Overview of Courses
- HRSJ 5010: Foundations of Human Rights and Social Justice
- HRSJ 5020: Indigenous Ways of Knowing: Pedagogy and Practices
- HRSJ 5110: Genocide in the 20th Century
- HRSJ 5030: Problem Solving in the Field
- HRSJ 5210: Law, Human Rights and Justice
- HRSJ 5230: Emergence of Global Capitalism
- HRSJ 5040: HRSJ Field Experience (British Columbia Law Institute)
- HRSJ 5940: Master of Arts e-Portfolio
- HRSJ 5810: Directed Studies: The Gulag and Its Place in Imagining the 20th Century
- POLI 547D: Democratic Theory (University of British Columbia)
Reading Reflection
This reading reflection has been developed from my existing work in HRSJ 5020 – Indigenous Ways: Pedagogies and Practices, and reflects my ongoing effort to grapple with the challenging questions posed by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) in their seminal article, Decolonization is Not a Metaphor. This critical piece forces us to confront the uncomfortable reality that without the repatriation of Indigenous lands, decolonization risks becoming merely a metaphor—an idea co-opted by existing colonial structures to maintain the status quo.
This seminal polemic makes the argument that decolonization without repatriation of Indigenous land is simply a figurative exercise, one that can be easily grafted onto existing colonial frameworks. To furnish this point, the authors emphasize the transformation of land into property, reducing it to a relational binary of owner and commodity.
This is to suggest that the reconciliatory mechanisms of the state Indigenous land effectively absorb Indigenous land claims into existing capitalist and colonial superstructures. In fact, decolonization efforts that ignore this colonial logic may risk reproducing the same structures of power they claim to challenge. Indeed, broader reconciliation movements often operate within frameworks that prioritize state-led, institutional, and legal responses, that skew toward Western liberal conceptions of justice. This is undoubtedly a crucial insight, that requires a shift from attempting to fit Indigenous and marginalized worldviews into existing colonial frameworks towards creating new spaces that honour distinct epistemologies, sovereignties, and practices of self-determination.
What I found the most striking was Tuck and Yang’s position on reconciliation, critiquing the discourse as a salve for settler guilt, or a “settler move to innocence” (2012, pp. 9-28). The six ways towards a “move to innocence” include:
Settler nativism – settlers claim an obscure indigenous or chattel slave ancestor/ancestry (Tuck & Yang, 2012, pp. 10-13).
Settler adoption fantasies – think Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves (Tuck & Yang, 2012, pp. 13-17)
Colonial equivocation – ascribing experiences of anti-capitalist resistance to decolonization, for example (Tuck & Yang, 2012, pp. 17-19)
Decolonizing/free your mind – unlearning colonial pedagogies and intellectual biases that may breed a self-satisfied complacency (Tuck & Yang, 2012, pp. 19-22).
A(s)t(e)risk peoples – reducing indigenous peoples to symbols, representing them as “at risk” or as a * in a large public data set (Tuck & Yang, 2012, pp. 22-23).
Re-occupation and urban homesteading – attributing eco-activism, naturalism, the Occupy Movement etc… to decolonization (Tuck & Yang, 2012, pp. 23-28).
In each of these “moves to innocence,” the underlying issue of incommensurability is clear. They represent efforts to ease settler guilt without confronting the deeper, structural incommensurability between settler-colonial frameworks and Indigenous sovereignty.
I’m of two minds on this work; on the one hand, I understand the frustration and danger of locating decolonization within a purely reconciliatory dialectic. Indeed, it risks prioritizing “settler normalcy” over meaningful change (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 35). A feckless mixture of incrementalism and lofty rhetoric without follow-through seems to be the prevailing modus operandi of our government – so perhaps a radical re-thinking of activism is needed. On the other hand, I wonder if this ‘incommensurability’ isn’t polarizing settlers and Indigenous people into a colonial binary? Wherein reciprocity, mutual recognition, indigenous pedagogy, and cooperation of all peoples towards an indigenous resurgence are all subordinate to an “un-commonality that un-coalesces coalition politics” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 35). It seems to me, (perhaps wrongly) that any activity that does not subscribe to this incommensurable distinction will become the subject of considerable suspicion and rivalry. Does this not simply lock the project of resistance into the semiotic opposition that was established by imperial discourse in the first place?
Citation:
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.
Assignment Reflection
Writing my final paper for HRSJ 5010: Foundations of Human Rights and Social Justice titled, “A Relation of Enmity: Borders, Refugees, and the Production of Bare Life,” allowed me to dig deep into the works of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe, and Frantz Fanon, to illustrate how the biopolitical and necropolitical paradigms of sovereignty, and border security relegate the refugee to a zone of indistinction, wherein exceptional activities become rule – producing figures of bare life.
Upon reflection, the difficulty of the writing process lay in presenting these abstract concepts with clarity while remaining faithful to their complexity. My challenge was to illustrate how this exclusion operates in the real-world, particularly within the European Union’s border policies during the refugee crisis of 2016. Agamben’s work invites one to consider how modern states render certain populations as exceptions to the political and legal order, thus producing bare life. Yet, the task of bringing this theory into conversation with historical and empirical instances was neither straightforward nor without its interpretative difficulties.
Equally demanding was the incorporation of Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, which complements Agamben’s work by extending biopower into the realm of death. By examining colonial practices of occupation and domination, Mbembe reveals the underlying racial logics that animate the production of bare life. Writing this section required an acute sensitivity to the historical continuities that underpin modern border practices. In particular, the analysis of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank demanded a careful articulation of the ways in which biopower and necropower intersect in the creation of zones of indistinction, where life and death are governed by the same structures of exclusion and control.
One of the most compelling aspects of the writing process was the exploration of Fanon’s insights on colonial spatialities and their relevance to contemporary border imaginaries. Fanon’s depiction of the colonized world as a place of reciprocal exclusivity—where space is divided between the colonizer and the colonized—resonates deeply with modern border regimes, where refugees are confined to spaces of exclusion, violence, and surveillance. The task of aligning Fanon’s critique of colonialism with Agamben’s and Mbembe’s work allowed for a richer understanding of how the figure of the refugee emerges as a product of biopolitical and necropolitical logics.
The concluding section, which sought to reimagine borders, provided a moment of reflection within the broader theoretical framework. Here, I aimed to move beyond mere critique, proposing that borders must be understood not as fixed entities but as fluid constructs that can be rethought in light of the violence they produce.
It should be said, the stakes of the analysis are real, and the lives of refugees, caught in the crosshairs of biopolitical and necropolitical regimes, demand our critical attention. The theoretical frameworks that underpin this analysis provide a powerful lens through which to view the global refugee crisis, yet they also compel us to think beyond these frameworks toward a future where life is no longer subjected to sovereign violence.
The full essay is available to read below.
Image Credit
Photo Credit: Susan Wilkinson via Unsplash