies) and the Middle East produces dehumanizing misrepresentations that sanction political interventions and repressive relationships. These misrepresentations perpetually mar the realities of Middle Eastern peoples, societies, and political economies. Consequently, Orientalism, Orientalists, and their racialized conception of the Orient silence those they claim to represent, erasing the presence and existence of Middle Easterners like Kuchuk Hanem.39 The reception of Said’s prominent work spanned many political spectrums, disciplines, languages, platforms, and places. As the PalestinianAmerican himself noted almost two decades later, “some of it (as was to be expected) very hostile, some of it uncomprehending, but most of it positive and enthusiastic.”40 Since 1978, many scholars have exhaustively tested Orientalism and identified its limitations, which Said himself did in the latter half of the book’s introduction. Myriad others fully embraced its framework, particularly its critique of imperial culture, and wrote back against empire, resulting in the formation of a new discipline: postcolonial studies.41 Likewise, Said’s self-described “partisan”

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chef d’oeuvre forever changed the field of Middle East studies. This was something that he openly wanted, however grandiose an ambition.42 Criticisms of Orientalism were aplenty in the wake of its release, contributing to the book’s notoriety. Many critics did not find Orientalism whole enough; Said anticipated this.43 The 1978 book was frequently scrutinized for its incompleteness – that is, for what it did not do. For instance, the absence of gender or class as central dimensions in Said’s analysis, Orientalism’s exclusion of European Orientalists beyond Britain and France, its lack of archival research, and the omission of particular places outside the Middle East or historical periods predating the modern era became customary.44 Antithetically, a different critique accused Said of essentializing Orientalists and their academic discipline. Some versions even went as far as wrongfully implying that Said portrayed all Westerners as overt racists. In the end, this conversation incited an important reflection about whether or not Said’s framework treated differences too rigidly. It wondered if Orientalism’s flattened the politics of difference and discounted possibilities of ambiguities, ambivalences, and dynamics.45 Beyond these assessments, other criticisms emerged that dug deeper into Said’s conceptual framework in an attempt to push its decolonial politics. Chief among these was that Orientalism, which grosso modo excluded Middle Eastern peoples and their historical critiques of the discipline of Orientalism and its broader culture, reified the very imperial structure that it sought to dismantle.46 As Leela Ghandi eloquently put it, “Sometimes, in his obdurate determination that Orientalism silenced opposition, Said, ironically, silences opposition.”47 Aijaz Ahmad, an Indian Marxist scholar based in the United States, was more ruthless in his contribution to this critique, arguing that Said “duplicates all of [the Orientalist] procedures even as he debunks the very tradition from which he has borrowed them.” Ahmad, in essence, accused Said of being an Orientalist in Orientalism. Disconnecting Said’s personal experience authoring the 1978 book, as well as discounting the fact that the politically active Palestinian-American wrote many of its pages in Lebanon, Ahmad contended that, “There had been … no evidence until after the publication of the book that Said had read any considerable number of non-Western writers.”48 His harsh critique struck a sensitive chord with Said, leading the latter to pen a resentful complaint to the former’s publisher Verso. He felt that the Indian

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scholar’s attack was “slanderously malicious, out of context, distorted … As with far too many Third World characters in the West,” opined Said, “[Ahmad] has been trying to make his reputation by attacking wellknown people.” Verso’s publication of his work was “bad judgment.” Appalled, Said proclaimed that henceforth, “I can’t, won’t, be published by such a bunch of incompetent assholes.”49 Acknowledging Orientalism’s conceptual shortcomings, Said slightly reoriented his anti-Orientalist critique and, in the process, initiated a post-Orientalist framework. Avowing that “we are obliged on intellectual as well as political grounds to investigate the resistance to the politics of Orientalism,” he better understood the importance of incorporating both the mispresented and the global process of decolonization when analyzing the role of culture in empire-making. This active inclusion, which systematically countered imperial exclusions, unsettled Orientalism itself and (in)formed a post-Orientalist approach. To further empower structural decolonization, Said concluded, the misrepresented must be present with imperial discourses and their misrepresenters that vow that “they cannot represent themselves.”50 In narrative form, they needed to represent themselves, not Others. Edward Said’s sequel to Orientalism, coincidentally entitled Culture and Imperialism (1993), spelled out his subtle anti-Orientalist re-orientation more explicitly. Post-Orientalism, a term that Said never used, could not “ignore or otherwise discount the overlapping experiences of Westerners and Orientals, the interdependence of cultural terrains in which the colonizer and the colonized co-existed and battled each other.” The key to an improved anti-Orientalist critique, Said opined, was “to show the two forces together.”51 Put differently, as he did in a 1993 interview with Radical Philosophy, “[i]t’s impossible to talk about the sides of the opposition between oriental and occidental separately … imperialism was not one side only, but of two sides, and the two are always involved in each other.” A genuine decolonial approach, therefore, required post-Orientalism to adopt “the integrative view, rather than the separatist one.”52 Anti-Orientalism, at its best, was no longer strictly about talking back; it was about talking with. Despite changes in Said’s own anti-Orientalist critique since 1978, criticisms of Orientalism remain alive and well. A most recent example was put forward by Wael Hallaq’s analysis of Orientalism’s standing in the twenty-first century. In his Restating Orientalism, Hallaq sternly

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argues that Said misconceived Orientalism. Therefore, his antiOrientalist critique’s “critical edge is incoherent and dull” because it fails “to appreciate the full force of [its] destructive power as a modern form of power.” Said put the proverbial cart before the horse. Culture did not move empire. According to Hallaq, empire produces culture; Orientalism is empire’s “handmaiden.” He posits that Said’s 1978 book “scapegoated” Orientalism through his failure to unearth “the structural anchors of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, as well as their political manifestations in the larger modern project.”53 By “obsessing” with Orientalist authors and their texts, Hallaq contends that Said neglected to critically examine the “organizing suprastructure” that anchored Orientalism: the European Enlightenment. Orientalism, he asserts, “exhibits the common and quite ordinary common denominator of modern knowledge.” It represents the rule, not the exception. As a result, Said’s canonical work restates Orientalism instead of uprooting it, as the latter’s foundations remain predominantly untouched. Hallaq asserts “that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gradually produced particular and unprecedented kinds of knowledge that indeed made themselves substantively and inherently amenable to the manipulation of power, giving the latter its distinctive and complex meaning.” Orientalism continues to reign supreme due to “the sovereign thought structure” that the European Enlightenment holds on numerous units of modern knowledge, not just Middle East studies.54 At its core, Hallaq’s 2018 critique of Said’s 1978 book is an important one; Orientalism’s power perseveres, and we must better understand why.55 Yet, Restating Orientalism does not go far enough in incorporating the fact that Orientalism (the book) itself honed, imprinted, marshalled, and ultimately globalized anti-Orientalism as a mode of liberation. Hallaq acknowledges that Said facilitated the formation of his own anti-Orientalist critique. However, the way he criticizes the 1978 book and its author has an effect of concealing the structure of anti-Orientalism from its relationship with Orientalism. It disconnects decolonization from empire when, ironically, Hallaq and Said are on the same side of the anti-Orientalist coin. Whereas anti-Orientalism etymologically includes Orientalism, decolonial understandings of Orientalism must not exclude anti-Orientalism. Hallaq’s Restating Orientalism offers proof that the anti-Orientalist critique popularized by Said itself appears to be at a general theoretical

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“impasse” four decades after the publication of Orientalism.56 Most scholars have thought about both Said and his book, without necessarily thinking with their post-1978 travels. That is, they have included Orientalism in their intellectual toolboxes, without entangling themselves within anti-Orientalism’s migrations and their transformative effects on the formation of post-Orientalism, which seeks to push decolonization and Orientalism’s core humanist perspective forward. This is the junction whereby this volume connects with Edward Said’s anti-Orientalist thinking after Orientalism, while not losing sight of ongoing criticisms like Ahmed’s and Hallaq’s. Following the ruminations of Said and myriad others, this edited collection defines post-Orientalism as a category of analysis that, through the boomerang effect of decolonization and its “optics of coexistence,”57 systematically dis-orders the imperial politics of difference. Derived from the intellectual critique that Said popularized in the West, but not limited to either Orientalism (the book), Edward Said himself, the Middle East, and/or the so-called postcolonial era, it is a worldly frame that works to unsettle empire’s un-natural system of differences, which sanction(ed) social hierarchies and human inequalities.58 Rather than firmly dividing entities in a binary way, it keeps parts together within a wider web of identity formations and interactions. Like the postcolonial critique,59 post-Orientalism sets “the will to dominate” others as its humanizing target.60 But it does not strictly target imperial culture; it simultaneously structures decolonization by reorienting the politics of difference. To counteract the power of imperial culture, post-Orientalism desegregates different peoples, places, and discourses enmeshed in the legacies of imperialism. Through diffraction,61 which explains the quantum entanglement between differences within processes of differencemaking, the decolonial concept makes “worldly configurations” that bridge “a gap between representations and represented.”62 Contrary to imperial culture – which imposes “muteness,” exercises exclusion, and results in imagined peripheralities – post-Orientalism deals with the “relational rather than essential.”63 That is, it analyzes relations between misrepresentations and misrepresented peoples in ways that do not exclude misrepresenters and parallel imperial formations. By exploring “the relational nature of difference” and its intra-activities,64 such an approach affirms decolonial presence and outlines the coexistential nature within imperial culture itself. It is based on the philosophical

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notion that to exist is a result of coexistence with others, not vice versa (coexistence is a result of existence). As French political philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, “Presence is impossible except as copresence.”65 Ultimately, post-Orientalism’s approach critically presents difference differently than imperial culture, without structuring inequalities or erasing differences altogether.66

• This edited volume is organized in three sections that seek to not overdetermine how each chapter can be read. The first section offers two examples, predating Edward Said’s publication of Orientalism, that historicize different kinds of relationships within the boomerang effect of decolonization in Canada. While neither example directly affected the specific formation of Said’s critique of Orientalism’s imperial culture, they both evidence that the Palestinian-American’s experience was far from unique or isolated. To begin, Allyson Stevenson’s essay examines how the writings and activities of Indigenous leader Howard Adams contributed to the process of decolonization in the Canadian Prairies. Like Said, Adams developed an intellectual critique and practice that sought to humanize the Métis national movement and its misrepresenters. By naming Canadian imperialism, revealing its racialization of the Métis, and demystifying ideas of settler benevolence, the Métis leader was integral to the development of what Stevenson terms “a Métis historical consciousness” and growing “international” calls for a reorientation in Indigenous-settler relations in Canada in the late 1960s and 1970s.67 Mary-Ellen Kelm’s contribution, like Stevenson’s, is centred in Canada. It focuses on the positioning of a settler, Robin Badgley, within the arduous process of “decolonizing” the Canadian government’s formal medical relationship with Cree and Anishinaabe people in the Sioux Lookout region of Treaty 9 territory, located in northwestern Ontario. Kelm, more specifically, analyzes both the pushes of decolonial revelations and pulls of imperial praxis faced by the renowned medical sociologist during his attempt to devise a new public health care system, known as the Sioux Lookout Project, in the early 1970s. Despite being unable to finish his study, Badgley put forward a rare settler critique of Canada’s imperial relationship with Indigenous Peoples. With affected

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Indigenous community members, he set in motion a pseudo-decolonial mentalité that valued Indigenous knowledge, re-assessed medical rights in the Sioux Lookout region in a more humanizing way, and acknowledged the government of Canada’s treaty obligations on matters of health, healing, and well-being. This volume’s second section turns its attention more directly to Edward Said, in an attempt to further comprehend his historical relationship with anti-Orientalism before and after the publication of Orientalism. As Sung-eun Choi points out in chapter 3, Said’s critique was partly informed by the work of an unusual European anti-Orientalist Orientalist, Jacques Berque. An anomaly in his field, the French scholar of North Africa sought to humanize Orientalism by challenging the hegemony of European superiority. In the process, Berque radically called upon his Orientalist peers to engage directly with the peoples and societies they studied. A deeper Orientalist understanding of asala (“authenticity” in Arabic) and its rapport with ideas of modernization, avowed the French Orientalist, would facilitate political and cultural processes of decolonization in between the Orient and Occident. Whereas Berque played an important role in the formation of Said’s anti-Orientalist critique before Orientalism, so did the PalestinianAmerican’s experience in North America. Yasmeen Abu-Laban’s essay examines how the politics of race in 1960s and 1970s Canada and the United States shaped the beginnings of Said’s anti-racist practice. AntiArab and anti-Muslim racisms and the subsequent formation of an Arab North American Left refined Said’s opposition to the academic field of Orientalism and evidenced the presence of imperial culture in Western metropoles that did not formally colonize lands in the Middle East and North Africa. From this context, Abu-Laban shifts focus toward the present to suggest ways in which the particular anti-racist resistance that Said popularized can be more effective in mainstream society. Lorenzo Veracini’s contribution complements Choi’s and Abu-Laban’s by focusing on a moment in the elaboration of Said’s anti-Orientalist critique and decolonial practice after Orientalism’s publication. Said’s published exchange in the 1980s with political theorist Michael Walzer on the contemporary representations and political usages of the Exodus story, Veracini asserts, served as a post-Orientalist intervention of his against global settler colonialism’s mode of domination, especially its ways of displacement and exclusionary silencing of an Indigenous

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Canaanite perspective. Well versed in Biblical studies scholarship,68 Said unearthed how Walzer’s Zionist misrepresentation of Exodus as a revolutionary tradition related with Orientalism and its imperial culture. Veracini identifies the Walzer-Said exchange as a revelatory intellectual extension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the United States’ perceived role in it. Section 3, for its part, offers two reflections on contemporary post-Orientalism and its decolonial potential. The first, offered by Rachad Antonius, presents an important fault line within antiOrientalism’s decentred consciousness in the world after Orientalism. By examining the role of supremacist discourse in Egyptian Islamism’s perception and treatment of non-Muslim minorities, Antonius unearths a way in which relations between Orient and Occident in a postOrientalist world blur national and local hierarchy and their repressive relationships in the Middle East. Similar to Leela Gandhi’s critique of Said’s Orientalism cited above, he asserts that post-Orientalism has had the contributive effects of silencing Islamist dehumanizations and erasing Coptic Christians, a group that Antonius categorizes as subaltern to the subaltern in Egypt. His essay, as a result, calls upon decolonial scholars to contemplate relations of domination within dominated societies in a way that is more inclusive and does not indirectly contribute to an Orientalization of the Middle East. Finally, Mira Sucharov’s contribution auto-assesses the practice of Jewish allyship with Arabs and Muslims in contemporary North America. While contemplating her public advocacy for the release of Canadian Hassan Diab from a French prison, Sucharov grapples with the particular role of Jewish public intellectuals in a post-Orientalist world constantly linked to the Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflicts. She also contemplates the latter’s relationship within the ongoing relationality in between anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish racisms. Her essay offers a unique glimpse into the tricky politics of positionality within the process of allyship-making, problems and challenges included. Collectively, the ensuing seven chapters, along with this introduction, provide a very small window into seeing ways in which Orientalism and anti-Orientalism have travelled and coexisted together. Akin to Said’s narrative efforts in Orientalism, this volume is not intended – nor is it able – to present a full picture of post-Orientalism. Women historical actors, gender, and intersectionalities regrettably do not take

Introduction

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up enough space amid the pages that follow. This regrettable lacuna is not meant to imply that, for instance, women were not historical agents of decolonial change; au contraire. Like Said with Orientalism and alongside the narratives deployed to demonstrate the boomerang effect of decolonization, individual authors and their identities are important subjects within post-Orientalism’s decolonial practice, its integrative conceptual framework, and this volume. However grandiose Edward Said’s ambition was when he published Orientalism over four decades ago, the primary objective of this volume is much simpler and smaller. In an effort to further encourage the boomerang effect of decolonization, I would like to give back to the many women, non-binary and Two Spirit people, and men that have facilitated decolonial humanizations in the world. Notes 1 For an explanation of the term “decolonial,” see Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 2 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994 [1978]), 348. 3 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 41. 4 Said, Orientalism, 338. 5 Ngūgī wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 1981); and Edward Said, “Decolonizing the Mind,” in Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (New York: Vintage, 1996), 92–9. 6 “Beginnings (Fall 1976 Interview in Diacritics 6, 3)” in Edward Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said (New York: Vintage, 2001), 38. 7 Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 148. 8 Said, Orientalism, 329. 9 Ibid., xxx. 10 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of SelfDetermination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 2; Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019 [1998]), 177; and Said, Orientalism, 24.

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11 Lotfi Ben Rejeb, email correspondence with author, 1 October 2017. 12 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co, 1903), 2–3. 13 Lotfi Ben Rejeb, conversation with author, 22 May 2018. 14 Lotfi Ben Rejeb, letter to Edward Said, 19 November 1979; Edward Said Papers; Box, 5 Folder 14, Series I.1; Columbia University Archives. 15 Lotfi Ben Rejeb, conversation with author, 22 May 2018; and Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Race & Class 27, no. 2 (1985): 4. 16 Said, Orientalism, 335. 17 Lotfi Ben Rejeb, “‘To the Shores of Tripoli’: The Impact of Barbary on Early American Nationalism” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1982). 18 “Special Report: Islam, Orientalism and the West,” Time, 16 April 1979, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,912409,00.html. 19 Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Vintage, 1981), 16–17. 20 “Special Report: Islam, Orientalism and the West.” 21 Ben Rejeb, letter to Said, 19 November 1979. 22 Ibid. 23 Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” 14. 24 For more on the relationship between reconciliation and critiques of imperial culture, see David Jefferess, Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation, and Transformation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 25 Ben Rejeb, conversation with author, 22 May 2018. 26 Ben Rejeb, email correspondence with author, 1 October 2017. 27 Anne Beezer and Peter Osborne, “Orientalism and After: An Interview with Edward Said,” Radical Philosophy 63 (1993): 28. 28 A few examples are: Hamid Dabashi, Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror (London: Transaction Publishers, 2009); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 2 (1990): 383–408. 29 Said, Orientalism, 21. 30 Daniel Martinez HoSang and Natalia Molina, “Toward a Relational Consciousness of Race,” in Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice, eds. Natalia Molina, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and Ramón A. Gutiérrez (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 8. 31 Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour (New York: Penguin Books, 1996 [1972]), 113–20.

Introduction 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41 42

43 44

45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

21

Said, Orientalism, 6. Emphasis added. Said, Orientalism, 25. Ibid., 26–8. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); and Stuart Ward, “The European Provenance of Decolonization,” Past and Present 230 (2016): 228–60. Said, Orientalism, 2, 3, 8, 12–14, 25, 39, and 204. Maurice Jr. Labelle, “De-Coca-Colonizing Egypt: Globalization, Decolonization, and the Egyptian Boycott of Coca-Cola, 1966–68,” Journal of Global History 9, no. 1 (March 2014): 122–42. Edward Said, letter to William McClung, 5 July 1977; Edward Said Papers, Box 47, Folder 16, Series II.1; Columbia University Archives. Said, Orientalism, 1, 27, and 108–9. Edward Said, “East Isn’t East,” The Times Literary Supplement, 3 February 1995, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/east-isnt-east/. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Write Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature (New York: Routledge, 1989). Said, Orientalism, 339; and Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Said, Orientalism, 17, 18, and 24. Alexander Lyon Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2001); and Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 7. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 79; and Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). James Clifford, “Orientalism,” History and Theory 19, 2 (1980): 204–23; and Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin 8 (1981), http://www.matzpen.org/english/1981-07-10/orientalism-andorientalism-in-reverse-sadik-jalal-al-azm/. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 79. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992), 167 and 202. Edward Said, letter to Verso Books, 30 December 1992; Edward Said Papers, Box 52, Folder 1, Series II.1, Columbia University Archives. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” 2 and 5–6. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), xx and xxiv. “Orientalism and After,” 28. Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 6, 8, 21, and 29.

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54 Ibid., 9–10, 16, 72, and 237. 55 Saree Makdisi, “Orientalism Today,” in After Said: Postcolonial Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Bashir Abu-Manneh, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 183; and Vivek Chiber, “The Dual Legacy of Orientalism,” in After Said, ed. Abu-Manneh (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 37. 56 Edmund Burke III and David Prochaska, eds., Genealogies of Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 46. 57 Louiza Odysseos, The Subject of Coexistence: Otherness in International Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 58. 58 For more on the politics of difference in empire-making, see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 59 Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998); and Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Malden: Blackwell, 2001). 60 Said, Orientalism, xix. 61 Jessica Smartt Guillon, Diffractive Ethnography: Social Sciences and the Ontological Turn (New York: Routledge, 2018). 62 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 48 and 91. 63 Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” 4–5; and Prakash, “Writing PostOrientalist Histories of the Third World,” 339. 64 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 33 and 72. 65 Odysseos, The Subject of Coexistence, 59; Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 4 and 62; and Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxiv. 66 Karen Barad, “Diffracting Difference: Cutting Together-Apart,” Parallax 20, no. 3 (2014): 170 and 176. 67 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 68 Said, Orientalism, 18.

PART ONE Anti-Orientalism in Canada before Edward Said’s Orientalism

1

Dr Howard Adams’s Halfbreed Histories of Canadian Colonialism An Indigenous Paradigm for Decolonization Allyson Stevenson

Canada’s settler-colonial history haunts the cities, towns, and rural areas of Saskatchewan as nowhere else.1 Here, where Métis leader Louis Riel was hanged, Idle No More was birthed, and the statue of John A. Macdonald drips (symbolically) with blood, the past is ever present.2 The largely rural province straddles the Great Plains to the south and the boreal forest to the North, bisected by the North and South Saskatchewan River (kisiskāciwani-sīpiy, meaning “swift flowing river” in Cree). Saskatchewan has long been the epicentre of radical Indigenous political resistance and remarkable Indigenous cultural and political persistence. First Nations and Métis Peoples who encountered settler colonialism and cultural imperialism have generated creative, radical, and life-affirming responses that link local struggles for Indigenous justice, freedom, and decolonization to worldwide liberation movements.3 Saskatchewan Métis political activist and professor Howard Adams, author of Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View (1975) and A Tortured People: The Politics of Colonization (1999), wove radical Indigenous politics, a leftist political economic approach, and a searing critique of Canadian colonialism to construct a decolonial counter-narrative of Canadian history.4 The first (self-identifying) Métis person to complete a PhD, Adams obtained his doctorate in history of education from the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1960s.5 A contemporary of Edward Said, whose critique of Orientalism transformed postcolonial scholarship, Adams was part

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of a new generation of Indigenous intellectuals and writers, such as Maria Campbell, Harold Cardinal, Vine Deloria Jr, and George Manuel.6 Writing back against imperialism and white supremacy in Canada, Adams’s scholarship deconstructed Canadian exceptionalist myths of settler benevolence and peaceful expansion.7 This writing and activist work operated as a boomerang of decolonization, dispelling imperial misrepresentations of Indigenous Peoples and their history to dismantle the dehumanizing, racialized structures that maintained Indigenous marginalization and inferiority. Re-examining the writings of Adams in light of recent historiographical developments and contemporary Indigenous scholarly writing reveals important innovations in his scholarly analysis and political engagement, as well as the limitations of his critical engagements in the area of the gendered and sexualized logics of colonization.8 Adams’s scholarship, political work, and foundational role in creating Indigenous studies programs in Canada and the United States emerged from his desire to decolonize Indigenous education and politics, and to unite Indigenous people in a common struggle against colonialism and imperialism. His work was informed by an indigenized Métis history, alongside Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth, as well as Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized. Adams’s books, Prison of Grass and A Tortured People: The Politics of Colonization. Furthermore, he appears to be inspired in part by Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) and Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967).9 Employing a personal narrative and a critical historical analysis of contemporary racial relations, Adams advanced a new form of Indigenous scholarship that situated the struggle of Indigenous people in Canada for self-determination in a decolonial world that included the resistances of all colonized peoples.

• Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Métis communities underwent a period of severe economic and social marginalization in Prairie society. What Adams termed “the ossification of Native society” occurred following the 1885 armed resistance between the Canadian government and the Métis in Saskatchewan. First Nations Peoples were relegated to reserves, and the “defeated” Métis Peoples

An Indigenous Paradigm for Decolonization

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lived marginalized and landless in road allowance settlements, or they were powerless in small, rural communities.10 Despite the difficult social conditions for Indigenous Peoples in this period, Howard Adams was a talented student. He left his home in the Métis community of St Louis, Saskatchewan in 1941, completed his bachelor of arts in sociology at the University of British Columbia in 1950, obtained a teaching certificate from the University of Toronto in 1957, and taught school in Coquitlam, British Columbia, from 1957 to 1962. From 1962 to 1966, Adams and his partner Marge moved to California, while he undertook his PhD in the History of Education at UC Berkeley.11 Adams’s experiences during the years he attended UC Berkeley were formative in his intellectual and political outlook. He took part in the student movements for civil rights, and he was present in the United States when the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and later Malcolm X took place. He witnessed first-hand the movements for justice taking place among young people and he carefully watched the impacts of decolonization movements in other parts of the world. Harmut Lutz, a friend and biographer, recounted that “Howard shared the revolutionary optimism of the times.”12 He connected the experiences of “oppressed racial groups in North America as internally colonized and as diasporic members of the Third World, and he saw his own Métis and Indian brothers and sisters as members of the Indigenous Fourth World.”13 The emerging global Indigenous rights movement, to which Howard Adams contributed substantially through his writing, teaching, and political activities in Canada, began through the transnational movements of Indigenous bodies and ideas across borders in the 1960s. The critical, generative encounters between North American Indigenous Peoples such as George Manuel, architect of the concept of the Fourth World and instrumental member in the creation of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, and Howard Adams with other colonized peoples in the world contributed to what were formally localized and individualized experiences of oppression. Indigenous internationalism developed from these encounters and embraced some of the key insights of the Third World approaches to liberation. As Jonathan Crossen argues, Indigenous internationalism took shape in the 1970s in part by drawing from the “Third-Worldist movement’s key ideas concerning international cooperation, national sovereignty, and the importance of

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culture to national self-development, and [it] plied them in new places and in new ways.”14 At Berkeley, Adams first identified the distinctive nature of his Halfbreed/Native heritage in his encounters with other students around him. This experience of alterity made him aware of his identity in a way that had not been the case in Canada. He recalled, “this international association made me conscious of myself as a Canadian, yet being Canadian did not satisfy or explain fully my nationality.”15 It became clear to him that First Nations and Métis Peoples shared a common experience of racialized political and economic oppression with African Americans. In the United States, the African American Civil Rights and Black Power movements, as well as the Red Power movement, identified a common problem of white supremacy. In addition, Adams was exposed to Third World Marxists, from whom he formed his analysis of the class-based radical nationalist politics for the liberation of Indigenous Peoples from oppression in Western society.16 Because of the ideological control the mainstream Canadian society had on the educational system and media, the colonized had no consciousness of their own as an oppressed class, and thus the first step was to develop a sense of political consciousness. Influenced by educational decolonization of Paulo Friere, Adams believed that the struggle for liberation must come as a result of consciousness.17 According to the Métis leader, “It is a struggle for humanity” – that is, decolonial humanization.18 With the completion of his PhD, Adams returned to Saskatchewan in 1966, embraced his Halfbreed identity, and joined the emerging struggle for First Nations and Métis decolonization. Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris, two influential Métis leaders from Alberta who were successful in organizing the Alberta Métis Association, had been organizing the Métis in Saskatchewan. Encouraged by the election of the socialist-democratic government of Tommy Douglas in 1944, both men took jobs with the newly formed Department of Natural Resources. Both well-read Métis nationalists, Brady and Norris viewed the solution to Métis landlessness and marginalization through a decolonial and socialist lens. In a letter, Jim Brady characterized the two Métis resistances as national liberation movements, and articulated: Basically it didn’t differ the least from the national movements against colonialism that we are all familiar with in the last

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twenty or thirty years in Asia and Africa and the Arab world … liberation of the Indian people and the Métis people in Canada cannot be completed until Canada as a whole and the western world as a whole free themselves of the vicious system which has imposed these conditions on a conquered people.19 Brady and Norris associated Métis resistances to Canadian imperialism in 1870 and 1885 with liberation movements globally, and they believed that the struggle for socialism and nationalism were inseparable.20 Brady and Norris, like Adams, were determined to correct Métis and Canadian history. At the Métis historic site of Batoche in 1962, Brady and Norris challenged the term rebellion and lamented that “It was unfortunate that early historians have recorded the Métis struggle for justice in this light.”21 Like all nationalist movements, the Métis historical perspective had to align with the aims of the movement for liberation. Under the leadership of Malcolm Norris, the Métis Association of Saskatchewan, based in Prince Albert, organized in 1964 to represent northern Métis interests, while the Métis Society of Saskatchewan organized in 1965 in Regina to represent southern Métis interests. The two organizations combined in 1967 as the Saskatchewan Métis Society under the leadership of Joe Amyotte.22 In April 1969, Howard Adams replaced Amyotte as president. Because Adams drew attention to imperialism and its white supremacy, as well as challenging settler hegemony, the media viewed Adams as a militant and revolutionary, stoking the white public’s fear of violence similar to the US race riots taking place.23 Upon returning to Saskatchewan, Adams immediately dedicated himself to local efforts to establish an educational program for Métis communities in the North, fostering a critical decolonial history of Canada while organizing political work amid Métis people in Saskatchewan. In 1972, Adams prepared a report for the Métis Society of Saskatchewan, entitled “The Outsiders: An Educational Survey of the Métis and Non-Treaty Indians of Saskatchewan,” that empowered a spirit of decolonial humanization via critique. Under this guise, the Métis Society visited several urban, rural, and northern Métis communities around Saskatchewan to understand the educational experiences and needs of the Métis Peoples. Through this survey, Adams gained

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valuable insight into the nature of the relationship between Métis Peoples, settler society, and the dominant ideologies of race. “Under racism,” he found, “natives have internalized the distorted image of themselves and in this way have become inferiorized.” Adams, in the process, identified the white ideal as “the unconscious tendency towards seeking acceptance and success in white society.”24 In conclusion, the Métis Society argued for Métis control of education for decolonization.25 Many of the ideas found in Adams’s later works first appeared in this 1972 report. By quickly establishing himself as a local and regional leader, Adams played a foundational role in the emerging Indigenous intellectual and political revolution taking place globally via his application of a transnational, decolonial perspective to the Métis situation in Saskatchewan and beyond. Through the leadership of Howard Adams, the Métis Society began publishing New Breed magazine, the voice of the growing Métis nationalist movement in Canada.26 Adams began New Breed as a vehicle to educate Métis in Saskatchewan about Métis history, current events, and Indigenous rights movements around the globe. As a counter to the hegemonic cultural discourses of Métis inferiority, or alternately, Métis erasure, New Breed offered Indigenous perspectives and topics of concern, and it created a common Indigenous-Métis consciousness rooted in pride, political engagement, and common purpose. It acted as a counter to messages of white supremacy in dominant society. In 1975, Adams published Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View, which argued that Native Peoples in Canada formed a racialized class exploited for their land and labour. Adams drew in part from his own lived experience under colonial conditions as a disempowered Métis man. He identified the political and economic origins of Indigenous oppression, and he identified Canada as an ongoing colonizing imperial project. Prison of Grass was the first unapologetic and unflinching account of the dehumanizing conditions of Canadian colonialism. In reflecting on the impetus for writing Prison of Grass in the preface of the revised 1989 edition, he argued that Canadian historical writing lacked an analysis of Eurocentrism and white supremacy. His 1975 book intervened against what would later be described as “the hegemony of whiteness in settler society.”27 By sharing his decolonial perspective with mainstream, English-speaking Canadians, he popularized the notion that the history of Canada from a Native point of view constituted four

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hundred years of racism, imperialism, and colonization.28 This critical engagement in the contemporary conditions of Indigenous communities, identifying colonialism as a fundamental structuring element of the Indigenous-settler relationship, and commitment to political and social justice for communities encompasses what Seminole historian Susan A. Miller calls “the Indigenous historical paradigm.”29 Like New Breed, Adams’s books narrated the emergence of his decolonial Métis consciousness while simultaneously narrating his counter-narrative of Canadian history. Adams wrote his greatgrandfather, Maxime Lepine, a renowned guerilla warrior involved in 1885, back into the historical narrative of the Métis resistance.30 As many Métis people in Canada can likely identify with, Howard Adams did not know that his great-grandfather had “helped [to] organize and lead our people against a colonizing white oppressor,” and he recalled, “I wept with bitterness when I thought about how I had never heard about the great hero my great grandfather was, and the noble guerilla warrior he had been … His history was hidden from me.”31 Adams, his family, his community, and other Métis in Canada at the time were haunted by this violent history, but they were at the same time unable to speak of it. This “haunting legacy” was excavated through Adams’s transgenerational awareness and his need to understand the repressed loss and unresolved present.32 Adams explained the significance of this history in part by alluding to Frantz Fanon’s influential works Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961): “We were still the wretched of the earth … The truth would have given us strength and pride, but instead we followed in the debased path cut out for us by the white image makers.”33 In Prison of Grass, Adams engaged in decolonial humanization by sharing why and how he left his birthplace in the historic Métis community of St Louis, Saskatchewan, at the age of twenty to join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. At that time, he recounted his deep desire to leave all things “Halfbreed” behind him to begin a new life that reflected what he considered the beauty and endless possibility of white, middle-class Canada.34 The death of his mother in 1948 proved a turning point in his life when he came to understand the costs of rejecting his family and Halfbreed identity. In his need to prove himself, he cast aside his mother, “yet she was still the most precious person to me … and I had cast

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her aside … Now I hated myself for what I’d done.”35 He saw how colonial racial hierarchy invaded the intimate domain of his family life. He recalled, “But at that time I still did not understand how cultural genocide systematically operated to colonize me.”36 From his personal experience, he became aware that “cultural genocide” killed Indigenous people (his mother’s premature death at fifty-two) and destroyed Indigenous love (humanity). He resolved to understand it and “work towards the destruction of such as system.”37 His complicated and unresolved relationship to white, middle-class, urban Canada was only partially settled in his life. The sash of his Métis identity consisted of varying parts of Canadian, First Nations, and Halfbreed culture.38 Throughout Prison of Grass, Adams related his own experiences as the “colonized” who became aware of his debased status and charted his subsequent journey to decolonization and “repersonalization.” The Métis leader and intellectual explained that his journey back home to Saskatchewan as a Halfbreed could only be undertaken once he reoriented his historical understanding and placed himself and his family in a narrative that would open up a space for their humanity, agency, and life-purpose. In chapter 10, entitled: “Courtroom: The Mask of Conquest,” he begins with his family’s experience of the justice system in 1885. His great-grandfather was imprisoned for seven years for the “cause of native freedom.” Although as a child he stayed at his grandparents’ house, the former home of his great-grandfather, and “trampl[ed] the footprints of a noble guerilla warrior,” no one mentioned this past. He lamented, “This history was hidden from us because our grandparents and parents were defeated generations. We were a new generation, starting our lives in defeat, without hope, ashamed of ourselves as Halfbreeds.”39 In developing a Métis historical consciousness, Adams both became politically active and decolonized his own thinking, motivating him to reconceptualize the historical narrative of western imperialism. Elsewhere in his 1975 book, Adams exposed Canada’s cherished image as a benevolent humanitarian nation and champion of human rights to be nothing more than a hypocritical lie that served to mask its complicity in the suffering and deaths of Indigenous Peoples. Unlike social scientists who relied on statistics to depersonalize Indigenous suffering or historians who employed detached and disinterested catalogues of events, Adams’s raw, emotionally charged writing demanded

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that the reader acknowledge Indigenous suffering and humanity, alongside white culpability. For Adams, “Canadian authorities and historians … managed to perpetuate the illusion that Canada has never been a white-supremist society, an illusion that the Canadian people continue to believe.”40 He argued, “White supremacy has become woven into Canadian institutions such as the Church, schools, and the courts and remained the working ideology of these institutions.”41 Adams’s own experiences grappling with the racism and hostility directed towards Indigenous Peoples in the West during the post-war period, coupled with the liberatory decolonial framework he embraced in his encounters with US civil rights activists and working alongside grassroots and radical Métis leaders in Saskatchewan, shaped his counter-narrative of Canadian history. In both Prison and Grass and A Tortured People, Adams drew from his experiences growing up in a “Halfbreed ghetto” in St Louis, Saskatchewan, to expose the myth of Canadian exceptionalism. In St Louis, he and other impoverished Métis families either lived in log shacks in town or subsisted on marginal farms. Treatment at the hands of white landowners, business people, clergy, and employers left him feeling degraded, and it “destroyed [his] sense of self-esteem and humanity.”42 Because of the shame attached to the conquest of the Métis in 1885, his family and the larger Métis community in St Louis remained silent about their Métis ancestry, the history of the Métis people, and their place in Canadian society. In part, denial of Native ancestry stemmed from living under a pervasive and genocidal system of white supremacy. Like Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed, Adams reminded the reader that colonization was personal and material.43 It was felt most deeply in the severed relationships with families, the loss of self-esteem, the lack of acceptance or fulfillment in white society, and the need for reconnection to home.44 For Adams, decolonizing Canadian history meant restoring the past to Métis people, one that included their own accomplishments, and documenting the record of colonialist incursions. In A Tortured People, Adams tells a story of the type of silence and shame that some Métis people felt about their identity in Saskatchewan in the 1960s. In the section “My Halfbreed Torture,” he recounted the time he was invited to speak at the first conference organized to discuss First Nations and Métis education. He recalled: “When I stood on the

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platform before the nation and media and declared I was proud to be a Halfbreed, with my heritage of Cree, French and English, I was not well received … They saw and heard me and were outraged. It was the greatest insult to them. My relatives were humiliated and ashamed beyond words … The worst thing for them was that I acknowledged my Cree Indian blood heritage.”45 Adams specifically chose to self-identify with the term Halfbreed, rather than the more socially acceptable and somewhat romanticized term Métis. He took pride in his background and saw its significance for the struggle he was mounting in Saskatchewan. He explained: “I liked the power and the toughness it represents to me. Since the 1885 resistance, three generations of Halfbreeds lived in Batoche, St. Laurent, St. Louis, MacDowell, and surrounding districts. We all accepted ourselves and others as Halfbreeds but we certainly did not express or share that knowledge.”46 Initially, the term “Métis” described French-speaking mixed-ancestry peoples of the Red River area. Europeans travelling west derisively referred to mixed-ancestry peoples they encountered as “Half-breeds, breeds; mixed bloods”; or if of a higher class, “natives of the country.”47 The Cree called their cousins the Métis Otipemisiwak, or the free peoples, reflecting their independence.48 The term Métis has come to be the dominant Canadian term that includes both the French Métis as well as Anglo and Scots “Halfbreeds” who resided in Rupert’s Land at the time of Confederation. This broader usage of Métis not only includes the best-known Métis community originating around the Red River and Batoche areas in present-day Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but also encompasses independently developed communities in northern communities and in the northern United States whose kinship relationships connect them to the Métis homeland.49 Adams, in parallel with Said and other decolonial intellectuals, advanced that colonial myths of Indigenous inferiority operated as structures of domination, which maintained an ideological grip on Western societies like Canada. Like the pervasive discourse of Orientalism, the civilization/savagery dichotomy in the Canadian intellectual context has been both “antihuman and persistent.”50 Further, in identifying Canada as an imperial nation no different from the United States, Britain, or France, Adams recognized that settler Canada and Indigenous Peoples were, in a sense, locked in an ideological and, for many, social position determined by the original national narrative. As Said similarly later pointed out in Culture and Imperialism, “The

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main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now decides its future, these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative … The power to narrate or to block other narratives from forming and emerging is very important to culture and imperialism, and [it] constitutes one of the main connections between them.”51 For Adams and other Indigenous Peoples, the first encounter with the dehumanizing historical narrative that upheld settler colonialism in Canada occurred at the local school.52 There, Indigenous children learned an imperial history and encountered for the first time their culturally mandated and ideologically replicated inferiority.53 For Adams, school was simultaneously the site of colonization and liberation. While he experienced the stigma of being Halfbreed in Canada and the shame of being on the wrong side of history, it also afforded him the opportunity to engage in new ideas and new texts, and to gain self-esteem. In Prison of Grass, he states dramatically: “The school system systematically and meticulously conditions natives to a state of inferiorization and colonization.”54 The inferiorization occurred as students encountered white teachers, authority figures and white ideals. Middle-class values and racism pervaded the curriculum. He argued that Indigenous self-hatred was rooted in these early encounters in racial oppression.55 Nevertheless, he was a strong advocate for the liberatory possibilities of institutional education. In Prison of Grass, Adams locates the origins of Indigenous oppression in the original encounter with European society and racism against Indigenous Peoples as a product of economics. Grounding his analysis in Marxist theories of the exploitation of labour by capitalists, aided by the unholy alliance between commercial, imperial, and religious interests in Indigenous lands and territories, Adams argues that this colonial legacy became fundamental to the operation of Canadian capitalism. The “racial stereotypes” that deemed Indigenous Peoples inferior, stupid, deserving of their fate, and incapable of looking after their own affairs worked both to justify continued oppression and to generate feelings of inferiority and hopelessness in First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people. His ideas adapted the theories of Albert Memmi, who argued that “[j]ust as the bourgeoisie proposes an image of the proletariat, the existence of the colonizer requires that an image of the colonized be suggested. These images become excuses without which

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the presence and conduct of a colonizer, and that of a bourgeois, would seem shocking. But the favored image becomes a myth precisely because it suits them all too well.”56 The laziness myth, Adams concluded, justified poor wages, as well as a series of other negative characterizations that led to the complete dehumanization of the colonized. It also accounted for the lack of response on the part of the colonizer to suffering, injustice, and the perpetuation of imperial relations. The colonizer, in part, believed the myth about him- or herself. The imperial relationship dehumanized not only the colonized but also the colonizer, who likewise became incomplete and consumed by preserving the inequality. Through this relation, Memmi argued, the colonizer “is disfigured into an oppressor, a partial, unpatriotic and treacherous being, worrying only about his privileges and their defense; the other, into an oppressed creature, whose development is broken and who compromises by his defeat.”57 Furthermore, Adams was not alone amid the Métis intervention against pervasive imperial myths. Olive P. Dickason’s 1977 The Myth of the Savage systematically dismantled the grounds for perpetuating this myth as a means of Indigenous dispossession. “By classifying Amerindians as savages,” she wrote, “Europeans were able to create the ideology that helped make it possible to launch once of the greatest movements in the history of western civilization; the colonization of the Americas.”58 For Adams, the decolonial future needed a history and theory of Canadian colonization and its specific impact on First Nations and Métis Peoples. In Prison of Grass, he pointed to the legal and spatial segregation of Indigenous Peoples on the Prairies, the unspoken cancer of white supremacy and Indigenous dehumanization, misrepresentation, and miseducation, and he identified the psychology of colonization rooted in economic colonization through the system of capitalism. He made it clear that Indigenous Peoples had not been fighting “civilization,” but fighting for freedom to remain Indigenous. He warned against the emergence of neo-colonialism, a concept popularized by Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah,59 in the government funding of Indigenous organizations that reflected the contemporary manifestation of a divide and rule mentality. Through government funding, an artificially created class system among Indigenous Peoples emerged, controlled by Native elites, causing Native people to fight amongst themselves.

