Miscegenation in the Colonial Context: Defying Imperial Inclusion and Exclusion

I recently bought a used set of English flashcards published in the late 1970s. The reverse side for the word “Miscegenation” reads “Marriage between people of widely differing races” and the example sentence “Miscegenation has never been favorably regarded in the United States.” Pondering over the harmful cultural implications of such a definition I thought of a book I recently read by Ann Stoler. She shows that interracial relations are not limited to the cultural sphere and in fact have played a central role in colonialism and political power. In Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Power, published by the University of California Press in 2002, Ann Stoler demonstrates the importance interracial relationships played in the development of colonial structures of power.

This work advances several arguments and employs excellent and revealing photos. Within these she notes that many colonial cultures structured access to power and privilege through the construction of racial dichotomies. What happens when the racial hierarchies are complicated by a grey zone of biologically and culturally mixed people? Stoler indicates that, for one, the distribution of the wealth developed by the colonial enterprise becomes knotty, which catalyzes a change in the social construction of identities. Stoler’s contention is that in the colonial context of the Javanese heartland of Indonesia, the categories of inclusion and exclusion became untenable as they had previously been defined and that those in possession of power and wealth sought to stem the tide of miscegenation.

The culture of colonialism that Stoler describes in her first five chapters is one which develops to suit the needs of a European body of profiteers. This is convoluted by the reality that, for various reasons, the early period of colonialism forbade the migration of European women to the focal points of resource development and extraction. The corporate bodies in these spaces instead preferred their European subordinates to take on concubines to serve as domestic servants, sexual objects, and cultural instructors. One consequence of this was the development of mixed raced progeny. This complicated not just the distribution of wealth through the construction of self and other in the periphery but also the categories or ‘units of analysis’ in the colonial encounter, which brings us to Stoler’s theoretical argument.

Ann Stoler, an anthropologist, produced this text as a history but also one which attempts to advance the theory of history through a thorough going analysis of its methods. By aptly describing the unique position of ethnically and or culturally mixed persons in the periphery she showed how certain units of analysis are in and of themselves insufficient for describing the particulars which develop in any particular encounter. She insists though that she is not interested in merely throwing out the categories of description developed thus far. Instead she argues that it is through the process of examining the dichotomies and theoretical demarcations of postcolonial theory against and within the archive that new insights can be gained. She takes the construction of the European self, juxtaposed with the attempts to mutually construct a colonial other, as one example, and complicates it by pursuing those individuals who don’t fit entirely in either category. Moreover, she looks at the effect of the sites of intimacy on the macro-culture and the implications for the maintenance of a system of gross exploitation: the imperial project.

By reexamining certain categories, such as the self and other, or ‘white prestige’ over time and up close in the archive she is able to produce new ways of seeing the development of social, cultural, and economic systems. She shows that instead of these categories revealing the realities of the cultural encounter they reinforce what we as researchers expect to find and thus reproduce the same levels of description. Her discussion of the complexity of racial inclusion and exclusion in the colony further enhances her own theoretical position of the grey zone in mobilizing theory. Her approach seeks to re-energize theory by reconfiguring the way we approach them: critically.

Ordering Space in a Post-Capitalist World: Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space

What would a society that moves beyond capitalism towards a humanitarian or egalitarian space look like? For Henri Lefebvre, contemporary global spatial relations rest on a foundation supporting the continued enfranchisement of the wealthiest segment of society. Lefebvre’s La Production de L’Espace (1974), well translated by Donald Nicholson~Smith in 1991 and published by Blackwell Publishing argues that urban designs developed in the epoch of capitalism hinder the functioning of a more egalitarian world model. Lefebvre asserts that wholly new spatial coding would be necessary for the implementation of a socialist utopia.

For Lefebvre the conceiving of space by the current ruling class maintains unequal relations of power, whether intentional or a product of the relations of power which came into being following the collapse of the feudal order. In order to maintain the structure of power relations, tools of social abstraction are deployed in zoning and architectural planning. Lefebvre points out on page 316 that “For the working class, as is well known, the primary product of capitalism in its ‘ascendant’ phase . . . was the slums at the edge of the city.” This has evolved since the initial rise of capitalism, but the international distribution of labor still operates under this basic system of labor extraction. He maintains that minimal housing for the most marginal segments of any population under this rubric of social organization is carefully managed both physically and culturally.

