![]() | Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition Subjects: Indians of North America -- Canada -- Government relations; Indians of North America -- Canada -- Politics and government; Indians of North America -- Legal status laws. etc. -- Canada; Indians Treatment of -- Canada; Canada -- Ethnic relations -- Polit; WINNER OF: Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical Association Canadian Political Science Association's C.B. MacPherson Prize Studies in Political Economy Book Prize
In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics--one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a "place-based" modification of Karl Marx's theory of "primitive accumulation" throws light on Indigenous-state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon's critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.
Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) is assistant professor in the First Nations Studies Program and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. |
![hidden image for function call](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/1x1.png)