•

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While Edward Said’s Orientalism did not directly inform Howard Adams’s thinking, like Said, Adams identified a global ideological structure that had emanated from Western Europe as the root of Indigenous oppression in Canada. In his critique of Canada’s mythical narrative of the peaceful dominion, rearticulation of radical Métis thought, and his involvement in Métis politics, Adams continued a struggle for Indigenous self-determination that was centuries in the making. In his impassioned writing style, Adams pioneered a new form of Indigenous scholarship that drew from his lived experience of racialized segregation, dismantled the savagery/civilization dichotomy, and spoke out against white supremacy, while illustrating how history and its interpretation informed contemporary social and political conditions. However, Adams’s writing and thinking did not engage seriously in the gendered and sexualized power relations that generated the violence Indigenous women navigated in Canada. In fact, his writing often reflected his own gender privilege as a male benefiting from the misogyny that the patriarchal institutions of the state and church introduced.60 New Breed magazine, Adams’s scholarly works, and engagement in Indigenous education provided a space for Indigenous voices and epistemologies, acted as a means to counter the prevalence of the “white ideal,” and facilitated a decolonial consciousness within Indigenous communities as a necessary first step. His work, in this regard, contributed to a boomerang of decolonization, as he sought to dispel the specifically Canadian forms of imperial misrepresentations of Indigenous Peoples and their history to dismantle the dehumanizing, racialized structures that maintained Indigenous marginalization and inferiority, and by which, settlers would no longer require myths and misrepresentations to bolster their sense of Canadian identity. Notes 1 Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 2 “Sir John A Macdonald Statue in Regina Vandalized for a Second Time This Year,” Globe and Mail, 21 August 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ canada/article-sir-john-a-macdonald-statue-in-regina-vandalized-withpaint-for/. 3 Métis is a contested term in contemporary Canada. Métis scholars such as Adam Gaudry, “Communing with the Dead: The ‘New Métis,’ Métis Identity

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4

5

6

7

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Appropriation, and the Displacement of Living Métis Culture,” American Indian Quarterly 42, no. 2 (2018): 162–90, and Chris Andersen argue that individuals who can demonstrate ties to the historic Métis community of Red River should claim a contemporary, political identity as Métis. See Chris Anderson, “Mixed Ancestry or Métis?,” in Indigenous Identity and Resistance: Researching the Diversity of Knowledge, ed. Brendan Hokowhitu, Nathalie Kermoal, and Chris Andersen (Dunedin, NZ: Otago University Press, 2010), 23–36; and Paul Chartrand, “The Hard Case of Defining ‘The Métis People’ and Their Rights: A Comment on R. v. Powley,” Constitutional Forum 12, no. 3 (2003): 84. For the purpose of this paper, I use the terms Halfbreed and Métis to speak of the Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan that Adams’s work sought to depict. The roots of these historic communities traverse several Euro-Canadian boundaries, including the political, racial, legal, and ethnic definitions imposed by colonial and settler-colonial governments. Adams’s analysis sought to illustrate the common experience of Indigenous Peoples in Canada who experienced a type of marginalization common to all colonized peoples by pointing to the experiences living under capitalist, white supremacy. For a very thorough analysis of the potential and pitfalls of Howard Adams’s decolonial thought, see Daniel Jacob-Paul Voth, “The Devil’s Northern Triangle: Howard Adams and Métis Multidimensional Relationships with and within Colonialism” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2015), chapter 2. Howard Adams and Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies, Otapawy! The Life of a Métis Leader in His Own Words and in Those of His Contemporaries (Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2005). See Emma LaRocque, “Native Writers Resisting Colonizing Practices in Canadian Historiography and Literature” (PhD diss., University of Manitoba, 1999). The idea that the settlement of Canadian West was more peaceful and benevolent than the military conquest of the American West is a persistent myth with origins in the newspaper accounts, popular community history books, heroic pioneer stories, museums, narrative histories, etc. See Sarah Carter, Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). Other Indigenous historians who combine Indigenous methodologies, personal experience, historical analysis, and decolonization include: Neal McLeod, Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times (Saskatoon: Purich, 2007); George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (Don Mills: Collier-Macmillan Canada, 1974); and Winona Wheeler, “Decolonizing Tribal Histories” (PhD diss., University

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9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22

23 24

25 26

27 28

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of California, Berkeley, 2000). For a recent analysis of the problematic gender dynamics in Adams’s thinking see Daniel Voth, “Order Up! The Decolonizing Politics of Howard Adams and Maria Campbell with a Side of Imagining Otherwise,” Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 5, no. 2 (2018): 16–36. Stokely Carmichael, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967). Howard Adams, Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View (Saskatoon: Fifth House Books, 1989 [1975]), 35. Adams and Gabriel Dumont Institute, Otapawy!, x. Ibid., 295. Ibid., 296. Jonathan Crossen, “Another Wave of Anti-Colonialism: The Origins of Indigenous Internationalism,” Canadian Journal of History 52, no. 3 (2017): 535. Adams, Prison of Grass, 152. Adams and Gabriel Dumont Institute, Otapawy!, 227. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2000 [1970]). Adams, Prison of Grass, 170. Emphasis added. Quoted from a letter from Jim Brady. See Murray Dobbin, The One-and-a-Half Men: The Story of Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris, Métis Patriots of the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1981), 198–9. Ibid. Ibid., 204–5. See the NFB documentary Pow Wow at Duck Lake (1967) for a glimpse of the oratorical skills of Howard Adams, https://www.nfb.ca/film/ powwow_at_duck_lake/. See also Jim Pitsula, “The Thatcher Government in Saskatchewan and the Revival of Métis Nationalism, 1964–1971,” Great Plains Studies 17 (1997): 222. Ibid., 225. Howard Adams, The Outsiders: An Educational Survey of the Métis and NonTreaty Indians of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon: Métis Society of Saskatchewan, 1972), 16. Ibid., 53. Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Thought in Sixties Montreal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), traces the influence of Third World nationalism and Black power on liberation activism in Montreal. Anne Bonds and Joshua Inwood, “Beyond White Privilege,” Progress in Human Geography 40, no. 6 (2016): 716. Adams, Prison of Grass, 7.

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29 Susan A. Miller and James Riding, Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011), 26. 30 Adams, Prison of Grass, 98. 31 Adams and Gabriel Dumont Institute, Otapawy!, 214–15. 32 Schwab, Haunting Legacies, 5. 33 Adams, Prison of Grass, 98. 34 Ibid., 123. 35 Ibid. 36 Emphasis added. Ibid., 125. 37 Ibid. 38 Adams and Gabriel Dumont Institute, Otapawy! 39 Adams, Prison of Grass, 98. 40 Ibid., 43. 41 Ibid., 14. 42 Ibid., 10–11. 43 Maria Campbell, Half-Breed (Halifax: Formac, 1983). 44 As Indigenous theorist Dian Million claims, “Canadian colonialism is ‘felt’ in that it is a broad spectrum of nuances, valences/practices with the power to create emotionally charged meanings as common knowledge.” See Dian Million, “Felt Theory,” in Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014), 46. 45 Howard Adams, Tortured People: The Politics of Colonization (Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 2002 [1997]), 3. 46 Ibid. 47 Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S.H. Brown, “Introduction,” in The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985), 4. 48 Diane Payment, “The Free People-Otipemisiwak”: Batoche, Saskatchewan, 1870–1930 (Ottawa: National Historic Parks and Sites, Parks Service, Environment Canada, 1990). 49 See Gregg Dahl, “A Half-breed’s Perspective on Being Métis,” in Métis in Canada: History, Identity, Law and Politic, eds. Christopher Adams, Gregg Dahl, and IanPeach (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2013). 50 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 44. 51 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), xii–xiii. 52 Wendat scholar Georges Sioui begins his introduction to For an Amerindian Autohistory with his sad memory of “having just received my first lesson in Canadian history,” in which he was taught that his ancestors were godless savages. Georges Sioui, For an Amerindian Autohistory: An Essay on the Foundations of a Social Ethic (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,

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53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60

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1995). George Manuel came to residential school not able to speak English, and he remembered three things from the school: the hunger, speaking English, and being called a heathen because of his grandfather. Manuel and Posluns, The Fourth World, 63. Adams, Prison of Grass, 15. Ibid., 132 Ibid., 147. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (New York: Routledge, 2013 [1957, 1965]), 79. Ibid., 89. Olive Patricia Dickason, “The Myth of the Savage: And the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas” (Edmonton, AB, revision of PhD diss. [Université d’Ottawa, 1977], 1984), xii. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1965). See Voth, “Order Up!,” for a discussion of Adams’s gender bias, and possibilities for “imagining otherwise.”

2

Boomerang Epistemologies Indian Health Services, the Sioux Lookout Project, and Colonially Entangled Knowledge Mary-Ellen Kelm

Knowing anything about Indigenous Peoples in settler colonial regimes is tricky. We all need tools to think with. In Canada, knowledge about Indigenous Peoples found in the colonial archive is made with tools forged through the policies and practices of dispossession. Procedures of Indigenous containment and surveillance produced a vast archive of knowledge through the reporting and epistolary routines of the Canadian state. The documented history of Indigenous health in Canada in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one part of this massive and unwieldy archive, is difficult to interpret. Contorted by the circumstances that created it, the government record of Indigenous health history rests on a set of binary opposites, irreducible poles of difference that ascribe competence and benevolence to Canadians and disease and collapse to Indigenous Peoples. Like the research enterprise in other colonial contexts, the archive of Indigenous health knowledge ignored as much as it created, homogenizing Indigenous experience, rejecting Indigenous knowledge, and stifling Indigenous voice. On the subject of Indigenous health, indeed on many other subjects related to Indigenous people, Canada’s settler-colonial tool kit seems fit for little more than building edifices of its own power.1 Edward Said’s Orientalism, and the postcolonial critique that engaged with Said’s interventions, offered a way out of the stifling epistemology of the colonial archive. Postcolonial criticism bestowed tools meant for

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weaving the fragmented strands of knowledge made by government agents and others into a larger discursive pattern that was revealing both of how knowledge was produced and how it was occluded. Interpreting texts that were about Indigenous people for what they taught us about the settler state, its paradigms, agents, and actions, similarly liberated these texts from their segmentation away from Canadian history. Where Canadian history had, too often, been parochial and exceptionalist, a postcolonial critique encouraged a view that saw Canada’s past as enmeshed in overlapping forms of colonial power. Re-embedding them in their contexts of production and reception offered new insights about Canada and confounded the politics and production of difference. Postcolonial analysis of colonial archives revealed that knowledge sometimes boomerangs in ways not previously acknowledged.2 Boomerang epistemologies defy separateness by understanding colonial knowledge to be co-produced, reciprocating between metropole and colony and transiting from one colonial space to another. In his 1976 Collège de France lecture, Michel Foucault explored how political, social, legal, and spatial experiments of rule enacted in colonial settings came home to the West – this he called boomerang effects. He wrote: “It should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.”3 Canada’s internal colonies included extractive and settler varieties experienced sequentially and simultaneously involving Indigenous Peoples and settlers in remote regions.4 Canadian colonial epistemologies of Indigenous Peoples owed much to and shared the kinds of binary-bound understandings of the world that postcolonial critics, including Edward Said, found proliferated in colonial knowledge production. Like Said, North American scholars have turned the analytic lens towards those who produced ideas about “the Indian,” tossing a boomerang into the history of literature, ethnography, and history in North America. Here they found that, in settler colonies, the logic of elimination underwrote both colonial mimicry and hybridity. Canadians made culture for themselves by appropriating Indigeneity and

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then erasing Indigenous people, their land rights, political place, and unique cultures from Canada.5 Boomerang epistemologies emerged in fields where colonial categories of difference were most porous, especially in the realm of biopolitics. Sex, desire, and disease all blurred messily across the lines meant to delimit Indigenous and colonized populations. Public health had long built the boomerang into its ways of thinking, knowing, and acting, especially about contagious diseases. When diseases like smallpox affected Indigenous people more than settlers, they were understood variously as acts of God, evidence of primitivism, or faulty evolution. When tuberculosis threatened to boomerang back from Indigenous communities to settlers, public health responded with segregation in Indigenous-only hospitals and hospital wards, legislatively mandated surveillance, and research in which Indigenous children became test subjects for vaccines and treatments meant for them and others. Mid-twentieth-century movements of migration and decolonization raised further questions for public health about how to control disease in conditions of profound impoverishment; reserve communities of North America, sadly, offered opportunities for them to answer such questions.6 Global health researchers shared these concerns, and as they considered the role of culture in health care, practitioners and theoreticians threw another boomerang. While for generations, colonial public health scrutinized Indigenous and colonized peoples’ culture for the seeds of disease and resistance to imperial medicine, in the 1950s and 1960s applied anthropologists began to ask searching questions about the culture of development organizations, including those of public health. They asked how organizational values and structures shaped public health initiatives and, importantly, how valuable this work was to Indigenous, poor, or colonized communities. At other times, they posed this question of the governments who delivered the services, paid their salaries, and pushed development in all its colonial and post-colonial manifestations.7 Moreover, boomerang epistemologies of global health transited between post-colonial and settler colonial contexts. Health researchers working in Indigenous communities from the 1960s onwards asked questions derived from global health (with its own set of colonial paradigms) and asked them not just of or in Indigenous communities but

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of and in Canada itself. They asked about the intersection of culture change, health, and health care and were ready to explore answers that deviated from the norms imposed by Canada’s assimilationist Indigenous policy. One of these, Robin Badgley, sojourned briefly in the field of Indigenous health and health services analysis, but his work and that of his graduate students re-directed the field in important ways. Informed by work he did in Colombia, he asked a new set of questions about Canada, how it had constructed its national self-image of benevolence, and how it dealt with (or denied) its responsibilities to Indigenous people. In so doing, he demonstrated the colonial entanglements of knowledge-making practices within the field of Indigenous health research in those middle decades of the twentieth century. He produced a ground-breaking analysis that argued that Canada’s medical colonialism affected not just Indigenous people but Canada itself. Badgley’s work had wider applicability, specifically as it spoke to the emerging global health modality: primary health care. Primary health care (PHC) relied on the work of local leaders to define community health needs, and on local healers and trained health auxiliaries to provide for those needs with the support of government planning, training, and infrastructure. While globally, PHC foundered on economic restraint and emergent neo-liberalism, Canada’s own neo-liberal turn embraced aspects of PHC. PHC offered to the Canadian government an opportunity to reduce expenditure, particularly on costly hospitals and competitive physician salaries as it shifted responsibility for health care to Indigenous communities. As PHC seemed to flourish there, health researchers in Canada argued that they had a model for health care delivery from which the world could learn. The boomerang flew again. Postcolonial ideas did not necessarily see, much less solve, the problems of settler colonialism. Badgley, with his global health toolkit, struggled to understand the importance of Treaties and Treaty Rights to health care, even as he observed the lengths to which Indigenous people would go to ensure access to health care. The trauma caused by state institutions was illegible to Badgley even as he recognized the structural violence of health research on Indigenous communities. Analyzing Badgley’s research methods and results track a boomerang of knowledge production that swooped in from global health into Indigenous communities and back again. It offers a promising and cautionary tale of paradigms generated in one kind of colonial/postcolonial context

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applied to another, a process that troubled but did not entirely disrupt the legacy of settler colonialism on Indigenous health.

• Robin Badgley’s foray into Indigenous health research in Canada came at a particularly fractious and productive moment. Indian Health Services (IHS), the arm of Medical Services Branch, National Health and Welfare that administered health services to status Indians, had grown exponentially from its modest beginnings in 1904. By 1956, IHS operated eighteen hospitals, thirty-three nursing stations, fifty-two health centres with dispensaries, and thirteen other health centres. It employed 39 field medical officers, 43 hospital medical officers, 11 dental surgeons, 106 field nurses, and 232 hospital nurses alongside part-time and private physicians and dentists who worked on a fee-for-service basis. Parliament approved over $17 million for these medical services in 1956.8 Mounting costs inspired the government to redouble its efforts to refuse responsibility for health care to Indigenous people. Indeed, the federal government long refused to accept responsibility for the ongoing health care of status Indians and Inuit, let alone nonstatus Indians or Métis. Structurally, the British North America Act (1867) placed health in provincial hands and all matters relating to Indigenous Peoples in the hands of the federal government. Provinces were quick to point this out whenever an infectious disease outbreak on a reserve seemed to threaten surrounding non-Indigenous settler populations. British Columbia’s provincial secretary Henry Esson Young, for example, demanded that the federal government improve reserve conditions and treat tuberculosis among reserve populations for he feared that “the intermingling of the races is very intimate and the white people are exposed to the results of the conditions existing amongst the Indians.”9 Most importantly, Indigenous leaders extracted promises of free medical care from the government during Treaty talks. In Treaty 6, the government promised a medicine chest and government aid in time of “pestilence or … famine.”10 The report of Treaty 8 talks in the summer of 1899, for example, reveals that the government party led by J.A. Macrae “promised that supplies of medicines would be put in the charge of persons selected by the Government at different points, and would be disturbed free to those of the Indians who might

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require them.”11 The federal government consistently denied any such undertaking. In 1935 and 1968, Cree leaders took the federal government to court to prove that Treaty 6 entitled them all (not just the indigent) to free health care. Lower courts’ decisions in their favour were overturned on appeal. In 1968, the federal government announced its Health Plan for Indians. In a letter to band councils, the federal government announced that Indian Health Services would no longer subsidize health care. Individuals would need to prove their impoverishment and that they sought financial support from band funds and provincial welfare agencies. They were then required to apply to IHS to cover provincial health premiums or co-insurance changes. The federal government planned to force Indigenous people to use provincial health services.12 While other Canadians were gaining access to free universal health care through Medicare, Indigenous people were losing their access to a parallel system, and the provinces were not at all certain that they wished to gain Indigenous people as health care clients. At the same time, Indigenous activists and social justice allies were intensifying their protests over poor health conditions and deteriorating health care in Indigenous communities. Mercury contamination of water and fish in northwestern Ontario and central British Columbia garnered much media attention, some research, but little or no government action.13 The government’s attempt to diminish its long-standing relationship with Indigenous people through the eventual abolition of the Indian Act and the dismantling of treaties articulated by the 1969 White Paper was met with sustained and sophisticated resistance.14 In this process, Harold Cardinal of the Indian Association of Alberta articulated their position on health care clearly: health care was a treaty right, not a handout, but a “fair exchange” for settler access to lands and resources. The Grand Council of Treaty 9 held a similar position: “the Federal Government must retain the sole and final responsibility for the health and welfare of the Indian people until such time as all the outstanding issues arising out of the aboriginal and treaty rights have been successfully negotiated between the Indian people and the Crown.”15 Even as the government withdrew the White Paper, the Health Plan for Indians remained in place and the federal government proceeded to close many of the Indian hospitals that it ran.16 Social justice critics protested the decline of health services in Indigenous communities. In the spring of 1969, Paul St Jacques

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(a Catholic school teacher in northwestern Ontario) drew public attention to the fact that there was only one doctor and one dentist working in the Sioux Lookout Zone, a region of 100,000 square kilometres that was home to 10,000 Indigenous people. National media reprinted his articles.17 Critics of the government were quick to point out that Canada’s international humanitarian reputation was unsustainable in light of the poor conditions in which Indigenous people lived.18 Globally, governments, international bodies, and non-governmental organizations were actively engaged in health promotion. Indeed, health promotion was integral to the dominant ethos of the era: development. Development, in the immediate post-war period, focused on national economies as expressed through gross national product (GNP) and manifested through large infrastructural projects. These projects were designed to boost production of exportable commodities both to stimulate growth in the world’s poorest countries – typically emerging decolonizing states, labelled “developing” – and to sustain growth among the world’s richest countries – labelled “developed.”19 Charles-Edward Amory Winslow, the founding professor of Yale’s School of Public Health, summed up the connection between health and development and role that the nation must play in promoting health: This is a period of the world history when it behooves every nation large or small, to take stock of its human and natural resources and do all that is possible to build up its material and moral strength; and there is little time for delay. It would be highly desirable for the responsible health leaders of each country to analyze its present health problems, to survey its existing health machinery, and to make a definite plan for expansion during succeeding period of years.20 What that expansion should look like, however, became the subject of debate during the 1960s. While global population health in the 1950s favoured technocratic solutions targeting disease eradication – the most successful and widely known being smallpox – more complex health problems remained intransigent. The success of China’s barefoot doctors – local health care workers who attended to the health needs of their communities with state-provided training and limited technology – encouraged global health practitioners to develop programs of

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primary health care (PHC). PHC’s focus was on community-based care that paid particular attention to maternal and child health, communicable disease control, sanitation, and clean water. Local people who were healers, leaders, and midwives were to be trained as health auxiliaries incorporating local expertise, and developing comprehensive community health records. PHC directed attention towards ameliorating the socio-economic and environmental determinants of health. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, high-profile organizations, including the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), considered how best to meet the health needs of the world’s poor.21 Canada’s ambivalence in meeting the health needs of one of its poorest populations put it out of step with this consensus. The Sioux Lookout Project embodied many of these impulses and contradictions. Focused initially on expanding medical services at limited cost to government, the Project soon began asking larger questions about the determinants of health and the best way to meet Indigenous health needs. The Sioux Lookout Project came into being in February 1969 through an agreement between the federal government’s Medical Services Branch (MSB), Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, and the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine. Through this agreement, the Hospital for Sick Children and Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine agreed to send family physicians, specialists, residents, and students to bolster the health care services for the Cree and Anishinaabe residents of the Sioux Lookout Zone.22 MSB held similar agreements with the University of Manitoba, Queen’s University, and McGill University, and they all served to attract health care staff to underserviced regions of the country. While MSB paid the salaries of health care workers, research grants funded students. Moreover, universities became responsible for recruitment and, while not eliminating turnover, offered a steady stream of staff to these remote communities. Medical schools provided clinical back-up to health care workers in the field and gained access to communities for research and teaching. Through these agreements, universities cultivated an image of themselves of “stepping out of the ivory tower to help the impoverished and underserved.”23 Notably, none of these universitygovernment agreements involved Indigenous governing bodies. The initial goal of the Sioux Lookout Project was to increase the accessibility of health care in the region and to research the health needs

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of the people.24 The Sioux Lookout Project immediately increased health coverage by hiring family practitioners and by bringing in second and third-year residents in various specialties, including pediatrics, ophthalmology, and psychiatry. Technicians from the Sioux Lookout Hospital visited Toronto to get refresher courses, and diagnostic facilities at the University of Toronto were made available to health staff in the region. Soon, the Project’s goals expanded dramatically as project leads Harry W. Bain (Hospital for Sick Children) and Gary Goldthorpe (Medical Services Branch) considered the connections between what they were doing in northwestern Ontario and PHC.25 New goals reflected the Project’s reorientation toward “community-oriented total health care.” Now they sought: “the development and operation of mechanisms through which the consumers of the health services share in the planning and the control of the services,” and “to coordinate provision of personal health service with other major determinants of health such as income, job opportunity, education, physical environment (sanitation etc) and community (political) development.”26 At the same time, the Project seemed to work in step with the federal government’s goal to bring status First Nations People into the provincial health care systems as Bain and Goldthorpe expressed their hope for the integration for “registered Indians and other Canadians,” so that the services they offered could extend beyond reserve communities. The Sioux Lookout Project then shifted from being one solely focused on service delivery to one that had the potential to influence the very nature of health care delivery in Indigenous and isolated communities in Canada, offering insights that might be useful to primary health care planners the world over.27 For these hopes to be realized, the Project needed to be evaluated. And so, in 1971, Bain and Goldthorpe asked Dr Robin Badgley to lead a five-year study of the effectiveness of the Sioux Lookout Project funded by the Department of National Health and Welfare.28 Robin Badgley was an ideal choice to lead the evaluation. Badgley came to the University of Toronto in 1968 to be the inaugural chair of the Department of Behavioral Sciences in the Faculty Medicine with the goal of improving the relationship between the social and medical sciences there.29 With a PhD from Yale, Badgley was fresh from the publication of the first scholarly analysis of socialized medicine in Canada and the reactions of the medical community to it.30 Badgley had a public profile that

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would only grow as he went on to head two federal inquiries: one on the functioning of Canada’s abortion law and the second on child sexual abuse. Badgley’s five-year study of the Sioux Lookout Project held the potential to make a critical intervention in the field of health services to Indigenous people, a field that had been under-studied, siloed from academic analysis.31 Badgley’s experience in global health recommended him. While holding a postdoctoral fellowship at the Milbank Memorial Fund, he was a senior member of the technical staff devoted to the “Study of Health Manpower and Medical Education in Colombia.” Convened by the government of Colombia in March 1964 and supported by the Pan American Health Organization and the Milbank, the research team led by Drs Alfonso Mejia Vanegas and Raul Paredes Manrique studied medical and nursing education, and the economics of health services and health infrastructure. A National Health Survey with over 51,000 Colombians showed how the people viewed their own health and how they used health services. The team presented preliminary findings at health conferences in Venezuela and Colombia in 1967 before heading to the Plaza Hotel in New York City for an international and interdisciplinary Round Table on Social Science and Health Planning. There Badgley, along with other team members, reported on methodological, social, cultural, and economic factors related to health care and health systems research.32 The Colombia study became the template for Badgley’s evaluation of the Sioux Lookout Project. Badgley’s conclusions about Colombia prompted his questions about Canada, Indian Health Services, and Indigenous health. In Colombia, national governments planned to play a critical role in health promotion and health service provision. Research-based national planning was an important first step toward social and economic development. Health care training could and should adapt to meet these priorities. Government, therefore, ought not spend extravagantly on health infrastructure without knowing precisely how this would address those health needs. National planning, however, was complicated in Colombia by disparities of wealth and opportunity within populations that dramatically affected their health outcomes. “Developing” and “developed,” they found, were but crude descriptors of nations and their economies. Colombia, for example, they wrote was a country of “heterogenous development.”33

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In Colombia, Badgley and his co-authors observed the role that culture and community values played in how people viewed their own health, absorbed new health knowledge, and used medical services. Community leaders, therefore, needed to lead health care planning. These leaders, alongside midwives and healers, were ideal candidates for training in basic medical care so that the locus of control in medical interventions might shift from urban-trained doctors to local medical auxiliaries. The Colombia study confirmed many of the principles of primary health care and demonstrated the critical role of government. The nation, they observed, had a responsibility to enable the health of all of its people, to oversee social and economic development yet needed to respond to local conditions, and to incorporate the expertise of local leaders.34 As Badgley would soon discover, Canada too was characterized by heterogeneous development, with varying relations of power over land and resources, but held to a set of narratives that tended to obscure rather than address these disparities.

• In order to assess the Sioux Lookout Project, Badgley first had to understand Indian Health Services (IHS), how it functioned, and how it thought. Development initiatives had, from the 1950s, employed social science researchers to predict the outcomes of their interventions among particular populations: how might the culture, the social and economic conditions, of a local community hinder or facilitate the success of development? Smithsonian director for social anthropology George Foster wrote on precisely this topic in his text, A Cross-Cultural Anthropological Analysis of a Technical Aid Program.35 By the end of the 1960s, Foster was arguing that both the culture of the target population but also that of the intervening development organization needed to be understood. He commented on Badgley’s report of the Colombia study by drawing attention to the role that the “sequence of philosophies” within development work brought their own limitations – “the questions asked, the solutions found reflected these implicit assumptions.”36 Badgley set out to find the implicit assumptions that resided within IHS. What he read told him more about Canada than it did Indigenous people and predicted, he argued, Canada’s ability to develop a national health policy.37 He found a public narrative of benevolence and altruism

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that rested uncomfortably on an oppositional culture that pitted the government of Canada and its health care workers against Indigenous people and their treaty rights.38 Whereas published accounts of Indian Health Services referred to the “great humanitarians” among its staff, private correspondence revealed considerable in-fighting among and between government departments.39 While Indian Health Services officials described Indigenous people as apathetic, unable to care for themselves, and living in disintegrated communities, internal reports revealed Indigenous people to be articulate champions of their treaty rights to health and wary consumers of health services.40 To Badgley, the health services archival record said several things about Canada. First, the federal government had done little to clear up the administrative confusion that mired Indian Health Services. Its policies were far from transparent, indeed, those tasked with administering them struggled to keep up with repeated changes. Departmental regulations were not grounded in legislation, and decisions tended to be made unilaterally. Shuffling from one department to another reflected the whim of Parliament and not the needs of the people. Indigenous people who lived on reserves had access to only the most rudimentary of health care, while those who lived in or travelled to urban centres for more advanced care faced mounting health care and transportation costs for which they may or may not receive reimbursement. None of this worked to advance their health. Health care shaped “the life chances of a people,” Badgley wrote, and the system facing Indigenous people put them in a “cruel and confusing dilemma.”41 While he noted that the aggressiveness of the Indian Health Services had always been balanced by the altruism of its workers, nonetheless the IHS foundational narrative that cast Canada as a nation with the best interests of Indigenous people at heart was, at best, only partially correct. In an era of political confrontation, Badgley wrote that Canada needed to reexamine itself, to engage in a “continuous national appraisal of … health and social welfare.”42 Only by treating Indigenous people as allies rather than subjects, engaging them in continuous dialogue, could Canada offer health services to Indigenous people that matched the narrative of benevolence and humanitarianism that it articulated.43 This was the first, and for over ten years, the only scholarly analysis of Indian Health Services. Badgley’s experience, first as a medical sociologist with an interest in Medicare and then his work in global

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health, gave him a set of questions that others, writing before him, simply had not asked. By probing the culture of IHS, Badgley found that health services alone would not improve the health of the people. What, then, would be the utility of a program, like the Sioux Lookout Project, which hoped to extend those services? How might the Sioux Lookout Project meet the needs of Indigenous Peoples in such a way that they would willingly use those health services? These were the questions to which Badgley then turned.

• To evaluate the Sioux Lookout Project and determine the best course of action for the future, Badgley again turned to the methodologies of global health and the questions of the Colombia health study. In doing so, he did three things that had never been done in Canada. First, he asked Indigenous people – in this case Cree and Anishinaabe people of northwestern Ontario – and what they thought about their health and their health needs. Second, he built his assessment of their clinical needs on local knowledge of the population providing his research staff with both accurate census data and the relationships that would facilitate their work. Finally, as he interpreted the data collected in communities, he tried to understand the impacts of cultural change on health and health care utilization. Here he explicitly broke with the dominant discourses of Indian Health Services that had long argued that Indigenous culture had to change in order for the people to be healthy and, more recently, that Indigenous women needed to curtail their fertility to prevent a “population bomb” in Indigenous communities.44 Through these processes, novel in Canada but common in global health, Badgley’s research produced an archive of mediated Indigenous knowledge about health and health care that was largely unprecedented for the time. In order to understand how Anishinaabe and Cree knowledge functioned in the everyday world of health services interactions, Badgley used a community household health survey adapted from the Colombia project. Badgley requested and obtained permission to do research in these communities from the Treaty 9 chiefs. He relied on local Indigenous leaders and Knowledge Keepers to adapt the survey to the communities. Then he hired local health workers, community leaders, and students to conduct the survey in Cree and Anishinaabemowin. He

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worked with Indigenous Knowledge Keepers to select the communities and construct local censuses of the communities from which to take a representative sample. No one, it seemed, had ever put together a community-based survey of these communities, and it promised to be the most accurate population analysis to date.45 Badgley was particularly interested in the role of culture and culture change in influencing health perceptions and the use of health care services. As George Foster had written, knowledge of local cultures was essential to anticipating and mitigating resistance to medical interventions.46 Badgley wrote, referring to the Colombia work, that “the essence of public health is its concern with social change.”47 He understood that, in northwestern Ontario, a great deal of social and cultural change had already taken place. He hypothesized that “the pattern of acculturation concerning health (changes in value, behaviour) of the Indians varies by geographic isolation and degree of social interaction with whites. The acceptance or non-acceptance of health values and procedures of the whites is a function of the extent to which these are compatible or non-compatible with Indian culture.”48 In order to understand the relationship between culture change, health perceptions, and the use of health services, Badgley selected six communities that he graded according to their degree of culture change or, as he put it, “contact with whites.” From among these, 50 per cent of the households were interviewed in Cree or Anishinaabemowin. In the summer of 1971, community researchers conducted eighty-six interviews. The next summer, an additional 193 interviews were obtained, completing the survey.49 The survey results were surprising and utterly subverted the narratives of Indian Health Services that emphasized the pathological nature of Indigenous communities and the importance of medical services in remediating those health conditions. Seventy per cent said that they were in good health; 17 per cent said that their health was good; and a final 13 per cent reported poor health. Tiredness, headache, and toothache were the top three illnesses experienced. A third said that they had not been ill in the previous year, but almost 10 per cent said that they had experienced five or more illness episodes. There were, of course, variations by age, with those over forty-five reporting most of the illness. Thirty-five per cent thought that their community was healthy, another third of respondents thought that the community’s health was fair, while a final third looked around them and saw poor health. More

56 Table 2.1

Mary-Ellen Kelm Evaluation of health services by extent of Indian-white contacts

Contacts

Evaluation of health services Positive

Neutral

Negative

Not reported

Extensive

46.1

14.4

34.2

5.3

Moderate

57.3

13.6

14.6

14.6

Limited

62.0

9.0

16.0

13.0

Total

55.9

12.2

20.4

11.5

Source: Sioux Lookout Project, September 1973, A86-0037, box 1, Behavioural Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, 137–51. Table reproduced verbatim. Totals are not cumulative.

Table 2.2 Improved health services as major community priority by extent of Indian-white contact Contacts

Improved health care services Yes

No

Extensive

0

100

Moderate

3.9

96.1

11.0

89.0

5.4

94.6

Limited Total

Source: Sioux Lookout Project, September 1973, A86-0037, box 1, Behavioural Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, 137–51. Table reproduced verbatim. Totals are not cumulative.

than 70 per cent said that access to clean drinking water was a major health problem, and over two-thirds noted that the toilets in their community were poor. When asked what would improve the health of their communities, more jobs topped the list, followed by better homes, better sanitation, and better transportation.50 This was not the vision of communities in a health crisis that Indian Health Services painted in their publications, nor even communities without sufficient medical services, the view put forward by social justice critics. Still, there were many factors that might have influenced individuals’ self-assessment or their willingness to report illness or injury, including a tendency to avoid complaining about one’s health or a desire to answer in ways that reflected well on the community.51 More research would be required to get a clearer picture of the people’s health.

IHS and Colonially Entangled Knowledge Table 2.3

57

Recommendations to improve level of health in community

Recommendation

%

Water accessibility/purity

16.8

Sanitation

40.5

Housing

28.0

Nursing station

1.1

Nursing personnel

2.2

Physicians

1.8

More jobs

4.3

Education

3.2

Health workers/aides Other

5.0 24.4

Source: Sioux Lookout Project, September 1973, A86-0037, box 1, Behavioural Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, 137–51. Table reproduced verbatim. Totals are not cumulative.

Table 2.4 Evaluation of community health by extent of Indianwhite contact Contacts

Level of community health Mostly healthy

Mixed

A lot sick

Not reported

Extensive

19.7

25.0

47.4

7.9

Moderate

36.9

20.4

17.6

25.2

Limited

45.0

26.0

5.0

24.0

Total

35.1

23.7

21.2

20.1

Source: Sioux Lookout Project, September 1973, A86-0037, box 1, Behavioural Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, 137–51. Table reproduced verbatim. Totals are not cumulative.

For that, Badgley hired anaesthetist Mary Hunter to conduct a clinical needs assessment on a sample of the total status Indian population in the Sioux Lookout Zone. There was no way even to draw a sample without first engaging with Indigenous knowledge. The calculation of simple health measures was hampered by the complicated band registry systems imposed by the Indian Act and imperfectly followed in communities. Band lists were often inaccurate reflections

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of who was actually living in communities. Seasonal mobility, and a host of other reasons why Indigenous people might not want to be counted by band administrators, further undermined confidence in the denominator figures (total population) necessary for calculating such essential measures as per capita live births, morbidity, and mortality rates. So the first critical step in the clinical needs assessment was a thorough census of communities. Badgley hired a local Anishnaabe school teacher, John Day, as a research associate to Mary Hunter. Day’s mother was critical to the project. Through her, Day’s house-to-house survey, and by extension Hunter’s work, gained legitimacy. As Hunter described in a memo to Badgley, “John Day lives here and is known here. He told me his mother explained the project to the people and was instrumental in getting people to come in.”52 In order to complete the census of communities, Day cross-referenced band lists with the health records, birth, and death registries kept at the nursing stations and health centres. He determined his own criteria for community residence (three months) that  was independent of Department of Indian Affairs standards, but that reflected the lives of the people. By these measures, Day determined the 20 per cent sample for the clinical needs assessment, with an additional 10 per cent selected to replace those of the sample who were either unavailable or unwilling to participate.53 In the early summer 1972, Hunter and Day undertook a pilot study of the clinical needs assessment in the community of Bear Lake. They used a thirteen-page survey instrument widely used by global health researchers and very similar to the one Badgley’s team used in Colombia. Hunter took anthropometric data, collected blood and urine samples, and when she obtained specific consent, conducted breast, pelvic, and rectal exams. Very quickly, it became clear that very few would consent to these exams, and they were dropped when the full clinical assessment began the next summer.54 Over ten months, beginning in the summer of 1973, Hunter and Day travelled to twenty-three isolated communities where they collected data on 1,055 individuals. The work was novel; as Hunter put it: “No previous Canadian studies have been attempted to determine the general health profile of an essentially well Indian people living in a score of isolated northern communities.”55 Hunter’s results, tabulated and verified statistically, revealed that the community’s self-assessments were largely accurate. They had said

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that they felt reasonably healthy and, based on the evidence Hunter gathered, they were. There was little evidence of advanced chronic or acute illnesses. Of the over 800 urine samples taken, only 6 per cent revealed any sort of finding; only 3 per cent of chest exams showed any evidence of lung disease; surprising findings for health researchers in Canada who were already worried about rising rates of diabetes in Indigenous populations and who continued to be concerned about tuberculosis and the emerging effects of smoking. As Hunter concluded: “despite the large number of symptoms being recorded – the objective physical findings and measurements would indicate that generally the health of the native Indians living in isolated communities in the Middle North is reasonably good.”56 There was one exception. Just as the people reported toothaches as among their top three complaints, Hunter found many instances of dental caries, particularly among those people living closest to settler communities or regularly in the employ of non-Indigenous people. The results from Hunter’s survey indicated that these were the people most likely to consume store-bought foods and to buy candy for their children. This was just one example of how the incorporation of non-Indigenous commodities was affecting the health of the people. As a medical sociologist and one trained in global health, Badgley was particularly interested in health care and cultural change. Based on his previous work, Badgley hypothesized that where contact with settlers (whom Badgley called “whites”) was most intimate and enduring, cultural change among Anishinaabe and Cree people would make them more comfortable with and more frequent users of Indian Health Services. What he found was more complicated than that. Cree and Anishinaabe people did use these services, indeed travelled great distances to do so, but those in communities with the most contact with settlers were the least satisfied with Indian Health Services. They were also the least inclined to see more health services as solving their health problems. Given the attitudes towards Indigenous people that some Indian Health Services staff expressed in their private correspondence, this finding was perhaps not that surprising. But this sort of dissatisfaction (say, with a particular staff member) was not a cultural barrier per se. Badgley needed data beyond the aggregate statistics that resulted from the survey work to fully assess how health care and cultural change interacted in the Sioux Lookout Zone.

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To probe this relationship, Badgley turned to the mothers residing in the Sioux Lookout Hospital either awaiting delivery or immediately following the birth of their child. By 1970, nearly a quarter of all mothers in the Zone delivered their babies in the Sioux Lookout Hospital. Many landed in hospital weeks before delivery because of poor travelling conditions and hospital staff complained of overcrowding as a result.57 The average hospital stay was nineteen days.58 Maternal and child health was a key focus of PHC initiatives globally, and a preoccupation of global health debates over the so-called population bomb.59 Health researchers at the time, Badgley included, viewed maternal and child mortality as “sensitive index to measure equally the volume and quality of health services provided as well as of economic standard of living and prevailing social values.”60 Badgley was particularly interested in the maternal bond and the “sensitive web” of cultural values that moved intergenerationally across it. In the summer of 1972, student researchers interviewed the ninety-two expectant or new mothers boarding at the Sioux Lookout Hospital.61 As Badgley reviewed the interview transcripts, only education appeared to have a straightforward effect on behaviour: women with more education (high school completion and post-secondary training) were more likely to use birth control.62 Apart from that, women of varying ages, educational levels, and family size reported a remarkable degree of cultural hybridization in attitudes to child-bearing and child-rearing practices. They all planned to breastfeed and to wean their children to a combination of store-bought foods (pablum and Gerbers) and country foods (masticated fish roe and rabbit); they all planned to use or were already using the tikangan – a cradle board in which infants were swaddled. All agreed that this gave the baby access to all the family’s activities while ensuring their safety from hazards in the home and protection from bug bites when outside. Many health care professionals criticized the tikangan as the cause of hip dysplasia. Mothers responded that, to them, hip dysplasia was neither a defect nor a disability.63 Badgley’s conclusions demonstrate his ambivalence towards cultural change. Despite the evidence of hybridization in the interviews, he lamented “the passing of traditional Indian values.” He feared that the children would grow up to be “not fully Indian or western, but marginal to each way of life.”64 Health care workers, he warned, were “catalysts of

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change,” but needed to be sensitive to “preserve cultural identity.” At the same time, the interventions required to improve the health of women, children, and families were necessary and not incompatible with the cultivation of personal dignity. Health education could go a long way to advance the health of the communities: to encourage women to plan pregnancies and treat minor illnesses and injuries, for which they now relied on nurses. There was great scope for a primary health care system that would build upon the community-based expertise and offer alternatives to reliance on an expensive, and sometimes hostile, health care system.65 Badgley never fully completed his evaluation of the Sioux Lookout Project. By 1974, he was already been drawn into other work. His publication on Indian Health Services indicated some of what he learned. Badgley’s conclusions made plain to Harry Bain and Gary Goldthorpe that extended health services were not the answer.66 Socio-economic and political development, and meaningful input from Indigenous people themselves was the answer to the health crisis in Indigenous communities, he argued. For proof that primary health care was the best kind of health care for these communities, he turned to Badgley’s bright and prolific graduate student T. Kue Young.67

• There was one more trajectory for the boomerang. In 1981, T. Kue Young, then a budding social epidemiologist, published “Primary Health Care for Isolated Indians in Northwestern Ontario” in Public Health Reports, a premier journal in the field.68 Using the data that Badgley collected, Young argued that “the experience of northwestern Ontario should be of interest to health professionals who provide services to people in isolated and underdeveloped areas world-wide.”69 Just as Badgley and the Colombia national health survey team concluded that a nation like Colombia could have both developed and developing regions and populations, so too did Young make the case that Indigenous populations in Canada shared many characteristics with “the developing countries of the Third World.” The population was young: Day’s census demonstrated this for the Cree and Anishinaabe communities, and in 1971 the census revealed that 49 per cent of the status Indian population was under fifteen years of age. Health indices, such as infant mortality rates, were

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similarly more like developing countries than like Canada as a whole. Environmental conditions of reserves and the socio-economic levels of their residents mirrored that of the disadvantaged in the Third World.70

• In the years following Badgley’s report, the Sioux Lookout Project implemented a mixed-medical model for service delivery. Nurses and community members trained as native health auxiliaries staffed health stations in eighteen of the communities in the region. They were meant to be health educators, but often they, alongside nurses, did the work of physicians without reported adverse health outcomes.71 Primary health care was sufficient to support the health of residents, while “more intensive medical input in the form of more frequent visits by physicians or more sophisticated stationary health facilities,” Young argued, “[was] not likely to improve health status significantly. The health outcomes of the people studied indicate that indigenous health auxiliaries can provide just as effective services.”72 This, Young argued, was significant. It confirmed the WHO’s recommendation in favour of primary health care, and it replicated similar findings based on studies in the United States. There were concerns about the deployment of primary health care workers in poorer regions of wealthy developed countries, seen as a refusal to address regional socio-economic disparities and an unwillingness to force physicians into service in these regions. Nonetheless, Young argued that primary health care with infrastructure and technological supports was a cost-effective way to meet the needs of remote communities.73 The Sioux Lookout Project, then, offered insights into the effectiveness of primary health care in both the developing and the developed world. Indeed, by the time Young published his article, Canada had moved toward a community-development model for health care among Indigenous Peoples in Canada. In 1978, Canada participated in the International Conference on Primary Health Care at Alma Ata, and affirmed its declaration that redefined health as a “state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being,” denounced “gross inequality in the health status of the people,” and called for health care that was “universally available, technologically and culturally appropriate … integrating biomedical and traditional approaches and incorporating

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community-based participation.”74 A newly elected Conservative government under Joe Clark put forward a re-envisioned approach to health services to status Indians. The 1979 Indian Health Policy was the first to acknowledge Canada’s “special relationship with Indian peoples,” and to recognize “its legal and traditional responsibilities to Indians.” It offered three pillars that would support efforts to increase the health of Indigenous communities: community development that would include both socio-economic and cultural and spiritual development; the strengthening of the “traditional relationship of the Indian people to the Federal Government” through communication and Indigenous involvement in planning, budgeting and delivering health programs; and a multi-level integrated health system with roles for the federal, provincial and Indigenous government bodies.75 Beyond policy, community-based health programs put Indigenous people in planning and service role positions. The Community Health Demonstration Programme (CHDP), implemented in 1981, brought Indigenous communities into the planning and cost-analysis of transferring the control of health services to them. The Community Health Representative Program and the Native Alcohol and Drug Addictions Program put community members into health promotion positions that were community-based.76 The 1974 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement created the first Cree and Inuit Boards of Health.77 The 1989 Indian Health Transfer Policy furthered the agenda of the federal government to move administrative control over health services to Indigenous governance bodies. It also served the long-term agenda of, as community health services professor Josée Lavoie put it, “getting out of the business of health service delivery.”78 This was the last turn of the boomerang as PHC found a home in Indigenous communities as Canada’s neo-liberal agenda advanced.

