Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities *PDF
Shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities. In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe―from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan―the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors―victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries―based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation. Read more
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Why Must Read Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities?
Mamdani's scholarship is only augmented by his clarity. This is a phenomenally comprehensive work that urges us to historicize--rather than mythologize--identity. "I seek to understand colonization as the making of permanent minorities and their maintenance through the politicization of identity, which leads to political violence--in some cases extreme violence." (18) "We can all learn to see ourselves as survivors of political modernity." (20) Chapter 1 examines the first concentration camps in the modern world: American Indian Reservations. These, "...permanent internal colon[ies]...rendered [American Indians] a permanent minority without rights." (24-5) "Indians are more completely colonized today than they were in 1789 or 1924, when they were allowed their second class citizenship." (39) "Today American Indians on reservations remain the only US citizens without rights guaranteed in the Constitution or protected under the 1964 Civil Rights Act." (80) Chapter 2, Nuremberg: The Failure of Nenazification, disturbingly illustrates the parallels between the genocide of American Indians and the Holocaust. Mamdani further critiques the Nuremberg Tribunals, which he argues abdicated responsibility away from, "...the political institutions and social relations that made the Holocaust thinkable inside Germany..." (102) "...the victorious Allies in the West reinvented Nazism as an accumulation of individual crimes rather than a political project." (102) "To put Nazism--as opposed to individual Nazis--on trial would have revealed that it was not just a German project but also an American one and indeed a global one." (108) Chapter 3 is a thorough history of the abolition of apartheid in South Africa. While Mamdani critiques the shortcomings of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), he argues that, "The post-apartheid transition serves as a critique of Nuremberg and the contemporary human rights movement." (192) Chapter 4 examines how, "The British created Sudanese tribalism precisely to foster infighting and thereby prevent solidarity against themselves." (200) Chapter 5 is a meticulous and scathing critique of Zionism and the apartheid state of Israel. Chapter 6 is Mamdani's prescription for the unmaking of permanent minorities: decolonizing the political. "[Political] Violence is a means of defining who is a member and who is not...Only by decoupling the nation from the state can there be a democracy..." (329) "Nationhood is the instrumentalizing of culture for the purposes of domination." (330) "...politics is produced through...historical contests over membership..." (331) "...yesterday's victim is likely to seek benefits and become tomorrow's perpetrator..." (333) "From a democratic point of view, majorities and minorities cannot precede the democratic process; rather, they must be its outcome." (339) "The nation is not inherent in us." (355)
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