Empire in Transit: Critical Race Theory and the Palimpsest of Indianness

• In Event: 72.050 - The Relationship Between Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education: Theoretical Considerations for the Future

Abstract

Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati (2002) and Mari Matsuda (2002) caution that to understand American racism we must understand African American history as American history. Here, however, I examine whether such an understanding of history precludes a deeper analysis of coloniality in the U.S. Thus, in this paper I take indigenous scholar, Jodi A. Byrd’s (2011) proposition that “[a]ctivating the Indian as a foundational concept within poststructural, postcolonial, and critical race theories leads…” us to consider: “How might the terms of current academic and political debates change if the responsibilities of that very real lived condition of colonialism were prioritized as a condition of possibility?” (p. xx). Specifically I examine how her concept of Indianness – the traces of the original discourses produced and maintained in empire vis-a-vis indigenous peoples are foundational to empire today – and the material realities of colonialism might offer CRT a way to address some of its external and internal critiques; namely, the assertion that CRT lacks a structural analysis of race. I offer a holistic dialogue that provides CRT mechanisms to begin what Byrd calls “transit” from the mechanisms of empire and colonialism that facilitate racism and white supremacy.

I conduct a critical literature review that examines Byrd’s ideas of transit and Indianness, Lisa Ford’s (2010) work on sovereignty under empire, and Carbado and Gulati (2002), and Matsuda’s (2002) work that identify issues with critiques of the black/white binary. Specifically Byrd and Ford allow me to thoughtfully examine the limitations of a black/white binary in CRT. This work is undertaken using postcolonial understandings of the palimpsest – a document that has many writings on it, so much so that they begin to bleed through one another (Johannessen, 2012). This method is both literary and conceptual. It allows me to peel away the layers of colonial meaning making (legal, political, economic) regarding the other to arrive at a particular understanding of the American juridical order.

Byrd argues that we must understand the transit of Indianness across U.S. empire because it proposes a way to historicize and concretize the manner in which U.S. empire, expressed as sovereign power, is produced. Yet the idea of sovereign power as manifested through U.S. empire must also be historicized, understood in its own transit. Here, the work of Ford (2010) explains that the way we understand sovereignty from a U.S. standpoint is specific to the settler colonial origins of the U.S. and that at the heart of this order is territory. Ford examines how settlers imposed and created a particular type of sovereignty in relationship to indigenous peoples that continues to shape the juridical manifestations of sovereignty vis-a-vis the other. What Ford and Byrd, read together, demonstrate is that at the heart of U.S. empire are the relations between indigenous groups and the U.S. Yet, both note that these origins, though they remain central, are obscured. Arriving at the transit of Indianness, I explore how such an understanding can help us thoughtfully explore the black/white binary in CRT.

Author

• Dolores Calderon, University of Utah