• This case study offers a chance to consider this volume’s central question – how has post-Orientalism travelled and coexisted with ongoing imperial difference-makings? – in a Canadian context. How well did Badgley’s experience in a postcolonial setting (Colombia) serve him and his research in a settler colony (Canada)? Did postcolonial tools make possible new knowledge of Indigenous health in a settler-colonial state?

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Badgley’s experience in global health research prompted a series of questions that were novel to an analysis of Indian Health Services. The first of these was: what role did government play in promoting the health of Indigenous people and in serving their health needs? He found, as I have argued, that Canada really had little desire beyond its own self-interest to engage in health promotion in Indigenous communities, and that it balked at providing health services. While Badgley knew that Indigenous people in Colombia too relied mainly on local healers, as a whole Colombia was a nation where various levels of government were more deeply involved in the provision of health care to its people: physicians typically worked several hours a day in one of the state-organized sites of medical care.79 Importantly, the Ministry of Health under Antonio Hernandez Prada was avowedly committed to national health planning as a key piece of economic development.80 Badgley expected that, with Medicare, Canada too would engage in national health planning and that understanding Indian Health Services would predict something about how Canada might proceed. The example of Indian Health Services was not promising in this regard. There was much that Canada could learn by incorporating Indigenous people into decision-making in health planning. This was the first toss of the boomerang. Badgley proceeded according to these principles and engaged with Indigenous people to make new knowledge about their perceptions of health and experiences of health care. He was a sensitive observer. He  noted, but did not fully interpret, the fact that those who had the most contact with Canada’s health systems were the most wary of them.  He described Indigenous understanding that community development would improve their health more than expanded health services. He refused to affirm any notion of a “population bomb” waiting to go off in Indigenous communities and remained silent on the role that fertility control should or might play in the lives of Indigenous women and their families. He described what he saw as the culturally mixed ways that women were rearing their children and, unlike the government’s continued assimilationist stance, worried that cultural knowledge and feelings of belonging might be lost in the process. Here the boomerang swung back to Indigenous knowledge. But what could Badgley not see with his postcolonial lens? Colombia understood itself to have a particular trajectory of health colonization

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and decolonization: Indigenous health care existed pre-contact and was faced with colonial domination (stages one and two); the country was emancipated from colonial rule, but institutions such as the Catholic Church retained their influence (stage three); the country learned about social insurance from foreign industrialized states and applied those principles at home (stage four); preventative public health knowledge was transmitted from North America and Europe (stage five); finally, “the relatively recent emergence of uniquely national and self-determined patterns of integrated health services integration.”81 While Badgley referred to Canada’s colonial past in his analysis of Indian Health Services, he meant Canada’s relationship with Great Britain. The structures (not stages) of settler colonialism appeared to be illegible to him, though to be fair, Patrick Wolfe’s ground-breaking analysis that differentiated settler colonialism from other forms was nearly thirty years in the future.82 Those structures were evident, and Badgley saw them – Treaties were critical mechanisms by which Canada obtained land for settlement, and they contained Indigenous hopes for health care. But Badgley could not quite understand the Treaties and Indigenous resistance to any attempt to dismantle them. To Badgley, Treaty obligations “created confusion,” and the forms of Indigenous protest he observed (“boycotting services, hunger strikes, mock trials, sit-ins in government offices, and printing pamphlets attacking the existing system”), and the demands that they made for more and better services free of charge, indicated to him that they may have been “inadvertently co-opted by the very system which they opposed.”83 While he respected Indigenous sovereignty over knowledge by engaging Treaty 9 chiefs and councillors in his research plans, he underestimated the importance of the treaties and the way that they worked to brace Indigenous people against the disaggregating structures of Canadian settler colonialism. In a similar vein, Badgley did not overtly consider the structural violence of the Canadian state experienced by Indigenous people. Badgley’s analysis does not include residential schools, the apprehension of Indigenous children from their homes during the so-called Sixties Scoop, the practices of reproductive injustice, or medical research carried out in Indian hospitals.84 While Indigenous writers were beginning to describe these experiences in their work, it is equally true that these histories had not entered the public mind in the early 1970s when Badgley worked in this field. Nonetheless, had he considered these

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experiences, he might have understood better some of the gendered dynamics shaping the experience of health care for the Cree and Anishnaabe people with whom he worked. One story offers a chilling though inconclusive example. One of Badgley’s central questions was about culture change and the role that it might play in shaping Indigenous use of existing health care services. His hypothesis was that greater contact with settlers would create greater comfort and confidence in dealing with health care providers who were white. His aggregate data proved the opposite, and he looked more closely at individual stories to help him understand why. One of these involved the family of a male caretaker at a nursing station in a remote community. Concerned by his infant son’s persistent diarrhea, he brought his wife and child to see the nurse. The wife was clearly reluctant, extremely nervous, and the child was inconsolable during the examination. The nurse lectured the family on the importance of adding Javex to their drinking water which was drawn from a nearby lake. The woman simply nodded and fled the encounter as quickly as possible. We can’t know precisely the source of her reaction. To Badgley, this was an example of how the more acculturated man was better able to engage the health care system than his less acculturated wife. We might also wonder about the structural violence of settler colonialism. Anthropologist Adrian Tanner noted that the Cree and Anishnaabe women he encountered were very reluctant to allow outsiders near their children.85 There were certainly immediate reasons for that. In the same period, American anthropologist Marshall Hurlich was in the region studying cold adaptation as part of the Northern Algonkian Project funded by the National Science Foundation.86 Health researcher Mary Hunter heard stories of his work. People she encountered in Fort Severn in 1973 described being “frightened” by his experiments, which involved thrusting men’s hands into cold water, five degrees Celsius, for as long as thirty minutes.87 But larger forces – residential schooling, child apprehension – might also have caused women to be particularly reluctant to let outsiders interact with their children. The advice to add Javex was common but set within a larger context might also have seemed more sinister. The effects of mercury contamination of water were well-known in Indigenous communities. A Manitoulin Island study in the same period asked women why they were unwilling to add

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Javex to their drinking water if it would prevent their children from contracting gastro-intestinal diseases. They asked their own question to the researcher: why, given all they were hearing about contaminated water, would they willingly contaminate the lake water they considered pure with bleach?88 Mothers had reason to be wary of outside interventions in their children’s lives and health. Without a greater understanding of the contexts of women’s behaviour, Badgley’s conclusions about culture change may have lacked sufficient contextualization. The ways that Canada embraced PHC for Indigenous communities are also examples of how colonial power can enlist ways of knowing and acting that are not formally aligned with colonialism but which, deployed in certain ways, reinforce the making of difference. Canada’s health care system has, overall, maintained its adherence to physiciancentred health care and its passion for technocratic solutions. Just as those critics with whom Young contended in the 1980s alleged, PHC for impoverished, Indigenous, racialized, or remote communities has indeed created a two-tiered system.89 The problems faced by Indigenous communities in the 1970s have remained. Without clean water, without adequate sanitation, without socio-economic opportunities, without community development, indeed, without a new way of envisioning land and resource allocation that does not ignore Indigenous rights and title but privileges them, Indigenous health remains poorer than that of other Canadians as measured by the various indices by which we know health. It turns out that acting in the interests of Indigenous health in Canada is even trickier than creating new knowledge about it. Notes The author acknowledges that she lives on unceded Kwantlen land and works on unceded Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam, and Squamish territory. Funding for the larger project on the production of health knowledge about and by Indigenous Peoples was obtained from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and a research stipend from the Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at Simon Fraser University. 1 Mary Jane McCallum, “This Last Frontier: Isolation and Aboriginal Health,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History / Bulletin canadien d’histoire de la médecine 22, no. 1 (2005): 103–20; Seth Archer, “Colonialism and Other

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Afflictions: Rethinking Native American Health History,” History Compass 14, no. 10 (2016): 511–21; Christopher Fletcher, “Measuring Inuit Health from Ungava to Nunavik via Nouveau Québec: Episodes in the History of Researcher–Subject Relations,” American Review of Canadian Studies 47, no. 2 (June 2017): 206–24; John D. O’Neil, “The Politics of Health in the Fourth World: A Northern Canadian Example,” Human Organization 45, no. 2 (1986): 119; Mary Jane Logan Mccallum, “Starvation, Experimentation, Segregation, and Trauma: Words for Reading Indigenous Health History,” Canadian Historical Review 98, no. 1 (2017): 96–113; and Angela Wanhalla, “Housing Un/Healthy Bodies: Native Housing Surveys and Maori Health in New Zealand 1930–45,” Health and History 8, no. 1 (2006): 100–20. 2 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993 [1978]); Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 1–20; Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, eds., Theorizing Native Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 13–15; and Adele Perry, “The Historian and the Theorist Revisited,” Histoire sociale / Social History 33, no. 65 (2000): 145–51. 3 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003). Ann Laura Stoler’s work is perhaps the best example of Foucault’s ideas applied to colonial contexts. See Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 4 The term “internal colonialism” has been used to refer to the relationship between Ottawa and northerners living in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon. James Frideres used it to describe Canada’s relationship with Indigenous Peoples and this was an important intervention into the literature. More recently, Joan Sangster has argued that for Canada’s north, the particular dynamics of internal colonialism seem more apparent than those of settler colonialism and she eschews the latter term in her analysis as a result. For the purposes of this paper, I am highlighting the ways in which knowledge of ‘the other’ in colonies of exploitation and even decolonized spaces transited to Indigenous communities but I am not arguing that those ideas did not boomerang back in application to settlers and newcomers as well. Heidi Bohaker and Franca Iacovetta did important work when they demonstrated the connection between assimilative policies directed towards new Canadians and Indigenous Peoples. Laurie Bertram has persuasively

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argued that Icelandic immigrants faced similar discourses as Indigenous people and responded by demonstrating their allegiance to the federal government and arguably to ‘whiteness’ during the second Northwest resistance. James S. Frideres, Native Peoples in Canada: Contemporary Conflicts (Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall Canada, 1988), 295–6; Heidi Bohaker and Franca Iacovetta, “Making Aboriginal People ‘Immigrants Too’: A Comparison of Citizenship Programs for Newcomers and Indigenous Peoples in Postwar Canada, 1940s–1960s,” Canadian Historical Review 90, no. 3 (2009): 426–61; Joan Sangster, The Iconic North: Cultural Constructions of Aboriginal Life in Postwar Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2016); and Laurie K. Bertram, “‘Eskimo’ Immigrants and Colonial Soldiers: Icelandic Immigrants and the North-West Resistance, 1885,” Canadian Historical Review 99, no. 1 (2018): 63–97. For further work that tangles the histories of settlers and Indigenous people in exciting ways, see Ryan Eyford, “Quarantined Within a New Colonial Order: The 1876– 1877 Lake Winnipeg Smallpox Epidemic,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 17 (2006): 55–78; and Ryan Eyford, White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2016). 5 Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982); Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992); Kristina Fagan et al., “Canadian Indian Literary Nationalism? Critical Approaches in Canadian Indigenous Contexts – A Collaborative Interlogue,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 29, no. 1/2 (2009): 19–44; Simpson and Smith, Theorizing Native Studies, 6–10; Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 7; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 122–25; and Kristina Fagan, “Tewatatha:wi,” American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 1/2 (2004): 1–11. 6 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power; Adele Perry, Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the NineteenthCentury Imperial World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); David Shumway Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Christian W. McMillan, Discovering Tuberculosis: A Global History 1900 to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Maureen K. Lux, Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s–1980s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016); Maureen Lux, “Perfect Subjects: Race, Tuberculosis, and the Qu’Appelle BCG Vaccine

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Trial,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History / Bulletin canadien d’histoire de la médecine 15, no. 1 (1998): 277–95; Ian Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952,” Histoire sociale / Social History 46, no. 91 (2013): 145–72; Hugh Shewell, “‘What Makes the Indian Tick?’: The Influence of Social Sciences on Canada’s Indian Policy, 1947–1964,” Histoire sociale / Social History 34, no. 67 (2001): 133–67; and David S. Jones, “The Health Care Experiments at Many Farms: The Navajo, Tuberculosis, and the Limits of Modern Medicine, 1952–1962,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76, no. 4 (2002): 749–90. James A. Trostle, Epidemiology and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Adela Berdichewsky et al., “Illness and Health Services in Colombia: Implications for Health Planning: Commentary,” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 46, no. 2 (1968): 173. James B. Waldram, D. Ann Hering, and T. Kue Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada: Historical, Cultural, and Epidemiological Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 197. H.E. Young to W.J. Roche, 31 March 1914, Black Series, Record Group [RG] 10, volume 3641, file 7557 p. 0, Department of Indian Affairs, Library and Archives Canada [LAC] in Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900–1950 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998), 107 (endnote 33). Alexander Morris, The Treaties of Canada and the Indians of Manitoba and Northwest Territories (Toronto: Belfords, Clarks and Co, 1880), cited in Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 117 (endnote 106). J.A. Macrae, “Report of Commissioners for Treaty 8,” Sessional Papers 14 (1920): 6, cited in Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 117. Lux, Separate Beds, 153; and Byron Plant, “The Politics of Indian Administration: A Revisionist History of Intrastate Relations in MidTwentieth Century British Columbia” (PhD diss., Saskatoon, University of Saskatchewan, 2009). Carol Spindell Farkas, “Components of the Northern Canadian Indian Diet and Mercury Toxicity: with special attention paid to Thiamin, Magnesium and Flouride” (National Indian Brotherhood, 1976); Brittany Luby, “From Milk-Medicine to Public (Re)Education Programs: An Examination of Anishinabek Mothers’ Responses to Hydroelectric Flooding in the Treaty #3 District, 1900–1975,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History / Bulletin canadien d’histoire de la médecine 32, no. 2 (2016): 363–89; G.J. Stopps, Chief, Environmental Health Effects Services, Public Health Division, Department of Health, Ontario Government, to Dr Gary Goldthorpe, Sioux Lookout Zone Hospital (cc Dr H. Bain), 11 October 1972;

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16 17

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A97 0012 box 001, Research – Sioux Lookout 1972–1978, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, Ontario; 27 January 1973, “Mercury Poisoning Urged as Verdict in Guide’s Death, Kenora,” clipping, Globe and Mail, A860037 box 003, Faculty of Medicine, Behavioural Sciences, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, Ontario. Sarah Nickel, Assembling Unity: Indigenous Politics, Gender, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2019); and Sarah Nickel, “Reconsidering 1969: The White Paper and the Making of the Modern Indigenous Rights Movement,” Canadian Historical Review 100, no. 2 (2019): 223–38. Grand Council Treaty 9, “A Proposal to the Department of National Health and Welfare to Undertake a Health and Social Services Program in Treaty No. 9 Area.” (proposal, 1973), 1, A86-0036 box 2, Behavioural Sciences, University of Toronto Archives. Lux, Separate Beds, 156. H.W. Bain and Gary Goldthorpe, “The University of Toronto ‘Sioux Lookout Project’ – a Model of Health Care Delivery,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 107, no. 6 (1972): 523; “Indian Drug Supply Under Renewed Attack,” Globe and Mail, 3 October 1968; T. Kue-Hing Young, “Indian Health Care in Northwestern Ontario: Health Status, Medical Care, and Social Policy” (master’s thesis, University of Toronto, 1979), 142. Bob Burt, “Medical Mission Called Off: U of T to Treat Indians,” Sault Star, n.d.; “Sioux Lookout Project formation,” A97-002 box 2, Sioux Lookout Project, University of Toronto Archives; C.A. Pearson to H.A. Proctor, 24 January 1969; H.A. Proctor to K.F. Bulter (a/Regional Director, Ontario Region), 28 January 1969, National Health and Welfare, RG 29 v2647 f80013-16, Library and Archives Canada. Considerable work has been done unpacking the discourses of development. Escobar’s seminal work stands out in this regard. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 5. C.E.A. Winslow, The Cost of Sickness and the Price of Health (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1951), 9. Iris Borowy, “Shifting Between Biomedical and Social Medicine: International Health Organizations in the 20th Century,” History Compass 12, no. 6 (2014): 517–30; Iris Borowy, “Global Health and Development: Conceptualizing Health Between Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 68, no. 3: 451–85; and Randall M. Packard, A History of Global Health: Interventions In the Lives of Other Peoples (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 235.

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22 Bain and Goldthorpe, “University of Toronto ‘Sioux Lookout Project,’” 524. 23 James B. Waldram, D. Ann Herring, and T. Kue Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada: Historical, Cultural, and Epidemiological Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 223. 24 Bain and Goldthorpe, “University of Toronto ‘Sioux Lookout Project,’” 524. 25 Packard, A History of Global Health, 232; T. Kue-Hing Young, “Indian Health Care in Northwestern Ontario,” 145. 26 Bain and Goldthorpe, “University of Toronto ‘Sioux Lookout Project,’” 525. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Robin F. Badgley and Samuel W. Bloom, “Behavioral Sciences and Medical Education: The Case of Sociology,” Social Science & Medicine (1967) 7, no. 12 (1973): 927–41. Hugh Shewell describes the larger context of social science research in Indigenous communities, while James Trostle outlines the relationship between the social and behavioural sciences and medicine. Shewell, “‘What Makes the Indian Tick?’”; James Trostle, “Anthropology and Epidemiology in the Twentieth Century: A Selective History of Collaborative Projects and Theoretical Affinities, 1920 to 1970,” in Anthropology and Epidemiology (Dordrecht: Springer, 1986): 59–94; and James Trostle and Johannes Sommerfeld, “Medical Anthropology and Epidemiology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996): 253–74. 30 Robin F. Badgley and Alexander Robertson, “Foreword,” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 46, no. 2 (1968): 11–15; and Robin F. Badgley, Doctors’ Strike: Medical Care and Conflict in Saskatchewan (New York: Atherton Press, 1967). 31 “Dr. Robin F. Badgley, 1931 – 2011,” Globe and Mail, accessed 5 December 2016, http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/Deaths.20120428. 93292655/BDAStory/BDA/deaths. 32 Badgley and Robertson, “Foreword.” 33 Robin F. Badgley et al., “Illness and Health Services in Colombia: Implications for Health Planning,” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 46, no. 2 (1968): 146–64. 34 Ibid. 35 Packard, A History of Global Health, 109. 36 Berdichewsky et al., “Illness and Health Services in Colombia,” 172. 37 “A Summary of the Annual Reports on the Sioux Lookout Zone and Central Region,” 1952–1968, A86-0037, box 2, files 1–5, Behavioural Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, ON. 38 Robin F. Badgley, “Social Policy and Indian Health Services in Canada,” Anthropological Quarterly 46, no. 3 (1973): 150.

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39 P.E. Moore, “Indian Health Services,” Canadian Journal of Public Health / Revue canadienne de santé publique 37, no. 4 (1946): 140–42; W.B. Brittain, “The Impact of Hospital Insurance on Indian Health Services,” Medical Services Journal 15 (1959): 632–34; and G. Graham-Cummings, “Health of the Original Canadians, 1867–1967,” Medical Services Journal (1967): 115–66. 40 “A Summary of the Annual Reports on the Sioux Lookout Zone and Central Region,” 1952–1968, A86-0037, box 2, files 1–5, Behavioural Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, ON. 41 Badgley, “Social Policy and Indian Health Services in Canada,” 156. 42 Ibid., 159. 43 Ibid. 44 Erika Dyck and Maureen Lux, “Population Control in the ‘Global North’? Canada’s Response to Indigenous Reproductive Rights and Neo-Eugenics,” Canadian Historical Review 97, no. 4 (2016): 481–512. 45 Minutes of the Human Investigation Committee, 16 July 1973, A20140050/001, Clinical Needs Assessment, Sioux Lookout Project, 1973–74, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, ON. 46 Packard, A History of Global Health, 110–11. 47 Badgley et al., “Illness and Health Services in Colombia,” 158. 48 “Objectives of the Study,” Sioux Lookout Project, September 1973, A860037, box 001, file Sioux Lookout Project, Behavioural Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, ON. 49 Appendix I – Research Program April 1974–March 1976, A86-0037, box 001, file Sioux Lookout Project, September 1973. 50 Sioux Lookout Project, September 1973, Part 1, pp. 110–21, A86-0036, box 001, Behavioural Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, ON. 51 T. Kue Young, “Self-Perceived and Clinically Assessed Health Status of Indians in Northwestern Ontario: Analysis of a Health Survey,” Canadian Journal of Public Health / Revue canadienne de santé publique 73 (1982): 272–7. 52 Sioux Lookout Project, Clinical Needs Assessment, Forms, Notes, Pamphlets, 1970-4. A2014-0050/002 file 1. University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, ON. 53 Ibid. 54 Sioux Lookout Project, Clinical Needs Assessment, Correspondence, Memos and Reports, Mary Hunter to Sidney Dymond, 19 December 1973; Sidney Dymond to Mary Hunter, 4 January 1974; Badgley’s Minutes of the Human Investigation Committee, 16 July 1973, A2014-0050/001, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, ON.

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55 Sioux Lookout Project II, A96-0012, box 06 file 07, Mary Hunter, Research Report, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, ON. 56 Hunter report to the Clinical Society of Toronto, 1976, Sioux Lookout Project II. 57 Sioux Lookout Project, September 1973, Part 1, pp. 27–38, A86-0037, box 001 A86-0036, box 001, Behavioural Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, ON; for the larger context see Patricia Jasen, “Race, Culture, and the Colonization of Childbirth in Northern Canada,” Social History of Medicine 10, no. 3 (1997): 383–400. 58 Sioux Lookout Project, September 1973, p. 82, A86-0036, box 001, Behavioural Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, ON. 59 Packard, A History of Global Health, 232; Dyck and Lux, “Population Control in the ‘Global North’?”; Jasen, “Race, Culture, and the Colonization of Childbirth in Northern Canada”; W.D. Thomas, “Maternal Mortality in Native British Columbia Indians, a High-Risk Group,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 99, no. 2 (1968): 64–7; Terry O’Driscoll et al., “Delivering Away from Home: The Perinatal Experiences of First Nations Women in Northwestern Ontario,” Canadian Journal of Rural Medicine / Journal canadien de la médecine rurale 16, no. 4 (2011): 126–30; Timothy L. Taylor, “Determinants of Primary Medical Care Use among Urban American Indians,” American Indian Culture & Research Journal 13, no. 3/4 (1989): 215–32; Anne‐Emanuelle Birn, Laura Nervi, and Eduardo Siqueira, “Neoliberalism Redux: The Global Health Policy Agenda and the Politics of Cooptation in Latin America and Beyond,” Development & Change 47, no. 4 (2016): 734–59; Jonathan P. Weiner, “Primary Health Care Systems in the United States, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden: Can the ‘Corporatized’ Learn from the ‘Socialized,’ or Vice Versa?,” Scandinavian Studies 61, no. 2/3 (1989): 231–60; Geoffrey R. Weller, “The Delivery of Health Services in the Canadian North,” Journal of Canadian Studies 16, no. 1 (1981): 69–80; O’Neil, “The Politics of Health in the Fourth World”; and George Weisz and Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, “The Theory of Epidemiologic Transition: The Origins of a Citation Classic,” Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences 65, no. 3 (2010): 287–326. 60 Sioux Lookout Project, September 1973, p. 25, A86-0036, box 001, Behavioural Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, ON. 61 Ibid.

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62 Sioux Lookout Project, September 1973, p. 96, A86-0036, box 001, Behavioural Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, ON. 63 Ibid., 75. 64 Ibid., 98. 65 Ibid., 98–9. 66 H.W. Bain, “Community Development: An Approach to Health Care of Indians,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 126, no. 3 (1982): 223. 67 Ibid., 224. 68 Public Health Reports has been published since 1878. It is currently the official journal of the Office of the US Surgeon General and the US Public Health Service. It is published in agreement with the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. Public Health Reports, Sage Publishing, accessed 17 July 2019, https: //us-sagepub-com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/en-us/nam/ public-health-reports/journal202574#submission-guidelines. 69 T. Kue Young, “Primary Health Care for Isolated Indians in Northwestern Ontario,” Public Health Reports 96, no. 5 (1981): 391. 70 Ibid., 391–2. See also A2014-0050/002 file 12; Mary E. Hunter, “Clinical Assessment Survey Report 1975: Sioux Lookout Project II.” 71 Ibid., 392. 72 Ibid., 396. 73 Ibid., 397–8. 74 Martha Roberts, Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay, Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Farah Shroff, Smita Pakhale, and Lori Hanson, “ALMA-ATA at 40: Insights from Canada,” Health and Human Rights Journal (blog) (17 October 2018), 1, https://www.hhrjournal.org/2018/10/alma-ata-at-40-insights-from-canada/. 75 Indian Health Policy (1979), accessed 9 August 2019, https://www.canada. ca/en/indigenous-services-canada/corporate/first-nations-inuit-healthbranch/indian-health-policy-1979.html. 76 Josée G. Lavoie, “Medicare and the Care of First Nations, Métis and Inuit,” Health Economics, Policy and Law 13, no. 3–4 (2018): 286. 77 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, The Path to Healing: Report of the Round Table on Aboriginal Health and Social Issues (Ottawa: Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1993), 41. 78 Lavoie, “Medicare and the Care of First Nations, Métis and Inuit,” 287. 79 Milton I. Roemer, “Colombian Health Services in the Perspective of Latin American Patterns,” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 46, no. 2 (1968): 205. 80 Antonio Hernandez Prada, “Health Planning for Colombia, I,” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 46, no. 2 (1968): 274; and Alfonso Mejia and Raul

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Paredes, “Health Planning for Colombia: 2,” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 46, no. 2 (1968): 277. Roemer, “Colombian Health Services in the Perspective of Latin American Patterns,” 204. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999). Badgley, “Social Policy and Indian Health Services in Canada,” 156–7. Badgley was not entirely unaware of the question of forced sterilization and other injustices alleged to have occurred in Indian hospitals in this time. Chief Andrew Rickard raises these issues in his letter affirming support for Badgley’s study into the clinical needs of the population. See Sioux Lookout Project, Correspondence, memos and reports 1973–74 Badgley to Hunter, 21 August 1973, University of Toronto Archives, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON. Adrien Tanner, “Sickness and Ideology among the Ojibway, summer 1971,” Mary Hunter, Clinical Assessment, Sioux Lookout Project, A20140050/001/001. Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, ON. Mary Hunter, “Factors Found in the Field Which Could Have Altered Subject Response,” Sioux Lookout Clinical Assessment, A2014-0050/002, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Archives, Toronto, ON; and A. Theodore Steegman, Boreal Forest Adaptations: The Northern Algonkians (Springer Science & Business Media, 2013). UT Archives Sioux Lookout Project, Correspondence, Memos and reports, 1973–74 A2014-0050/001; Mary Hunter to Sidney Dymond, 19 December 1973; Sidney Dymond to Mary Hunter, 4 January 1974; Badgley’s minutes of the Human Investigation Committee, 16 July 1973; Marshall G. Hurlich and A.T. Steegmann, “Hand Immersion in Cold Water at 5°C in Sub-Arctic Algonkian Indian Males from Two Villages: A European Admixture Effect?,” Human Biology 51, no. 3 (1979): 255–78. For more on cold acclimatization work see Matthew S. Wiseman, “Unlocking the ‘Eskimo Secret’: Defence Science in the Cold War Canadian Arctic, 1947–1954,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 26, no. 1 (2015): 191–223. Manitoulin Island Reserve Pediatric Morbidity Survey, Preliminary Report, 1 July to 30 October 1972; Carol Spindell Farkas, “Components of the Northern Canadian Indian Diet and Mercury Toxicity,” unpublished report to National Indian Brotherhood, June 1976, Sioux Lookout Project, A970012/004, B1: 14:01:01, University of Toronto Archives, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON. Roberts et al., “ALMA-ATA at 40.”

PART TWO Edward Said’s World and the Formation of His Critique of Orientalism

3

Authenticity and Renewal in Jacque Berque’s Critique of Orientalism Sung-eun Choi

Edward Said’s Orientalism is a historical study of more than two centuries of European cultural practices that have delineated the “Orient” as a seemingly coherent entity under the western gaze.1 In tracing Orientalism’s evolution, Said summoned not only its most prominent spokespersons but also its most notable dissenters, individuals who defied the conventions of their field and challenged the norms of their milieu. Prominent among the latter was Jacques Berque (1910–1995), a settler born and raised in French Algeria who would become France’s premier expert on North Africa and Islam. Said deeply admired Berque’s anti-Orientalism, praising his reflective and astute approach to Arab culture. Said never grappled with Berque’s disaffection with settler colonialism, however, and chose instead to emphasize the latter’s uniquely French humanist thinking. As I argue in this chapter, Berque’s “French” humanism was also entwined with France’s settler-colonial history. In essence, Berque’s ideas were a distinct product of his renouncing the settler milieu while seeking mental refuge in a culture that appeared diametrically opposed to his own. French imperialists and experts on the Orient feature prominently in Said’s Orientalism. The introduction to Orientalism opens with a line about a French journalist’s ruminations in 1970s war-torn Beirut as the latter casts a despondent gaze upon a city that once “belonged to the Orient of Nerval and Chateaubriand.”2 The Orient was still, after over a century, very much a part of the French cultural imaginary. It

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was the French Orientalists who, while “outclassed in brilliance and tactical maneuvering by the British,” surpassed their Anglophone counterparts with a distinctive esprit humain. This esprit, they acquired through a rigorous immersion in the Gallic humanist tradition, which had imparted to its delegates the unmatched aesthetic sensibilities that were so wanting across the Channel.3 Before Berque, there was Louis Massignon, the French Catholic Orientalist. Massignon remained unreservedly Orientalist in outlook, however, he was unable to transcend his generation’s frame of mind.4 Still, notwithstanding Massignon’s claim that “Arab societies were deficient in their understanding of Islam” in addition to being “spiritual, radically monotheistic, tribalistic, un-Aryan, Semitic,”5 Said defended the doyen’s “fight for Muslim civilization” and his concern for the plight of Palestinians, which Massignon in fact perceived as a distinctly Semitic problem.6 It was again Massignon’s French training which Said emphasized as the force behind his sensual poetic engagement with Islam, the source of inspiration for his first-rate followers, among them Jacques Berque (the others being Maxime Rodinson, Yves Lacoste, and Roger Arnaldez).7 Said wrote highly favourably of Berque in Orientalism, where the latter is introduced after Massignon as one of the prodigies of his generation along with Maxime Rodinson. “Trained in the traditional Orientalist disciplines,” products of French humanist learning, Said wrote, Berque and Rodinson were able to free themselves from “the old ideological straitjacket [of Orientalism],” ultimately outshining Massignon.8 Underscored by Said were two points: first, Berque’s readiness for self-examination and methodological consciousness, which helped “overcome doctrinal preconceptions”; and second, the cross-disciplinary nature of their work, which lent their ideas to an intellectual and humanist openness.9 Berque drew on the social sciences to understand a universal “anthropological variation,” a term used by Said as an allusion to Berque’s conception of Islam as a secular force. Said likewise emphasized the multidisciplinary method in Berque and Rodinson’s works, both integrating sociological and political theories in their studies of Islam and innovating approaches to “Oriental problems” since the interwar period.10 Said and Berque’s paths crossed in the 1990s albeit in print, when conflicting perspectives among academicians on the ongoing Arab-Israeli

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conflict fueled new debates about the methods and approaches to studying the Middle East. A cohort of conservative academics led by Elie Kedourie of the London School of Economics closed ranks against the politicized intellectual “clerisy” of their day. Drawing on Julien Benda’s work, Kedourie accused Said of “using [his] intelligence as a weapon to defend one particular interest or attack another.”11 Kedourie, a Baghdadi Jew by background and outspoken critic of the anti-Jewish attacks in Iraq, cast aspersions on academics who defended Arab nationalism in the name of anti-imperialism, putting them on par with the French intellectuals of the 1920s who had endorsed or joined the far right Action française. In Berque, Kedourie saw an unconscionable “arabophile” of the worst kind, a traitor to true scholarship and an activist who remained more committed to an irrational defence of radical Arab nationalism than to truth.12 In response to Kedourie’s onslaught on Berque, Said defended the latter’s admirable effort to understand Arab societies on their terms.13 Albert Hourani also joined Said in defence of Berque, praising the latter’s emphasis on the need for real “partnership with those who know their societies and cultures from within” and distinguished Berque from other Orientalists who were indifferent to such an undertaking.14 Berque rarely implicated himself in open debate against his conservative detractors, however. Nor did he join Said in any express retaliation against Kedourie.15 For Said, however, it was clear: far from betraying his intellectual calling, Berque’s “individual genius” had cast off the Orientalist mold of his generation, breaking the conventions that had long held the Orient hostage to the Western imagination.16 If Said launched a boomerang that drew in new and often far-flung adherents to an anti-Orientalist critique, we could argue that Berque had begun his own humanizing process a generation earlier. Could this have been a post-Orientalism? An attempt to rethink Orientalism through a transnational, humanist lens? The terms humanist and humanism (also humanities and humanistic) recur throughout Orientalism. For Said, Berque’s case spoke to the power of humanist learning to foment anti-Orientalist critique even among those trained in the Orientalist tradition. Said’s Orientalism thus validated the centrality of “humanist critique,” even as postcolonial critics would go on to express disdain for its Eurocentric tendencies.17 In declaring his own approach explicitly humanist, Said was pointing to something fundamentally trans-national:

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the “historical and rational use of the mind for the purpose of reflective understanding and genuine disclosure.”18 What “disheartened” Said was not that humanists were European, but that so many Orientalists deviated from the humanist and what appeared to be a French tradition, eventually yielding to the “territorially reductive polarization of Islam vs. the West.”19 Kedourie was misguided when he characterized Berque’s support of North Africa’s independence as a blind endorsement of radical nationalism. Berque’s views of decolonization and Islam were far more complex, and must be understood not just in relation to the historical context of decolonization in the Arab world, but also in light of the personal: the conflicted experiences of the settler who disavowed his colonial heritage at the same time he claimed an indissociable and visceral attachment to it. As a settler whose separation from colonial society was attended by “torment and debate,” he chased the intellectual world on “the other side” and saw in it “a solution to the wrenching [déchirement]” that marked his life.20 As Berque noted in one televised interview, it was by immersing himself in the study of Arab communities that he became a fierce critic “of [his] race,” the pieds noirs.21 For Berque, the “contradiction within himself ” – as settler and exile – was what fundamentally grounded his immersion in Islamic culture and learning. That is, Berque took an outsider-insider position. While his contemporaries in the settler colony questioned the very notion of Arab culture and therefore identity, Berque immersed himself in the Arabism shoring up the very identity repudiated by his society – a mindset that would eventually tie him to the Ba’athist movement. In interviews, he even explained his entry into Islam and Arab society as experiential rather than scholarly. It was an exploration of worlds made erstwhile invisible by the Europeans. As Berque explained, “Islam, purged from power and almost from law, omnipresent nonetheless, remained for me, imperceptible.”22 His relationship to Islam was thus described as uninhibited and visceral, not derivative: “Since birth, I lived amongst [parmi] Islam”;23 “Arabs played a primordial role in my life.”24 He recounted his experiences as an administrator in the rural outposts of North African society as an awakening to “the colonial contradiction in himself,” and the devastation laid by an imperial power that condoned the radicalization of settler-colonial interests. His was also a reaction to an intellectual juncture, a response to the commanding influence

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of Louis Massignon, who, while drawing admiration, also prompted Berque to question the former’s presumptions about a lesser Orient and European cultural supremacy. Berque posited his outsider-insider position in contradistinction to Orientalists whose exclusively outsider position translated into obstinate authority over Arab culture. When the colonized rejected the colonizer, the latter refused to acknowledge the “discombobulation” they felt.25 For Berque, the future of European relations with the Orient would be determined by the willing recognition of the humanity embodied in the object of Orientalist study and the discombobulation of empire’s end.26 It was imperative that Orientalists engage directly with living subjects. Academic detachment from the very people it claimed to know was Orientalism’s greatest weakness for Berque as it would be for Said.27 And yet, Berque remained critical of those who took up the revolutionary cause without fully engaging with Islamic learning and North African patrimony. He reserved criticism for Frantz Fanon, “an observant clinical psychiatrist of great finesse” whose knowledge of Islam and arabisme was unfortunately rather limited.28 To think with Berque is to debate and explore the horizons of a humanist post-Orientalist critique for our own times. How would an appreciation of Islamic learning and humanism overcome Orientalism as a Eurocentric enterprise, and how might we identify a trans-national humanism that would allow an appreciation of parity across cultures?

• Born twenty-five years earlier than Said in 1910 to a settler family in the mixed commune (commune mixte) of Frenda in French Algeria, Berque would soon follow in his father Augustin’s footsteps to pursue a career in the colonial administration.29 Augustin Berque was himself a highly educated administrator and adept Arabist. In his memoirs, Berque would portray his father as a stolid character whose passivity belied the “intellectual anarchism inherited from his mentors.”30 In fact, the only real rebellion of Augustin’s life was to marry below his station.31 In his father, Berque discerned an empathetic mind and moral uprightness, values he would try to emulate.32 It was Augustin who had criticized French land reforms in Algeria for having reordered Muslim lands into a destructive system of private parcels. The 1863 Senate Law (Sénatus

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consulte), which introduced massive land reforms, had empowered an insatiable petite bourgeoisie (dignitaires de chapelet) whose predatory exploitation of the rural economy was left unchecked, not unlike in the metropole.33 Anti–petit bourgeois sentiment was at the heart of the younger Berque’s objections to the pied-noir milieu into which he was born and raised.34 Berque’s account of the 1930 centennial of Algeria’s conquest relayed a precocious cynicism of a frivolous and unknowing European society in French Algeria. The pieds noirs were eager to stand on ceremony, conceited even if at times democratic, but wholly out of touch with the resentment that palpitated in the hearts and minds of the colonized masses. In his youth, Berque was not impervious to pied-noir affectation, however. Remembering the surge of emotions while watching the French fleet in the port of Algiers as a child, Berque admitted to a youthful optimism and national pride. But, as he matured in years, his outlook would be shaped increasingly by cosmopolitan interests, reading, and learned conversations with erudite locals – the cheikhs. He commemorated the year 1930 in his memoirs with the significant events that went uncelebrated by the Europeans of his world: “I cared far more about the opening of the first commercial air route between France and South America and the inauguration of the first European cancer clinic and research center in the Villejuif neighborhood of Paris than I did for the [French Algerian] centenary.”35 Berque returned to North Africa after his studies in Paris where, by his own account, he was never really at home: first to Algiers, and then later to the High Atlas region of Morocco as a colonial administrator. In 1937, he took up another administrative post, this time in Fez. Berque joined the army in World War II until the armistice of 1940, after which he began to write regularly about the decay and inertia of colonial Morocco. His views landed him in a remote outpost in the High Atlas mountains of Morocco, where he lived for over a decade. In 1953, less than three years prior to Moroccan independence, Berque left for Egypt, much perturbed by the forced exile of Sultan Mohamed V of Morocco, to begin work as an expert consultant on cultural and educational matters for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). A post at the Collège de France came next, which he attained with the decisive endorsement of Fernand Braudel and Henri Lefebvre.36

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Initially dedicated to his responsibilities, Berque became a perceptive observer of affairs on the ground in North Africa, increasingly cognizant of the fragility of French rule and the concomitant rise of a defiant Berber resistance. It was during his time as a colonial administrator that Berque became attuned to the persistence of indigenous social networks in the region, especially among local notables. The influence of tribal leaders was still evident, their reach being far wider and deeper than the French administration.37 His experience as a contrôleur civil led him to distrust the conventional binary of “primitive” and “modern.” These categories undergirded European rule and proved unable to account for the historical unevenness in how different segments within colonized societies reacted to colonial intervention. Colonial powers privileged those receptive to modernization and European influences, for instance, while overlooking modernization’s remorseless tendency to drive the most under-resourced communities “in reverse,” pushing them into servitude and toward mass proletarianization.38 Imperialism was accompanied by a destructive modernization, which widened class divisions, exacerbated poverty, and undermined indigenous social mechanisms of achieving integration and cohesion. Berque proposed an alternative set of concepts to analyze the social structures of colonized societies: “coherence and incoherence.” These referred to the organic integration achieved in each society between humans and the “natural milieu,” and would be measured in cultural terms, rather than in terms of economic productivity.39 Socially speaking, integration was the result of a long historical process of attaining a balance between the expenditure of time and effort on the one hand and a shared consensus about the desired social returns on that investment on the other. Social “coherence” was achieved not through any principle of efficiency, but through “socio-economic vitality, innovation, and social consciousness” necessary to enhance cultural innovation and social cohesion.40 Modernizing processes that accompanied colonialism continued on with decolonization. Communities were thus uprooted from their base without regenerating meaningful economic and social identities. In such conditions, the introduction of the modern wage system became a form of servitude with little promise in any of the radical movements. Sayyid Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, was a transition from “doctrinal oppression to violence,” explains Wadi Bouzar in his

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study of Berque.41 Berque saw Nasser as a symptom of a divided Islam in the post-imperial Arab nations, which served primarily as an ideological instrument and a political means.42 In his study of Islam in North Africa after decolonization, Berque identified a conceptual foundation, a universal referent, which could frame analyses of Islam’s modernity and the future of the Muslim Arab societies once colonized by European powers: asala, often translated as “originality” or “authenticity.” The term was central to Berque’s historical framing of modern Islamic societies. As Berque argued, the concept had long eluded Orientalists, even though it was integral to a shared Islamic heritage across Arab societies. Affirming asala was not about returning to something original, however; there was no such state. It was about moving forward politically and economically while renewing and ennobling those very moral values, norms, and even historical memories, which had been forcibly extinguished by imperialism. The next section explores the centrality of asala in Berque’s thinking and the decolonizing context in which he developed it.

