I’ve been thinking of a comment bfp left here a few weeks ago
…because of borders, I became “mexican” rather than indigenous…
and reflecting on how maps and borders classify people, instead of the other way around.
In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson studied how cultural instruments such as maps, the census, and museums were not only a result of colonization, but in fact served and furthered colonial interests. These regulatory instruments illuminated “the late colonial state’s style of thinking about its domain” (184). The grid of maps allowed for serialization in the colonies. The Netherlands could therefore be reproduced in the Netherlands Indies and New Amsterdam. Mother Spain is reproduced in the Philippines, in the encomienda system and in the surnames people had to take for classification.
People’s lives were molded and organized around these classification tools, these imposed borders. Classification and technology made peoples, groups, and territories visible to the colonial powers, allowing them to reproduce themselves through empire and colonization.
And what of those people who do not fit the set classifications? They’re the ones who get categorized as not statistically significant. The ones that we turn into Others, into Outliers. It’s okay for them to be the collateral damage of what gets called progress.
A quote from Walter Benjamin, which I’ve seen most recently from Curate:
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. . . . His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees on single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.
I’m one of those people who find it hard to read maps. I can’t help but wonder what has been exluded, and why. What is flattened out?
And whose lives get disappeard into that pile of debris?
That is true, but it goes further back than that. The mere existence of “Spain” and “The Netherlands” is itself the result of the process you describe in which individuals are subsumed into collective identities based on arbitrary geographical divisions. The colonial state merely applied to foreigners the same reasoning it applied to it’s “own people.”
Also, don’t forget to think about it from the other side as well. It has been argued that prior use of such imagined identity makes people far easier to subjugate, as is shown from the fairly quick domination of the South American peoples, who were already used to imperial rule when the Spanish arrived, as compared to that of the North American peoples, who required multiple centuries to fully subjugate.
Ah, Curate reblogged from my Tumblr!
By way of introduction, kumusta! I’ve been following your blog for a short while– good to see another kasama writing about these issues.
@Words and Steel — Hello kasama! I actually spent yesterday’s bus ride home thinking about your latest post about all those white classmates in language class. But it takes me a while to think and process. What a nice surprise to see your comment, salamat and welcome.
@AR — Spain and the Netherlands aren’t postcolonies. The geographical divisions that were imposed in the colonies of Asia and Africa and the Americas were not arbitrary. They were created systematically “dominate the physical space, reform the natives’ minds, and integrate local economic histories into the Western perspective” (Valentin Mudimbe). These colonizing structures are still very much intact. Also, South America is not the area I’m studying, but I take strong exception to those who argue that South American peoples accepted imperialism and colonization. There has always been massive resistance to colonialism and imperialism among the South American indigenous groups, and this resistance continues to today.
I’m not saying that they “accepted” imperialism, certainly no more so than they “accepted” Aztec or Incan imperialism. Nonetheless, the prior existence of such political structure did mean that, while it would still take coercion to promote acceptance of Spanish imperial rule, it was not necessary to introduce the idea of imperial rule per se, nor to impose completely from the outside the social concepts needed for the effective exercise of political power.
But if you put it that way, every society had a hierarchical political structure that one could use to explain the acceptance of colonialism. Imperial rule is very very different, and a large part of its success was perpetuating the trope that somehow the natives wanted or accepted or did not have to be coerced much to accept their rule. Which again involves relegating much history to debris.
Not every society has such structures, no. The structures must resemble those of the conqueror. The closer they are, the more a change in rule becomes a simple case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” from the perspective of the majority of the ruled. In much of historic imperialism, the conqueror did not so much subjugate people asstole the authority to subjugate people from those who had already been doing so.
And that does not even begin to consider forms of imperialism in which the local rulers are not displaced at all, such as the imperialism of the Persian Empire. In that case, pre-existing political power made things very easy once the opposing army was defeated, as the conqueror simply left local oppression to those who already had experience doing it.
AR – This is an issue we’re not going to agree on, and the discussion seems to be outliving its usefulness. Also, I’m talking about European colonialism, whose effects still linger, not the Persian empire.
But I just want to emphasize that your contention that the subjugated would accept mere changes in imperial rule is really really problematic. You’re relying on historical accounts of the colonizers for this, which erase the history of struggle and resistance. My post is a reflection on what has been excluded, flattened out, and disappeared. And that’s what you’re doing when you discount the violence involved in colonial rule as a simple change in management.
I think it is you who are discounting the violence that existed in native imperialism. For instance, a significant contributing factor in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire is that they were such brutal rulers that their own subjects were quite eager to turn against them. In what way did Spanish rule not constitute a mere “change in management” for those peoples?
In any case, I don’t think you can say that the effects of Persian imperialism don’t still linger, since Persian aggression against Greek cities contributed to the creation of a common Greek identity and culture, whose institutions would heavily influence the Roman Empire, which shaped the cultural foundations of latter European powers. Nothing in history occurs in a vacuum.
AR — You’re seriously starting to piss me off. Stop using “native imperialism” (what the hell?) as a gloss over the brutality of white European and EuroAmerican colonizers. That’s white man as savior narrative at its finest. And stop going back 2000 years to the Persian Empire to talk about effects of colonialism because that’s such a red herring. I’m talking about the lingering effects–poverty, dehumanization, death–in the postcolonies. I stated that above.
This may be all a fun intellectual exercise for you, but people to whom I feel accountable to are forced to live their lives under the shadow of colonialism and neocolonialism. So the minimization of that, whether intended to or not on your part, makes me seethe.
I understand what you’re getting at, and I do not agree, so there’s no need to keep posting the same point over and over. I’ll be offline the rest of the day but hope you honor the request to stop this line of argument on my blog.