The strategic space of capitalism and its own social space “becomes a space that sorts – a space that classifies in the service of class,” Lefebvre writes, on page 375, while it pretends to do away with want in providing tolerable housing and minimal sustenance. In designing urban and rural spaces with these aims, power forces “worrisome groups, the workers among others towards the periphery.” According to his argumentation the very organization of the living situation in cities, in towns, and between the town and the surrounding rural spaces is designed to retain the wealthiest persons in their positions as such. These designs blur the relations of production from working class consciousness. Indeed, we have recently seen that the thresholds of tolerance have become so well culturally maintained by the culture industry in the United States as to force millions of homes to go empty and even become unnecessarily demolished, even as their former residents erect tent cities throughout the country. Lefebvre’s argument holds true today.

Lefebvre sees this spatial ordering as an impediment to the integration and production of an alternate, socialist space. He writes on page 379 that “innumerable groups, some ephemeral, some more durable, have sought to invent a ‘new life’ – usually a communal one," although he notes that these experiments have often failed because they relied on the orderings of capitalist relations. Then what space is appropriate for such a socially progressive enterprise? Lefebvre outlines a brief synopsis of how the development of a socialist space could take place in his first chapter where he prescribes, on page 55, that its strategy “would be founded on small and medium sized businesses and on towns of a size compatible with that emphasis.” Furthermore, Lefebvre’s utopian development would seek to enhance the entirety of the land at its disposal “forward together” and it would not disjoin “growth from development.” Therefore, Lefebvre’s ideal spatial re-coding allows workers to live geographically with the means of production spread throughout a more evenly developed landscape, one in which power doesn’t diffuse from a center, but arises throughout.

Put more simply, a more egalitarian world – according to this line of thinking – would necessitate the development and planning of a new code of urban and rural design.

Self-Promotion or Self-Critique?

Milton Fisk reviews a volume (in which I am a contributor) in "Radical Thought in the Time of Corporate Globalization," in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Vol. 18 n. 4 (Winter 2007), pp. 148-150.

His overall judgment on Philosophy Against Empire, Radical Philosophy Today, Vol. 4, edited by Tony Smith and Harry van der Linden (Philosophy Documentation Center, 2006):

Editors Tony Smith and Harry van der Linden have put together an excellent volume on a wide range of important social and political problems. A notable exception is the absence of an essay devoted to the impact of corporate globalization on the environment, which reflects the absence of a major focus on the environment within this group of radical philosophers.

On my contribution, Fisk writes:

In “Biopolitics and the State of Exception,” Devin Zane Shaw criticizes the state from the perspective of immigration. Following Giorgio Agamben, Shaw sees migrants as exposing a crisis that affects sovereignty, democracy, and human rights. Sovereignty leads to treating migrants as outcasts, as bare individuals with no democratic or human rights. Due to the nature of sovereignty, failure awaits reformists who accept the sovereign state. Moreover, human rights, being for Shaw only the creatures of sovereignty, lack liberatory potential. The implication is that the plight of migrants can be resolved by doing away with the state.

That's a decent synopsis. Although I must admit that I have since been rethinking whether that implication should be that the state form should be abolished, especially if that means that multinational corporations will take over its functions. If I had to write the piece now, I don't think I would rely as heavily on Foucault and Agamben. I now think he overstates his case because the 'state of exception' appears to be a metaphysical destiny, which has those same fatalist overtones that Heidegger's later work possesses. This would require rereading Agamben, but I am currently busy with philosophy from the 1920s to 1940s (at this moment, Benjamin and Sartre, an odd couple if there ever was one), which is over a century after the stuff I was reading for the primary sources of my dissertation (Schelling's work from 1795-1810).

In retrospect, I think that one of the major problems with Agamben's (and, in a different way, Foucault's) analysis is that while it talks biopolitics quite well, it has trouble linking this with a critique of capitalism. I do, however, still think that politically marginalized populations tell us important things about globalization, which is why I discussed the figure of the immigrant and his or her relationship to sovereign power. What my article stressed is that anybody's encounter with the state as police force depends on the caprice of this force, and that formal rights don't guarantee anything in this encounter.

What I had not worked on so much, as I wrote that essay (from 2003 to 2005), was a theory of ideology. I think a theory of ideology would have allowed me to render less abstract, and less global, statements about things such as the mobilization of human rights in the war on terror. Now I would try and pinpoint the history of human rights as they are mobilized for intervention and when they are not, to show how these interventions correspond to some other interest (like geo-political dominance, economic benefit, etc.). It seems to me that this would lead to a distinction between formal, individual rights and collective economic justice (including environmental justice, since Fisk mentioned that the Radical Philosophy volume did not display interest in this topic) and that the left should advocate the latter.