• Asala, a term “violently rejected by some and exaggerated by others,” as Berque put it, was key to his theory of decolonization. Berque was influenced by Syrian pan-Arabist Michel Aflaq and the Lebanese politician and fierce opponent of the Assad government Kamal Jumblat.43 Ba’athists and intellectuals of the pan-Arab resurgence across Egypt and the Levant searched for a non-racialized transnational pan-Arab identity grounded in a shared language and historical memory, which shaped Berque’s understanding of a cultural “rapport between us and our base.”44 For Berque, true decolonization would be possible when modernization was congruous with preserving this base, asala. For Berque, asala was the antithesis of imperialism and colonialism, but it was also forged through colonial experiences. Decolonization would therefore require confronting the struggles of the colonial past and a synergy that would move toward a dialectic overcoming. For Berque, asala was not about a singular teleological national becoming. Asala had broader connotations, which allowed for Berque’s conceptual expansion of the Orient’s meaning. Far from the singular Orient delineated by the west, “there was a second Orient” beyond

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geographically defined borders, the realm of cultural becoming and integration across Arab and Islamic societies.45 As Berque maintained, “authenticity [or asala] was not a reactionary notion.”46 Asala was foremost a reconciliation of Muslims with Islam. Here, it must be said that Islam was not a religious or exclusively spiritual concept as it had been for Massignon; it remained for Berque, thoroughly secular. As Patrick Laude has written: Authenticity, a key word in Berque’s vocabulary and a key concept in his understanding of Islam, results from a relationship between ideals and their natural and social base. This relationship is by definition diverse and mobile, allowing for the integration of intellectual and cultural elements, which are not specifically articulated to the ghayb (that which is concealed to all but Allah) and the Qur’an. What is essential in Islam is not the creed, nor the actual practices but the relationship between the two: this relationship defines Islam, and it also opens Islam to change.47 In this way, asala maintains a relational dimension: between faith and practice; between ideals and material foundations and the environment; between communities and the surrounding culture. If asala is foundational to Muslim Arab societies, it also facilitates Islam’s openness to change. Asala was an enduring part of Islamic history for Berque. In fact, the historical events surrounding the rise of Islam invited asala from the very beginning. Historically, early Islamic societies survived a history of constant struggle against external forces, which led them to stress the importance of self-preservation. Early Bedouin societies, for example, constantly clashed with neighbouring cultures. The Umayyad Caliphate was inclined to adopt the practices of its more advanced Byzantine adversaries – their legal codes, architecture, and institutions, while remaining steadfast in their commitment to Islamic beliefs and practices. Born much later than the other monotheistic religions, Islam’s spiritual leaders inevitably grappled with the intellectual and material forces that shaped their world. Asala has been a provocation in debates about Arab identities and Islam well beyond Berque. Asala was not always used consistently among intellectuals. North African thinkers have recently contested the term and its misguided attempts to pin the Maghreb to an idealized and

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essentialized Islamic past.48 Berque meanwhile conjured his humanist training to ground asala in the Rousseauean liberal tradition, which saw individuals as distinct entities bearing the mark of their communal base. Transposed back into the Arab cultural context, asala became “authenticity,” a recognition of difference across Arab and European societies and the grounds for tolerance. Berque’s asala was the response to the “anthropological variation” across the West and the East.49 For Berque, asala was what had historically enabled Arab societies to engage with and absorb the foreign cultural elements as their own. For Berque, the point was not to modernize Islam, but allow Islam’s humanity to drive modernization. The Mediterranean as the historical site of deep cultural interchange was evidence that Islam had already demonstrated its capacity for genuine modernization and renewal. In fact, Europe’s modernity was owed to Islam, which was always “an integral part of our historical truth [notre vérité historique].”50 Historically, Hellenistic currents were transported to the Islamic world across the Mediterranean, raising up centres of knowledge such as Alexandria and Pergamum. Eventually, these accomplishments fueled the Renaissance in Europe, achieving a true cultural syncretism. The centuries-long crossfertilization was only disrupted by the economic and religious crises in the Mediterranean in the fourteenth century, which led to the decline of the intellectual currents that had powered a cosmopolitan Islam. The syncretism that made the Mediterranean a crossroads of cultures could inspire a renewal of Islam in the era of decolonization, and by extension, nothing short of the liberation of the whole of humanity. The idea that Islam shaped the cultural systems of Europe had a history that preceded Berque. Max Meyerhof, a scholar of Islamic medicine, maintained that Islam was at the core of European natural sciences, while Robert Briffault, a contemporary of Berque, also emphasized the contribution of Arab and Islamic culture to the development of the sciences in Europe.51 However, these accomplishments were relegated to the realm of natural sciences. It was, in fact, Berque’s wider understanding of Islam as a site of humanity’s regeneration that separated his thinking from that of his predecessors. Asala would ground Islam’s regenerative force. For North African critics of Berque, asala was controversial, even objectionable. Such leading figures as the Moroccan author and literary critic Abdelkhabir Khatibi saw in asala the autocratic elements of

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Salafism and Islam as another hegemonic imposition unable to regain its mediary status.52 Khatibi agreed with Berque that the historical travel of Arabic translations of Greek texts in the eighth century was evidence of genuine cultural interchange.53 Khatibi rejected Arabism or Islam as the means to a cultural regeneration in Arab societies, not because such a regeneration was implausible, but because Islam itself has mutated into something altogether different: “Arabic civilization [had] neglected its Greek heritage and Islam became theocratic as it lost its faculty to mediate between cultures.”54 Other charismatic North African intellectuals, too, brought their case against asala during the 1970s mainly in light of theological implications. Influenced by Derrida and the post-structuralists, Khatibi and his contemporaries – Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Beddeb and Algerian critic Nourredine Abdi – were interested in de-centring dominant historical narratives such as those woven around asala in favour of the dissonances within the Maghreb at the “radical margins.” These thinkers contested asala as they associated its meaning with all authoritarian structures that undermined regional integration.55 The disagreements over the validity of asala, as a category of history and politics, resulted from the wide gap in experiences between Berque and his North African critics. For Berque, Islam’s theocratic radicalism was never so adverse as to undermine the more discerning voices within the community that continued to adapt, reform, and evolve. His intellectual trajectory in French North Africa brought on a strong appreciation for indigenous intellectual resources for anticolonial contest. His reading of asala contested the Orientalism of the  colonial period and provided him with a counterpoint to the European repudiation of Islam’s ability to generate a humanist culture. Whereas Khatibi insisted upon abandoning the “nostalgic notions of identity, the poisonous identitarian discourse of the asala,” Berque clung to it as a new kind of binding force, an intellectualized distinctiveness that gave shape to the Islamic culture and learning of the colonized.56 For Berque, asala could not be reduced to language or politics. The variety of human foundations was not so concrete and could neither be classified by nor materialized through dialects or ethnicities. For Berque, asala was the premise for an integrated selfhood. Berque’s writing aimed to reconcile two notions: asala and tajjadud (modernization). Khatibi had referred to a very different binary: asala and change, but this was

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a false contradiction to Berque’s mind. Islam was a continual relational movement, never static, and never exclusively theological or practical: it was a “dialectic between the two.”57 By its historical nature, Islam was always “moving toward progress while remaining as oneself ” (progresser en restant elles mêmes). Berque turned to the Arabic term, tat’awwur (translated most commonly as “evolution”), which referred to the historical changes in Islam, with one phase following the other over time. But like the evolution of biological organisms and the morphological innovations in species, Islam, too, underwent modification in form, practice, and content throughout history, but not without a traceable lineage. For Berque, the renewal of Islam was about bringing elements of this lineage to bear on the present, to regenerate Islam from within Arab societies while retaining those elements that gave it birth.

• In an interview with Mirèse Akar around the time that Orientalism was published, Berque talked about his disagreement with Frantz Fanon. Unlike Fanon, who “chose to focus on the miserable state of Arabs,” Berque decidedly saw the Arabs “as they saw themselves … as seigneurs and conquerors, unjustly deprived, eager to keep abreast of the world [de se remettre à jour].”58 Misery was a colonial affliction, not the asala of the Arabs. Berque thus conceived of asala as antithetical to the notion that Arabs suffered from a deficit in cultural heritage and intellectual infirmity. For Berque, any analysis that took the dejection of colonized societies as its starting point was limited, producing only shortsighted resolutions to the fundamental crisis: the crisis of identity– the crisis of asala. For Berque, Third World revolutionaries had failed to understand the significance of existential claims that were not directly in the service of nationalist resistance. So how would asala figure in Berque’s analysis of decolonization? As Berque stated, liberation movements in the Arab world were already exhausted by the end of World War I – the Rif in Morocco and movements among the Druze in Syria, for example. Since the 1920s, nationalism clashed with alternate visions of liberation, eventually overpowering them. Egypt was of special interest to Berque. It had evaded the fate of North Africa, which, under France’s policy of assimilation,

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retreated from any effort at self-preservation.59 Egypt’s Wafd movement, which was nationalist, still maintained a united front against a common enemy – the West – while other movements in the Arab world splintered into fractious movements, unable to mend internal divisions. The Wafd movement demonstrated a history of will, a persistent search for selfhood, which, despite its limitations, maintained a sense of anticipation for something to come while remaining resilient as a culture. Berque’s writings on decolonization were driven by a key question: how would societal movements in the colonized Arab societies address the tension between the indomitable pressure to integrate globalizing trends on the one hand and the desire to remain intact with a stable foundation on the other? How would Arab societies confront and resolve this tension, i.e., decolonize, and revitalize their foundations? To examine the question in actual historical context, Berque turned to Egypt. Asala became apparent in the cultural resilience of Egyptians as he encountered it in the 1950s. For Berque, culture in many Islamic societies was an amalgam of a shared intellectual heritage, learning, and an economic order that tied artisans and producers to Nature. Berque argued then that decolonization must strike an important balance between achieving modernization and affirming a shared cultural base: “all too many militants and intellectuals are proponents either of an authenticity with no future or of a modernism with no roots,” he lamented in a public lecture organized by UNESCO in 1980.60 Again, the tension between roots and modernization is key. Historically, cultural alienation in the Middle East resulted from imprudent acquiescence to European epistemologies since the eighteenth century. Cultural fragmentation further intensified with the colonial interventions of the nineteenth century. Could there ever be a model for rebuilding after colonialism? It was from Cairo that Berque developed his comparative thoughts about anti-imperial revolutions in North Africa and Egypt. In Egypt, Berque was in dialogue with progressive thinkers who inspired him to think more deeply about the Orient and decolonization.61 Between 1953 and 1955, he was based in Cairo as a foreign expert for UNESCO, just as the organization was setting up new scientific and pedagogical development projects in the Middle East and Africa. There was little thrill in serving an organization that, by Berque’s account, was primarily an extension of “American triumphalism” and ineluctable dominance

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in the Third World.62 But the affiliation with UNESCO did allow him to return to Morocco as an academic after having left his post there as a colonial administrator in 1953. His 1967 tome Egypt, Imperialism and Revolution (L’Egypte, Impérialisme et revolution) was an analysis of the country’s response to the modern industrializing trends that had transformed large parts of the country’s intellectual and economic life. Despite the stultifying effects of Western imperial intervention, Berque believed that Egypt was never entirely subjugated culturally, and it had managed to retain a sense of historical continuity and identity. Its peasants also “consistently renewed their ties to Nature” – the inhabited environment – and after a period of decline, were able to revive their culture. By the first decades of the twentieth century, modern industry permeated every aspect of Egyptian life. Berque’s analysis of the economic transformations in Egypt at this juncture was at once a critique of capital’s expropriation of local resources and unwavering pursuit of market profits. At the same time, Berque valorized the participation of educated Egyptians in various enterprises as an ethical intervention in the otherwise largely European enterprises of banking, shareholding, and finance. The sustained incorporation of a wide swathe of the population into manufacture, too, spelled for Berque an accomplishment not to be underestimated. The real test, however, would be with Egyptian society’s relationship with “Nature,” a term Berque employed, always capitalized, to refer to the inhabited world rather than nature with a lower case “n,” which he referred to as pre-Nature.63 Nature shaped the contours of the economic and intellectual activity of a society and enabled inhabitants to produce, create, innovate, and expand. The human understanding of sand winds, flooding, animals, soil, minerals, craftsmanship, farming, and industry was constitutive of the relationship with Nature in Egypt. Different sectors of Egyptian society were more successful than others in demonstrating their acumen in forging meaningful ties with Nature as markets opened to foreign goods and capital. And if the peasantry first lost out in the mechanization of agriculture and land reform, artisans remained resourceful and continued their craft, skillfully innovating with new materials imported from overseas, namely silk. Craftsmen modified their methods to generate new textile products for consumption and export overseas, and they were able to thwart the ambition of foreign importers.64 Artisans were ingenious, even

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“valiant,” in maintaining their ties to Nature, able to adopt and innovate with new material while demonstrating an abiding attachment to Egyptian craftsmanship.65 In the 1920s, Egyptians reclaimed their position in governing bodies comprised of industrialists, merchants, and financiers. The establishment of the Egyptian National Bank by Egyptian notables was also successful. Popular movements also called for the cancellation of excise taxes and the removal of such foreign products as cigarettes, which were misaligned with popular values. Others mobilized to promote national products and used the power of the press to promote national industries.66 For Berque, what mattered foremost was the presence of Egyptians across these activities and protests, injecting their own talents, patriotism, and aesthetic elements into the production and consumption process. Regarding certain industries whose fates were not so fortunate, however, Berque could only admit to the limitations of available “definitions” that could convey the full-scale impact of modern industries. Innovation was also noteworthy in the area of theatre as Western plays and performances began to enter Egypt. Here, dramatists and actors responded with their unique adaptation of European classics, reinventing characters and stylizing their acting to tend to the emotional registers and expectations of Egyptian audiences. By embellishing sets and editing foreign scripts for Egyptian audiences, Berque maintained that “the men of the theater” had in fact converted their anxieties about the new art form into creative channels of the Egyptian ethos, all the while accommodating an art form that forced a tense self-awareness and self-distancing.67 Berque’s regard for the theatre was part of his understanding of how Egyptians “looked at themselves” and possessed an identity.68 Audiences saw the West through the Egyptian narrative and stagecraft, to experience a kind of “inverted catharsis.”69 Theatre was where Egyptian instincts were at work, in Berque’s view, where efforts to master a foreign art form made careers and paved the path for some to newfound celebrity. And while the decline in audience attendance and enthusiasm reduced the lifespan of these innovations, Berque credited the interwar Egyptian theatre with ingenuity and intelligence. In Culture and Imperialism, Said devoted a section to Verdi’s opera Aida as it was performed in Egypt in 1871 to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal. In introducing the story behind the composition and

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staging of the opera commissioned by the Khedive, Said cited Berque’s account of the “chaotic confusion” that resulted from the welter of artistic imports that began to flow into Egypt.70 For Said, Aida, a foreign art form, was wholly disconnected from the realities of modern Egypt, intended to cater to the promotional aims of the Ottoman viceroy and the aspiring bourgeoisie who could afford the tickets. The extravagance and artifice of the production were certainly extraordinary for nineteenthcentury opera. With all of its newly invented embellishments and ambitious scale, Aida in Egypt was evidence of the hybridization of musical and staging techniques that became necessary for the operatic display of imperial predominance. For Berque, the staging of Aida in Egypt represented something quite different. With spoken poetry and forms specific to “Eastern art,” Berque saw in it an adapted operatic art tailored to evoke the instincts and emotions of Egyptian crowds. Different adaptations appeared in Egypt, each captivating audiences with daring satire, farce, and artistry of speech, a sign that Egyptians had achieved a kind of equilibrium and synthesis between tradition and the new; Egyptian and foreign; the familiar and the alien. The inherited form was being enriched with new content before eventually breaking out into new forms derived from the West. A study of Arab genres and styles in their modern development would provide remarkable examples of branchingout and interchange of forms, and of permutations between form and content. The whole evolution of these societies might be reconstructed, we believe, by studying these complex artistic developments from a historical and structural point of view.71 For Berque, each type of musical and dramatic adaptation in Egypt revealed the underlying creativity that defined the Egyptian personality. While Berque analyzed the Egyptian “personality,” he almost always alluded to the qualities of Egyptian society that suggested mutability: versatility, latitude, and accommodation, consistent with his idea that asala was that which allows for self-hood. Egypt was forced to dig deep and “search deep within itself,” Berque remarked, to resolve the tensions endemic to modernizing countries.72 For Berque, Islam was key to this search for selfhood. As a spiritual

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force, it was the binding agent of Egypt’s many intellectual movements, learning, and moral traditions, the encasement of its shared cultural heritage, and the all-encompassing site of its struggle against the West. Through Islamic reform movements, Egyptians, like other Muslim societies, attempted to reconcile modernity’s conflicting agendas of self-preservation and adaptation. Already by the 1930s, a variety of Egypt’s moderate and radical Islamic movements tried to address this tension, each by leaning toward a social and more popularized platform. The pressure points of this transition appeared as Egypt’s centres of learning, including Islamic institutions, debated the global issues of the day. Agrarian reform and changes in peasant life, women’s emancipation, popular welfare, and debates about nation-building pressured mosques, madrasas, and the universities to provide the moral and practical principles by which societal changes should be accommodated, if at all. The responses from the Islamic community were less intellectual than they were pragmatic, Berque observed. As different institutions responded to modernizing forces, Islam as a movement splintered into factions, into modernists, traditionalists, with moderate and subversive tendencies, conformists and terrorists. Berque believed in the merits of “modernist rationalism of the liberal humanists and of socialists” over the re-sacralization efforts of some of the vocal sheikhs whose efforts at cultural restoration signalled regression rather than meaningful engagement.73 Asala in Egypt was thus contested not in the religious sphere but in the realm of secular culture, where clerics were but one of many participants in the debate about Egypt’s identity and path to modernity.

• In Berque’s view, as decolonization unfolded, it spelled something both potentially powerful and ominous. The successes of nationalist movements were only a starting point for the challenges to come. Independence would have to be followed by the reconstitution of identity and the overcoming of alienation.74 Global dominance by foreign powers came neither in the form of military conquest nor material or institutional supremacy. Their power was now expressed through images of well-being and prosperity, which invited others to imagine a like future for themselves. In fact, decolonization, as it unfolded across

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Arab societies, became about gaining acceptance and recognition for conforming to the standards set by globally dominant powers. The antidote to the conformist strain of decolonization was asala, Berque answered. The point was how to achieve modernization and decolonization as renewal/innovation in a way that would enable asala to give form and structure to the process of change and adaptation. Berque visualized renewal as a coil being looped around a core centre, then stretched to form yet another coil in succession, so as not to fold in on itself. “A people does not access the world despite [bien que] oneself, but as [en tant que] oneself; consequently, authenticity, or asala, is central to an engaged [active] history.”75 This was renewal. Arab societies, by drawing on asala, must move away from conformity and uniformity. Berque derived this relationship between authenticity and renewal from a specific interpretation of the terms in Arabic, which granted authenticity the notion of the inter-connectedness between “us and our base,” or to be exact, a plurality of “natural, cosmological, historical, and social bases” that ground us. Just as there are multiple “bases,” there are multiple paths toward “authenticity” or asala.76 Renewal could thus hardly be gained through conformity. It could only be achieved through a dialectic between restoring connections and reimagining asala. The meaning of asala was central to Berque’s conception of modernization via its Arabic term tajjadud, which signified “an indefinite or perhaps infinite process, which renews, more than it innovates.”77 The challenge for Berque, then, was to analyze renewal against the ineluctable transfer of modernizing forces from the West in the era of decolonization.78 Decolonization must be achieved with a society’s confidence in its foundation. Berque often favoured allegories in many of his works to make his point. In the chronicles of Oqba ben Nâfi, a tale of the Arab conquest and conversion of North African Berbers, for example, Berque highlighted a specific segment of the story: When Oqba ben Nâfi arrived on the plain and set upon the land with his cavalry, the beasts made way for the charge, carrying their own young away in their jaws to provide a clearing. The epic of Berber conversion indicated for Berque a particularly Arab sensibility, a reverence for nature but also the ferocity of spirit. History and myth, memory and experience, the tale of conquest and submission to Islam captured for Berque the character of Bedouin identity. Berque recalled the epic on a visit to the mosque of Kairaoun

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in Tunisia, a mosque known for its eclectic style and located in the historic governorate first founded by the Umayyads in Tunisia. But Kairaoun was also the site of contest – the troubled site of memory for adherents seeking a more “Arab” mosque and foreigners who denied that there were any real Arab features about the mosque. Berque was specifically using a contentious edifice to bring attention to the very elements of authenticity denied to the Arabs. For Berque, Kairaoun was the signification of adaptation at the heart of Islam’s history: Asala, as he wished to foreground it.79 Here, Berque would note the alternate histories of invariance and variability in the Orient. Drawing on Massignon, he defined the invariant as the metaphysical permanence between man and the divine. But the invariant was a principle found in philosophy and in mathematics: a value, an expression, a relation, a property of something that gives it its distinction, and retains these properties even after undergoing computation or logical argumentation. In short, Berque secularized what most Orientalists relegated to the religious. Islam needed to be engaged in the practical life sphere, as a guiding paradigm for “authenticity”: “It is not through tradition that we identify a collective personality, but rather on the basis of the potential to rebuild itself,” Berque argued.80 As seen in his discussion of Kairaoun, an unorthodox representation of Arab culture, the Asala lay not in what was most mainstream or popular or recognizable about a society. Asala, was the metaphysical and  the primordial, relayed through acts and representations that reflected the cumulative products of the most audacious risks and compromises. For Berque, asala must attend to the pull that forces societies to confront change and provide the solid base for generating fortitude and self-confidence; asala was that which compelled exile, forged during the most trying times. “After all, it was with imperialism and colonization, trials as they were, and with the invasive forces of technology that the cultures of the world have come forth, in all of their diversity and resilience. It was in the struggles [of decolonization] that the most primordial traits resurged. The authentic is not the antiquated, and was far from a regurgitation of something past. It is innovation that is also a homecoming.”81 Wary of the modernizing influences of a “pseudo-Occidentalism” in the Arab world, Berque rejected hybridity in the rejuvenation of Islam during decolonization. With decolonization, as new nations aspired

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to close the gap with developed countries especially where knowledge making was concerned, Berque found another instance of trial by history. For societies faced with deculturation and depersonalization, the task at hand was to render cultural aggression powerless and reclaim asala in ways that would confront not only the dominance but also the melding of imported modernizing forces in all of its forms – material, cultural, and even mental – with local cultural elements. Orientalism was not just about the West’s cultural imagining of Arab societies for Europeans. Its potency lay in its ability to captivate the imagination and self-understanding of the very societies upon which it laid claim, as Said well explained. For Berque, Orientalism could only be countered with something that evaded empire’s infiltration. It had to be practical in one sense, metaphysical in another, and mediated by Islam. For Berque, the invariant was the signification of the foundation upon which all societies derive their self-worth. This foundation or Nature was a vast site, “open to transnational and transcultural solidarities” across societies. What Berque attempted was to anti-imperialize the Orient. That is, to decolonize by positing the second Orient against Eurocentric narratives. I would argue that Berque constructed his concepts always with imperialism in mind. All of his theories of Islam and Muslim societies since the colonial period had to do with either subverting or competing with the forces that claimed to dominate and civilize them. Berque was an outsider seeking to grapple with the contradiction in himself as he proposed a parallel undoing in the former colonies, that is, to free the self and its representation from the refracted image cast by the colonial mirror. Progressive writers of Islam have accused Berque of continuing the image of the West as technologically advanced and superior in its culture and industry. But I would argue that this is a superficial understanding of Berque’s notion of modernity, which must be situated in the decolonizing context of Berque’s times. For Berque, rejecting modernizing influences in total would only deprive Arab societies of the opportunity to compete with the West, thus further diminishing the aspiration of Arabs to connect to a foundational selfhood. While most critics believed asala to be an archaic return, Berque imbued it with meanings of renewal and recuperation – hardly a reactionary concept.

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It is Berque’s outlook on Arab societies in the midst of decolonization that I wished to highlight rather than his sociological analysis of Arab society. I propose that a post-Orientalist theory must incorporate a trans-humanist approach, which places “the Orient” and Western societies on terms of cultural parity, the central message in the works of both Said and Berque. Both saw imperialism as sterile in the end because it failed to generate in its subjects a desire to emulate unconditionally and denied the humanistic in the Other. In my view, the most humanist critique offered up by Berque was to turn the Orientalist notion on its head, to imbue asala with the very humanity denied it by empire. This he did, not by pursuing the restoration of what existed in the past, but by insisting on the adaptation of the past in ways that would generate a renewed foundation for a cultural liberation and decolonization. The point here is to appreciate the stakes that were involved in Berque’s conceptualization of asala, intended to repudiate the pervasive idea of Arab inertia and stagnation, and to consider his anti-settler consciousness, which became indelibly intertwined with his post-Orientalism.

Notes 1 Said saw his account as a depiction of the structures of the cultural and intellectual fields within Orientalism rather than a history of the Orientalist figures themselves. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003 [1978]), 202. 2 Ibid., 1. 3 Emphasis added. Ibid., 266. 4 Ibid., 271. 5 Ibid., 270. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 265–6. 8 Ibid., 326. 9 Ibid., 327. 10 Ibid. For more on the controversy raised in light of Said’s radical crossdisciplinary work, see Gyan Prakash, “Orientalism Now,” History and Theory 34, no. 3 (1995): 199–212. 11 Elie Kedourie, “Politics & the Academy,” Commentary 94, no. 2 (1992): 1. Kedourie translated Benda’s “cleric” as clerisy, for lack of a better word.

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12 Ibid., 2. Massignon was also criticized for his impassioned lectures where he raised the issue of anti-Islamism in the west. Rodinson was largely spared the attack, however. A stern critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, Rodinson was the offspring of parents who were killed in Auschwitz. His opposition to the 1979 Iranian Revolution no doubt also helped him dodge Kedourie’s rebuke. See also Sébastien Boussois and Michel Rodinson, Maxime Rodinson: un intellectuel du XXe siècle (Paris: Riveneuve, 2008). 13 For more on Kedourie’s criticisms, see James Whidden, “Jacques Berque and the Academy: Islam and the West,” Journal of North African Studies 13, no. 4 (2008): 471–86. 14 Albert Hourani, Islam in European Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 130. Italics are mine, indicating the phrase’s relevance to a later discussion in the chapter. 15 It is worth noting that even in his most explicit attack on “Zionist colonialism in Palestine,” Berque made no mention of Edward Said. See Jacques Berque and Suha Sabbagh, “Jacques Berque: The Pen and the Sword,” Journal of Palestine Studies 15, no. 2 (Winter, 1986): 109–18. 16 Said, Orientalism, 271. 17 Ibid., xxii. 18 Ibid., xxiii. 19 Ibid. 20 See Jacques Berque, interview by Bernard Pivot, excerpt of Apostrophe, ina. fr, 1 June 1979. 21 Ibid. 22 Jacques Berque, L’Islam au défi: Les essais CCXI (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 11. 23 Ibid. 24 Berque, Arabies: Entretiens avec Mirèse Akar (Paris: Éditions Stock, 1978), 25. 25 Berque, L’Islam au défi, 31. 26 Ibid., 32. 27 Ibid., 34. 28 Berque, Mémoires des deux rives (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 191. 29 A mixed commune was an administrative unit in the French empire. Usually established in rural areas, the mixed commune was predominantly native or non-European. 30 Berque, Mémoires, 13. 31 Ibid., 12. 32 Albert Hourani points to the moral environment in which the young Jacques was raised. See Hourani, Islam in European Thought, 134. 33 Berque, Mémoires, 13. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 30.

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36 Ibid., 140. 37 Ibid., 48. 38 Berque, “Droits des terres et intégration sociale au Maghreb,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 25 (1958): 39. 39 Ibid., 41. 40 Ibid., 43. 41 Wadi Bouzar, “Jacques Berque et son ‘autre,’” Confluences Méditerranée 41 (2002): 181–90 and 226. 42 Berque, L’Islam au défi, 26. 43 Ibid., 21. See also Amatzia Baram, “Mesopotamian Identity in Ba’thi Iraq,” Middle Eastern Studies 19, no. 4 (1983): 426–55. Though dated, the article provides a good overview of Iraqi Ba’athists and Syrian thinker Michel Aflaq’s vision of pan-Arabism. 44 Berque, L’Islam au défi, 21. 45 Ibid., 22. 46 Ibid. 47 Patrick Laude, “Louis Massignon’s Axial and Jacques Berque’s Dialectical Islam: Two French Perspectives,” Arab Studies Journal 6/7, no. 1/2 (1998/1999): 76. 48 See also Idriss Jebari’s analysis of Khatibi and a transnational Maghreb identity: “Rethinking the Maghreb and the Post-Colonial Intellectual in Khatibi’s Les temps modernes Issue in 1977,” The Journal of North African Studies 23, no. 1/2 (2018): 53–70. 49 I am borrowing from Patrick Laude who uses the phrase “diversity of bases” in relation to Berque’s understanding of Islam. See Laude, “Louis Massignon’s Axial and Jacques Berque’s Dialectical Islam,” 77. 50 Berque, Arabies, 22. 51 Robert Briffault, The Making of Humanity (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938 [1919]). 52 Azzedine Haddour offers a convincing explanation of Khatibi in “Tradition, Translation, and Colonization,” in Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zajko eds., Translation and the Classic, Identity as Change in the History of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 211. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Jebari, “Rethinking the Maghreb,” 7. 56 Haddour, “Tradition, Translation,” 210. 57 Laude, “Louis Massignon’s Axial and Jacques Berque’s Dialectical Islam,” 76. 58 Berque, Arabies, 13. 59 Jacques Berque, Egypt, Imperialism and Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 523.

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60 Jacques Berque, Islam, Philosophy, and Science: Four Public Lectures Organized by UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 70. 61 Berque, L’Islam au défi, 21. 62 Berque, Mémoires, 151. 63 Jacques Berque, L’Orient second (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 33. 64 Berque, Egypt, 329. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 330. 67 Ibid., 350. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 129. 71 Emphasis added. Berque, Egypt, 348. 72 Ibid., 523. 73 Ibid., 506. 74 Berque, L’Orient second, 47. 75 Ibid., 32. 76 Berque, L’Islam au défi, 21. 77 Berque, L’Orient second, 33. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 35. 80 Ibid., 44. 81 Ibid.

4

Edward Said and the Politics of Race Yasmeen Abu-Laban

There is no doubt that the late Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism is a modern classic. Cited widely across the humanities and social sciences, the book was pivotal in challenging Orientalist scholarship, as well as reframing the study of scholarship on the Middle East and the Third World more generally. In this and other works, Said’s plea was to avoid monolithic and essentialist thinking, approaching the complex histories of the Middle East region with nuance and treating its peoples as human beings. This plea I have elsewhere referred to as humanizing the Oriental,1 but it might be added that, as a humanist, Edward Said categorically rejected unnuanced projections about “the West” or “Occident.” Indeed he even concludes Orientalism by admonishing: “Above all, I hope to have shown my reader that the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism.”2 Given that the book has now entered its fifth decade since publication and it still continues to draw citations and discussions across disciplines, the invitation to consider “post-Orientalism” is appropriate and germane. As Maurice Jr. Labelle articulates the idea of “postOrientalism,” it “builds off Orientalism (the book) itself and the continuous conversations it generates” (see introduction). Indeed, Said did exactly that kind of “post-Oriental” engagement by, for example, considering questions of culture and empire in a broader sense. In the introduction to his 1993 book Culture and Imperialism, Said observes: “A substantial amount of scholarship in anthropology, history, and

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area studies has developed arguments I put forward in Orientalism, which was limited to the Middle East. So I, too, have tried to expand the arguments of the earlier book to describe a more general pattern of relationships between the modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories.”3 A question that needs to be asked is: what conversations should we be engaging in post-Orientalism? For example, it is notable that in 2018, the year marking the fortieth anniversary of Orientalism, Bernard Lewis passed away at the age of 101, an occasion marked by obituaries in numerous dailies extolling his intellect and contributions.4 This kind of remembrance is relevant because Lewis was not only a chief exemplar of the Orientalist scholarship critiqued as “aggressively ideological”5 by Said in his 1978 book, but in turn, Lewis was one of the most forceful critics of Orientalism. Moreover, Lewis used his expertise (knowledge) in the service of Western and American assertions of control (power) in the Middle East, with Arabs and/or Muslims frequently depicted in monolithic terms. Lewis’s condemnation of Orientalism and Said’s rejoinder, splashed across the pages of The New York Review of Books in the early 1980s, still make for a tense reading rarely occasioned in academe unless the stakes are high. As Said observed at the time, “Insouciant, outrageous, arbitrary, false, absurd, astonishing, reckless – these are some of the words Bernard Lewis (New York Review of Books, June 24) uses to characterize what he interprets me as saying in Orientalism (1978). Yet despite these protestations, the sheer length of his diatribe and the four years of gestation he needed to produce it suggest that he takes what I say quite seriously, non-Orientalist though I may be.”6 The New York Times obituary on Bernard Lewis refers to him as an “eminent historian.”7 The accolade is given irrespective of the fact that the same obituary also observes that Lewis’s influence on the George W. Bush administration was “widely perceived to have beaten the drum for war,” that “people spoke of a ‘Lewis doctrine’ of imposing democracy on despotic regimes,” and that well before Samuel Huntington, Lewis coined the phrase “clash of civilizations” and saw this clash as stemming from a monolithic “sick Arab society.”8 I contend that a desperately needed conversation to have postOrientalism is one that can explain what makes it possible to be Orientalist, but also still command respect, whether in or outside the academy.

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In this chapter, I argue that Orientalism, in terms of both its context and its content, was at heart concerned with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racisms. These, of course, stemmed from the structures and power that enabled colonialism and imperialism, but also from the ideas or discourses that sustain an us/them thinking that works to justify violence, war, discrimination, and power. Explicitly naming and talking about anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism is important both because these forces are alive and well, and also because it is only by naming these racisms, and their historically specific manifestations, that we can begin to forward an alternative attuned to the possibility of anti-racist praxis irrespective of one’s identity, or location in or outside the academy. In what follows, a threefold approach is taken to substantiate this critical argument. In the first section of the paper, consideration is given not just to the content, but also to the context, that informed Said’s work Orientalism. As will be highlighted, this context was as grounded in the realities of minority experience and discrimination in North America, as it was in the Middle East or Israel/Palestine. In the second section of the paper, I turn to consider how themes identified by Said are still relevant in expressions of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racisms today, as well as some themes that are arguably more contemporary. The paper concludes with a consideration of anti-racist praxis in the current moment.

• It is well known that Edward Said (1935–2003) was Palestinian. What might be less known to those unfamiliar with the Israel/Palestine context is Palestinian denial of identity by the Zionist political project in Israel/Palestine, particularly since the founding of Israel in 1948. The outlines of this denial were memorably articulated by Israeli prime minister Golda Meir when in 1969 she stated: “There was no such thing as a Palestinian. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? … They did not exist.”9 However, the outlines of this denial were perhaps more famously expressed in the early slogan of the Zionist political project in Palestine, sometimes attributed to an essay by playwright Israel Zangwill,10 of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” This erasure of Palestinian Christians and Muslims in this articulation is not novel but rather endemic to

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settler-colonial projects and contexts, including Canada, where the goal was to have Indigenous Peoples disappear from the land.11 Indeed, in Canada, Indigenous claims, experiences, knowledges, and identities are denied by a majority that nonetheless embraces lacrosse as a Canadian sport, federalism as a Canadian governing principle, and maple syrup as a Canadian treat when they are all rooted in Indigenous traditions and thought and are not the invention of settlers.12 In the case of Palestine, it was Edward Said in particular who came to give an authoritative voice, in the global lingua franca of English, to the experience and perspectives of the Palestinians as a dispossessed people after 1948, in a book published closely on the heels of Orientalism, namely The Question of Palestine.13 With his cultural capital as a professor at Columbia University, speaking about Palestine as a self-identified Palestinian, it was perhaps inevitable that he himself would come to face personal attacks and attempts to debunk his Palestinian identity.14 Given the politics surrounding the denial of Palestinian identity, a perspective that embraces ideas of cultural intermixing and multiplicity may seem particularly fraught. Yet Said himself recognized the complexity of identity, and in his sequel to Orientalism, the book Culture and Imperialism, he would explicitly write that “no one today is purely one thing.”15 Without denying his Palestinian identity then, it is nonetheless both fitting and accurate to situate Edward Said in the context of North America because, in addition to being Palestinian, he was also associated with what is now being called the “Arab American Left.” The Arab American Left is a useful shorthand to reference what historian Pamela Pennock calls one of the most overlooked minorities in social movement organizing from the 1960s.16 However, insofar as Arab minorities in Canada were influenced by a similar climate of issues and concerns, and worked with Arab minorities in the United States, it may be useful to think about an “Arab North American Left.” In the case of Said, explicitly making this link with the Arab North American Left serves to highlight the fact that he worked with many others in the United States and Canada to build an English-language repertoire of knowledge about the histories, peoples, and politics of the Middle East, their migratory experiences in North America, and the political and civil rights context facing Arab Americans and Arab Canadians. Much of this work was done through the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), a US-based academic organization

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formed in 1967, in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the ensuing negative media and other depictions of Arabs/Arab Americans in the American media. Reflecting on the shared climate on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel, in Canada the Canadian Arab Federation was also formed in 1967, stemming largely from similar concerns with stereotypes, although it was an umbrella organization of community groups as opposed to an academic organization.17 In the case of AAUG, flowing from this climate of vilification, an initial meeting of Arab-origin professors and professionals highlighted a “pressing need for united action to confront certain urgent problems facing our communities in the United States, Canada and our land of origin,”18 and in the months that followed AAUG was eventually founded. The organization in its heyday continually attracted both Canadian and US-based academics, with Canadian sociologist Baha Abu-Laban serving as one of its early presidents in 1973–74 and Canadian political scientist Hani Faris serving later in 1984–85.19 AAUG is significant in relation to any discussion of Edward Said and his work because it points to the climate of ideas as well as interpersonal and organizational contexts in which he was embedded. As Gualtieri argues, the AAUG, its activities, discussions, publications, and Said’s own “deep friendships with activists of Arab origin living and working in the United States and Canada”20 were pivotal in shaping the content for Orientalism. In fact, an early iteration of the arguments that would form the basis of Orientalism is found in a paper Said delivered at the AAUG meeting held 25–27 October 1974 in Cleveland, Ohio; this paper was subsequently published as a chapter in a 1975 book volume edited by AAUG members Baha Abu-Laban and Faith Zeadey.21 These facts then also remind us of the importance of the North American experience as part of the context that gave rise to a book that takes as its primary focus the representation of the societies and peoples of “the Orient” – that is everything outside of Europe in the Eastern hemisphere, but especially the Middle East. For the Arab North American Left, a concern with disadvantage, injustice, and racism united a focus on struggles against colonialism, settlercolonialism, and imperialism in the Third World with the question of the opportunities and challenges Arab-origin refugees, immigrants, and their descendants faced in North America. As a literary critic and professor at Columbia University, Said actually did not necessarily fit

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the reigning image of “the Left” of the 1960s. In fact, one former student (now himself a distinguished professor) recalls first meeting a conservatively attired Said in 1968 and thinking he “looked sort of out of it and ‘square’ from my generation’s perspective.”22 But even if Said did not fit the stereotyped image of the “bell bottom-wearing hippie era Left,” he challenged colonialism, imperialism, and oppression. With the publication of the now-classic book Orientalism in 1978, he built upon Michel Foucault’s understanding that there was an inter-relationship between knowledge and power by considering how the so-called Orient was studied and understood in the Western academy and the corridors of political power.23 For Said, Orientalism is a manner of thinking and style of scholarship based on an ontological and epistemological distinction between the East/Orient and West/Occident. This form of “knowledge” provided a justification for “power” in the form of colonialism and the continued domination by the West. In other words, it was a form of “knowledge” that was really about “power” over “the Other.” Although there may be many points of origin for postcolonial thought both geographically and intellectually, there is no question that Orientalism is routinely credited with ushering in a new field of studies around colonial discourse and post-colonial theory.24 What is less obvious is how Orientalism connects to considerations of racism and anti-racism. To be clear, Said’s Orientalism is expressly concerned with racism at several junctures from consideration of nineteenthcentury ideas of biological race,25 the classification and vilification of the “Semitic,”26 and the late twentieth-century figure of “the Arab” in popular culture.27 Perhaps most especially, Said speaks of racism in relation to a web. In his words: “The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny.”28 However, Orientalism should also be understood as a critical contribution to theorizing not only racism but also anti-racism because Said, sensitive as he was to the ideas of Frantz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci, was interested not only in power but resistance.29 The possibility is indicated in Said’s borrowing from Gramsci of the idea of hegemony (and by extension, contestation) which he uses to situate Orientalism as a force in the cultural life of the industrialized West.30 He captures the possibility of contestation and change by highlighting his “rational

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expectation in my own mind that Orientalism need not always be so unchallenged, intellectually, ideologically, and politically, as it has been.”31 This embrace of the possibility of resistance and imagining of an alternative to Orientalism also links Orientalism with The Question of Palestine because here he speaks of Palestine as an idea, precisely because the Palestinians – having been dispossessed, occupied, and rendered stateless – aspire to an idea of existence that is better, that is the idea of Palestine. The workings of Fanon are also evident in the underlying quest for liberation underpinning much of Said’s work, a quest that as yet is only to be conceptualized. In Culture and Imperialism, Said makes this point explicit, noting, “If I have so often cited Fanon, it is because more dramatically and decisively than anyone, I believe, he expresses the immense cultural shift from the terrain of nationalist independence to the theoretical domain of liberation.”32 However, as noted, Said was also inspired by his connections and the climate of ideas in organizations such as AAUG. It is worth considering Said’s rather stunning depiction of disappointing encounters with Foucault, along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir,33 to understand why it is also relevant to link Said’s work to the Arab North American Left, concerned as they were with issues of racism, solidarity with African-Americans, and quite clearly praxis.34 This kind of praxis is also critical for thinking about the conversations that might be engendered after Orientalism (or post-Orientalism), given how contemporary anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racisms in the post 9/11 era continue to reflect and extend Orientalist tropes highlighted by Said, which can take new twists and turns.

• Said’s book Orientalism has been widely taken up globally across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, and was a pivotal intervention in understanding the Middle East and its peoples in relation to colonial discourse.35 This work has therefore been received well beyond the field of literary criticism and has reached multidisciplinary audiences internationally. In the process, Said’s ideas have also been taken up by scholars studying colonial, settler-colonial and postcolonial contexts other than the Middle East/Orient – a critical form of postOrientalism. For example, as I noted in an address to the Canadian

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Political Science Association, political scientists in the settler-colonial space of Canada have used Said’s work and postcolonial theory to examine such varied concerns as Quebec and “the national question,” the “Jewish question” in new light, popular views regarding those of Chinese origin in Canada, and Indigenous-settler relations in Canada.36 In these kinds of extensions, the reach of Orientalism lies specifically in its ability to illuminate the way in which us/them thinking (knowledge) feeds into a multitude of different expressions of hierarchical differentiation (power) with the result that in Canada there may be potentially multiple Others. This is rooted in Canada’s foundation as a settler colony, and the complex relations of power relating to race, ethnicity, language, region, gender, and other markers of difference that continue to play out.37 In other words, these unequal relations of power are not static, nor are the ways in which these differences are expressed as knowledge. Taking this insight back into the discussion of “post-Orientalism,” what I would highlight is that the forms of differentiation Said identified regarding the “Orient” and the “Oriental Other” would also benefit from explicit attention to potentially shifting power relations over time and space, and therefore potentially different expressions of differentiating the Other. In Orientalism, Said’s discussion up until the late 1970s considers how the Orient and the Oriental can be viewed in different ways: as exotic/alluring, backward/inferior, and uncivilized/dangerous. He took these ideas further in his examination of American media coverage relating to Islam and Muslims following the Iranian hostage crisis.38 However, what I would also stress is that in today’s post-9/11 environment of knowledge production (in the academy, media, and amongst policymakers), there are some key differences from the period in which Said wrote relating to tropes, knowledge construction, and power. When it comes to how the Orient and the Oriental are viewed, although there may be numerous examples of how ideas relating to the inferiority and uncivility of Arabs and/or Muslims still exist, it is actually increasingly difficult to find readily available examples of how the Orient/Oriental is treated as exotic/alluring by policy-makers or in popular culture. Hollywood film production is a key example of this. Jack Shaheen notes, in his extensive discussions of the negative portrayal by Hollywood of Arabs/Muslims on the silver screen, that while men have been frequently treated as barbaric/uncivilized and

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violent/dangerous, the portrayal of Arab and/or Muslim women has dramatically shifted over time – from the alluring femmes fatales of the silent era of film to, increasingly after 11 September 2001, being shapeless figures shrouded in black.39 This is relevant to understanding contemporary politics and power relations. Indeed, stereotyped representations of Arab and/or Muslim women as, in the words of Sherene Razack, “imperiled” at the hands of “dangerous” Muslim men40 have lent support to the War on Terror, particularly the US-led military operation in Afghanistan.41 To fully understand this dimension has required much greater consideration of gender and sexuality in Orientalist discourse than given by Said in the original articulation.42 Indeed, consideration for gender and sexuality in the current moment is especially critical because these stereotypes have taken on a life of their own, especially in the context of a normalization of “women’s rights” and “LGBTQ rights” as human rights, supported in countries of the West. This, of course, does not mean that either women or sexual minorities have achieved full equality or acceptance in spheres of power or influence in countries of the West. However, the discourse about the acceptance of equality has changed, particularly since 9/11. Gender equality and gay rights discourses have been appropriated into distinctions between “us” and “them.” These include the ongoing niqab debate in Canada and Quebec, where banning facial covering was framed as a key issue involving gender equality in federal citizenship ceremonies under the Harper Conservatives, and continues to be a point of policy contestation in the province of Quebec.43 More broadly, the appropriation of gender equality discourse by right-wing nationalists and some feminists in service of stigmatizing Muslim men is dubbed “femonationalism” in Sara Farris’s recent exploration of countries of Europe, specifically France, Italy, and the Netherlands.44 Similarly, in a process Jasbir Puar coins “homonationalism,”45 LGBTQ rights claims are taken up to distinguish us and them, pushing nationalist and exclusionary claims in Israel vis-à-vis Palestinians, and in Western countries vis-à-vis Muslim minorities and immigrants. When Edward Said wrote Orientalism, the focus was on the production of knowledge by a relatively small group of scholars writing in a particular tradition (of which Bernard Lewis was a contemporary example). Beyond the academy, his textual focus was American and Western mainstream media in the book Covering Islam (1979).

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However, today communications are effectively global. Hence, what would previously have been a local debate concerning the negative cartoon portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed in Denmark in a relatively obscure newspaper became a global issue in the post-9/11 environment.46 In this fast-paced changing context, the site of “the academy” as a key purveyor of knowledge has been dramatically transformed by new communication technologies, and there has effectively been a “democratization” of knowledge production corresponding with the globalization of information and communications. That this “knowledge” is not always accurate is reflected in the fact that in the wake of the Brexit decision (concerning the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union), as well as the election of US president Donald Trump, Oxford Dictionaries not only noted the dramatic uptick in usage of the word “post-truth,” but also heralded it as its international word of the year for 2016.47 While there has long been an understanding that there are challenges with evidence-based research in the natural and social sciences, as well as public policy,48 the deliberate spreading of falsehoods and complete rejection of evidence-based research or discussion raises profound questions for minorities and for democracy itself. Indeed, what Suad Joseph has called the “chaos” of governance by the Trump administration was emboldened by erroneous statements concerning Arabs/Arab Americans and/or Muslims and other minorities.49 Communications and fake news reached levels where reality was so camouflaged that some might come to believe news from reputable sources was actually fake, explaining why more than three hundred editorial boards of American newspapers coordinated editorials in August 2018 to denounce President Trump’s attacks on the media in relation to free speech and democracy.50 The power that concerned Edward Said related to the imposition of colonial controls in the corridors of power in the West, particularly in Washington, after World War II. However, just as there has been an explosion and democratization of knowledge, there has been an explosion of new and deeper forms of control, particularly since 9/11. This involves institutions (which concerned Said), but it also involves new technologies. The multidisciplinary area of surveillance studies draws attention to how new technologies, as well as new security rationales post-9/11, have widened and deepened forms of surveillance that go far beyond anything Orwell ever envisioned for the state in the classic

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1984, or what Said was concerned with as early as the 1970s. While surveillance may be used for many ends, it is hard to escape the ways in which surveillance technologies enhance the abilities of both state and non-state actors to exercise power and control, as well as the profound consequences to privacy, human rights, and ethics.51 Two contexts are worth mentioning here, because they point to how “the Oriental Other” has escaped the implicit geographies of understanding of “Orient” and “Occident” that underpinned the book Orientalism. First, Israel and Israeli companies have been major players in the surveillance of Palestinians in the context of the ongoing occupation in Palestine, where Palestinians have long been negatively framed as terrorists. Increasingly, since 9/11, these technologies and rationales from the context of Israel’s occupation have been marketed elsewhere as key to anti-terrorism, with particular implications for racialized immigrants and minorities who are (or are perceived as) Arab and/ or Muslim.52 Second, elements of the global war on terror, which has served to securitize Muslims, have turned inward in ways that also defy an easy East/West geography. This includes within Africa53 and Asia. A graphic example concerns the case of the Muslim-minority Uighurs in China, where new surveillance technologies have been used to support effectively totalitarian practices and reassert the majority Han identity.54

• Edward Said’s great contribution in the book Orientalism was to strikingly and emphatically pinpoint and illustrate important dimensions relating to the dynamics of colonialism and the West/East in a way that had not quite been done before. The language of “Orientalism” gave a new way for scholars worldwide and across disciplines to actually speak about the Middle East and other colonial and settler-colonial contexts, a way to speak about power and the role of knowledge, and a way to think about resistance. However, as suggested, today’s context is not exactly the same as when Edward Said wrote because of new discourses concerning the construction of self/other around expressions of gender and sexuality, new communications technologies, and new forms of surveillance and control. That these dynamics carry particular implications for Arabs and/or Muslims should not detract from the fact that they may also carry implications for other groups in and outside

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the context of the Middle East. This could bring Orientalism full circle into the concerns that gave rise to the Arab North American Left. While the ideas associated with Orientalism remain important contributions, a lingering reality is that the word “Orientalism” has never seeped into the public lexicon. This may be because the original examples used to exemplify the phenomenon in Orientalism were largely not part of popular culture, but rather were scholarly, literary, and media texts that tended to be consumed by elites. Nonetheless, the issues Edward Said highlighted, and others have continued to build on, are ones which might feed into a broader conversation of processes of race and racialization, and how these intersect with gender, class, location, and other markers in popularly culture, everyday life and specific locales. Since 9/11, scholars, activists, government, and international organizations have struggled with the labels to attribute to examples of bias or exclusion experienced by Arabs and/or Muslims. Terms like “Islamophobia” have been used by the United Nations and elsewhere to signal prejudice against Muslims, and “Arabophobia” around Arabs from the Middle East. However, the challenge with both these terms is that they re-inscribe a stereotype: that Arabs and or Muslims are dangerous, and therefore people to fear (which is why they produce a phobia). It is my contention that we need to be able to talk about racism (and ultimately anti-racism). In this regard, speaking about “anti-Arab racism” or “anti-Muslim racism” are preferable terms because they clarify that the kinds of stereotypes we see are examples of the broader phenomenon of racism itself. Minoritized groups that lack power and suffer from misrepresentation are numerous, and racism is experienced in different ways, at different times, by a wide range of groups. Colonial and settler-colonial contexts tend to be especially stark when it comes to race, gender, and class exclusions, precisely because of the material issues at stake relating to land and resources.55 In thinking about post-Orientalism then, a central question is whether the term “Orientialism” can fully do the work that needs to be done today to show the linkages between, say, the situation facing African-Americans in the United States and Palestinians under occupation as captured in the anti-racist slogan “From Ferguson to Palestine”?56 Post-Orientalism, in my reading, requires serious consideration of whether we need terms besides Orientalism to capture the complex

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realities facing Arabs and/or Muslims since they intersect with other identities and inter-relate to other groups, who have experienced racism, discrimination, and disadvantage, as well as securitization.57 Since the roots of Orientalism are in the thought and praxis of the Arab North American Left and its struggles against racism, and Orientalism concerned itself with race and racism, the wider adoption of terms like anti-Muslim racism and anti-Arab racism would be a fitting activity of post-Orientalism. The emergence of new and old tropes, the messages that are mobilized in online spaces, and surveillance studies could all benefit from attention to processes of racialization and forms of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism specifically. Moreover, such an activity would help better connect the longstanding concerns relating to colonialism, settler-colonialism, postcolonialism, and power with those of critical race theory and ever-shifting constructions of whiteness and power at a theoretical level. Such an activity may also lay the groundwork for new forms of solidarity and praxis across groups mobilized by an antiracist agenda. Considering the rise of xenophobic and exclusionary populisms, continued practices of dispossession, growing numbers of refugees and other stateless persons, as well as growing inequities within and between the north and the south, the twenty-first century seems to demand nothing less. Notes

1

2 3 4

5

For research assistance I thank University of Alberta PhD student Nariya Khasanova. Yasmeen Abu-Laban, “Humanizing the Oriental: Edward Said and Western Scholarly Discourse,” in Revising Culture, Reinventing Peace: The Influence of Edward W. Said, eds. Naseer Aruri and Muhammad A. Shuraydi (New York and Northampton: Interlink/Olive Branch Press, 2001), 74–85. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979[1978]), 328. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xi. Peter Oborne, “Do Not Weep for Bernard Lewis, High Priest of War in the Middle East,” Middle East Eye, 21 May 2018, https://www.middleeasteye.net/ columns/bernard-lewis-neocons-high-priest-war-and-bloodshed-middleeast-1876449346. Said, Orientalism, 316.

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6 Edward Said, “Orientalism: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books 29, no. 13, 12 August 1982. 7 Douglas Martin, “Bernard Lewis, Influential Scholar of Islam, Is Dead at 101,” The New York Times, 21 May 2018, https://www.nytimes. com/2018/05/21/obituaries/bernard-lewis-islam-scholar-dies.html. 8 Ibid. 9 Quoted in Frank Giles, “Interview with Golda Meir,” The Sunday Times, 15 June 1969. 10 Israel Zangwill, “Return to Palestine,” The New Liberal Review (1901): 615–34. 11 See Emma Battell Lowman and Adam J. Barker, Settler Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada (Halifax: Fernwood Press, 2015). 12 For the case of federalism, see Kiera Ladner, “Treaty Federalism: An Indigenous Vision of Canadian Federalisms,” in New Trends in Canadian Federalism, eds. François Rocher and Miriam Smith (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003), 167–94. 13 Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 14 See Shuraydi, Muhammad, “Edward W. Said and his ‘Beautiful Old House’: A Response to Weiner,” in Revising Culture, Reinventing Peace: The Influence of Edward W. Said, eds. Naseer Aruri and Muhammad A. Shuraydi (New York and Northampton: Interlink/Olive Branch Press, 2001), 170–8. 15 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxv. 16 Pamela Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies and their Fight Against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s–1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 17 Yasmeen Abu-Laban, “On the Borderlines of Human and Citizen: The Liminal State of Arab Canadians,” in Targeted Transnationals: The State, the Media and Arab Canadians, eds. Bessma Momani and Jenna Hennebry (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 68–85. 18 Cited in Sarah Gualtieri, “Edward Said, the AAUG, and Arab American Archival Methods,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38, no. 1 (2018): 21–9. 19 For a reflection on the history and challenges of AAUG, see also Baha Abu-Laban, “Reflections on the Rise and Decline of an Arab American Organization,” Arab Studies Quarterly 29, no. 3/4 (2007): 47–56. 20 Sarah Gualtieri, “Edward Said, the AAUG, and Arab American Archival Methods,” 21. 21 See Edward Said, “Orientalism and the October War: The Shattered Myths,” in Arabs in America: Myths and Realities, eds. Baha Abu-Laban and Faith T. Zeadey (Wilmette, Illinois: The Medina University Press International, 1975), 83–112.

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22 Lennard Davis, “Nationality, Disability and Deafness,” in Revising Culture, Reinventing Peace: The Influence of Edward W. Said, eds. Naseer Aruri and Muhammad A. Shuraydi (New York and Northampton: Interlink/Olive Branch Press, 2001), 2–28. 23 Said, Orientalism. 24 Ibid.; Patrick Williams and Chrisman, Laura, “Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: An Introduction,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 5. 25 Said, Orientalism, 206. 26 Ibid., 231. 27 Ibid., 284. 28 Ibid., 27. 29 Enakshi Dua, “Not Quite a Case of the Disappearing Marx: Tracing the Place of Material Relations in Postcolonial Theory,” in Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories, eds. Abigail B. Bakan and Enakshi Dua (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 63–91. 30 Said, Orientalism, 7. 31 Ibid., 326. 32 Emphasis added. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 268. 33 Edward Said, “Diary,” London Review of Books 22, no. 1 (1 June 2000): 42–3. 34 Sarah Gualtieri, “Edward Said, the AAUG, and Arab American Archival Methods,” 27–8. 35 Abu-Laban, “Humanizing the Oriental,” 74–85. 36 Yasmeen Abu-Laban, “Narrating Canadian Political Science: History Revisited/Presidential Address to the Canadian Political Science Association, Toronto, Ontario, May 30, 2017,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 50, no. 4 (2017): 900–01. 37 Ibid., 901. 38 Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997 [1981]). 39 Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001); Jack Shaheen, Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs After 9/11 (Northampton: Olive Branch Press, 2008). 40 Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 41 See also Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Need Saving? The Western Crusade to Rescue Muslim Women has Reduced them to a Simplistic Stereotype,” Time (November 2013). 42 Lila Abu-Lughod, “Orientalism and Middle East Feminist Studies,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 101–13.

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43 Jasmine Thomas, “Only If She Shows Her Face: Canadian Media Portrayals of the Niqab Ban during Citizenship Ceremonies,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 47, no. 2 (2015): 187–201. 44 Sara Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). 45 Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 46 Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Baha Abu-Laban, “Reasonable Accommodation in a Global Village,” Policy Options (September 2007): 28–33. 47 The Guardian, “‘Post-truth’ Named Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries,” 15 November 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/15/posttruth-named-word-of-the-year-by-oxford-dictionaries. 48 Michael Howlett, “Policy Analytical Capacity and Evidence-Based Policy Making: Lessons From Canada,” Canadian Public Administration 52, no. 2 (2009): 153–75. 49 Suad Joseph, “Chaos as a Political Strategy of Governance,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 13, no. 3 (2017): 486–8. 50 James Doubek, “Hundreds of Newspapers Denounce Trump’s Attacks on Media in Coordinated Editorials,” National Public Radio, 16 August 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/08/16/639125774/hundreds-of-newspapersdenounce-trumps-attacks-on-media-in-coordinated-editorial. 51 Yasmeen Abu-Laban, “The Politics of Surveillance: Civil Liberties, Human Rights and Ethics,” in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, eds. Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty and David Lyon (New York: Routledge, 2012), 420–7. 52 Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan, “The ‘Israelization’ of Social Sorting and the ‘Palestinianization’ of the Racial Contract: Reframing Israel/ Palestine and the War on Terror,” in Surveillance and Control in Israel/ Palestine: Population, Territory and Power, eds. Elia Zureik, David Lyon and Yasmeen Abu-Laban (New York: Routledge, 2011), 276–94. 53 See Malinda Smith, Securing Africa: Post 9/11 Discourse on Terrorism (London: Aldeshot, 2010). 54 James A. Millward, “What’s It Like to Live in a Surveillance State?,” The New York Times, 3 February 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/ opinion/sunday/china-surveillance-state-uighurs.html. 55 Daiva K. Staisulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class (London: Sage, 1995); Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan, Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race: Exploring Identity in Global Context (London: IB Tauris/ Bloomsbury, 2020).

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56 See Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2016). 57 Rita Dhamoon and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, “Dangerous (Internal) Foreigners and Nation-Building: The Case of Canada,” International Political Science Review 30, no. 2 (2009): 163–83.

5

Exodus or Revolution “World Turned Inside Out” vs “World Turned Upside Down” in a 1980s Exchange Lorenzo Veracini

Edward Said responded emphatically to Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution.1 Walzer had presented an argument that is part of a longlasting political tradition I have called “the world turned inside out”: the attempt to constitute political regimes elsewhere as an alternative to embracing emplaced change.2 Walzer had deliberately or unwillingly misunderstood Exodus and its politics and presented them as constituting revolutionary and progressive traditions. Against this misrepresentation, Said restated the “world turned upside down,” the attempt to change the world by reshaping specific geographies.3 He demolished Walzer’s contention that Exodus could sustain a revolutionary template and reflected on the exclusions that Exodus as politics is inevitably premised. This paper revisits this 1985–86 exchange by referring to the long history of opposition between revolution and displacement as political options. I argue that, despite his ostensible embrace of revolution, Walzer actually rehearsed unoriginally a long-lasting tradition of preemptive displacement as an alternative to change, whereas Said’s critique of Walzer’s mobile Orientalism was part of a revolutionary struggle to create a post-Orientalist world. Said recognized how crucial it was to counter fantasies about displacement as a way to avoid contradictions, and how devastating these fantasies had been for Palestine and Palestinians. Decolonization, he argued, is also and especially about the histories colonizers tell about themselves. Said restated a universalist and humanist revolutionary option: like a boomerang must return to

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its location of origin, stories about one-way journeys towards someone else’s place must face the contradictions they arise from as well as the dehumanizations they imply. It was a call to focus of genuine decolonization’s necessary “boomerang effect” – a call that is as relevant today as it was nearly forty years ago. The political traditions of “the world turned inside out” are distinct from the “world turned upside down” Christopher Hill outlined in his 1972 book of the same name. The advocates of the world turned inside out adopt displacement as a mode for enacting political change; they change worlds rather than change the world. But it is not an innocent choice: this approach only temporarily escapes contradictions, carrying devastating consequences for Indigenous Peoples because all worlds turned inside out are necessarily premised on settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination  – that is, on the ability to displace somewhere else while carrying a substantive sovereign and constituent ability. Without this sovereignty, a capability that is asserted equally over indigenous and exogenous sovereigns, there cannot be the world turned inside out. In this paper I argue, like Said (even though Said did not refer to settler-colonial phenomena specifically), that settler colonialism and the politics of Exodus explored by Walzer are a response to revolutionary transformation; they do not constitute revolutionary political traditions. This paper is a text about a text about a text about a text (isn’t it crazy what scholars do for a living?): Walzer contended that these politics are liberating by referring to Exodus and its political uses, but, as Said emphasized in his response, Exodus, the Biblical story and many of its derivatives – a famous novel, a movie, etc. – and all settler colonialisms are fundamentally exclusive.4 The “settler contract” outlined by Carole Pateman, like other covenants analyzed by Donald Akenson in his seminal book, is constituted against some and without others (and therefore can be amended through inclusion for some, but can never be remedied in relation to others).5 There is no exodus without a promise, no exodus without a political covenant, and all covenants are inherently political.6 Exclusion, by definition, implies its dialectical obverse: membership. Walzer liked the concept and dwelled on it in Spheres of Justice, a successful book he published the year before he released Exodus and Revolution.7 For Walzer, membership in the “political community” is

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the “most important good” that can be distributed. The decision about its distribution is a preliminary decision, he argues; it determines all the following choices that are to be made and makes them possible. It is for him precisely a decision on the boundaries of political subjecthood that establishes the fundamental distinction between “members” and “foreigners.” Except that emancipating “membership” is impossible in the case of Indigenous Peoples in settler polities, where the very extension of settler membership – assimilation – is used as a weapon to dispossess them of their political autonomy (and where, by definition, they cannot be “foreigners”). This paper’s first section reads Walzer’s reliance on Exodus through a settler-colonial studies lens (and as an instance of the world turned inside out); its second section interprets Said’s response to Walzer’s assertion as a revolutionary text. Walzer did not consider settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination even if he was completely enmeshed in it; Edward Said developed an “epistemology of displacement” instead (he did not consider settler colonialism either).8 The Walzer-Said exchange fits into a wider history of Said’s particular struggle against imperial misrepresentations and their political consequences. After the publication of Orientalism, his ongoing endeavour was to call out the “misrepresenters.” Said’s response to Walzer’s statement was an important moment in the process of his becoming a public spokesperson in the United States (and the West, more broadly) for the Palestinian national movement. His response demonstrates his post-Orientalist determination that the best way to resist Orientalism and its Zionist variant was for him to make himself visible as a Palestinian and to ensure that a Palestinian perspective would not be excluded from key public conversations.

• Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution, as Edward Said authoritatively demonstrated and as I will briefly rehearse in the following section, despite the “and” in the title, was not about revolution. He did not advocate a revolutionary choice or talk about historical experiences that thought about their liberation in revolutionary terms. They dreamt of moving elsewhere and there establishing new political orders. Walzer’s outline of the political uses of Exodus can be read as an embrace of

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the world turned inside out as a political tradition and as an apology of settler colonialism. Exodus, like most settler-colonial stories, is premised on a linear narrative structure.9 Walzer embraced the narrative for its implications about the possibility of political change: “The [Exodus] story is a classic narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an end: problem, struggle, resolution – Egypt, the wilderness, the promised land … The Exodus bears no resemblance to those ancient tales of voyages and journeys that, whatever the adventures they include, begin and end at home … In the literature of the ancient world only the Aeneid resembles the Exodus in its narrative structure, describing a divinely guided and world-historical journey to something like a promised land.”10 Indeed, Exodus is a settler-colonial story (Virgil’s Aeneid also is). But it is also a world-turned-inside-out story, as it identifies the convergence between personal and regime change. Walzer embraces this convergence: “The appeal of Exodus history to generations of radicals lies in its linearity, in the idea of a promised end, in the purposiveness of the Israelite march. The movement across space is readily reconstructed as a movement from one political regime to another. (I should note that the same reconstruction also works for personal change: thus John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the tale of a journey from the worldly city, through the wilderness of the world, to a place called Jerusalem – and also a tale of self-transformation.)”11 In this context, transformation is a product of displacement, not of political struggle. It is a result of flight rather than fight (as an aside, I should note that there is a political tradition that is neither a flight nor fight reaction, which may be summarised by “fright”): “Exodus is a model for messianic and millenarian thought, and it is also a standing alternative to it – a secular and historical account of ‘redemption,’ an account that does not require the miraculous transformation of the material world but sets God’s people marching through the world toward a better place within it.”12 Resistance brings liberation, but this resistance is nonrevolutionary because it is displaced.13 Walzer continues: “But God is a great warrior, and the tyrant is defeated: ‘the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.’ This was the moment of liberation. Benjamin Franklin’s proposal for the Great Seal [of the United States] captures the political sense of the Exodus text. Franklin went beyond the text, however, with

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his proposed inscription: ‘Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.’ In Exodus history … the Israelites do not themselves fight against the Pharaoh. It is God alone who destroys the Egyptian chariots.”14 There is no fight against the sovereign – God does the work; displacing is sufficient. Life in the new locale is fundamentally different. Wealth, for example, is distributed amongst those who have displaced, but displacement makes wealth ontologically different. It corrupted in the old context (and as such it was a good reason to escape), but it is ennobling in the new one (and a good reason to escape). It is displacement that transubstantiates it into its opposite: “The promised land [sic] repeats the affluence of the house of bondage, but this is supposed to be an affluence more widely shared than it was in Egypt, and it is supposed to be an affluence that doesn’t corrupt. And when it isn’t shared, and does corrupt, then it is time to invoke again the Exodus story.”15 Even the nature of political strife, normally the very outcome of markedly unequal wealth distribution, is transformed through displacement. Walzer thus saw Exodus as a/the model for political struggle: “Since [John Calvin and his followers] thought they were re-enacting the entire Exodus, they were able to read the entire text. The journey through the wilderness was in part a metaphor for their own politics, and in part a model. They too had escaped from (popish) oppression only to find themselves caught up in a long and difficult struggle with their own people [i.e., Israelites reverting to worshipping Egyptian Gods].”16 This is the stuff of settler-colonial politics, the politics of the polities established through what Louis Hartz called “fragmentation.”17 The “rites of assent” that characterize the fragments emanate from a specific political form, a form defined by displacement.18 They may displace rather than fight, but Walzer knows that the Exodees will need to fight in order to displace. This is absolutely crucial; there is no Exodus without the dispersal of the Canaanites that happened to inhabit the Promised Land. Displacement is premised on a foundational violence that begets displacement; this violent legacy characterizes all settler-colonial polities (the revolutionary violence that cannot be unleashed against the Pharaoh is necessarily redirected against Indigenous people – displacement then is metaphorical as well as literal). It is an armed political collective: “The result [of the experience in the wilderness] is that the Israelites at the Jordan [about to enter the Promised Land] are very different from the Israelites at the sea: they

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are ready at last to fight their own battles … They are a ‘political society,’ committed to one another and to the covenant that binds them together. This is the achievement of the four decades in the wilderness.”19 It is a covenantal political collective; it is constituted elsewhere and it is constituted before; it is before the Promised Land: “Covenant is the political invention of the book of Exodus … There is no precedent for a treaty between God and an entire people or for a treaty whose conditions are literally the laws of morality … Spinoza suggests that [the Israelites about to join the covenant] are, at this moment of freedom, in a state of nature … Indeed the Sinai covenant is radically inclusive.”20 And yet, this inclusion is only applied internally; it excludes all others, whether they are indigenous or exogenous. Exodus typically establishes a settler-colonial political form, not a revolutionary one: “God brings the Israelites out of Egypt, but they themselves must make the trek across the desert and conquer Canaan and work the land. And God gives the Israelites laws, which they must learn to live by. Since the laws are never fully observed, the land is never completely possessed. Canaan becomes Israel and still remains a promised land.”21 It is a polity to come, a fighting polity that fights to end all fights. Walzer embraces Isaiah’s vision of a settled society, “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”: “And [my people] shall build houses and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build and another inhabit [i.e., Indigenous people must disappear]; they shall not plant and another eat [i.e., exclusive control of the land] (65:21–22) … They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid (Mic. 4:4).”22 It will be a pacified society of homeowners. “Home” here is crucial: it identifies a reproductive unit, which is understandable, since the result of settler colonialism as a mode of domination is a political body that reproduces in the place of another. It is a future-oriented polity. What prevents it from becoming in the future like the previous society? What will prevent it from backsliding into “Egyptian practices”? Walzer’s 1980s answer is strikingly similar to Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1890s conclusion about the United States: it’s all about foundations, “frontier” foundations: “The discovery of Egypt in Canaan generates a series of reinterpretations of the Exodus. The first of these and the strangest (though we have seen it since) involves what might be best called a romanticizing of the wilderness period. The prophets Hosea

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and Jeremiah are the leading romantics. For them, the ethical high point of the Exodus is not the arrival in Canaan but the march across the desert.”23 All settlers long for a “frontier” circumstance as they endeavour to supersede it. If there is backsliding (but note the spatial content of the metaphorical structure that sustains the notion of “backsliding”), Exodus’s second Exodus is messianism: Jewish messianic thought, and so all messianic thought has its origins in the idea of a second Exodus … And then it is but a short and obvious step to bring him home, to make the goal of the second Exodus not Canaan but Eden. This is the crucial move in the development of a full-fledged messianism out of Exodus thinking … Eden is a mythical garden while the promised land has latitude and longitude; Eden stands at the beginning and then, in messianic thought, at the very end of human history, while the promised land is firmly located within history; and Eden represents the perfection of nature and human nature, while the promised land is simply a better place than Egypt was.24 Messianism is not the world turned inside out. Walzer does not approve of it; it sounds and feels very much like revolution, like fight rather than flight. Besides, the messiah gets to you, you don’t move towards him – the spatial politics of messianism do not require displacement, are not an exodus. So messianism derives from Exodus but stands radically apart from it [i.e., messianism is present at the beginning of the world turned inside out, but not at the end: displacement makes it impossible] … History will stop [after the fulfilment of messianic promises] – an idea entirely alien to the Exodus text, which almost seem designed to teach that the promises will never definitely be fulfilled, that backsliding and struggle are permanent features of human existence. And even if the promises were fulfilled, the result would still be a holy community living in historical time, its citizens farming the land, waiting for the rain, watching for foreign enemies, celebrating the seventh day and the seventh year and the jubilee.25

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Later Walzer concludes that, compared with political messianism, “Exodus makes for a cautious and moderate politics.”26 But the defining distinction is not about moderation. It is about displacement. Exodus and displacement as method, thus, result in a new type of governance: The government of the promised land is to be a kingdom without a king … There is no Leader and no hereditary line of leaders. This crucial idea is deeply embedded in the biblical text … This in any case was the message of the biblical text: the charismatic leader is not enough; the traditionalist structure of the tribes is not adequate to the new laws; so a new government must be worked out in the wilderness – a government for the wilderness and for the promised land as well.27 That is, a new form of government for the frontier and for the settler society to come. Crucially, the new government (and the new sovereignty that will subtend it) are place-specific: they can only happen elsewhere.

• Walzer was talking from within a settler-colonial political tradition and was consistent in finding in Exodus a “realistic,” secular paradigm for “radical politics.” He was reflecting on the possibility of “liberation,” “against oppression,” and ultimately justified in concluding that “it is possible to trace a continuous history from the Exodus to the radical politics of our own time.”28 The world turned inside out does constitute an autonomous and long-lasting political tradition – settlers are indeed realistic radicals (literally so, as they by definition strike roots – radices in Latin). Walzer, in that particular phase, could be seen as a public intellectual facing a circumstance when the disappearance of revolution as an option during the Reagan years forces a search for alternatives. Many others had performed a similar trajectory in other eras and in similar circumstances (as I outline in my work on the evolution of the world turned inside out): if the world turned inside out is an alternative to revolution, this is either because revolution is impossible or because it is undesirable. But “radical” and “exclusive” are not necessarily mutually

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exclusive propositions (especially when it comes to intentional communities and other volitional collectivities). On the contrary, Said’s advocacy for a post-Orientalist dispensation was premised on a stubbornly humanist approach – if displacement begets exclusion, a Canaanite perspective (much like its obverse, the perspective of exile, which remains a much more known topic of the Saidian reflection)29 is inherently universalist (much unlike its companion, an indigenist/nativist perspective, which is also exclusive). The people of Exodus move toward their country and nation-state, the people of exile dwell permanently in someone else’s country and defy the nation-state (with good reason). The collective constituted by exodus is before it is before the land. A Canaanite perspective, on the contrary, emerges after it (“after” should be here understood both in the sense of successive to, and in the sense of resulting from). Likewise, Said famously said that exile is a “permanent” state; exodus, on the other hand, is by definition temporary, both in the sense of a phase that is to be succeeded by another, and in the sense of a state that is located in an ordered narrative sequence structured by a teleology.30 Exile is not Exodus; we are clear on this. As noted, Said was not enmeshed in settler colonialism, even though his exile was a product of it, unlike Walzer, who belonged in a settler society (the United States) and consistently supported another (Israel). That is why Said could see it so well, as his rejoinder to Walzer’s book testifies. He was forcibly removed from Palestine, the site of a settlercolonial project, but Palestine was not removed from him. Likewise, he was “Palestinian-American,” but never simply “American,” never a settler; he was in a settler society but never of one. And he was among very few in the Palestinian leadership who recognized the implications of a specific threat; his opposition to the “Oslo Process,” which was not in Oslo and turned out not to be a process, was indeed premised on an understanding of Zionism as settler colonialism, on settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination, and on the insight that the discourse of “opposing nationalisms” and associated symmetries actively obfuscated the intolerable exclusions associated with one specific instance of the “politics of Exodus.”31 Said begins by noting that Walzer’s position is not unprecedented (even if he does not use my terms to identify the tradition Walzer belonged to).32 It is not unprecedented (Said’s opposition against the

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Exodus story wasn’t unprecedented in the context of the Palestinian nationalist critique either), and it is also irredeemably particular.33 Said’s critique of Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution remarks its confusion of biblical and Western history: “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution … is principally a contemporary reading of the Old Testament story. Yet it also touches on revolutionary politics and biblical and narrative interpretation; and it refers to the relationship between secular and religious realms, between ‘paradigms’ and actual events, between a particularly Jewish and a more generally Western history.”34 “Particularly” and “generally” does not mean universally (Walzer, on the other hand saw the United States as “universal”). Confusing particularity and generality, Walzer faithfully reproduced his sources, and Said emphasizes this conflation. The Bible is not necessarily a settlercolonial text, but settlers before, during, and after the global “settler revolution” saw in it a text they could definitely use.35 Besides its particularity, Said also notices that the location of this politics depended on its foundational narratives’ linear shape. Walzer used texts and interpretations produced by seventeenth-century Protestant radicals drawing upon divine authority for “radical hope” and the need for a “worldly endeavor,” but which world they were talking about remained unclear (for settlers, people who have a “home” here and also somewhere else, a most interesting proposition, this ambivalence is normal).36 Is it this place or another? “The essential lines of Walzer’s argument are quickly rehearsed. Unlike narratives of recurrence and return, the Exodus story is linear, Walzer says, and moves from bondage and oppression in Egypt, through the wanderings in Sinai, to the Promised Land.”37 It is a distinctive feature of settler colonialism as a mode of domination that settlers envisage no return; they express an animus manendi that defines the political collectives they constitute. Said then notes how Walzer recognizes in Exodus an “original form of progressive history.”38 But “progressive” here is understood in strictly literal terms, definitely below the threshold of a metaphorical understanding of the term (“below” and “threshold” are used here deliberately in the context of an analysis that prioritizes political geometry). Progress that is limited to the spatial understanding of the term is essentially nondialectical. Said remarks that none of the authors Walzer used were revolutionaries (they were theorizing the world turned inside out as an alternative to

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revolution, and so was Walzer). Said’s was a Marxian, even though not a Marxist response. If it isn’t revolution, what is it? Said notes how Walzer builds his argument on what he defines as “the Jewish account of deliverance and the political theory of liberation”: “Specific to both of these is the covenant, which in the Old Testament is made with God but which Walzer reinterprets as ‘a founding act’ that creates ‘a people’ and the possibility of a politics without precedent in [the people’s] own experience.”39 Which it is: “[m]ore advantages of the covenant are that ‘the people’ become a ‘moral agent.’” Thus for this people, “solidarity with the oppressed is a moral obligation.”40 But this solidarity, as noted, is premised on a type of membership that is attributed as a preliminary act. Hence, this political form produces a type of settler-colonial egalitarianism that is consistent with exclusion. Walzer’s main point, as Said remarks, is that the culmination of Exodus in “the attainment of a Promised Land is really the birth of a new polity, one that admits its members to a communal politics of participation.”41 A politics of participation can be “democratic” and even “radical,” but its exclusivity makes a Canaanite reading absolutely necessary (as Slavoj Žižek would note later, “democratic” and “exclusive,” rather than opposed to each other, are actually closely related).42 But while this polity can never be what it claims to be, its ability to displace revolutionary tension or defeat makes it appealing. Said is aware of the power of settler-colonial narratives: “Walzer’s readers are likely at first to go along with many of his suggestive, rather than exhaustive, arguments because they are, I think, inherently attractive.”43 Said calls this vision “[h]omey, egalitarian, melioristic” (which is as good a definition as any of a settler-colonial regime).44 Walzer spoke from within a political tradition; Said called him out (“in” and “out” are here used deliberately – the understanding of political geometry that underpins his criticism should be emphasized; after all, “orientation” and “Orientalism” share a common etymology). Said’s deconstruction of Walzer’s argument proceeded with an emphasis on the “many extremely severe excisions and restrictions [that] have occurred in order to produce the calmly civilized world of Walzer’s Exodus,” and its politics.45 He remarks: “Walzer’s political and moral study is addressed to us ‘in the West’ and his prose is dotted with us’s and ours, the net result of which is to mobilize a community of

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interpretation.”46 This community is an exclusive one – it constitutes itself not by inclusion, but through a series of foundationally exclusive acts. It is also a possessive community.47 It is not that Said merely disagreed with Walzer; he fundamentally disagreed: unlike the Orientalist scholarship he had criticized in his famous book, the tradition that Walzer espoused was implicitly rather than explicitly Orientalist. It was in many ways more dangerous than its counterpart, as it operated through a “logic of elimination” rather than through the ongoing reassertion of “rule of colonial difference.”48 Said, therefore, emphasizes the genocidal implications of Exodus, indeed, its genocidal explications, “the injunction laid on the Jews by God to exterminate their opponents.” Walzer “seems unperturbed,” Said notes, that for the Jews of Exodus “the Canaanites are explicitly excluded from the world of moral concern.”49 Walzer avoided this fundamental issue. But how could he? The typical response is that avoidance is unavoidable, that victimization in one locale makes the violence that inevitably accompanies displacement urgent and justifiable: victimisation in one locale forces a violent exodus towards another. But Said knows that this is not so, and that the politics of exodus are necessarily preemptive. He emphasizes how even the biblical texts stresses that the Jews were not oppressed in Egypt, that “they had possession therein, and grew, and multiplied exceedingly,” and that the Pharaoh had originally welcomed the Israelites.50 “Communities of interpretation,” that is, covenantal communities that move across space in order to constitute a political community, are by definition endowed of an inherent constituent ability. They are not migrants, who by definition must recognize sovereign orders that are already constituted. Migrants to Egypt, settler colonists to the Promised Land. Said’s criticism of Walzer does not focus specifically on settler colonialism as a mode of domination. The world turned inside out/ settler-colonial analytics were only implicit in this exchange (and yet, as I hope I have demonstrated, the settler-colonial analytics can help make sense of it). And yet, Said was not unaware of the settlercolonial uses of Exodus: “Similarly, he avers, ‘the original conquest and occupation’ of the land plays only ‘a small part’ in Exodus politics. It is difficult to know here what Walzer is talking about, so anxious is he to disconnect from, and yet connect with, the essential parts of Exodus that have inspired the text’s later users, from Indian-killing Puritans in

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New England to South African Boers claiming large swathces [sic] of territory held by Blacks.”51 Simultaneously disconnecting from, and connecting with, can only be premised on spatial displacement. Said knew about the fundamental difference between a settler-colonial polity that, even under liberal and egalitarian or radical regimes, works by way of co-optation and exclusion, and a polity that is established in a revolutionary, universalist, and humanist way. Against Walzer’s particularist, nonrevolutionary, exclusive, and genocidal politics of Exodus, Said restated a revolutionary and post-Orientalist perspective. His humanism was to be a “usable praxis for intellectuals and academics.”52 A Canaanite perspective enabled this praxis.

• Walzer’s “exodus”/covenantal politics, and Said’s demolition are premised on the contradiction pitting two mutually exclusive options. Particularism and universalism cannot coexist simultaneously, but as far as Walzer was concerned they could do so spatially, side by side. The Walzer-Said exchange was premised on talking about different locations, but also about when they are. The political traditions of settler colonialism (i.e., exodus politics) are often born in a critique of oppressive political regimes in one place as they then exclude Indigenous Peoples from the “world of moral concern” in an act of foundational violence in another. They aim to displace, it is something that will or is happening, but in the case of Said displacement has already happened, it is a traumatic event that is firmly located in the past. Said’s exile “negates the existence of a destination, a Holy Land,” he prefers an exilic existence more than the rootedness that follows exodus.53 “Better our wanderings, I sometimes think, than the horrid clanging shutters of their return.”54 Walzer was talking from within a settler-colonial political tradition, and proposing a “realistic, secular paradigm for ‘radical politics’,” that was “about liberation and against oppression” and that “it is possible to trace a continuous history from the Exodus to the radical politics of our own time.”55 This covenantal tradition can have reactionary as well as radical outcomes, but it isn’t revolutionary.56 Said responded that “Vico, Marx, Michelet, Gramsci, Fanon either mention Exodus not at

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all or only in passing,” and that many “Black and Central American theorists do mention it; but a great many more do not,” and concludes that Walzer is “deeply and symptomatically anti-Marxist.”57 Said was spot on, but did not proceed to identify it as an instance of an autonomous and long-lasting political tradition: the world turned inside out. Exile, unlike exodus, does not displace revolution; it is often a means to a revolutionary end. Exile is often a revolutionary choice that endures displacement as it simultaneously rejects it. In exile, the eye remains fixed on the motherland. The latter does not move. In the case of exodus, the homeland travels with the exodees, it is a portable homeland: the exile moves back, the settler moves forward, he or she has programmatically given up on the old land. Walzer’s book may have been entitled “Exodus or revolution”; Said’s response could have been “Exile and revolution.” Walzer’s exodus, considering his ongoing support for Zionism would advocate for a “return” to Palestine as much as Said’s exile would, but these “returns” are structurally different. There is no symmetry in the struggle over Palestine. One return is an alternative to revolution, and the other is a fulfilment of it. It is in this sense that the Walzer-Said exchange can be seen as being specifically about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the grip the Zionist narrative held on US policy in the mid1980s.58 Settler-colonial identification, more than biblical interpretation, was and is crucial to US unquestioning support for Israel.59 The exodus option is still proposed today as a possibility, and it is still offered as a revolutionary choice. Walzer’s logic has followers, and it seems a pity that honest thinking about the political implications of colonialism has globally atrophied in recent years. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have recently engaged with the world turned inside out. Defeated or former revolutionaries often are. They advocate a politics of subtraction rather than seizure. And they advocate exodus: “The multitude must flee the family, the corporation and the nation but at the same time build on the promises of the common they mobilize.” Fleeing requires mobility, and so does the mobilization of new commons. It will be a “process of subtraction from capital and the construction of autonomy”; for them “exodus is the primary form class struggle takes today.”60 Elsewhere, Negri acknowledges that the commons that may be established on some frontier may have a cost, but decides to disregard it (he wouldn’t be the one paying for it):

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Let’s not cry over the Indians, whose civilization and savage independence are sacrificed to freedom [on the frontier, which Negri recognizes as a site of “constituent power”]. In this [i.e., when we cry over the sacrifice of Indigenous life and sovereignty] we see only the symptom of a more universal heteronomy of effects, the symptom of a revolution blocked in its concept, of a process of liberation that becomes a process of destruction, of a principle of freedom that becomes a principle of oppression.61 I would really like to hear how Said would have responded; perhaps he would have written another demolition issued from a Canaanite perspective. If revolution is no longer an option, the world turned inside out persists. We need all the Canaanite strength we can muster. Notes 1 Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Edward Said, “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading,” in Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, eds. Edward W. Said and Christopher Hitchens (London: Verso, 1988), 161–78; also published as Edward W. Said, “Michael Walzer’s ‘Exodus and Revolution’: A Canaanite Reading,” Grand Street 5, no. 2 (1986): 86–106. 2 Lorenzo Veracini, The World Turned Inside Out: The Political Imagination of Settler Colonialism (London: Verso, 2021). See also Gabriel Piterberg, Lorenzo Veracini, “Wakefield, Marx and the World Turned Inside Out,” Journal of Global History 10, no. 3 (2015): 457–78; Lorenzo Veracini, “Ian Turner’s The Australian Dream and Australia’s ‘Settler Transition’,” Journal of Australian Studies 40, no. 3 (2016): 302–18; Lorenzo Veracini, “Displacement as Method: Seasteading, Tiny Houses, and ‘Freemen on the Land,’” in Unbounding Housing: Intersections in Economics, Environment and Politics in Australia, eds. Nicole Cook, Louise Crabtree and Aidan Davidson (London: Routledge, 2016), 134–50; Lorenzo Veracini, “Postcolonial Garibaldi?,” Modern Italy 24, no. 1 (2019): 99–112; Lorenzo Veracini, “Displaced: John Mulgan’s Man Alone and Guido Morselli’s The Communist,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 38, no. 1 (2020): 84–104; Lorenzo Veracini, “Henry Carey’s ‘Entire Bad Joke’ and Henry George’s ‘Idle Taunt’: Displacement and Revolution in Nineteenth Century America,” Settler Colonial Studies 10, no. 3 (2020): 422–41.

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3 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London: Penguin, 1984 [1972]). 4 See Amy Kaplan, “Zionism as Anticolonialism: The Case of Exodus,” American Literary History 25, no. 4 (2013): 870–95. 5 Carole Pateman, “The Settler Contract,” in Contract and Domination, by Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 35–78; Donald Harman Akenson, God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel and Ulster (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 6 Anthony Smith’s authoritative work on the “chosen peoples” highlights the capacity of covenantal forms “for mobilizing and motivating community and states … through a sacred communion of the elect.” “Mobilizing” here should be understood literally. Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 77. 7 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 8 Cited in Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, “Introduction: Emancipation and Representation,” in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, eds. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 5. 9 See Lorenzo Veracini, “Historylessness: Australia as a Settler Colonial Collective,” Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 3 (2007): 271–85. 10 Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 10–11. 11 Ibid., 14. 12 Emphasis added. Ibid., 17. 13 In The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993) Sacvan Bercovitch famously noted in American culture a consistent tendency “to displace radical alternatives with an indigenous tradition of reform” (19). One significant element of “this form of cultural work” is that it metaphorically displaces radical alternatives by way of proposing a literal displacement. 14 Emphasis added. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 32–3. 15 Emphasis added. Ibid., 40. 16 Ibid., 63. 17 Louis Hartz, ed., The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1964). 18 See Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent. Even if Bercovitch was talking about the Puritan experience in New England, he consistently maintained a comparative outlook. 19 Emphasis added. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 68–9.

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Ibid., 74–5. Emphasis added. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 105, 107. Ibid., 115–16. Ibid., 117. Emphasis added. Ibid., 119–20. Ibid., 147. Emphasis added. Ibid., 126–7. Said, “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution,” 167–8. See Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Bashir Abu-Manneh, ed., After Said: Postcolonial Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Edward Said, “The Mind of Winter: Reflections on a Life in Exile,” Harper’s Magazine 269 (1984): 49–55. His writings on this topic were collected in Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (New York: Random House, 2000). On the relationship between Exodus and revolution there is a wide literature, and Said referred to Lewis Feuer, Ideology and the Ideologists (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975). Said, “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution,” 163. See Aziz S. Sahwell, Exodus: A Distortion of Truth (New York: Arab Information Center, 1960). On the narrative grip the Exodus story holds over US public discourse, see Amy Kaplan, “Zionism as Anticolonialism.” Said, “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution,” 161. On the relationship between the origins of biblical text in settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination, see Pekka Pitkänen, A Commentary on Numbers: Narrative, Ritual, and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2017). On the global “settler revolution,” see James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). For a long tradition of American pseudo-biblical writing (including, for example, The Book of Mormon), see Eran Shalev, American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). See Gérard Bouchard, The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008). Said, “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution,” 161. Ibid. Ibid., 162. Ibid. Ibid. See Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (London: Verso, 2003), 187. Žižek refers to Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XVII, and its emphasis on “the

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49 50 51

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link between the rule of post-revolutionary fraternité and the logic of segregation.” Said, “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution,” 161, 163. Ibid., 163. Ibid., 164. Emphasis added. Ibid., 165. Harry Berger Junior distinguishes between “possessive nomadism” and “customary nomadism” (the latter type is the nomadism of people that intend to continue their movement); see Harry Berger Jr, “The Lie of the Land: The Text beyond Canaan,” Representations 25 (1989): 119–38, and especially 134–5. Berger focuses specifically on Exodus, which “sets the tent against the house, nomadism against agriculture, the wilderness against Canaan, wandering and exile against settlement, diaspora against the political integrity of the settled state,” and on its “antiroyalism” (123). See Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409; Partha Chatterjee, “The Colonial State,” in The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Partha Chatterjee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 14–34. See Said, “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution,” 166–7. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 166–7. But it is an interpretative question, and the biblical text, and Exodus in particular, can support migrant narratives as well as settlercolonial ones. They are all premised on displacement but are not the same. See, for example, Efraín Agosto and Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, “Introduction: Reading the Bible and Latinx Migrations/the Bible as Text(s) of Migration,” in Latinxs, the Bible, and Migration, eds. Efraín Agosto and Jacqueline M. Hidalgo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 1–19. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 7. Iskandar and Rustom, “Introduction,” 6. Said cited in Iskandar and Rustom, “Introduction,” 7. Said, “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution,” 167–8. Donald Harman Akenson’s analysis of Ulster’s covenant of 1912 brings this to the fore. “On 23 September 1912,” he notes, “more than 218,000 men – virtually the entire adult male Protestant population of Ulster – signed ‘Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant.’” This Protestant population was constituted by exodus and structured its polity as a preemptively counterrevolutionary move: 1912 precedes 1916. Akenson, God’s Peoples, 3. Said, “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution,” 167–8. See, for example, Amy Kaplan, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). Palestinian

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intellectuals had already understood that this was a crucial site for the expression of a Zionist hegemony. See, for example, Fayez Sayegh, “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012 [1965]): 206–25; and Maurice Jr. M. Labelle, “‘The American People Know So Little’: The Palestine Arab Refugee Office and the Challenge of Anti-Orientalism in the United States, 1955–1962,” Mashriq & Mahjar 5, no. 2 (2018): 78–104. 59 Lorenzo Veracini, “Interacting Imaginaries in Israel and the United States,” in Edward Said: Debating the Legacy of a Public Intellectual, eds. Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguly (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 293–312. 60 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 164. 61 Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and The Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 188.

PART THREE Post-Orientalism after Edward Said

6

Can the Subaltern of the Subaltern Speak? A Post-Orientalist Reading of Sayyid Qutb’s Notion of Hierarchy Rachad Antonius

What do the discourses of Sayyid Qutb, Youssef Al-Qaradawi, and Wagdi Ghoneim and the tensions in the villages of Upper Egypt tell us about Orientalism and post-Orientalism? How to interpret them? And with what conceptual tools? Orientalism (the book) was part of a much broader movement of decolonization that set its sights on culture. The latter quickly morphed into a research and militant agenda framed by several complementary theoretical paradigms: postcolonial studies, subaltern studies, etc. Its focus was the study of the cultural dimension of domination and oppression, as seen by the once-dominated people, the subaltern. The term “subaltern,” first defined to designate the dominated masses in India, resonated across the globe and was extended to designate the victims of colonization. The present chapter is an illustration, in one specific area, of how the methods of anti-Orientalist critique have travelled. It shows both the power of the method, as it is applied to a different level of domination, and its limitations. The anti-Orientalist critique mostly thinks of domination as being colonial domination, overlooking the fact that locally, a colonized culture can have its own subalterns, a dimension usually overlooked by now “classical” approaches of decolonization studies. This boomerang is not thrown back with “intellectual and emotional might in the opposite direction” (see introduction), but rather thrown back gently, as a mirror image, at potential allies who fail to see the second level of subalternity for reasons that are explained below.

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More explicitly, this paper explores a blind spot within antiracist paradigms rooted in the critique of Orientalism and subaltern studies. This blind spot concerns one aspect of the politics of difference, the relationships of domination based on religious identity in subaltern societies, and in particular in Muslim societies. I am referring to the concept of “subaltern” as defined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Citing Ranajit Guha, Spivak explains: “The terms ‘people’ and ‘subaltern classes’ have been used as synonymous throughout this note. The social groups and elements included in this category represent the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the ‘elite.’”1 These terms have been extended to cover all colonized people, excluding the elites of these colonized people, as the latter participate in global hegemonic power. This definition is dichotomic. The people in Muslim societies who have been subjected to colonization are thus among the subaltern groups. The dominant discourse of colonialism has seen them through the prism of Orientalism. Challenging these views, antiracist scholarship has developed anti-colonialist, anti-Orientalist representations of Muslim societies, seeing their members as subjects and listening to their voices, as expressed through literature, the arts, and of course politics. In this process, one aspect of this discourse emerging from a subaltern society has been overlooked: Can these subaltern societies have their own subalterns, who may be subject to processes of exclusion and discrimination by the dominant local group, which is itself the first-level subalternity? Asking the question in these terms introduces a notion of layers of subalternity, which means that a subaltern group may itself function locally as a dominant majority and exclude some of its minorities from the benefits of equal treatment. But given the globalized context of relationships of domination, the position of subaltern of the subaltern is more complex because the dominant powers at the global level may try to instrumentalize the minority status of the second-level subaltern in order to weaken the first-level subaltern. As a result, the demands of the second-level subalterns for full equality become delegitimized via instrumentalization. Can we address issues of exclusion and privilege within subaltern Muslim societies with the prism of intersectionality articulated by

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Kimberlé Crenshaw and others?2 I will claim that these conceptual tools are not sufficient to explore the full range and the full meaning of the relations of domination within dominated societies. To the extent that certain important political trends in these dominated societies see themselves as dominant majorities, some aspects of the relationship of domination between Muslim majorities and their minorities cannot be addressed adequately with these two paradigms. I will argue that, within Muslim societies, the political trends subsumed under the general term “Islamism” produce an ideological discourse that can be qualified as a supremacist discourse. I define Islamism as including the various political trends that seek to place the Islamic dogma and belief system at the heart of their political project. Such a discourse theorizes and justifies domination and privilege for the local majority (including its sexual, class, and ethnic minorities) and exclusion for non-Muslim minorities, which are perceived to lie outside the collective identity of the Ummah, but tolerated nevertheless with magnanimity. I claim that this is true at least for the Arab brand of political Islam.

• In its most radical manifestations, political Islam is the expression of an identity-based, supremacist movement, with religious references.3 It is an identity-based movement to the extent that the political options that it proposes are based on a definition of the dominant group, the Ummah, by its religious identity and not by reference to a territory or to a nation-state. The political choices that are put forward by Islamists political currents are presented as the only ones that truly express the identity of the Ummah and its interests. Islamists political trends are generally supremacist as they conceive the relationship with non-Muslim societies and non-Muslim minorities in a hierarchical way. They explicitly affirm their morally superior position and the subaltern position of non-Muslims, and they call for a political order in which this moral hierarchy is transformed into a political hierarchy. The political movements that adopt such identity-based, supremacist political views are the Muslim equivalent of the extreme right-wing in European contexts. It is this far-right, religiously justified ideology and its political trends that give the global Islamist movement its coherence

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and strength, as well as the financial and political means that allow it to expand. The social order envisaged by the various tendencies within this movement is diversified, but it presents three common characteristics: the hierarchy between Muslims and non-Muslims that it theorizes and promotes with insistence; its religious-identity dimension, which can be compared to far-right identity-based nationalism; and the neo-liberal orientation that underlies its most important factions. Its social manifestations encompass to varying degrees these three dimensions. Of particular interest is the notion of hierarchy in this ideology. Radical Islamist movements establish a double moral hierarchy: a hierarchy between Muslim societies and other societies on the one hand and a hierarchy between Muslim individuals and non-Muslims in Muslim societies on the other. And they aim to translate this moral hierarchy into political terms and to include them in constitutions and laws, which is what makes many of them far-right supremacist movements. As for mainstream Islamist movements, we will see through one of their most important spokespersons that they incorporate this moral hierarchy in their worldview, but are more pragmatic when it comes to implementation.

• Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) theorized this hierarchy by drawing on the opposition between the concepts of hakimiyyah and jahiliyyah. Qutb is a central figure of contemporary Islamism. According to William Shepard, “Both as a writer and as a martyr he has been a major influence on the Islamic ‘resurgence,’ which began shortly after his death.”4 For his part, Olivier Carré believes that his masterpiece, Fi zilal al Qur’an (In the Shadow of the Qur’an), is “a work that will undoubtedly still mark generations of Muslims of all trends around the world.”5 Not only are his works (and in particular Milestones6) widely distributed, read, and commented on, but a large number of studies have been devoted to him. He is considered one of the most important thinkers of militant Islamism. The number of recently published research papers that are devoted to Qutb’s thought bear witness to that importance. The influence of his conception of the ideal social order for Muslim societies has reached far beyond militant circles, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood.

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The concept of hakimiyyah, introduced in contemporary political Islam by Abu A’la Al Mawdudi and developed further by Sayyid Qutb, outlines that only the laws attributed to God and specifically included in the Qur’an can be invoked to regulate human societies. Hadiths can help interpret them or extend them to areas that are not explicitly mentioned in the Qur’an. But any pretense by human beings of wanting to legislate is a usurpation of a divine prerogative. It constitutes a deification of the human being and thus a negation of the unicity of God. The true Muslim society is one that is ruled by hakimiyyah and nothing else. This notion is a central principle in the conception of “democracy” as understood and propagated by Islamist currents, which gives a whole different meaning to the notion of democracy, stripping it from its most essential features. For Islamist currents that refer to the notion of hakimiyyah, democracy should have only one function: to designate by ballot who will have the responsibility to enforce the law of God and not to designate who will establish the law. The notion of a legislature is therefore null and void. But these currents differ from each other in the degree of rigidity in their interpretation of the notion of hakimiyyah. For Salafists, it is central. The Muslim Brotherhood has tended to mute it or even soften its interpretation in a pragmatic way. In Muslim-majority countries, when Islamists parties agree to participate in the electoral process, they tend to make it clear that it is only a step to reach the moment when the balance of power will change and the principle of hakimiyyah can be fully implemented. But let us not forget that a pragmatic trend within the movement of the Muslim Brotherhood is trying, as best it can, to truly reconcile the principles of democracy with a flexible adherence to the norms derived from the sacred text. This can bring its members to implicitly reject the notion of hakimiyyah. The occurrence of the term jahiliyyah is rare in the Qur’an. It appears only four times, to oppose the morality proposed by the Qur’an to that of pre-Islamic societies, described as jahiliyyah.7 It thus has a twofold connotation: a historical one (it designates the historical period that preceded the revelation of Islam), and a pejorative moral connotation (it describes a state of ignorance, which is morally inferior and should not be imitated). A moral hierarchy is thus established between the behaviour recommended by Islam and the behaviour of the preIslamic society, which is ignorant. By extension, Muslim society and its normative system are considered morally superior to pre-Islamic

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societies. This is not specific to Islam: all religions assume that their normative system is superior to others. However, the contemporary re-actualization of the concept of jahiliyyah by Sayyid Qutb and its transposition into the political domain in plural societies has given it a clearly supremacist meaning. Qutb expanded its meaning beyond the concept’s original historical meaning. The concept of jahiliyyah is crucial in Qutb’s thinking, as is the concept of hakimiyyah to which it is opposed. Being taken up from the Qur’an and supported by verses, the concept of jahiliyyah acquires a discursive power that allows it to play a major ideological role. In Milestones, written in the early 1960s, Qutb states: The jahili society is any society other than the Muslim society; and if we want a more specific definition, we may say that any society is a jahili society which does not dedicate itself to submission to God alone, in its beliefs and ideas in its observances of worship, and in its legal regulations. According to this definition, all the societies existing in the world today are jahili.8 He also believed that even contemporary Muslim societies did not deserve to be called “Muslim”: Lastly, all the existing so-called “Muslim” societies are also jahili societies. We classify them among jahili societies not because they believe in other deities besides God or because they worship anyone other than God, but because their way of life is not based on submission to God alone. Although they believe in the Unity of God, still they have relegated the legislative attribute of God to others and submit to this authority, and from this authority they derive their systems, their traditions and customs, their laws, their values and standards, and almost every practice of life.9 In other words, according to this view, in a Muslim society, it is not enough to believe in one God. Individuals must also believe that only the law of God, as revealed in the Qur’an, must be the foundation of the social and political order. The requirement of belief in the unicity of

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God is thus extended to the uniqueness of the normative system of a society, which must have a single source, Sharia. This is close to the Wahhabi conception of unicity: any human contribution to the systems of governance or laws of a country contradicts the unicity of God if it is not entirely inspired by Sharia and by Sharia alone. People, let alone governments, cannot determine which laws govern their own society: it would be a way of substituting oneself for God. Societies can only apply the laws that result from Sharia, and the enunciation of new laws is permitted only in areas not explicitly mentioned in the Qur’an, provided they are fully compatible with the other provisions of the Qur’an. If a society applies this conception of unicity of God, it can consider itself Muslim. This is what will bring about the ideal Muslim society and distinguish it from jahili societies and will make it morally superior. This idea made its way into the Islamist movement and beyond. Islamist groups focus their mobilization work on a “re-Islamization” of society from the bottom up, without excluding re-Islamization from the top down, by taking power if possible. This strategy has been largely documented in the literature. We interpret this new religiosity as a way of re-Islamizing society by putting religious normativity at the heart of social life and at the center of individual concerns. This is not to say that religion was not important in Arab Muslim societies before the “Islamic awakening.” Rather, it means that the modalities of being religious have changed deeply, and that the strict adherence to the religious norms and rituals has tended to replace a more serene interpretion of what it is to be “a good Muslim.” Qutb is very clear on what distinguishes Muslim society from jahiliyya societies. His views do not concern political power and systems of government alone, but also morality and everyday behaviour: “The Islamic society is, by its very nature, the only civilized society, and the jahili societies, in all their various forms, are backward societies … Beyond all these, we arrive at ‘human’ values and morals and at animalistic values and morals, this being the correct separation or, in Islamic terminology, Islamic values and morals and jahili’ values and morals.”10 The concept of “animalistic values” used in Qutb’s thinking is a fundamental element that justifies the hierarchy among societies and the superior position attributed to Muslim society in this hierarchy. “Human” morality and the civilized character of societies are attributed to the truly Islamic societies. The others are described, in comparison,

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as “backward,” carrying “animalistic” values and morality. The notion of “animalistic values” should not go unnoticed. It occurs on several occasions in Milestones, when talking about non-Muslim societies. This notion is one of the elements on which white supremacist discourse is built. It is a crucial dimension of the supremacist discourse, which compares the racialized “other” with animals. This is one of the criteria that allows us to consider Qutb’s discourse about non-Muslims to be a supremacist discourse. Since the beginning of political emancipation from direct colonial rule, after World War II, various movements and Islamist political parties have mobilized to put Sharia at the heart of the constitutions of Arab countries. The social and political aspects of this return to Sharia is better understood when put in the context of the opposition between hakimiyyah and jahiliyyah. The reference to the concept of hakimiyyah structures these calls to implement Sharia. Qutb has developed these views by linking them to the issue of moral superiority.

• For Qutb, Muslim societies must completely disconnect from the normative systems attributed to jahiliyyah, without any compromise. He sets the conditions for living in peace with non-Muslim societies: It may happen that the enemies of Islam may consider it expedient not to take any action against Islam, if Islam leaves them alone in their geographical boundaries … But Islam cannot agree to this unless they submit to its authority by paying Jiziyah, which will be a guarantee that they have opened their doors for the preaching of Islam and will not put any obstacle in its way through the power of the state … Jihad in Islam is simply a name for striving to make this system of life dominant in the world … Islam cannot accept any mixing with Jahiliyyah, either in its concept or in the modes of living which are derived from this concept. Either Islam will remain, or Jahiliyyah: Islam cannot accept or agree to a situation which is half-Islam and half-Jahiliyyah.11 According to Olivier Carré, Qutb believes that the attitude that Islam prescribes towards Jews and Christians in a Muslim society is a

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sign of great tolerance because these groups are accepted despite their hostility towards Islam.12 Qutb wants to reinstate the Jizya, the personal tax paid by the “people of the book” to the Islamic power in exchange for their protection. To put it more succinctly, the social order desired by Qutb is attributed to the divine will. It is based on a set of rules that must govern relations between individuals in society. But the status of the individuals, their rights, the relations that can be maintained with them, do not depend on their status as citizens: they depend on their belonging or not to the community of believers. And if they are not Muslims, or if they are not “good” Muslims, they do not have the same political and social rights and privileges as the rest of believers in an Islamic society. In his writings, Qutb articulates his vision of relations with nonMuslims in Muslim societies, reducing them to the status of subaltern who are tolerated, with an acute self-conscious sense of magnanimity towards them. This is indeed a supremacist view. His vision of relations with other societies must also be qualified as “supremacist,” because he articulates a political vision through which he wants to transform his feelings of moral superiority towards them into a political order that subjects these other societies to the power of righteous believers, including on their own territory. In addition, these views presuppose an essentialization of identities, that of Muslims first, which he conjugates in the singular. In his most important writings, he treats Islam as a moral person: “Islam cannot agree …,” “if Islam leaves them alone …,” and so on. It is not the political parties, or the political movements, or the Muslim societies, that are the social agents. For him, “Islam” is the social and political agent. This is an essentialization worthy of the most Orientalist of the Orientalists! The identity of non-Muslims is also reduced to one dimension, that of jahiliyyah. When he speaks of Christians or Jews in Muslim societies, there is an ahistorization of relations, as if the Christians of today are the same as those of fourteen centuries ago. “They” refers to all Christians, independently of their political or national affiliation, and independently of the century they lived in. And “they” must be submitted to the jiziah today because “they” were hostile to Islam fourteen centuries ago. The jiziah is the symbol and the means of their submission. We find here all the characteristics that theoreticians of racism attribute to the ideology of dominant groups. In this ideology, differentiation

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and hierarchy are intimately intertwined. In his Sociologie des relations interethniques et des minorités, Pierre-Jean Simon writes: “the two terms, differenciation and hierarchy, must be taken together, as an indissociable conceptual couple. We do not have difference on one side and hierarchy on the other.”13 In Qutb’s thought, these two concepts are indeed intertwined. The difference between Muslims and non-Muslims is first established on the basis of creed, and it is considered to be absolutely fundamental. The non-Muslims – “they” – are radically different because they do not believe in the same normative system as “us” (the Muslims). We, the Muslims, are distinguished by the fact that we apply the law of God, which differentiates us from them. On the basis of this difference, Qutb places the true Muslims in a higher moral position, which must be transformed into a hierarchical political position in order to make the ideal society happen. Qutb says explicitly that “Islam” should be dominant. Muslims, in Qutb’s view, have to work to make that welldeserved domination happen. Qutb’s conceptions are important on at least two counts. First, because of the intellectual leadership role he ended up playing on a global scale in the Islamist movement, not only among Salafists and jihadists, but also within the movement of the Muslim Brotherhood and beyond. It must be emphasized that his intellectual production is part of a larger movement, which he certainly contributed to, but whose expansion cannot be explained only by Qutb’s influence. There is a convergence of factors that have given the movement its current strength and presence. One cannot, therefore, attribute to his thought a role as principal causal factor. But it expresses the movement well, and the latter recognizes Qutb’s influence. Some Salafist leaders, such as Wagdi Ghoneim, for example, who is very close to the Muslim Brotherhood at the ideological level (conceptions of the world and the interest of the Islamic Ummah) but critical of their political choices, articulate the same conceptions of the relationships with non-Muslims as Sayyid Qutb. And we should not downplay the importance of the Salafi current in Arab societies, which has obtained, for example, more than 25 per cent of the votes in the legislative elections that took place in Egypt after the 2011 uprisings. Its strength varies among the various Arab countries, but it is definitely an important social factor.

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But the influence of Qutb is played on another level too. The goal of re-Islamizing Muslim societies, by bringing them closer to the Qur’anic literal reading and reproducing the social and normative behaviours of Arab society in the early years of Islam, is shared by a majority within the Islamist movement. Many groups, political parties and individuals within this movement are working to realize a society governed by hakimiyyah. The supremacist relationship with non-Muslims is not always expressed openly. For some, it is not even part of their conception of Islam. But, by working to set up a society governed by hakimiyyah, they participate in the establishment of the higher pole in this hierarchical relationship. Their action sits well with the ideological trend initiated by Qutb, and consequently, it strengthens it. It must be said that, in the history of Muslim societies, attitudes of intolerance such as the ones that have been theorized as Qutb are not frequent. When they occur, it is during periods of intense political conflicts. Muslim societies have generally been tolerant towards non-Muslims, even though this tolerance presupposed a political hierarchy, and sometimes a social hierarchy as well.14 Indeed, the notion of dhimmi, or protected subaltern, has always been present in the historical experience of Muslim societies. But it has been implemented in a “benign” way, depending on the spirit of the times and the political circumstances, in the sense that the norm actually in force has often been a little removed from the theoretical norm that a literal reading of the Qur’an would allow. The latter has always remained the distant reference in principle, the ideal to be reached, in which the empirical reality constituted a compromise that could still be accepted. It is with the rise of political Islam that we can really speak of a supremacist ideology.

• This conception of the hierarchy between Muslim and non-Muslim citizens in a Muslim society echoed beyond radical Islamist currents. A thinker like Youssef Al Qaradawi, who is associated with the moderate trend within political Islam, does reproduce certain aspects of this hierarchy in his writings, but he mixes it with a certain degree of benevolent, although discriminatory, tolerance of the “Other.”15 Given

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the leadership role and the importance of Youssef Al Qaradawi, it is worth examining the hierarchical conceptions that underly his views of the place of non-Muslims in Muslim society. In an Arabic text titled Non-Muslims in Muslim Society,16 he insists on the status of dhimmi of the “people of the book” – that is, Christians and Jews. But he also insists on the fact that the Muslim majority society must protect them “against all external aggression and against internal injustice”17 and that it must guarantee their security and that of their property. In exchange, however, they must pay the jizya and respect Islamic law for non-religious affairs, thus deserving to become members of “the House of Islam.” Non-Muslims who are not Christians, Jews, or Sabbatean are not included in the dhimmi status. This apparent magnanimity is undermined by the subaltern place of non-Muslims expressed by several statements that deserve to be analyzed. The first one is the following: All what Islam asks from non-Muslims is that they take into consideration the feelings of Muslims, and respect their religion. They should not exhibit their religious rituals and their crosses in Muslim areas, and they should not build a church in an Islamic city that never had churches. Because exhibiting [such symbols] is defying gesture towards Islamic feeling, which could lead to chaos and perturbations.18 Al Qaradawy considers the exhibition of non-Muslim religious rituals in Muslim areas to be a lack of respect towards Muslims. One can dwell on the meaning of respect in these circumstances. Why would the expression of religious difference be a form of disrespect? Such an expression would be a challenge to the total hegemony of the majority. But this is open to interpretation. It is also interesting to note how the overt practice of Christian rituals is considered a “defying gesture” towards Islamic feeling. The link with “chaos and perturbations” are also presented as a consequence of the feeling of Muslims being defied by non-Muslims. In other words, Muslims could react violently (chaos and perturbations), and Christians have to be aware of this and behave accordingly. It is worth noting that when the mirror images of such statements are made by far-right nationalist movements in Western countries, to the effect that Muslim migrants should not be allowed to

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build mosques in European cities “that never had mosques,” they are considered to be “racist” by the progressive trends. The same criteria would lead us to conclude that Qaradawi’s representation of the rights of non-Muslims is also a form of neo-racism.19 He continues: “Similarly, dhimmis should be forbidden from selling alcohol or pork meat in Muslim areas, and the opening of bars for drinking alcohol and facilitate its availability openly and its penetration of Muslim areas, even if it was for their private enjoyment, in order to prevent corruption and to block the possibility of moral chaos.”20 Here, the presence of non-Muslim citizens in “Muslim areas” is labelled “penetration” and their social practices are deemed to bring about corruption and moral chaos. We are not talking here about tourists who come to visit Muslim lands, but about citizens in a plural society where the majority is Muslim. He goes on: “Dhimmis have the right to occupy functions within the State, like Muslims, except functions that have a religious character such as the imamat, and the Presidency of the State, and leadership in the army, and the position of Judge for causes concerning Muslims, and the overseeing of the distribution of alms (sadaqat) and so on.”21 Three remarks are in order here. The first is that when talking about functions within the state, citizens are seen not as citizens but as either Muslims or dhimmis, with the possibility of being something else simply not considered. Thus, the very notion of citizenship is undermined, since these various categories of citizens do not have the same citizenship rights. The second remark is that the presidency of the state and the “leadership” in the army, i.e. all high-ranking positions, are considered to be functions with a “religious” character, and therefore off-limits to non-Muslim minorities. The position of judge for causes concerning Muslims is also considered off-limits to non-Muslim citizens not just for religious causes of for personal status laws, which differ according to religion, but more generally for all causes “concerning Muslims,” including commercial causes, for instance. The exclusion of nonMuslims from these functions have a much broader meaning than being an overt discrimination. It is the very collective identity of the nation that is at stake, with deep consequences on the conception and practice of citizenship and equality. The principles exposed here have been taken to their logical conclusion in the birthplace of Al Qaradawi, Egypt. Not because he articulated them, but because the dominant political culture

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in the country reflects these conceptions of the place of the “other.” There are very few (if any) high-ranking positions in the universities, among governors of the various governorates, in the police force, and in the army that are filled by Egyptian Coptic Christians. One aspect of Qaradawi’s conception of the place of non-Muslims in Muslim societies is his detailed discussion of the death penalty for a Muslim who kills a non-Muslim, an issue that has been raised in contemporary discussions on the application of Sharia law in Arab countries. Qaradawi notes that the majority tendency among legal Islamic schools (mathaheb) is that, while the murder of a Muslim by another Muslim must be punished by death, the murder of a kafer by  a Muslim does not deserve the death penalty. He explains and justifies this legal opinion by recalling a reliable hadith that states: La yuqtalu muslimun bi kafer (No Muslim shall be killed for the murder of a kafer).22 But holding such a position would be in contradiction with his general posture of benevolent tolerance, and challenging it would put him at odds with the dominant opinion among Islamic scholars. Qaradawi resolves the issue by considering that, in this context, kafer does not mean “non-Muslim,” but it means harbi, a member of a community that is at war with Muslims. Thus, he distances himself from the dominant position on this issue, and he rejects the idea that Muslims should be spared the death sentence for the murder of a nonMuslim, keeping in line with his position that dhimmis’ security should be guaranteed as long as they do not defy Muslims feeling. He does not challenge the principle that a Muslim should be spared the death sentence for the murder of a kafer, but he reinterprets the meaning of kafer to exclude from it non-Muslims who are not at war with Islam.23 The status of non-believer thus becomes a legal status that determines the relationships between individuals, establishing a hierarchy between Muslims and non-Muslims that is not only symbolic. Nowhere in this text does Qaradawi limit the scope of these considerations to their historical value: he presents them as providing a normative framework for regulating the relationship between contemporary Muslims and non-Muslims. Those views are combined with a sense of magnanimity towards non-Muslims. That is to say, the segregation and the proposed hierarchy are seen as a virtuous way of managing diversity. We have insisted on the views of Qaradawi because of the leadership role he plays in mainstream Islamic trends. This means that in the

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mainstream views within Islamic religious discourse, the dominant conception of the social order is quite compatible with the supremacist views of Sayyid Qutb. The desire to establish a society built on Hakimyyah has thus extensive consequences.24

• The dissemination of the views of Sayyid Qutb, with the rise of political Islam in the 1970s, have been accompanied by an openly hostile discourse towards the Christian Coptic citizens in Egypt and other non-Muslim citizens in Muslim majorities countries. Whether this trend is partly a result of Qutb’s influence, or whether both this trend and Qutb’s views are the result of common deeper, structural factors remains open to debate. It is important to illustrate and analyze how these hostile views are articulated in the supremacist, populist discourse of some of the important actors of political Islam. Shortly after the killing of twenty-one Copts on a beach in Sirte, Libya, on 15 February 2015 by members of the group Islamic State, Wagdi Ghoneim posted a video on his website where he commented on the killing.25 Ghoneim (born 1951) is a world-famous Egyptian Islamic preacher and an important Islamic media figure, politically close to the Muslim Brotherhood of which he has been an official member, but also close to the Salafists from the ideological point of view. He has been a public figure in Egyptian civil society. For more than ten years, he was the secretary general of an important professional order, the Syndicate of Commercial Professions. He toured and lectured in the United States during the 1990s. During his formal residence there from 2001 on, he was elected “Imam of the imams” of the North American Imams Federation (NAIF). When he was arrested in 2005 allegedly for his calls for violence, and then asked to leave, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) took his defence and considered that his expulsion was a discriminatory measure against Muslims. Ghoneim holds a master’s degree from the Faculty of Islamic Studies at Al-Azhar University, obtained in 1988. He received a certificate from the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America in 2004. He obtained another master’s degree (2006) and a PhD (2008) from the United States in Islamic theology from the Graduate Theological Foundation. He received the American Society of Muslim Scholars Certificate in “Handling Muslim USA Family Counseling &

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Crisis Management.” Sentenced to prison by the Hosni Mubarak regime, he was pardoned by Mohamed Morsi. He then lived in exile in Turkey. His Facebook page reveals that he has 1.5 million followers and 1.5 million likes. The broad political current to which Wagdi Ghoneim belongs is important in Egypt. In the legislative elections of 2011–12, the Islamist currents (Muslim Brothers and Salafists) collectively obtained more than 60 per cent of the votes, of which 28 per cent went to the Salafists. For Ghoneim, there are essentially two categories of Egyptians: Muslims on the one hand, and on the other hand, those he calls “the crusaders” (and sometimes “naṣâras”), by which he means the Copts.26 It must be emphasized that the term “crusaders” is very pejorative, as it places all Coptic citizens in the same role as the foreign aggressors at the time of the European Crusades from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. His use of the term “Muslims” includes indistinctly Muslim citizens and Islamist political actors, Muslim Brothers, Salafists, etc. Thus, an attack by the regime targeting the Muslim Brotherhood will be formulated as an aggression against “the Muslims,” with the effect of rejecting the regime and its representatives outside the community of Muslims, in the category of “apostates.” Similarly, all of today’s Egyptian Copts, the Copts of the seventh century at the time of the Arab conquest, and specific Coptic political actors are all lumped up in the same category and are designated by an all-encompassing “they.” Ghoneim does not attempt to be “nice” or politically correct. Unlike Qaradawi, he does not claim that Islam treats non-Muslims as equals. On the contrary, he aggressively asserts his hostility to non-Muslims and justifies their unequal treatment. In many respects, his Manichean, populist discourse evokes that of Donald Trump. All the elements and quotes that follow are drawn from the video clip mentioned above. The Copts are designated by the term “the crusaders” since the very beginning of the speech and repeatedly afterwards, qualified as “disbelievers” (kuffar) and called “associators,” which means that they do not believe in one God and associate him with other deities.27 This is an implicit reference to the Christian belief in the Trinity. They are said to be “raised in pigsty.” Moreover, they are treacherous, as illustrated by this quote: “But treason is in their blood, of course. Treason is in their blood.”28 In addition to the repetition, three elements must be emphasized in the last sentence: The words treason, blood, and of course. The treason, or betrayal, in this speech does not describe the action of a political actor

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in particular circumstances. It is a moral characteristic that flows in the blood, that is to say a biological characteristic (which may disappear only if they convert to Islam). The pronoun “their” designates all Coptic citizens, meaning that this characteristic applies to all of them. The term “of course” excludes this characterization from the field of deliberation: it is obvious and does not need to be discussed. We can see here the distinctive discursive procedures of populist racist speech. In this case, Qur’anic quotations are called in as an absolute proof of the low moral standards of Copts, attributed to the word of God. Among the other characterizations of the Copts in this short video, we find the following ideas: • Copts have advantages and privileges, given to them by the Egyptian State, that Muslims do not have. • Copts are criminals. • The security forces fear them and do not dare to punish them. • “They” abuse the rights granted to monasteries at the expense of the rights of Muslims, flouted by the police. • “They” insult Islamic faith and do not respect Islam (reference to a film that denigrates Islam as a religion, shot in the United States by a Copt). • “They” kill Muslims and then make the sign of the cross. • The Coptic leaders want to maintain the non-Islamic identity of the State. • “They” are ungrateful. • “They” hate Muslims for their beliefs (resentment, envy, hatred). • Their objective is to divert Muslims from their religion. • “They” are dirty. • “They” have no values, neither in this world nor in the hereafter. Another element of the discourse of domination is the representation of historical facts. Military conquest by Muslim armies are presented as a blessing for the conquered people, just as European right-wing currents present colonialism as a benefit for colonized people. We will not dwell further on this issue here, but it is certainly part of the analysis of the relationship of domination. On the basis of these representations, Wagdi Ghoneim spells out the way Muslim society should deal with “them”:

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• You must never trust them. • The ruling Muslim Brotherhood should not grant them rights as citizens; they should not enjoy full and equal rights. • They are not the equals of Muslims and should not be treated at the same level in general and especially with regard to church building permits. Citing a Hadith, he explains that despising “them” (the Jews mentioned in the Hadith) does not mean that we are being unjust with them. We can still treat them with justice. Despising them is not unjust because they deserve it. Transposing this example from the Hadith and citing the position of the Coptic religious leadership after the 2011 uprisings, he concludes that yes, we despise them.29 All this allows Wagdi Ghoneim to draw the conclusion of his speech. After a long list of blame and insults about “them” (the Copts), he concludes: “That’s why my comment on the killing of Crusaders in Libya is: … No comment!”30 These representations of a non-Muslim minority in a Muslim society are not confined to the domain of discourse. They translate to the domain of social interactions. Attacks against Copts in the villages of southern Egypt, assaulted by their neighbours in the name of defending the Islamic character of public space have become commonplace. The trigger can be a minor dispute over property between a Coptic family and Muslim villagers. This quickly becomes the occasion of a riot against Copts and their properties, even those who are not involved in the original conflict. Often, it is also the issue of a place of worship, or even the maintenance of a church. The public discourse in the village shows this as an identity threat to the village. Ordinary Muslim villagers then go to the building concerned, vandalize it, and attack Christian families. The authorities then intervene to “calm” the situation either by imprisoning the victims, or by organizing a “tribal reconciliation council” in the village, which ends up demanding that the Copts involved in the conflict be exiled from the village. The process is generally endorsed by local authorities representing the state. This pattern has been well documented by Egyptian human rights organizations.31 But such incidents have sometimes been instrumentalized by far-right American organizations, thus casting doubt on the accuracy, extent and seriousness of these kinds of violations of rights.32 As we will see further down, it is this instrumentalization by far-right Western political trends that makes

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talking about this issue very sensitive and that ends up discrediting the voices of the “subaltern of the subaltern” in the eyes of some progressive trends, making their legitimate claims invisible.

• Islamist discourse includes a supremacist tendency that excludes non-Muslims from equal citizenship, in theory as well as in practice. The conceptual tools of Orientalism and perhaps also the tools of subaltern studies do not help us see this discourse as a supremacist discourse, because “Islamic revival” is framed as an act of agency by a dominated group, and thus evaluated positively. The discourse about “the other” is seen as a discourse against colonial powers, and interpreted as a discourse of liberation. An anti-Orientalist paradigm is blind, or at least less sensitive, to the fact that, once the colonial “other” is characterized in religious terms, the non-Muslim citizen is automatically associated with the colonial West and treated as an enemy, thus legitimizing discrimination and racism against religious minorities. In addition to the critique of Orientalism, there is a nexus of theoretical paradigms that inform the conceptualization of the relationship between the “West” and “Islam.”33 The critical currents of subaltern, postcolonial, and decolonial studies, as well as of whiteness, are all mobilized to varying degrees to theorize the place of anti-Muslim racism in the political culture of Western societies. These approaches provide powerful insights about these forms of exclusion. They converge on the continuity between the colonial historical experience of Western societies and their relationship with their current Muslim minorities and, by the same token, they face the same methodological challenge that results from amalgamating different historical periods and different realities. But they also tend to converge on another point: their reluctance to include Islamism as a necessary element for the understanding and analysis of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism. There is a need for a post-Orientalism approach, as the classical paradigms derived from the critique of Orientalism do not provide all the conceptual tools needed to fully understand and analyze the supremacist discourses of domination that emerge from the Orient and that are based in local culture. Orientalism focuses on the (imaginary) representation of the Orient, and Edward Said’s critique of it shows

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how such representations are embedded in colonial power relations. However, this paradigm does not facilitate thinking about discourses of domination that emerge from colonized societies against their own minorities. Can the paradigms derived from subaltern studies fill the gap? In the paradigms derived from subaltern studies, there is a dichotomization of the relations of domination, as noted in the quote from Spivak at the beginning of this chapter. There are the dominant, usually white Western, and the dominated, usually people of colour of Eastern heritage. But within each of these categories, the “levels” of domination are not explicitly thought and articulated. They constitute a blind spot. Intersectional approaches allow for a complexification of the representations of domination within dominated societies. By talking about the superimposition of various systems of oppression, they allow us to study the intersection of oppression based on gender, race and class, which can be broadened to include sexual orientation or identity. The dominated are located at the intersection of these systems, and can themselves enjoy certain privileges and reproduce dominations simply by being at the intersection of two rather than three systems of domination, for example. Thus, “white feminists,” even if from a working-class background, may be in a position to reproduce racism against Black women as they do not themselves experience being racialized. So, in spite of the fact that they do not fully enjoy the privileges of being white because of their sex or class, they are in a position to reproduce racial hierarchies by implicitly assuming that it is their culture that provides the foundation for the universal values they defend. But paradoxically, there are hierarchies between these levels, revealed in part by the controversy sparked a few years ago by the critiques addressed vis-à-vis multiculturalism by Susan Moller Okin.34 Okin’s paper, originally published in the Boston Review, led to a polarization of positions, which resulted in a collective work in which the original text and fifteen answers and refutations were grouped together. Okin argued that multicultural policies, which seek to recognize and value minority cultures in all their dimensions, end up valorizing their patriarchal dimension, which sanctifies the marginalization of women and assigns them to gendered social roles. This assignment is accompanied by a hierarchy and an unequal distribution of power. Her opponents argued that this position legitimizes the critique of subordinate cultures, potentially feeding racism. The prominence of this paradigm in

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antiracist academic currents quickly led Susan Okin to back up, and to admit that she may not have put enough emphasis on women’s agency in patriarchal cultures. The question of the agency of women offers a way out for antiracist movements who water down their criticism of patriarchal cultures by fear of reinforcing cultural stereotypes. Thus, in her Politics of Piety, Saba Mahmoud focuses her attention on the agency of women in Salafist currents, ignoring two dimensions: 1) the sacralization of social roles that very often mean less power for women, and 2) the consolidation of supremacist dimensions in Salafist currents.35 The consequence of these approaches is that the relations of domination within the subaltern groups, which we have illustrated above in the case of radical political Islam, in their theoretical/ideological dimension as well as in the discourse of the political trends that carry them, are simply outside the radar of theoretical currents that analyze racism. The dilemma comes from the following consideration. When minority groups in dominated cultures, that is, “the subaltern of the subaltern” – we could call them “second-level subalterns” – challenge their lower position in a colonized society, they challenge the political culture that assigns them to this subordinate position. However, it is that very same culture, Islamic culture, that is targeted by far right supremacist currents within white Western cultures. As a result, the challenge addressed by the “subaltern of the subaltern” becomes suspicious, as it has the potential to reinforce white supremacist, culturally based discourse against a subaltern culture (in this case, Muslim societies). Indeed, when the subalterns of the subalterns try to speak, the hegemonic currents within colonial societies try to instrumentalize their voice, which then becomes suspicious and delegitimized from a progressist point of view. They thus become inaudible to the progressist currents within Western societies, and counterproductive when heard by the right-wing trends, who try to instrumentalize them, thus betraying legitimate claims to non-discrimination and equal rights. So, more frequently than not, they are either not heard or misunderstood. This is what we mean when we say the subaltern of the subaltern cannot speak.

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Notes 1 G.C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 271–313. 2 S. Cho, K. Crenshaw, and L. McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” Signs 38, no. 4 (2013): 785–810. 3 This dimension is more visible in Muslim majority societies that include non-Muslim minorities. It is less visible in religiously homogeneous Muslim societies. 4 William Shepard, “Sayyid Qutb’s Doctrine of Jāhiliyya,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 35, no. 4 (2003): 521–45. 5 Olivier Carré, “‘A l’ombre du Coran’ revisité: Les lendemains possibles de la pensée de Sayyid Qutb et du ‘Qutbisme,’” Arabica 48, no. 1 (2001): 81–111. 6 Syed Qutb, Milestones (Islamic Book Service, 1964), accessed 28 January 2019, https://www.holybooks.com/milestones-by-syed-qutb-shaheed/. 7 In the following Surahs and verses: S3 v.15 ; S5 v.50 ; S33 v.33 ; et S48 v.26. The concept of “ignorance” and the word “ignorant” appear a few more times, but they do not designate pre-Islamic societies in these other occurrences. 8 Qutb, Milestones, 64. According to Sayed Khatab, this is the fourth step in the definition of this concept by Qutb. See Sayed Khatab, The Political Thought of Sayyid Qutb: The Theory of Jahiliyyah (New York: Routledge, 2006), 64. 9 Qutb, Milestones, 66. 10 Ibid., 76 and 78. 11 Ibid., 57, 60, and 107. 12 Olivier Carré, Mystique et politique, le Coran des islamistes, Lecture du Coran par Sayyid Qutb, Frère musulman radical (Paris: Cerf, 2004). 13 P.J. Simon, Sociologie des relations interethniques et des minorités (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006), 133. 14 See Youssef Courbage and Philippe Fargues, Chrétiens et Juifs dans l’Islam arabe et turc (Paris: Payot, 1997). 15 We will not discuss here whether Qaradawi’s conceptions are the result of the influence of Sayyid Qutb or whether they have independent roots in classical Islamic political philosophy. We are interested here in describing and analysing the dominant trends within Islamic societies, and not in establishing their genealogies. But, whatever their genealogy, Qaradawi’s ideas are in resonance with Qutb’s conception of the hierarchy between Muslim and non-Muslim citizens in a Muslim-majority country. 16 Youssef Al Qaradawi, Ghayr al Muslimin fil mujtama’ al islamy (NonMuslims in Islamic society) (Cairo: Maktabet Wahba, 1992).

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17 Ibid., 9. 18 Ibid., 20. 19 A quick reminder that contemporary racism is no longer based on biological differences but on culture and beliefs. This is why many theorists of racism prefer to call it “neo-racism.” 20 Al Qaradawi, Ghayr al Muslimin fil mujtama’ al islamy, 22. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 10. 24 Note that we are not talking here about what “Islam” says or does not say. We are talking about what some important Muslim public figures say. 25 I would like to thank Dr Amany Salib for drawing my attention to the video clips of Wagdi Ghoneim and for researching that part of the paper, as part of a broader research project, and for transcribing Ghoneim’s discourse. Wagdi Ghoneim, “The Cheikh Wagdi Ghoneim comments on the killing of Copts in Libya” (in Arabic), YouTube video, 15:20, posted by Sultan Badar from wagdignoneim.net, 19 February 2015, youtube.com/ watch?v=Vd1kCNwR7Xs. 26 The Copts represent today about 10 per cent of the Egyptian population, but this figure is disputed. They were the original inhabitants of Egypt, who gradually converted to Islam over the centuries. Most Egyptian Muslims have Coptic ancestors. 27 Ghoneim, “The Cheikh Wagdi Ghoneim comments,” 1:07. 28 Ibid., 4:01. 29 Ibid., 13:44. 30 Ibid., 14:37. 31 See, for instance, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, “The EPPR condemns the pressure exerted on the Copts of Dimshaw to accept customary reconciliation,” 10 September 2018, https://eipr.org/en. See also Jason Brownlee, Violence against Copts in Egypt (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2013). 32 A Google search with the terms “Copts, persecution” yields results linked to these right-wing, usually faith-based Christian organizations, or to European and American news agencies’ briefs that describe the situation in terms of “persecution.” The terms “Copts, situation” yield very different results that are usually more balanced. 33 We use these terms with the understanding that each of them covers a very broad range of situations that cannot be lumped together. 34 Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 35 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

7

The Challenges and Demands of Allyship through the Public Intellectual Platform Mira Sucharov

It was the summer of 2017, and I was riding shotgun in my colleague’s car as we returned from a leadership retreat outside Ottawa. Suddenly a hailstorm overtook us, and we pulled off the road to wait it out. The pounding on the roof had made conversation impossible, so I took the opportunity to check my voicemail. There was a message from my Toronto-based friend and associate Bernie Farber. “Can’t talk now; crazy hail storm!” I texted. “Call me in a bit,” he replied. “I have an idea for us.” When I later reached him, he suggested we write an op-ed about the case of Hassan Diab. Diab was a Canadian citizen living in Ottawa when, in 2014, he was extradited to France, accused of committing a 1980 attack on a Paris synagogue in which four people were murdered and dozens more were injured. Diab – who was born in Lebanon and who acquired Canadian citizenship in 1993 – insisted they caught the wrong man. Evidence indeed appeared to be flimsy – handwriting analyses had been discredited, and there was enough counter-evidence to suggest that Diab was not the person responsible, and that indeed Diab was not even in France at the time of the attack. Still, Diab languished for years in a French jail, away from his wife and two young kids, without any actual trial.1 I had been vaguely following the case since representatives from a left-wing Jewish group had tried to get me to write about it or at least sign a petition. But I’d remained silent, overwhelmed by the legal details, and distracted by the fact that the group trying to get me on board was

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mostly dedicated to Palestine solidarity. It’s not that my views about Zionism are much different – I too now find Zionism as a structuring ideology problematic for bringing about justice in Israel-Palestine, but I was suspicious of the mixing of agendas. If this is about a miscarriage in the criminal justice system, and about the grave mistreatment of a human being and the domestic and international structures that sanction such discrimination, then the case of Diab should be framed as such, without the polarizing Israel-Palestine agenda possibly muddying the waters. On the other hand, this particular group promoting justice for Diab no doubt saw it as a natural extension of their anti-oppression work around Palestine. It’s a link I can now more easily appreciate once I step outside of the mainstream Jewish community view that sees the Israel-Palestine relationship as one of an enduring conflict, rather than of a fundamental and persistent injustice stemming from ethno-national (and racialized) oppression. But I knew how the mainstream Jewish community might view a message coming from that particular messenger. Our piece appeared soon after in the Toronto Star.2 The Star had covered the Diab case in detail over the previous nine years, including tracing the debate over whether Carleton University should have fired him, a contract instructor, in the wake of his arrest, a sympathetic op-ed and incisive reporting – featuring quotes by his lawyer and by an Amnesty International representative, not long before ours appeared.3 Other outlets in Canada had reported on the problems with the extradition law.4 And the Ottawa Citizen had recently published an editorial demanding that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau intervene on behalf of Diab.5 But justice had not yet been served. In our piece, Farber and I talked about having wished we had spoken up earlier in pushing the Canadian government to bring him home. The organization that Farber headed at the time of Diab’s extradition, the now-defunct Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), had actually spoken out in favour of the arrest at the time. We wrote: “In fact, a spokesperson for Farber’s organization had said that CJC was ‘very pleased’ that law enforcement authorities were ‘never giving up in the fight against terrorism,’ noting that the decision ‘brings comfort to the victims of terrorism as well.’”6 Nine years later, we realize we were wrong in not speaking out. That CJC spokesperson, Benjamin Shinewald, would later apologize to Diab in a piece Shinewald penned for the Canadian Jewish News. As Shinewald wrote, the “case turned out to be flimsy. The Canadian judge

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called it ‘very problematic’ and ‘convoluted.’ And that was before we discovered that our Department of Justice – think of that name – may have deliberately withheld exculpatory evidence, something shockingly permitted under our extradition process.”7 Given our Jewish community links and public anti-racist stances and activities (coupled with my being a professor at Carleton where Diab taught some courses), Farber and I were well-positioned to take a public stand. In this sense, we were standing alongside Diab – not attempting to speak for him, of course – all the while being aware that by virtue of being imprisoned abroad without trial, his attempt to advocate for himself had been tragically quashed. Our op-ed ended up being both a mea culpa and an attempt to model the fact that even when one is late to the task of being an ally in the search for justice, one should still take the task on.8 The truth is, I’m grateful that it was Farber who had suggested collaborating on the piece. Farber’s credibility in the Jewish community and on anti-racism issues more broadly would help us be heard in a different way. And as a member of a minority that has been persecuted and misrepresented throughout history in different ways at different points, and living in a settler society where we would like to roll back colonialism to whatever degree is feasible, our standing with an Arab-Canadian who appeared to be falsely accused seemed an apt task. Over the next several months, we wrote two more pieces focused on Islamophobia in Canada. Privately  – as well as perhaps semipublicly among those who know us and our respective views – focusing on Islamophobia in print was a convenient way both to sidestep our modest political disagreements on some matters related to IsraelPalestine, as well as to remind ourselves that next to an area of justice that remains “controversial” in the minds of many (that of the politics of Israel-Palestine), there should be no controversy over standing against Islamophobia (and indeed against any form of racism or bigotry). And I was keenly aware that our public Jewish identities – him as a retired Jewish professional, me as a Jewish scholar of Israel-Palestine who writes frequently in the Israeli, Canadian, and American Jewish press – carry particular moral weight in the eyes of some who we are trying to persuade. At the same time, anyone in our position needs to guard against the unsavoury potential pitfalls of allyship in this context: white saviour complex perhaps, and unintentionally furthering

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a Western gaze – unintentionally speaking “for” or “over” those whom we are trying to stand alongside.9 In his writings on the proper role of the public intellectual in society, Edward Said notes the importance of one group being able to universalize their own suffering to call out the oppression of others. “It is inadequate only to affirm that a people was dispossessed, oppressed or slaughtered, denied its rights and its political existence, without at the same time doing what Fanon did during the Algerian war, affiliating those horrors with the similar afflictions of other people.” Further, Said argues, “you are not relieved of the duty of revealing that your own people now may be visiting related crimes on their victims.”10 Said’s writings remind us that Jewish voices – carrying the weight of centuries of antisemitism, both individual and systemic – can play a particular role as allies when others are targeted. Not every case of hatred, prejudice, and bigotry is the same – some take more structural resonances at different points, some are viewed as socially acceptable at various junctures, and so on – but anyone who has been the target of collective hatred can speak with urgency and empathy in the face of other cases of injustice and hatred. But when it comes to Canadian Jews speaking out against Palestinian oppression at the hands of the State of Israel, the issue in some sense appears straightforward, and in other senses, it does not. It is indeed logical that one should speak out against abuses carried out by a country (Israel) that seeks to speak in our (Diaspora Jews’) name. But it is also fraught with tension in the minds of some, for various reasons. First, and most concretely, the mainstream Jewish community does not typically see Israeli Jewish structures as giving rise to Palestinian oppression. What Palestine solidarity activists see as oppression, the mainstream Jewish community tends to see as a defensive manoeuvre in the face of security threats. This is a discourse that Israel has mastered quite well through its sophisticated network of hasbarah, public diplomacy. According to this view, Israel’s actions – particularly in the occupation context – are taken not for oppressing for its own sake, but to defend its citizens from attack. Why is this? A combination of hawkishness appearing the safer bet in a world of uncertainty; the unwilling to consider Palestinian voices; the dehumanization of the Other that renders their needs and desires and basic rights invisible to many who are part of the collective Self. As Said wrote in Culture and

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Imperialism about Western colonialism, “there is only infrequently an acknowledgment that the colonized people should be heard from, their ideas known.”11 Second, there is a natural default to tribalism and loyalty, two impulses that deter people from criticizing their own. This kind of tribalism (the kind that leads an individual to stay silent in the face of Israeli abuses) is not a stance I personally embrace, but I conceptually understand the impulse, particularly when the group (Jews) has been the target of extensive historical persecution, and when Israel, the state, is experienced by many Jews as the embodied sovereign extension of the Jewish collective. It’s a state that has provided a measure of physical safety and security – and certainly ontological security – to the Jewish nation at the expense of many of the same things for the Palestinians, of course. The recent passing of the Nation-State Law, affecting non-Jewish citizens of Israel, is the latest manifestation of this tension. And it is this tension that deserves much more attention. No situation of collective safety should come at the expense of another’s. To this end, Said reminds us that “To the Palestinian, for whom Zionism was somebody else’s idea imported into Palestine and for which in a very concrete way he or she was made to pay and suffer, these forgotten things about Zionism are the very things that are centrally important.”12 Third, the more that Diaspora Jews issue public pronouncements about Israel that suggest that their identities are wrapped up in Israel (even if the pronouncements are critical), the more that the soil of antisemitism may be fertilized. This is to say, the more that Canadian or American Jews suggest that their identities are nourished or challenged by the State of Israel, the more that non-Jewish Canadians or Americans might, unjustly, blame Jews for Israel’s misdeeds. This is likely what happened when someone bombed that Paris synagogue in 1980. This suggests that even Diaspora Jews who are troubled by Israel may wish to remain silent, not wanting their non-Jewish friends, associates, neighbours, or co-workers to associate them with whatever failings Israel possesses. And yet, there is a great irony here. To remain silent may be to protect one from being associated with the actions of a far-flung state. But to remain silent is also the domain of the privileged – and is a dynamic Said well noted when he wrote of imperial culture.13 Morton Weinfeld, a sociologist of Canadian Jewry, has noted that antiracist alliances across minoritized groups may become more complex

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in the future. While once European immigrants may have sympathized with Canadian Jews’ Holocaust victimhood legacy, an increase in Arab and Muslim immigration to Canada means that the view of Jews may be shifting in the Canadian imaginary. According to this view, Jews may be more associated increasingly with “the wealthy, with Western powers, and with colonial exploiters,” something on which we’d admittedly need more data to claim with any degree of certainty.14 Some Jews have responded to this by becoming non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. Some of those Jews would say that solidarity with Arabs and Palestinians is thus a way of denouncing imperial culture. Others resist the metastasizing of anti-Zionism into antisemitism by refusing to play the game that would position themselves as the “good Jew.” Still others believe that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. The result of the latter view is the maintaining of silos between oppressed communities. This suggests a particular role for public intellectuals in challenging not only dominant assumptions but also dominant norms. This is something that Said certainly urges. “My opinion,” Said writes, “is that only the first of these two possibilities is truly the modern intellectual’s role (that of disputing the prevailing norms) precisely because the dominant norms are today so intimately connected to (because commanded at the top by) the nation, which is always triumphalist, always in a position of authority, always exacting loyalty and subservience rather than intellectual investigation and re-examination …”15 But when Farber and I wrote one of our next op-eds about Islamophobia, it was about supporting a parliamentary motion in favour of responding to the scourge of Islamophobia in society.16 In Said’s formulation, and particularly within a multicultural, liberal democracy like Canada, it is difficult to know where, exactly, the “nation” resides: in the hearts and minds of individual parliamentarians, in the consensus of the government, in the view of the parliamentary opposition, in the constitutional enshrining of multiculturalism, within the temperature of society generally, or within particular subgroups who believe themselves the truest representation of the nation? At particular points in history and within particular national contexts, a reflexive assumption that state-level norms always need to be contested could actually end up hurting the most vulnerable.

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Certainly, Islamophobia in North America is, sadly, alive and well, stemming from the triad of the view of an “Islamic peril,” a perverse notion of a perennial “clash of civilizations,” and the view of the Muslim, including those perceived to be Muslim, namely those who have Brown bodies, as “perennial foreigners.”17 And while the term Islamophobia wasn’t yet in popular use, Said described the dynamic sporadically in Orientalism, as when he notes that the “European encounter with the Orient, and specifically with Islam, strengthened this system of representing the Orient and … turned Islam into the very epitome of an outsider against which the whole of European civilization … was founded.”18 And again in his 1981 book Covering Islam, as a view popular in the West, Said writes: “whereas ‘the West’ is greater than and has surpassed the stage of Christianity, its principal religion, the world of Islam – its varied societies, histories, and languages notwithstanding – is still mired in religion, primitivity, and backwardness.” Put simply, he asks, “What is it about ‘Islam’ that provokes so quick and unrestrained a response?”19 In March 2017, the parliamentary motion passed by a vote of 201 to 91. While the motion was non-binding, it sent an important moral signal.

• What does it mean to be a good ally? My path to wanting to consider Arabs and Muslims as partners in countering oppression in Canada and abroad began in earnest during my undergraduate studies, while I was a Middle East studies major at McGill University. There, Arab politics and Israel-Palestine studies became at once an exciting area of academic pursuit for me and a real backdrop upon which Jewish-Arab solidarity could begin to take shape. For my twenty-first birthday, celebrated with friends in Israel as I was completing my study abroad year, an old boyfriend presented me with a copy of Orientalism he had spotted at a second-hand English-language bookstore in Jerusalem. “Here’s to your continuing academic success,” he wrote in pencil inside the front cover. Three months later, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization head Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo agreement, and the Jewish-Arab dialogue group my university friends and I had taken care to cultivate imploded. The Arab students did not want to be seen to be endorsing an agreement which they did not

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believe in, a position which Said himself echoed when he called the deal a “Palestinian Versailles.”20 At once, Said became a voice of important political critique and a barrier to face-to-face partnership. As fall gave way to winter in downtown Montreal, I was beginning to discover the stirrings of anti-normalization impulses firsthand. Having recently been published, a hardcover copy of Culture and Imperialism – with its striking cover art – became another gift, from the person I was dating, himself a graduate student in the field, an Arab student by heritage and citizenship, as I was graduating. “Happy birthday, and a million more to come,” he wrote. And I placed the book in a prominent place on my bookshelf. And then, as I began my own graduate work, the idea of taking public intellectualism seriously – something about which Said had much to say – became intoxicating. As a Jew, I am aware of the risks of being a minority in a society governed shakily by multiculturalism against a legacy of Christian hegemony and the privilege accrued by whiteness. This suggests a close link between Islamophobia and antisemitism (by which I mean, in the conventional use of the term, specifically anti-Jewish oppression and anti-Jewish animus). And I am aware that the country (Israel) that seeks to speak in my name, as a Jew, is wrapped up in anti-Palestinian (and thus partly anti-Muslim and anti-Arab) oppression. The ongoing occupation of the West Bank, the siege on Gaza, and the passage of the nation-state law are just the most recent manifestations of this, stemming from the Nakba itself. In my scholarly identity, I’m still not certain that I have avoided the seedy Orientalist underbelly of the practice of Middle East studies, as I toggle between embracing the intellectual possibilities of methodologies like ethnography and cultural analysis and being cautious about deploying the Western gaze. This may be why I’ve gravitated toward studying the societies about which I feel I have the most personal and emotional stake. And so, my ethnography is often auto-ethnography, and I may, too often, leave the Palestinian experience to be narrated by other scholars who specialize more intensively in that ethnic and political community. It remains a challenge, then, to “decolonize the mind,” as Labelle discusses, via Said and others, in his introduction to this volume.

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Said had incisive things to say about the relationship between Islamophobia and antisemitism. He has noted that “hostility to Islam in the modern Christian West has historically gone hand in hand with, has stemmed from the same source, has been nourished at the same stream as anti-Semitism, and … a critique of the orthodoxies, dogmas and disciplinary procedures of Orientalism contributes to an enlargement of our understandings of the cultural mechanisms of anti-Semitism.”21 In the case of Jewish allyship with other forms of racism and bigotry, Weinfeld has noted the propensity for Jews to be on the anti-racist left. This stems from multiple reasons: cultural – including the legacy of the Passover teachings about exodus and slavery; the prophetic search for peace and justice, and the strategic imperative to remain allied with all those who may wish to discriminate against minoritized populations – a point Said underscores when he talks about a common stream of hatred.22 But not everyone is aware of these links, of course, as Said well knew. And even those who are aware of the conceptual forces that link multiple types of oppressions don’t always adequately engage in the kind of multi-directional allyship that Sa’ed Atshan and Darnell Moore call for when they point to the importance of “the types of solidarities that move social justice advocates beyond the confines of singularity (of mission and work) into a type of work that is give-and-take and intersectional.”23 What is even less clear, unlike in the case of the kinds of queer-racial solidarities that Atshan and Moore examine, is whether in engaging in anti-racism work, antisemitism should be considered a subset of racism or whether light-skinned Jews (which are the vast majority of Jews in Canada) benefit from white privilege so fully that racism should be thought of as a completely distinct problem requiring different remedies. (The chants by the Charlottesville marchers, that “Jews will not replace us,” blur this separation.) And there are some light-skinned Jews who resist identifying as white.24 Of course, all bigotry, whether skin-based or not, should be denounced. But as Sarah Ruiz-Grossman argues in her call for white Jews to stand in solidarity with people of colour (including Arabs, presumably) and with Muslims: “The reality is, as a white Jew, I have the ultimate privilege when it comes to fearing hate: skin privilege. I can walk the streets and no one can identify me as ‘other,’ no one can single me out for harassment – which, needless to say, is not the case for black or brown people, or for Muslim women who choose to wear the hijab.”25

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Atshan and Moore describe allyship as entailing “self-reflexive work on the parts of both the person who is directly impacted by the very structures s/he is moving against and the ally (the indirectly impacted who might also double as an implicit agent in the very injustices s/he is rallying against).”26 In dismantling the structures of skin-based racism (including those that give rise to Islamophobia), light-skinned Jews clearly fall into the latter category. But in tearing down the kind of white supremacy structures that include antisemitism – the kind that give rise to actual neo-Nazis and other white supremacists – Jews, by virtue of the antisemitism that is so core to white supremacist beliefs, are also potential victims. This means that light-skinned Jews (which are the majority of Jews in Canada), might be well poised to operate at the intersection of those directly and indirectly affected. When it came to trying to find a culprit for that horrible 1980 act of antisemitism at the Paris synagogue, it seemed that the Canadian justice system was coming awfully close to using Islamophobia to fight antisemitism. Of course, it is not a total coincidence that a probably false accusation would confuse one Arab citizen with another (while the crime took place in Paris, it seemed at the time to stem from antisemitism motivated by the struggle in Israel-Palestine). And anyone can be extradited to languish in a foreign jail on flimsy evidence and without the case actually going to trial. But the question remains: would Canadians have gone along with it as long as they did if the victim of the flawed justice system was not Arab and Muslim?

• When it comes to allyship, I’m pleased with the good work Farber and I have done in the public sphere, and I know that our voices are an important addition to the public conversation. But in my broader activities and impulses, I’m partly troubled. I don’t yet know whether I’m always hitting the right mark when it comes to allyship. I think about the post-Orientalist tradition. I know that allyship provides opportunities and that it can pose challenges. And I know that the dynamics are both rich and complex in the case of Jewish allyship to Arabs and Muslims in North America, where Jewish allies are themselves the target of Othering from the dominant society. Christian hegemony affects everyone, especially non-Christians (though some Arabs, of course, are Christian). All this is made more complex

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in at least two ways, though: in the context of the struggle in IsraelPalestine where many Jewish North Americans feel a natural kinship to Israel as an imagined homeland, and where many Muslim and Arab North Americans feel a natural sense of solidarity with Palestinians. In this sense, it’s sometimes hard to disentangle antisemitism from anti-Zionism. And it can be hard to separate Islamophobia from solidarity with Israel, or, in some cases, with opposition to Hamas and other Islamist organizations that have adopted geopolitics as a way of furthering their political-religious agendas. But it’s something we must try to continue to do.

• Maurice Jr. Labelle suggests the importance of “re-structur[ing] human affairs by bringing different peoples together as equals, in a relational way that does not exclude or oppress, without flattening respective distinctiveness.” He adds that we need to resist “imperial culture – which imposes ‘muteness.’” I would add that this is one of the key challenges of allyship. How to speak in solidarity with those who are in the crosshairs of oppression, without speaking over, or instead of, their voices? I am chastened as I reflect back on the period last spring when Israeli forces shot and killed over one hundred Palestinians across the fence in Gaza. As the violence was raging, a friend in Ottawa and I considered planning a demonstration near Parliament Hill where we would recite kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourning, in their memory. It’s a type of action that other Jewish activist communities have been mounting across North America and the UK in recent months.27 I had found that in my public actions in the Canadian context, I had already been more forthright than I usually was. On a national television media interview as the casualties were mounting, I had called on the Canadian government to denounce the shootings. This is a mode I did not usually adopt, having implicitly decided, when I began public commentary, to adopt a more detached, analytical position when being interviewed by broadcast outlets, and instead save my own policy prescriptions and ethical announcements for when I was writing op-ed-style pieces. (It’s a distinction that is not necessarily universally held by my colleagues, I realize, and it’s a position to which I’d like to devote further thought.)

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But two days before our contemplated demonstration, my friend changed her mind. It wasn’t that she didn’t think Palestine solidarity was still of utmost urgency, nor did she change her mind on the need to speak out against Israeli violence in Gaza. It was that she felt it was not right to mount this kind of demonstration without Palestinian partners. We shouldn’t shout above their voices, she reasoned. To this, I would now add, did Palestinian Canadians even want us to say kaddish, a Jewish prayer, for their co-nationals, none of whom were Jewish? Was this a move that would be heard by those for whom we were intended to offer comfort and solidarity in the way we intended it? Were we sufficiently listening to those we were trying to help? In the words of today’s younger activist generation, we, not being Palestinian, shouldn’t “center ourselves” in what should really be a Palestinian story. And so the demonstration never happened. The kaddish prayer concludes with this: MAY A GREAT PEACE FROM HEAVEN – AND LIFE! – BE UPON US AND UPON ALL ISRAEL, AND SAY ALL AMEN! MAY HE WHO MAKES PEACE IN HIS HIGH PLACES MAKE PEACE UPON US AND UPON ALL ISRAEL, AND SAY ALL AMEN! Of course, the dead can never be consulted, and kaddish is a prayer for the dead. Or is it actually a prayer for the living? When it comes to death rites, this is one of the key paradoxes of grief, dignity, memory, and comfort.28 And what of “centring” the voices of the non-oppressed doing allyship more generally? What of a book like this – White Allies in the Struggle for Racial Justice? When I first came across this book, I was suspicious. But a closer look at the publisher’s intention, at least, reveals that they are aware of the complexities. The publishing information describes it this way: This timely book offers the little-known stories of 18 white Americans from the 18th century to the present who broke with

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a racist culture to become allies in the struggle for racial justice. The point is not to portray these people as leaders or heroes of this ongoing struggle but to challenge the idea that racial justice is only a concern for people of color. Drick Boyd shows that there are and have been white people who took up this challenge, often at great risk – and that their example can offer instruction and inspiration to others. At a time of renewed attention to the ongoing scourge of racial injustice in America, these stories are meant to motivate others to take action to oppose and dismantle racist practices and structures, on behalf of equality and human dignity.29 On the cover, I note, is a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr, standing next to Abraham Joshua Heschel. Of course, Heschel was not an ordinary white American. As a prominent Jewish spiritual leader, he was well aware of the legacy of antisemitism that continued to define Jews’ place in America. Heschel would have been aware of the relevance of white supremacy structures as excluding not only people of colour, but Jews as well. Decades later, the frightening events at Charlottesville in the summer of 2017, where neo-Nazis marched with torches, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” would drive this point home further.30 The publisher is right to note the obvious costs that can accrue to those seeking to adjust the status quo away from one that favours the in-group instead of the outgroup. These costs are more material than moral, of course, since the end of oppression makes everyone better off in an ethical and moral sense – though the benefits are enjoyed unequally. While whites, for example, would presumably lose some benefits that accrue from white privilege if white supremacy were to end, a post-white-supremacy society would ultimately be a healthier one, which means a better one, for all. When it comes to subverting oppression, Said describes the role of the public intellectual this way: “I think the major choice faced by the intellectual is whether to be allied with the stability of the victors and rules or – the more difficult path – to consider that stability as a state of emergency threatening the less fortunate with the danger of complete extinction, and take into account the experience of subordination itself, as well as the memory of forgotten voices and persons.”31 It shouldn’t have mattered (to me) that it was someone with strong Jewish community bona fides who had approached me to write that

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op-ed about Hassan Diab. But the truth is, it did. I disclose this here in the interests of an honest reckoning around what leads particular individuals in the public sphere to speak out at the moments they do. With all the discussion of “safe spaces” and the often misunderstood use of the term, I’d like to challenge myself a little more on the idea not of safety, with its binary connotations, but of comfort, something that exists more on a spectrum. In Hebrew, the word for comfort, noach (like the Biblical figure Noah), is the same as the word for convenient. This point is driven home to me in challenging ways when I consider the types of social justice spaces to which I generally gravitate. It’s true that I have felt more comfortable doing Palestine solidarity work either in solo spaces or in primarily Jewish spaces. In solo spaces, I can position myself behind my keyboard and my tools of activism are op-eds or social media debates.32 I can call on an array of scholarly or other values, depending on my imagined audience (in social media debates) or on the outlet in which I’m writing. And in collective activism in primarily Jewish spaces, I can enact my activism in ways framed by an appeal to Jewish values or else criticalinsider view of what Israel could become if it only took seriously the drives, needs, and demands for justice of two national communities in that land.33 Collective activism in the Jewish community has now become so finely spliced that intra-Jewish tensions are almost as motivating and galvanizing as are inter-communal debates.34 In solo spaces, I can pace myself, coming in and out of writing, deadlines, and social media debates according to my own needs and desires for contact and connection. Social media is a constant loop; there are no set times to arrive or depart. The conversations continue whether or not one is present for all of it. And while much of it takes place in real time, with its separate threads and subthreads there is no requirement to be present while others are. And in Jewish spaces, there is a sense of both comfort and convenience. The convenience comes through the exponential effect of being immersed in formal and informal codes: everything from what is known as the “Jewish geography” game to the implied gender of typically Jewish or specifically Hebrew names, to the songs or prayers that might open a close an activist meeting. And there is something even more deeply comforting about being in homogenous spaces even while we call for diversity. Here is where we return to the dilemma of imposed muteness that Labelle has rightly cautioned against. There is a nostalgia that can

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be comforting in wanting to consider what may have seemed – for particular communities – to be a simpler, more homogeneous past (And this nostalgic turn, when executed with care, can help give way to the embrace of more complexity in the present.).35 And yet, this comfort, this convenience, this hygge in Danish – a culture with which I have no prior affinity or loyalty but which has offered English speakers this particular, alluring word – is deceptive.36 My communities are as often as not stable, as I shift my views about Israel-Palestine, and thus my allegiances (and theirs to me).37 Said gets at this tension of insider-outsiderness. He writes: Exile is also for my purposes a metaphorical condition. By that I mean that my diagnosis of the intellectual in exile series from the social and political history of dislocation and migration … but is not limited to it. Even intellectuals who are lifelong members of a society can, in a manner of speaking, be divided into insiders and outsiders: those on the one hand who belong fully to the society as it is, who flourish in it without an overwhelming sense of dissonance or dissent, those who can be called yea-sayers; and on the other hand, the nay-sayers, the individuals at odds with their society and therefore outsiders and exiles so far as privileges, power, and honours are concerned.38 I have experienced this most acutely – and materially – when my outspokenness on matters related to Palestine solidarity led to the relinquishing of a board position in my local Jewish community. I have also experienced this when questioning the orthodoxies “to my left,” where anti-oppression groups and the individuals among them have at times deemed me not sufficiently progressive.39 Of course, in a post-Orientalist frame, comfort should be challenged and relationality is key. In the settler-colonial context, Paulette Regan urges her fellow Canadian settlers to unsettle themselves: “How can we, as non-Indigenous people, unsettle ourselves to name and then transform the settler – the colonizer who lurks within – not just in words but by our actions, as we confront the history of colonization, violence, racism, and injustice that remains part of the IRS [Indian Residential Schools] legacy today?” Regan asks.40 And as for relationality, partnering with another Jewish community activist has been productive

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and efficient, but I am aware of the need to seek out more meaningful connections of solidarity with Arabs and Muslims in Canada.

• Peter Mallory and Jesse Carlson have investigated the concept of political friendship, something that “refers to the problem of how anonymous strangers can feel connected to others they will never meet on the basis of principle rather than personal knowledge.”41 They continue: Theorizing stranger relations through an analogy with the positive norms of friendship – e.g. trust, generosity, mutuality, equality, and a willingness to act in the interests of others – opens the possibility for understanding the symbolic and ethical qualities of bonds between strangers. The concept, in its strongest interpretations, points to the civil and political spheres as more than just spaces of power, interests, and conflict, but as moral and symbolic spaces infused with emotions, solidarities, sympathies, and indignations relative to matters of justice. The concept helps to isolate the practices and institutions through which strangers extend or revoke symbolic and emotional bonds of solidarity towards those whom they will never meet nor know personally.42 Sometimes strangers will become face-to-face acquaintances by a chance meeting, however. And the allyship and solidarity work they engaged in will have primed them – or at least one of them – for the encounter. Some months after Hassan Diab was finally allowed to return to Canada and reunite with his family, I was walking through my neighbourhood with my daughter when I spotted Diab riding his bike. I called out to him. Though we’d never met, I would recognize him anywhere. I introduced myself and mentioned the op-ed I’d co-authored about his case. His wife had reached out to me at the time, thanking me for the piece, and I figured she may have mentioned it to him. We shook hands. He smiled broadly. I introduced him to my daughter, asked how his kids were, and welcomed him home.

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Notes 1 CBC News, “Terrorism Charges against Ottawa Professor Dropped in France,” 12 January 2018, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/chargesdropped-hassan-diab-1.4484443. 2 Bernie M. Farber and Mira Sucharov, “Ottawa Must Seek Justice for Hassan Diab,” Toronto Star, 10 July 2017. 3 Louise Brown, “Professor’s Firing Stirs Hot Debate,” Ottawa Citizen, 31 July 2009, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2009/07/31/professors_firing_ stirs_hot_debate.html; Mohamed Fahmy, “How a Canadian Professor’s Life Became a Horror Ahow: Fahmy,” Ottawa Citizen, 23 May 2017, https://www. thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/05/23/how-a-canadian-professorslife-became-a-horror-show-fahmy.html; Mike Blanchfield (The Canadian Press), “Amnesty Urges Trudeau to Act in Case of Ottawa Professor Jailed in France,” Ottawa Citizen, 21 June 2017, https://www.thestar.com/news/ canada/2017/06/21/amnesty-urges-trudeau-to-act-in-case-of-ottawaprofessor-jailed-in-france.html. 4 Chris Cobb, “Canada’s Extradition Law: A Legal Conundrum,” Ottawa Citizen, 15 November 2014, https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ canadas-extradition-law-a-legal-condundrum. 5 Ottawa Citizen Editorial Team, “Trudeau Must Speak out on Hassan Diab,” Ottawa Citizen, 23 June 2017, https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/ editorials/editorial-trudeau-must-speak-out-on-hassan-diab. 6 Bernie M. Farber and Mira Sucharov, “Ottawa Must Seek Justice for Hassan Diab,” The Toronto Star, 10 July 2017, https://www.thestar.com/opinion/ commentary/2017/07/10/ottawa-must-seek-justice-for-hassan-diab.html. 7 Benjamin Shinewald, “My Declaration of Contrition,” Canadian Jewish News, 6 September 2018, https://www.cjnews.com/perspectives/opinions/ shinewald-my-declaration-contrition. 8 This is a point I made about that piece in Mira Sucharov, Public Influence: A Guide to Op-Ed Writing and Social Media Engagement (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). 9 The concept of allyship has come under scrutiny from some activists and scholars who focus on Indigenous-settler relations in a post–Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canada, and it’s worth noting that here given the scope of this volume. But since this chapter covers a case of settlersettler allyship, I won’t address these critiques directly here. Similarly, some social activists seek to push those with privilege to adopt an “accomplice” position rather than one of “allyship.” As LGBTQ activist Dr Jon Paul writes, “The part that is most pivotal in conversations about moving from ally to

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accomplice is questioning what you are willing to give up. It is about asking yourself are you willing to lose elements of your privilege to help someone else’s life become easier to navigate.” See Dr Jon Paul, “I Need an Accomplice Not an Ally,” EFNIKS, 8 September 2017, http://efniks.com/the-deep-divefeatures/2017/9/6/i-need-an-accomplice-not-an-ally. This is a useful term to strive for as well. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 44. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 50. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (London: Vintage, 1979), 57. Silence – both that of imperialists and of their designated “natives” – is a theme that runs through Culture and Imperialism. Morton Weinfeld, Like Everyone Else but Different: The Paradoxical Success of Canadian Jews (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), 271. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 36. Bernie M. Farber and Mira Sucharov, “Why We Need a Parliamentary Motion to Fight Islamophobia,” The Toronto Star, 5 October 2017, https:// www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/10/05/why-we-need-aparliamentary-motion-to-fight-islamophobia.html. Monisha Bajaj, Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher, and Karishma Desai, “Brown Bodies and Xenophobic Bullying in US Schools: Critical Analysis and Strategies for Action,” Harvard Educational Review 86, no. 4 (2016): 490 and 615–16. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 70. Edward W. Said, Covering Islam (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 8 and 10. Edward W. Said, “The Morning After,” London Review of Books 15, no. 20 (21 October 1993), https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/edward-said/themorning-after. Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Race & Class 27, no. 2 (1985): 9. Weinfeld, Like Everyone Else but Different, 248. Sa’ed Atshan and Darnell L. Moore, “Reciprocal Solidarity: Where the Black and Palestinian Queer Struggles Meet,” Biography 37, no. 2 (2014): 681. For more on this topic, see Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Emma Green, “Are Jews White?” The Atlantic, 5 December 2016, https:// www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/are-jews-white/509453/. Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, “White Jews Have a Duty to Stand with Muslims and People of Color,” Huffington Post, 22 November 2016, https://www. huffingtonpost.ca/entry/white-jews-anti-semitism-trump-stand-withsolidarity-muslims-people-of-color_us_5834857ce4b000af95ecaff0.

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26 Atshan and Moore, “Reciprocal Solidarity,” 680. 27 JTA and TOI staff, “Dozens of London Jews say Kaddish for Palestinians killed in Gaza,” Times of Israel, 17 May 2018, https://www.timesofisrael.com/ dozens-of-london-jews-say-kaddish-for-palestinians-killed-in-gaza/. A similar demonstration was mounted by representatives of the Jewish group IfNotNow in Boston: https://www.facebook.com/IfNotNowOrg/videos/ ifnotnow-outside-the-boston-federation:/1706651312755163/. 28 For an extended discussion of the Kaddish prayer, see Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). 29 Drick Boyd, White Allies in the Struggle for Racial Justice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015). 30 As to Heschel’s views on Israel, here’s how Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine, puts it in a piece describing what Heschel would stand for were he alive today: “Heschel was enough of a Jewish particularist to want to see the State of Israel survive as an embodiment of Jewish values of social justice, peace, and love of neighbour and stranger. Heschel’s heart was broken at the immorality of the war in Vietnam and the indifference of his colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary to the suffering of the Vietnamese people – I can only imagine the suffering he would have experienced had he seen Jewish values transformed to be used as excuses for domination, cruelty, arrogance and the glorification of armed might by the government of the State of Israel.” Rabbi Michael Lerner, “What Would A.J. Heschel Be Doing or Advocating Today?,” Tikkun, 8 January 2013, https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/ what-would-a-j-heschel-be-doing-or-advocating-today. 31 Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 35. 32 On the role of scholars advancing their ideas via op-eds and social media, see Sucharov, Public Influence. On the role of public intellectuals in the context of Edward Said’s broader thinking, see Said, Representations of the Intellectual. 33 See Joshua Schreier and Mira Sucharov, “If Israel Lets in Palestinian Refugees, Will It Lose Its Jewish Character?,” The Forward, 17 October 2016, https://forward.com/opinion/352075/if-israel-lets-in-palestinian-refugeeswill-it-lose-its-jewish-character/; Mira Sucharov, “Israel Engagement Paradigms in Dissenting Jewish Organizations” (paper presented at the 2018 Biennial Scholar’s Conference on American Jewish History, Philadelphia, 17–19 June 2018). 34 See Dov Waxman, Trouble in the Tribe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 35 Mira Sucharov, “Imagining Ourselves Then and Now: Nostalgia and Canadian Multiculturalism,” Journal of International Relations and Development 16, no. 4 (2013): 539–65.

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36 Anna Altman, “The Year of Hygge, the Danish Obsession with Getting Cozy,” The New Yorker, 18 December 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/ culture-desk/the-year-of-hygge-the-danish-obsession-with-getting-cozy. 37 Mira Sucharov, “Feeling My Way Along the Seam Line of Jerusalem,” Journal of Narrative Politics 3, no. 2 (2017): 120–30. 38 Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 52–3. 39 Mira Sucharov, “Something is Rotten in Diaspora Discourse on Israel,” Haaretz, 4 November 2014, https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-something-isrotten-in-diaspora-discourse-on-israel-1.5323966; Mira Sucharov, “Scholarly and Public Engagement in Jewish Politics: Power, Responsibility & Identity,” SHOFAR: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies (forthcoming); Mira Sucharov, “Jews Drive US Police Brutality against People of Color? JVP Crosses Over into Anti-Semitism,” Haaretz, 10 July 2017. 40 Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010). 41 Peter Mallory and Jesse Carlson, “Rethinking Personal and Political Friendship with Durkheim,” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 15, no. 3 (2014): 327. 42 Ibid., 330.

Contributors

Yasmeen Abu-Laban is professor and Canada Research Chair in the Politics of Citizenship and Human Rights in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. Rachad Antonius is a retired full professor of sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He works on Arab societies, Arab communities in Canada, racism and discrimination, and quantitative methodology. Sung-eun Choi is associate professor in history at Bentley University. She is the author of Decolonization and the French of Algeria: Bringing the Settler Colony Home (Palgrave, 2016). Mary-Ellen Kelm is a professor of history at Simon Fraser University, specializing in settler-colonial histories of health and Indigenous Peoples. Maurice Jr. Labelle is an associate professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan. Scholarship of his explores how discursive practices of decolonization become universalized modes of liberation and reparation. Allyson Stevenson is an assistant professor and Métis historian at the University of Saskatchewan. She joined the Indigenous Studies

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Department as the Gabriel Dumont Institute Chair of Métis Research in July 2020. Mira Sucharov is professor of political science and university chair of teaching innovation at Carleton University. Her most recent book is Borders and Belonging: A Memoir (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Lorenzo Veracini teaches history and politics at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on the comparative history of colonial systems. His most recent book is The World Turned Inside Out (Verso, 2021).

Index

1863 Senate Law, 83–4 1885 armed resistance, 26–7, 34 1974 James Bay, 63 1979 Indian Health Policy, 63 1989 Indian Health Transfer Policy, 63 aaug. See Association of Arab American University Graduates Abdi, Nourredine, 89 Abu-Laban, Baha, 107 academic detachment, 83 Adams, Howard, 16, 25–37; alterity experience of, 28; counternarrative of Canadian history, 25, 31, 33; on decolonial future, 36; dehumanizing narrative and, 35; educational program for Métis communities, 29–30; education of, 25, 27; experiences as “colonized,” 32; family life of, 31–2; Halfbreed identity of, 28, 31–2, 34; intellectual and political outlook of, 27; joined Métis resistance, 28; laziness myth, 36;

media’s view on, 29; as president of Saskatchewan Métis Society, 29; report for Métis Society of Saskatchewan, 29; returned to Saskatchewan, 28; scholarly works of, 30–6; struggle for Indigenous self-determination, 37; transgenerational awareness of, 31; at uc Berkeley, 28 adaptation, 94–7 Aeneid (Virgil), 123 Aflaq, Michel, 86 African American Civil Rights and Black Power movements, 28 agreement, 49, 63, 170. See also Oslo agreement ahistorization of relations, 149 Ahmad, Aijaz, 12–13 Aida (opera), 93–4 Akenson, Donald, 121 Alberta Métis Association, 28 Algeria, 79; 1930 centennial of conquest of, 84; French land reforms in, 83–4 Algerian war, 167

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allyship, 172; challenges of, 174; definition of, 173; dynamics of, 173; Jews, Arabs, and Muslims, 173–5; making, positionality within, 18; and solidarity work, 179; in struggle for racial justice, 176; voices of non-oppressed doing, 175 “American triumphalism,” 91 Amyotte, Joe, 29 “animalistic values,” concept of, 147–8 Anishinaabemowin, 54–5 Anishinaabe people, 16, 49, 54, 59, 66; cultural change among, 59; knowledge, 54 “anthropological variation,” 80 anthropology, 103 anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racisms, 10, 17, 105, 114, 115, 171; following Iranian Revolution, 5; in political culture of Western societies, 159; in post-9/11 era, 109; Said’s experiences with, 10; stereotypes, 6; US media filled with, 6 anti-imperialism, 81 anti-imperial writings, 5–6 anti-Islamism, 100n12 anti-Muslim racisms. See anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racisms anti-Orientalism, 3, 13–15, 14, 17–18, 79, 159 anti-Orientalist: critique, 4, 9, 13–14, 17, 81, 141; re-orientation, 13–15 anti-Palestinian, 171 anti–petit bourgeois sentiment, 84 anti-racism, 108–9, 114, 142, 172; antiracist academic currents, 161; antiracist alliances, 168–9; antiracist movements, 161; blind

spot within paradigms of, 142; practice of Said, 17; praxis, 105, 109; stances, 166. See also antiArab and anti-Muslim racisms antisemitism, 167–9, 171–4, 176 anti-terrorism, 113 anti-Zionism, 18, 168, 169, 174 Arab American Left, 106 Arab Americans, 106–7, 112; erroneous statements concerning, 112 Arab American University Graduates, 106–7, 109 Arab Canadians, 106, 166 Arabism, 82, 89 Arab-Israeli War, 107 Arab North American Left, 17, 106–7, 109, 114 Arab North Americans, 174 Arabophobia, 114 Arab-origin refugees, 107 Arab(s), 5–10, 18, 82, 88, 90, 97–8, 104, 107–8, 110–17, 113, 169–70, 172–3, 179; complex realities facing, 115; culture, 79, 82–3, 97; erroneous statements concerning, 112; exclusion experienced by, 114; ideas related to inferiority and uncivility of, 110; identities and Islam, 87; minorities in Canada, 106; nationalism, 81; negative portrayal by Hollywood of, 110–11; sensibility, 96; women, stereotyped representations of, 111; world, 6, 29, 82, 90–1, 97 Arab societies, 80–1, 86, 88–91, 96, 98, 104, 150–1; Berque’s outlook on, 98–9; cultural regeneration in, 89; drawing on asala, 96; social and normative behaviours of, 151; societal movements in, 90–1

Index Arafat, Yasser, 7, 170 Arnaldez, Roger, 80 artisans, 91–2 asala, 17, 86–91, 94–9; in Arab cultural context, 88; authoritarian structures of, 89; in Berque’s analysis of decolonization, 90–5; as conformist strain of decolonization, 96; connotations of, 86; in cultural resilience of Egyptians, 91; disagreements over validity of, 89; in Egypt, 95; forged through colonial experiences, 86; from link between ideals and social base, 87; North African critics of, 87–9, 88–9; relational dimension of, 87; and renewal, relationship between, 96; in Rousseauean liberal tradition, 88 assimilationist Indigenous policy, 45, 64 Association of Arab American University Graduates: formation of, 106–7; need for, 107; shaping content for Orientalism, 107 Atshan, Sa’ed, 172–3 authenticity, 17, 86–8, 91, 96–7 authority, 146, 148, 158, 169 Badgley, Robin F., 16, 45–6, 50–5, 57–61, 63, 64–6; applicability of work of, 45; global health toolkit, 45; Indigenous health research work of, 45; publication on ihs, 61; report of Colombia study, 51–2; study of Sioux Lookout Project, 50, 54–61 Bain, Harry W., 50, 61 band councils, 47 band funds, 47 band registry, 57

189

Batoche, Métis historic site of, 29 Bear Lake community, clinical needs assessment in, 58 Beauvoir, Simone de, 109 Beddeb, Abdelwahab, 89 Bedouin identity, 96 Bedouin societies, 87 Beirut, 1970s war-torn, 79 beliefs, 4, 7, 146, 157 Benda, Julien, 81 benevolence, 42, 45, 52–3 Ben Rejeb, Lotfi, 5–10 Berbers: Arab conquest and conversion of, 96; resistance, 85 Berque, Augustin, 83 Berque, Jacques, 17, 79–102, 80, 99; anti-imperializing Orient, 98; on anti-imperial revolutions, 90–1; Arab culture, views of, 82, 83; asala in thinking of, 86–90; colonial administration career of, 84–5; conception of modernization, 96; decolonization, views of, 82, 86, 90–1, 95–9; disagreement with Fanon, 90; family background of, 83; as foreign expert for unesco, 91–2; “individual genius” of, 81; Islam, views of, 80, 82, 86–90, 94–5; Kedourie’s onslaught on, 81; methodological consciousness of, 80; on Nasser, 86; North African critics of, 88–9; objections to piednoir milieu, 84; outsider-insider position, 82–3; parallel undoing proposal of, 98; progressive writers on, 98; regard for theatre, 93–4; return to Morocco, 92; return to North Africa, 84; social structures of colonized societies, 85; support of North Africa’s independence, 82; youth of, 84. See also Arab

190

Index

societies; asala; decolonization; Islam Bertram, Laurie, 68n4 Bible, 129 bigotry, 166–7, 172 biopolitics, 44 Black Power movements, 28 Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (Charles), 26 Black Skin, White Masks (Frantz), 26, 31 Boers, 132 Bohaker, Heidi, 68n4 boomerang epistemologies, 43–4 Bouzar, Wadi, 85–6 Boyd, Drick, 176 Brady, Jim, 28–9 Brexit decision, 112 Briffault, Robert, 88 British Columbia, 27, 46–7; mercury contamination of water and fish in, 47; provincial secretary, 46 British North America Act (1867), 46 Bunyan, John, 123 Bush, George W., 8, 104 cair. See Council on AmericanIslamic Relations Campbell, Maria, 26, 33 Canaan, 125–6 Canaanites, 18, 124, 128, 130–2, 134 Canada, 16–17, 25–31, 33–5, 42–6, 48, 50–4, 59, 61–5, 106–7, 110–11, 165–6, 169–70, 172–3, 179; abortion law, 51; capitalism and colonial legacy, 35; cherished image, exposing, 32–3; identified as imperial nation, 34; past of, 43; structural violence of, 65

Canadian Arab Federation, 107 Canadian colonialism, 25, 30; colonial epistemologies of Indigenous Peoples, 43; dehumanizing conditions of, 30; Indigenous-settler relationship, 31 Canadian exceptionalism, myth of, 33 Canadian government, 16, 26, 45, 165, 174; critics on international humanitarian reputation of, 48; free medical care promises of, 46–7; Health Plan for Indians, 47; Indigenous health care, efforts to refuse, 46–7, 64 Canadian history, 25, 29, 31, 33, 43 Canadian imperialism, 16, 29 Canadian Jewish Congress, 165. See also “clash of civilizations” Canadian Jews, 167, 169; antiracist alliances, 168–9; becoming non-Zionist, 169; shifting views of, 169; speaking out Palestinian oppression, 167–8 Canadian justice system, 173 Canadian Political Science Association, 109–10 Canadians, 28, 30, 32, 34, 42–3, 47, 50, 106–7, 109, 165–6, 168, 173 capital, cultural, 106 Cardinal, Harold, 26 Carlson, Jesse, 179 Carmichael, Stokely, 26 Carré, Olivier, 144, 148 Catholic Church, 65 Césaire, Aimé, 3, 8 change: co-insurance, 47; cultural, 54–5, 59–60; political, 121, 123; regime, 123; social, 55, 95 chaos, 112, 152–3 Charlottesville: frightening events at, 176; marchers, 172

Index chdp. See Community Health Demonstration Programme China’s barefoot doctor, success of, 48 Christian Coptic citizens, hostile discourse towards, 155–6 Christian hegemony, 173 Christianity, 170 church, 33, 152, 158 citizenship, 153, 164, 171 civilization, 34, 36; Arabic, 89; European, 170; fight for Muslim, 80; Western, 36 cjc. See Canadian Jewish Congress Clark, Joe, 63 “clash of civilizations,” 104, 170 class, 12, 34, 114, 143, 160 class-based radical nationalist politics, 28 Coca-colonization, 11 collective activism, 177 collective hatred, target of, 167 Colombia, health services in, 51–2, 58, 61, 63–5; culture and community values for, 52; national planning of, 51; study of, 51–2, 54 colonial domination, 65, 141 colonialism, 4, 26, 28, 31, 43, 85–6, 91, 105, 107–8, 113, 133, 142, 157, 166. See also Canadian colonialism; “internal colonialism”; neo-colonialism; settler colonialism; Western colonialism colonial knowledge, 43 colonial knowledge production, 43 colonially entangled knowledge, 45 colonial models, 43 colonial public health: scrutiny of culture, 44; values and structures shaping, 44 colonial racial hierarchy, 32

191

colonies, settler: colonial mimicry and hybridity of, 43–4; extractive and settler varieties of, 43 colonization, 25–6, 31, 33, 35–6, 43, 97, 141–2, 178; dominant discourse of, 142; economic, 36; school as site of, 35 colonized peoples, 26–7, 44, 142, 157, 168 colonized societies: dejection of, 90; social structures of, 85; societal movements in, 90–1 colonizer, 4, 13, 26, 35–6, 83, 178; existence of, 35; as oppressor, 36; presence and conduct of, 36 Colonizer and the Colonized, The (Memmi), 26 communal politics of participation, 130 community, 31, 34, 48–50, 54–9, 61–2, 85, 87, 89, 107, 130–1, 149, 154, 156, 178; based care, 49; based health programs, 62–3; development, 63–4; health, 57; political, 121, 131, 171 Community Health Demonstration Programme, 63 Community Health Representative Program, 63 community household health survey, 54–5 community of interpretation, 130–1 “community-oriented total health care,” 50 consciousness, 28, 30, 31 Copts, 18; attacks against, 158; characterizations of, 156–7; killing of, 155 corruption, 124, 153 Council on American-Islamic Relations, 155

192

Index

covenant, 121, 125, 130 Covering Islam (Said), 6, 111, 170 Cree people, 25, 34, 49, 54–5; gendered dynamics shaping health care experience of, 66; knowledge, 54; population of, 61; wary of outside interventions, 66–7 Cree residents, 16, 49, 54, 59, 66 Cross-Cultural Anthropological Analysis of a Technical Aid Program, A (Foster), 52 Crossen, Jonathan, 27 “crusaders,” 155, 156, 158 cultural aggression, 98 cultural alienation, 91 cultural capital, 106 cultural domination, 10 “cultural genocide,” 32 cultural imperialism, 11, 25 cultural intermixing and multiplicity, 106 cultural syncretism of Mediterranean, 88 cultural underbelly, 10 culture, 4, 7, 10–12, 14, 28, 35, 43–4, 52, 54, 79, 81, 83, 88–9, 91–2, 97–8, 103, 114, 141, 160–3, 167, 178; and empire, 103; in Islamic societies, 91; local, 55, 159; patriarchal, 161; popular, 108, 110, 114; racist, 176; role in health care, 44, 52, 55. See also culture change Culture and Imperialism (Said), 13, 34, 93, 103, 106, 109, 167–8, 171 culture change: health care and, 55–7, 59–61; and health care services, 66–7; health perceptions and health services, link between, 55; social and, 55

Day, John, 58, 61 “decentered consciousness,” 7 decolonial approach, 13, 15 decolonial consciousness, 37 decolonial counter-narrative of Canadian history, 25 decolonial humanization, 8, 9, 10, 18, 28–9, 31, 36, 121, 167 decolonial politics, 12 decolonization, 4, 8, 13–17, 25, 27, 29–33, 32, 35, 44, 65, 82, 85–6, 88, 90–1, 95–7, 98, 120–1, 141; boomerang effect of, 4, 6–10, 15–16, 26; in Canadian Prairies, 16; challenges associated with success of, 95; conformist strain of, 96; “decolonizing the mind,” postcolonial efforts in, 4; educational, 28; formal, 10; hybridity in rejuvenation of Islam during, 97–8; between Orient and Occident, 17; as renewal/innovation, 96; in Sioux Lookout region, 16; with society’s confidence, 96; structural, 13; structures of, 15 deculturation, 98 defensive manoeuvre, Israel, 167 dehumanization, 18, 36, 121; of Arabs, 9; of other, 167. See also decolonial humanization Deloria, Vine, Jr, 26 democracy, 104, 112, 145 democratization, 112 demonstration, 174–5 depersonalization, 98 development, 16, 36, 48, 50, 52, 88, 126; economic, 51–2, 64; and health, connection between, 48; political, 61 dhimmi, notion of, 151–4

Index Diab, Hassan, 18, 164–6; accused of Paris synagogue attack, 164; case coverage in Toronto Star, 165; op-ed on, 165–6, 177; return to Canada, 179 Diaspora Jews, 167–8 Dickason, Olive P., 36 differentiation and hierarchy, 149–50 disagreements, 89–90, 166 disciplines, 4, 11–12, 80, 103, 109, 113 “discombobulation,” 83 Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire), 4 discrimination, 165; legitimizing, 159; in Middle East or Israel/ Palestine, 105; in North America, 105; overt, 153 displacement, 17, 120–1, 123–4, 126–7, 131–4; as armed political collective, 124; epistemology of, 122; Exodus and, 127; “fragmentation” and, 124; preemptive, 120; premised on foundational violence, 124; spatial, 132; and wealth, 124 dominated societies: domination within, 160; minority groups in, 161; political trends in, 143 domination, 10, 34, 108, 141, 143, 157, 159–60; cultural, 10; mode of, 10, 17, 121–2, 125, 128–9, 131; relationships of, 18, 142–3, 157, 160–1; relation within dominated societies, 143; western style of, 10 “double consciousness,” 5 Douglas, Tommy, 28 Du Bois, W.E.B., 5 Eden, 126 education, 25, 27, 30, 50, 57, 60

193

educational decolonization, 28 egalitarian, 130, 132 Egypt, 18, 84, 86, 90–5, 123–6, 129, 131, 150, 153, 156; Aida opera in, 93–4; anti-imperial revolutions in, 90–1; asala in, 95; Berque’s 1967 tome on, 92; cultural resilience of, 91; discovery in Canaan, 125; economic transformations in, 92–3; Islamic reform movements, 95; position in governing bodies, 93; theatre in, 93–4; Wafd movement, 91 Egyptian Coptic Christians, 154 Egyptian craftsmanship, 92–3 Egyptian human rights organizations, 158 Egyptian National Bank, 93 Egyptian “personality,” 94 Egyptian society: and Islam, 94–5; qualities of, 94; relationship with “Nature,” 92–3 Egypt, Imperialism and Revolution (Berque), 92 elites of colonized people, 142 environment, 8, 87, 110, 112 “epistemology of displacement,” 122 equality, 111, 142, 153, 176, 179 essentialization of identities, 149 ethnography, 43, 171 Eurocentrism, 30 Europe, 11, 88, 107, 111 European Enlightenment, 14 European Orientalists, 12 European relations: future with Orient, 83 European societies, 35, 36, 82, 84–5, 98, 170 evidence-based research, 112 evolution, 90, 94, 127 exclusion, definition of, 121

194

Index

exile, 82, 128, 132–3, 156, 178; compelled, 97; forced, 84; people of, 128; and revolution, 133; vs exodus, 128, 133 existential claims, 90 exodus, 121, 122, 126, 128, 131–3, 132, 172; in attainment of Promised Land, 130; collective constituted by, 128; and displacement, 127; ethical high point of, 126; genocidal implications of, 131; history, 123–4; linear narrative structure, 123; misrepresentation of, 120; as model for political struggle, 124; people of, 128; politics, 121–3, 131–2; progressive history recognized in, 129; radical politics and, 127; reinterpretations of, 125–6; and revolution, 120, 122, 129; as revolutionary choice, 133; second Exodus of, 126; settler-colonial political form, 125; as settler-colonial story, 123; settler-colonial uses of, 131; story, 17, 124, 129; vs exile, 128, 133; vs political messianism, 126–7; Zionist misrepresentation of, 18 Exodus and Revolution (Walzer), 120–2, 129 facial covering, banning of, 111 fake news, 112 Fanon, Frantz, 6, 26, 31, 83, 90 Farber, Bernie, 164–6, 169 Faris, Hani, 107 far-right Western political trends, 158 Farris, Sara, 111 federalism, 106 femonationalism, 111

First Nations Peoples, 25–6, 28, 32, 35; conference to discuss education of, 33–4; feelings of inferiority and hopelessness in, 35; political and economic oppression of, 28; provincial health care systems for, 50 Fi zilal al Qur’an (Qutb), 144 Flaubert, Gustave, 9–10 Foster, George, 52, 55 Foucault, Michel, 43, 108, 109 Fourth World, 27 “fragmentation,” 124 France, 11–12, 34, 84, 111, 164 Franklin, Benjamin, 123 freedom, 25, 36, 125 French land reforms, in Algeria, 83 French North Africa, 89 French Orientalists, 17; esprit humain of, 80; Massignon, Louis, 80 Frideres, James, 68n4 Friere, Paulo, 28 Gallic humanist tradition, 80 Gandhi, Leela, 18 gay rights discourses, 111 gender, 12, 18, 110–11, 113–14, 160 gender and sexuality: Indigenous health care, 66; in Orientalist discourse, 111; self/other around expressions of, 113 Ghandi, Leela, 12 Ghoneim, Wagdi, 141, 150, 155–8; approach to deal with Copts, 157–8; arrested for violence calls, 155; career of, 155; in exile, 156; hostility to non-Muslims, 156; on military conquest by Muslim armies, 157; video commentary of killing of Copts, 155–7

Index global health, 44–5, 51, 54, 59; methodologies of, 54–5; toolkit, 45 global imperial system, 11 globalization of decolonial “worldmaking,” 4 global population health, 48 global war on terror, 113 God: law of, 145–6, 150; unicity of, 145, 147 Goldthorpe, Gary, 50, 61 government funding: of Indigenous organizations, 36; for project on health knowledge, 67n1 Gramsci, Antonio, 108 Grand Council of Treaty 9, 47 Great Seal, 123 Guha, Ranajit, 142 hadith, 145, 158 hakimiyyah, concept of, 144–6, 148, 151, 155 Halfbreed (Maria), 33 Halfbreeds, 31–5 Hallaq, Wael, 13–15 Hamilton, Charles, 26 Hanem, Kuchuk, 9–10, 11 Hardt, Michael, 133 Harold Cardinal of Indian Association of Alberta, 47 Hartz, Louis, 124 hasbarah, 167 health: auxiliaries, 45, 49, 62; and development, 48; education, 61; perceptions and health services, 55–7; promotion, nation role in, 48, 51 health care, 44–7, 49–51, 53–4, 59, 61–2, 64–7; delivery model, 45; training, 51; workers, 48–9, 53, 60, 62

195

Health Plan for Indians, 47 health services, 46–7, 51, 53–6, 59–61, 63–4; analysis, 45; archival record, 53; as community priority, 56; by extent of Indian-white contacts, 56; health perceptions and culture change, link between, 55; interactions, 54; provincial, 47 hegemonic power, 142 hegemony, 17, 30, 108, 152, 171, 173 Hellenistic currents, 88 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 176 heterogeneous development, 52 hierarchy, 18, 141, 144, 147, 150–1, 154, 160; local, 18; political, 143, 151; racial, 32, 160; social, 15, 151 Hill, Christopher, 121 hip dysplasia, 60 Hollywood film production, 110 homeowners, pacified society of, 125 homonationalism, 111 Hospital for Sick Children, 49 Hourani, Albert, 81 human affairs, re-structuring, 174 humanism, 81, 83, 132 humanist, 81–2, 103; critique, 81; learning, 81; thinking, 79 Hunter, Mary, 58–9, 66 Huntington, Samuel, 104 Hurlich, Marshall, 66 Iacovetta, Franca, 68n4 Icelandic immigrants, 69n4 ideal social order for Muslim societies, conception of, 144 identities: cultural, 61; essentialization of, 149; formation, 15; public Jewish, 166; religious, 142–3; scholarly, 171 “ideological biases,” 4

196

Index

ideology, 33, 36, 144, 149 ihs. See Indian Health Services imperial culture, 9, 11, 15–18, 168, 169, 174 imperialism, 3, 10, 13, 15, 26, 29, 31–2, 34–5, 85–6, 92–3, 97–8, 99, 105–9, 168, 171; cultural, 11, 25; history, 35; main battle in, 35; political, 108 imperial misrepresentations, 9–11, 26, 37, 122 imperial myths, 36 imperial politics of difference, 5, 10, 15 Indian health, acculturation pattern of, 55 Indian Health Policy, 63 Indian Health Services, 42, 46–7, 51–6, 52, 59, 61, 64–5; administrative confusion of, 53; archival record, 53; Badgley’s publication on, 61; budget for, 46; change in eligibility criteria for seeking, 47; dominant discourses of, 54; growth of, 46; implicit assumptions of, 52; published accounts of, 53; scholarly analysis of, 52–4 Indian Health Transfer Policy, 63 Indian people, 12, 29, 46, 47, 55, 58, 60, 61–2, 63 Indian-white contact: community health evaluation by extent of, 57; health services as community priority by extent of, 56; health services evaluation by extent of, 56 Indigenous Canaanite perspective, displacement and exclusionary silencing of, 17–18 Indigenous communities, 31, 37, 44–5, 47, 54–5, 61, 63–4

Indigenous education, 37 Indigenous health, 42, 45–6, 49, 51, 63, 67; auxiliaries, 62; and health services analysis, 45 Indigenous health care, 65; of Colombia, 51–2, 54, 64–5; community-development model for, 62–3; government’s efforts to refuse, 46; history of, 42; knowledge of, 42–3; protests over decline of, 47–8, 65; provincial health services for, 47; settler colonialism legacy on, 45–6 Indigenous health research: colonially entangled knowledge in, 45; structural violence of, 45 “Indigenous historical paradigm,” 31 Indigenous inferiority, colonial myths of, 34 Indigenous internationalism, 27 Indigenous knowledge, 17, 42, 54–5, 57, 64 Indigenous oppression, 35, 37. See also oppression Indigenous Peoples, 16–17, 25–8, 30–6, 42–8, 50–4, 58–9, 61, 63–5, 85, 89, 106, 121–2, 124–5, 132; Canada’s imperial relationship with, 16–17; dehumanizing narrative and, 35; knowledge about, 42; legal and spatial segregation of, 36; political resistance, 25–6; populations characteristics, 61; racism against, 35 Indigenous rights movements, 27, 30 Indigenous self-determination, 36 Indigenous self-hatred, 35 Indigenous social networks, 85 Indigenous studies programs, 26, 29 Indigenous suffering, 32–3

Index Indigenous women, 54 inferiorization, school as site of, 35 “influential model of Oriental woman,” 10 infrastructural projects, 48 innovation, 93, 97 insider-outsiderness, 178 inter-communal debates, 177 “internal colonialism,” 68n4 intersectional approaches, 160 intolerance, attitudes of, 151 Inuit people, 35 invariant, 97, 98 Iranian hostage crisis, American media coverage of, 5, 110 Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis, 5 Islam, 6, 10, 80, 82–3, 87–90, 94–8, 110, 145–6, 148–52, 154, 156–7, 159, 170, 172; and Arab society, 82; European repudiation of, 89; historical changes in, 90; historical events surrounding rise of, 87; hybridity in rejuvenation of, 97–8; modernity analysis, 86, 88, 94–5; modernizing, 88; and Muslim societies, 98; in North Africa, 86; openness to change, 87; in practical life sphere, 97; regenerating, 90; renewal of, 88, 90; shaping cultural systems of Europe, 88; spiritual leaders, 87; theocratic radicalism of, 89. See also Arab societies; Muslim societies “Islamic awakening,” 147 Islamic culture, 82, 88–9, 161 “Islamic peril,” 170 Islamic reform movements, 95 “Islamic revival,” 159 Islamic society. See Muslim societies

197

“Islamic State,” 155 Islamism, 143, 159 Islamist currents, 145, 156 Islamist dehumanizations, silencing of, 18 Islamist movement, 143, 147, 150–1 Islamists political currents, 143 Islamists political trends, 143 Islamophobia, 114, 159, 166, 169, 171–4; and antisemitism, link between, 171–2; in North America, 170; op-eds about, 169; pieces on, 166; scourge in society, 169 Israel, 105, 111, 113, 125, 128, 133, 167–8, 170–1, 174–5, 177; Israeli forces, 174; public pronouncements about, 168 Israeli Jewish structures, 167 Israeli violence in Gaza, 174–5 Israel-Palestine relationship, 165–6, 173, 178 Jacques, Paul St, 47–8 jahili society, 146–7 jahiliyyah, concept of, 144–6, 145, 148–9 Jewish account of deliverance, 130 Jewish allyship with Arabs and Muslims, 18, 172–6, 179 Jewish-Arab dialogue group, 170 Jewish collective, 168 “Jewish geography,” 177 Jewish identities, 166 Jewish messianic thought, 126 Jewish North Americans, 174 Jewish prayer for mourning, 174–5 Jewish public intellectuals, 18 “Jewish question,” 110 Jews, 131, 148, 152, 158, 168–9, 171–3, 176; as anti-racist left, 172;

198

Index

of Exodus, 131; light-skinned, 172–3; in Muslim societies, 149 Jihad, 148 jiziah, 148–9 jizya, 152 Joseph, Suad, 112 Jumblat, Kamal, 86 justice, 27, 29, 121, 158, 165–6, 172, 177, 179 kaddish, 174–5 Kairaoun: mosque of, 96–7; as site of contest, 97 Kedourie, Elie, 81, 82 Kennedy, John F., 27 Khatibi, Abdelkhabir, 88–9 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 176 knowledge, 14, 34, 42–3, 55, 65, 83, 88, 98, 104, 106, 108, 110–13; colonial, 43; construction, 110; cultural, 64; “democratization” of, 112; personal, 179; and power, inter-relationship between, 108; production, 45, 110–12, 111; transnational, 4 Kue Young, 61 Labelle, Maurice Jr, 103, 171, 174, 177 Lacoste, Yves, 80 lacrosse, 106 Laude, Patrick, 87 Lavoie, Josée, 63 laziness myth, 36 leadership, 7, 29–30, 153 Lepine, Maxime, 31 Lewis, Bernard, 104, 111; condemnation of Orientalism, 104; New York Times obituary on, 104 lgbtq rights claims, 111

liberation, 14, 26–9, 35, 88, 90, 109, 122–3, 127, 130, 132, 159 liberation movements, 25, 28–9, 90; in Arab world, 90; in North Africa and Egypt, 90–1 life, in new locale, 124 local health care workers, 48 Lutz, Harmut, 27 Macdonald, John A., 25 Macrae, J.A., 46 Maghreb, 87, 89 Mahmoud, Saba, 161 Mallory, Peter, 179 Manrique, Raul Paredes, 51 Manuel, George, 26–7 Massignon, Louis, 80, 83, 87, 97, 100n12; concern for plight of Palestinians, 80; “fight for Muslim civilization,” 80 media, 28–9, 34, 110, 112; anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes, filled with, 6; depictions of Arabs/ Arab Americans, 107 medical colonialism, 45 Medical Services Branch, 46, 49–50 Medicare, 47, 53, 64 Meir, Golda, 105 Memmi, Albert, 6, 26, 35, 36 messianism, 126–7 Métis Association of Saskatchewan, 29 Métis communities, 26–7, 29, 31, 33–4 Métis decolonization, 28 Métis identity, 32 Métis national movement, 16 Métis Otipemisiwak, 34 Métis Peoples, 16, 25, 26, 28–34, 29, 46; 1885 armed resistance, 26–7; conference to discuss education

Index of, 33–4; consciousness of, 31; denial of Native ancestry, 33–4; distorted image internalized by, 30; educational program for, 29; feelings of inferiority and hopelessness in, 35; intervention against pervasive imperial myths, 36; marginalization of, 26, 28; road allowance settlements, 27; shame about identity, 33 Métis resistances, 31; historical narrative of, 31; as national liberation movements, 28–9; New Breed magazine role in, 30 Métis Society of Saskatchewan: Adams’s report for, 29–30; for Métis control of education, 30; New Breed magazine, 30 Meyerhof, Max, 88 middle-class values and racism, 35 Middle East, 6, 10–12, 15, 18, 81, 91, 103–7, 109, 113–16; and Africa, 91; cultural alienation in, 91; and North Africa, 17; Western supremacy, significance to, 11 Milbank, 51 Milestones (Qutb), 144, 148 military conquest by Muslim armies, 157 Miller, Susan A., 31 minorities, 106, 112–13, 142–3, 160, 166, 171; experience, realities of, 105–6; minoritized groups, 114; non-Muslim, 18, 143, 153, 158 misrepresentations, 5, 9–11, 15, 114, 120 mixed-medical model for service delivery, 62 mobile Orientalism, 120 modernization, 17, 85–6, 88–9, 91, 96; congruous with preserving

199

asala, 86; and decolonization, 96; as renewal/innovation, 96; and roots, tension between, 91 modern wage system, 85 Moore, Darnell, 172–3 moral hierarchy, 143–5 morality, 125, 145, 147–8 moral superiority, 148–9 Morocco, 84, 90, 92 Morsi, Mohamed, 156 movements, 27, 29, 90–1, 95, 123, 141, 144–5, 150–1; antiracist, 161; far-right supremacist, 144; fractious, 91; identity-based, 143; indigenous rights, 27, 30; intellectual, 95; Islamist, 144; Métis nationalist, 30; national, 16, 28, 122; political, 143, 149; radical, 85, 95; relational, 90; social, 91, 106 msb. See Medical Services Branch Mubarak, Hosni, 156 multiculturalism, 160, 169, 171 Muslim Arab, 86–7 Muslim Brotherhood, 85, 144–5, 150, 155–6, 158 Muslim Brothers, 156 Muslim majorities countries, 143, 145, 155 Muslims, 5–6, 8, 18, 87, 104–5, 108, 110, 112–15, 113, 143–4, 146–7, 149–58, 170, 172–3, 179; complex realities facing, 115; erroneous statements concerning, 112; exclusion experienced by, 114; feeling of being defied by non-Muslims, 152; ideas related to inferiority and uncivility of, 110; lands of, 83, 153; minorities, 111, 159; negative portrayal by Hollywood of, 110–11; and

200

Index

non-Muslims, difference between, 150–2, 154; securitization of, 113 Muslim societies, 86–7, 91, 95, 142–9, 151–2, 154, 157–8, 161; anti-colonialist, anti-Orientalist representations of, 142; attitudes of intolerance, 151; attitude towards Jews and Christians, 148– 9; conception of ideal social order for, 144; culture in, 91; dealing with Copts, 157–8; disconnect from normative systems, 148; notion of dhimmi in, 151–3; reIslamizing, 151; superior position attributed to, 146, 147; tolerant towards non-Muslims, 151; vs jahiliyya societies, 146–7 Muslim women, 111, 172 muteness, 15 myth, 26, 33, 96 Myth of the Savage, The (Dickason), 36 Nâfi, Oqba ben, 96 naif. See North American Imams Federation Nancy, Jean-Luc, 16 national economies, 48 nationalism, 29, 90; Arab, 81; clash with liberation movements, 90–1; far-right identity-based, 144; radical Arab, 81 nationalist movements, 29, 95, 152 “national question,” 110 nation-building, 95 Nation-State Law, 168 Native Alcohol and Drug Addictions Program, 63 Native Peoples, in Canada: Canadian history from point of view of, 30–1; racialized class

formed by, 30. See also Indigenous Peoples nature, 30, 91–3, 96, 98, 124–6 Negri, Antonio, 133 neo-colonialism, 36 neo-liberalism, 45 neo-Nazis, 173, 176 neo-racism, 152–3 New Breed magazine, 30, 37 New York Review of Books, The, 104 niqab debate, 111 Nkrumah, Kwame, 36 noach, 177 non-discrimination, 161 non-Muslims, 143–4, 148–54, 156, 159; citizens, 151, 153, 155, 159; death sentence for murder of, 154; exclusion from equal citizenship, 159; hostile discourse towards, 155–6; identity of, 149; legal status of, 154; minorities, treatment of, 18; minority representations in Muslim society, 156–8, 157–8; and Muslims, difference between, 150; and Muslims, hierarchy between, 151–2, 154; Qaradawi’s representation of rights of, 152–4; Qutb’s vision of relations with, 148–9; religious rituals in Muslim areas, exhibition of, 152; subaltern place of, 152; supremacist relationship with, 151 Non-Muslims in Muslim Society (Qaradawi), 152 non-Muslim societies: conditions for living in peace with, 148; and non-Muslim minorities, 143 non-racialized transnational panArab identity, 86 normative system, 145–8, 150 Norris, Malcolm, 28–9

Index North Africa, 6, 82, 84–5, 87–91, 90; anti-imperial revolutions in, 91; misperceptions of, 6; patrimony, 83 North America, 17, 27, 43–4, 105–7, 174 North American Imams Federation, 155 Northern Quebec Agreement, 63 Northwestern Ontario, 16, 47–8, 50, 55, 61 nursing stations, 46, 57–8, 66 Occident, 7, 11, 17–18, 103, 108, 113 Occidentalism, 103 Okin, Susan Moller, 160–1 Old Testament, 130 online spaces, 115 opera, 93–4 opposition, 12–13, 17, 120, 128, 144, 148, 169, 174 oppression, 27–8, 35, 108, 124, 129, 132, 141, 160, 165, 167, 171–2, 174, 176; anti-Jewish, 171; countering, 170; doctrinal, 85; economic, 28; ethno-national, 165; Indigenous, 30, 35; racial, 35; subverting, 176 oppressive political regimes, 132 organic integration, 85 Orient, 7, 9–11, 17–18, 79, 81, 83, 86, 91, 97–8, 99, 108–10, 113, 159, 170; anti-imperializing, 98; European encounter with, 170; invariance and variability in, 97; meaning, Berque’s conceptual expansion of, 86–7; and Oriental, 110; and Oriental Other, 110 Oriental, 4, 6–7, 10, 13, 103, 110 Orientalism, 5, 9–14, 10, 14, 18, 25, 34, 80, 83, 89, 98, 103, 108,

201

109, 114–15, 122, 141, 142, 159, 170, 172; complex structure of, 10–11; definition of, 10–11; “dehumanizing ideology,” 10; as empire’s “handmaiden,” 14; evolution of, 79; as force in cultural life, 108; ideas associated with, 114; imperial culture, 11; imperial misrepresentations of, 9; potency of, 98; roots of, 115 Orientalism (Said), 3–6, 8–12, 13–19, 25, 37, 42, 79, 81, 90, 103–11, 113–15, 122, 130, 141, 170; Ahmad’s criticism of, 12–13; and anti-racism, 108–9; canonization of, 4; conceptual shortcomings, 13; critique of, 16, 25, 142, 159; decolonial critique of, 5–6; focus of, 111–12; Gandhi’s critique of, 18; Hallaq’s criticism of, 13–14; “humanist critique” centrality, 81–2; introduction to, 10, 79; language of, 113; Lewis’s condemnation of, 104; multidisciplinary audiences of, 109; Orient linguistic inclusion in, 11; popularity of, 103; and racism, 108; reach of, 110; reception of, 11; Time’s review of, 6 Orientalists, 4, 11–12, 14, 80–3, 86, 97, 103, 104, 131, 149, 171 Orientalization of Middle East, 18 “Orientalizations,” 10 Oriental Other, 113 “Oriental problems,” 80 “Orientals,” 6 Orient and Occident: reconciliation between, 7; relations between, 18 Oslo agreement, 170 “Oslo Process,” 128 “Other,” tolerance of, 151

202

Index

Ottawa and northerners, relationship between, 68n4 Ottawa Citizen, 165 Oxford Dictionaries, 112 Palestine, 105–6, 109, 113–14, 120, 128, 133, 165, 168; as an idea, 109; national movement, 122; occupation in, 113; as self-identified Palestinian, 106; solidarity work, 165, 167, 175, 177–8 Palestinian Canadians, 175 Palestinian Christians and Muslims, 105–6 Palestinian denial of identity: outlines of, 105; politics surrounding, 106 Palestinian identity, complexity of, 106 Palestinian Liberation Organization, 7, 170 Palestinian oppression, Canadian Jews views on, 167–8 Palestinians, 6–7, 80, 105–6, 108–9, 111, 113, 120, 122, 168–9, 174–5; as dispossessed people, 106; under occupation, 114; surveillance of, 113 “Palestinian Versailles,” 171 Pan American Health Organization, 51 Paris synagogue, attack on, 164, 173 particularism and universalism, 132 Pateman, Carole, 121 Pennock, Pamela, 106 Pharaoh, 124, 131 phc. See primary health care Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 123 plo. See Palestinian Liberation Organization polarization of positions, 160

political collectives, 129 “political community,” 121–2 political consciousness, 28 political culture, 153, 159, 161 political friendship, concept of, 179 political Islam, 143, 145, 151, 155, 161 political orders, 122 political parties, 148–9, 151 political regimes, 120, 123, 132 political subjecthood, 122 political theory of liberation, 130 political traditions, 120–1, 123, 127, 130, 132–3 political trends, 143, 158, 161 politics, 13, 17, 26, 43, 89, 106, 120–1, 124, 129–30, 133, 142, 166 Politics of Piety (Mahmoud), 161 polity, 124–5, 130, 132 popular movements, 93 populist racist speech, 157 postcolonial analysis of colonial archives, 43 postcolonial criticism, 42 postcolonial phenomenon, 6 postcolonial scholarship, 25 postcolonial studies, 11 postcolonial theory, 110 postcolonial thought, 108 “post-Oriental” engagement, 103 post-Orientalism, 3, 4–5, 7–9, 13, 15–18, 17, 18, 63, 81, 99, 103–4, 109–10, 114–15, 128, 141, 159, 178; conversations in, 104; decolonial practice, 19; definition of, 15; integrative view of, 13; value of, 8; vs imperial culture, 15–16 post-Orientalist theory, 99 “post-truth” word, usage of, 112 power, 14–15, 34–5, 42–3, 52, 81–2, 93, 95, 104–5, 108, 110–15, 130,

Index 141, 145, 147–9, 160–1, 178–9; discursive, 146; political, 108, 147; relations, 52, 111; unequal relations of, 110 Prada, Antonio Hernandez, 64 pre-Islamic society and Islam, 145–6 primary health care, 45, 49–50, 52, 61–3; effectiveness of, 62; flourishing of, 45; focus of, 49, 60; foundered on neo-liberalism, 45; with infrastructure and technological supports, 62; motivation for developing, 48–9; reliance on locals, 45; two-tiered system, 67 Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View (Adams), 25–6, 30–3 protestant radicals, 129 provincial health care systems, 50 provincial health services, 47 “pseudo-Occidentalism,” 97–8 Puar, Jasbir, 111 public diplomacy, 167 public health, 44, 48, 55 Public Health Reports, 61 public intellectuals, 167, 169, 176 Puritans, 131 Qaradawi, Youssef Al, 141, 151–6 Quebec, 110–11 Question of Palestine, The (Said), 106, 109 Qur’an, 87, 144–7, 146, 151 Qutb, Sayyid, 85, 141, 144, 146–51, 155; “animalistic values” in thinking of, 147–8; books by, 144; on differentiation and hierarchy, 149–50; hakimiyyah concept, 145, 146, 155; influence on Islamic “resurgence,” 144, 150–1; intellectual leadership role

203 of, 150; jahiliyyah concept, 146; on Muslim society vs jahiliyya societies, 146–8; social and political order desired by, 144, 146, 149, 155; vision of relations with non-Muslims, 148, 149

Rabin, Yitzhak, 170 race, 17, 30, 46, 82, 103, 105, 107, 109–11, 113–15, 160 racialization, 9, 16, 114, 115 racial justice, 175–6 racism, 30–1, 33, 35, 105, 107–9, 108, 114, 149, 159–61, 166, 172, 178; anti-Arab, 114; anti-Jewish, 18; middle-class values and, 35; skin-based, 173 radical Indigenous politics, 25 radical Islamist movements, 144, 151 radical politics, 132 Razack, Sherene, 111 reconciliation, 7, 87 Red Power movement, 28 Regan, Paulette, 178 “re-Islamization,” 147, 151 relationality, 178 religion, 146–7, 152–3, 157, 170; adherence to religious norms, 147; religious identity, 143; religious rituals, 152 Renaissance, 88 renewal, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87–9, 91, 93, 95–9 “repersonalization,” 32 reserve populations, 46 resistance, 13, 26, 34, 44, 47, 108–9, 113, 123–4; and liberation, 123; nonrevolutionary, 123; to tyrants, 124 Restating Orientalism (Hallaq), 13–14

204

Index

revolution, 92, 120–3, 125–7, 129–31, 130, 133, 134 revolutionary option, universalist and humanist, 120–1 revolutionary politics, 129 Riel, Louis, 25 Rodinson, Maxime, 80, 100n12 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 31 Ruiz-Grossman, Sarah, 172 “safe spaces,” 177 Said, Edward W., 3, 4, 6, 8, 13, 15, 17, 25, 42–3, 79, 105–7, 109, 111– 17, 119–20, 122, 159, 167; antiOrientalist critique, 13; anti-racist intervention, 10; complaint to Verso, 12–13; deconstruction of Walzer’s argument, 130; depiction of encounters, 109; image of, 108; on racism, 108 Salafism, 89 Salafist currents, agency of women in, 161 Salafists, 145, 150, 155–6 Sangster, Joan, 68n4 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 109 Saskatchewan, 25–34 Saskatchewan Métis Society, 29 “second-level subalterns,” 161 secular and religious realms, relationship between, 129 security rationales post-9/11, 112–13 self-assessments, 58–9 self-esteem, 33, 35 settled society, Isaiah’s vision of, 125 settler-colonial analytics, 131 settler-colonial contexts, 109, 113–14, 125, 127, 132, 178 settler-colonial egalitarianism, 130 settler colonialism, 25, 35, 45–6, 65–6, 68n4, 79, 107, 121–3, 122,

125, 128–9, 131–2; history of, 25; legacy on Indigenous health, 45–6; as mode of domination, 125, 129, 131; political traditions of, 132; power of narratives of, 130; structural violence of, 66; structures of, 65 settler-colonial politics, 124, 127 settler-colonial polities, 124, 132 settler-colonial projects of Canada, 106 settler-colonial studies lens, 122 settler colonies, 11, 43, 63, 82, 110 “settler contract,” 121 settler society, 128 sexuality, 111, 113 sexualized power relations, 37 Shaheen, Jack, 110 shame, 33, 35 Sharia, 147–8 Shepard, William, 144 Shinewald, Benjamin, 165 Simon, Pierre-Jean, 150 Sinai covenant, 125 Sioux Lookout Project, 16–17, 42, 49–52; agreements for, 49; health coverage expansion, 50; initial goals of, 49–50; mixed-medical model for service delivery, 62 Sioux Lookout Project, Badgley’s evaluation of, 50, 54–61; in Bear Lake community, 58–9; clinical needs assessment, 57–8; community household health surveys, 54–5; cultural hybridization, 60; dissatisfaction, 59; health care and cultural change, 55–7, 59–61; health perceptions and health services, 55–7; maternal and child mortality, 60; methodologies for, 54; self-assessments, 58–9

Index Sioux Lookout Zone, 48–9, 57, 59 Sixties Scoop, 65 skin-based racism, 173 skin privilege, 172 smallpox, 48 social “coherence” and incoherence, 85 social hierarchies, 15 social justice spaces, 177 social media, 177 social order, 144, 149 solidarity, 109, 130, 169, 172, 174–5, 179 sovereignty, 121 Spheres of Justice (Walzer), 121 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 142 stereotypes, 107–8, 111, 114, 161 stranger relations, theorizing, 179 “subaltern,” concept of, 142; firstlevel, 142; second-level, 142, 161; subaltern of the, 142, 159, 161 subaltern Muslim societies, exclusion and privilege issues within, 142–3 subaltern studies, 141–2, 159–60 subordinate cultures, 160 supremacist discourse, 18, 143, 146, 148–9, 151, 155, 159, 161 surveillance studies, multidisciplinary area of, 112–13 tajjadud, 89, 96 Tanner, Adrian, 66 terrorism, 165 theatre, in Egypt, 93–4 Third World, 13, 27–8, 61–2, 90, 92, 103, 107; approaches to liberation, 27; Marxists, 28 Time review of Orientalism, 6 Tortured People, A (Adams), 25, 26, 33–4

205

trans-humanist approach, 99 transnational anti-Orientalist “style,” 7 treaties, 16, 46–7, 54, 65, 125; Treaty 6 rights, 46–7; Treaty 8 talks, 46; Treaty 9, 16–17, 65 tribalism and loyalty, natural default to, 168 tribal leaders, influence of, 85 Trudeau, Justin, 165 Trump, Donald, 112, 156 Tunisia, 7, 97 Tunisian Muslim, 6 Ture, Kwame, 26 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 125 Uighurs, 113 Umayyad Caliphate, 87 Ummah, 143 unequal wealth distribution outcome, 124 unesco. See United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization unicef. See United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund unicity, 146–7 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 84, 91–2 United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, 49 United States, 5, 11–12, 17–18, 26–8, 34, 62, 106–7, 122–3, 125, 128–9, 155, 157 University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, 49 Upper Egypt, tensions in villages of, 141

206

Index

values: animalistic, 147–8; cultural, 60; historical, 154; minority cultures, 160 Vanegas, Alfonso Mejia, 51 Verso (publisher), 12–13 vilification, 107–8 Wafd movement, 91 Wahhabi conception of unicity, 147 Walzer, Michael, 17–18, 120–33 Walzer-Said exchange, 17–18, 122, 132–3 wealth, distributed among displaced, 124 Weinfeld, Morton, 168–9, 172 “West” and “Islam,” relationship between, 159 Western-based imagined relationality, 11 Western colonialism, 168 Westerners and Orientals, 8, 13 Western perceptions of Middle East, 10 Western societies, 28, 34, 159, 161 White Allies in the Struggle for Racial Justice? (Boyd), 175–6 “white feminists,” 160 “white ideal,” 30, 37 white supremacy, 26, 28–30, 33, 173, 176 who. See World Health Organization wilderness, 123–5, 127

Winslow, Charles-Edward Amory, 48 Wolfe, Patrick, 65 women, 18, 60–1, 64, 66, 111, 160–1; agency in patriarchal cultures, 161; as agents of decolonial change, 18–19; gendered social roles, 160; violence against, 37; “women’s rights,” 111 World Bank, 49 World Council of Indigenous Peoples, 27 World Health Organization, 49 “world turned inside out,” 127, 131, 133; political traditions of, 120, 121, 123; premised on settler colonialism, 121 “world turned upside down,” political traditions of, 120, 121 worship, 124, 146, 158 Wretched of the Earth (Frantz), 26 X, Malcolm, 27 Young, Henry Esson, 46 Young, T. Kue, 61 Zangwill, Israel, 105 Zeadey, Faith, 107 Zionism, 128, 133, 165, 168 Zionist political project, 105