Global Historical Sociology of Race and Racism

Alexandre I.R. White, Katrina Quisumbing King, Alexandre I.R. White, Katrina Quisumbing King

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781801172219, 9781801172196
• eBook ISBN: 9781801172202
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

In this volume of Political Power and Social Theory, a special collection of papers reconsiders race and racism from global and historical perspectives. Together, these articles serve as an entry point for sharpening our sociological understandings of how racism operates in current times. They address questions such as: What can a new agenda for the global historical sociology of race and racism lend to the existing scholarship? What would it mean to recover the globally constituted forces that have shaped the production of racial categories and dynamics of racial oppression? How can we understand domestic racial policies, not only through their effects on local populations, but also as products of wider global and transnational forces, knowledges, and transformations?

In short, what would re-historicizing the history of racism mean for sociological theorizing on the subject in the 21st century? Drawing on empirical analyses of the relations, mechanisms, machinations, and structures of racial supremacies, this volume generates productive avenues for future thinking on race and racism. It sets the agenda for a new generation of scholars interested in sociological questions of race, imperial forms, and the construction of modernity.

COLONIAL AND DECOLONIAL RESIGNIFICATION: US EMPIRE-STATE SOVEREIGNTY IN HAWAI‘I

Heidi Nicholls

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the semiotic construction of US claims to sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Building on semiotic theories in sociology and theories within critical Indigenous and settler colonial studies, it presents an interpretive analysis of state, military, and academic discursive strategies. The US empire-state attempts to construct colonial narratives of race and sovereignty that rehistoricize the history of Hawaiians and other Indigenous peoples. In order to make claims to sovereignty, settler-colonists construct narratives that build upon false claims to superiority, advancement, and discovery. Colonial resignification is a process by which signs and symbols of Indigenous communities are conscripted into the myths of empire that maintain such sovereign claims. Yet, for this reason, colonial resignification can be undone through reclaiming such signs and symbols from their use within colonial metanarratives. In this case, efforts toward decolonial resignification enacted alternative metanarratives of peoples' relationships to place. This “flip side” of the synecdoche is a process that unravels the ties that bind layered myths by providing new answers to questions that underpin settler colonial sovereignty.

Keywords: Sovereignty; empire; settler colonialism; semiotics; racialization; Hawai‘i

Reflexive Statement

As the primary researcher for the following study, my relationship to the research, the place of Hawai‘i, and the various people in Hawai‘i, especially Hawaiians, is different from Indigenous researchers and scholars. I have come to these questions through my own relational and subjective standpoint as a haole (foreigner/white settler) in Hawai‘i, a settler on the continent, and the lessons I've learned from various relationships with and on occupied lands. Primarily, these include the lands of Kanaka Maoli and the lands of the Monacan Indian Nation.

Introduction

Hawai‘i is one place in which settler colonial sovereignty has been constructed and contested. As Hawaiian (also known as Kanaka Maoli, Kanaka ‘Ōiwi, or Kanaka) ¹ scholars have documented, European and later US colonialism in Hawai‘i spanned periods of the Hawaiian Monarchy, (Osorio, 2002), the US-backed overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani, US annexation in 1898, and later statehood of Hawai‘i in 1959 (Trask, 1999), and other episodes in statist politics of conquest (Arvin, 2019; Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, 2017; Silva, 2004). Through a cultural and interpretive approach, this chapter analyzes the semiotic construction of US claims to sovereignty over Hawai‘i. Signs presented by the state, military, and other settler colonial institutions in Hawai‘i cohere into particular metanarratives that parasitically intern signs and symbols of Indigenous peoples and Native nations. Such signs are key to maintaining the structure of settler colonialism. As such, decolonial efforts can refute imperial constructions and unravel the semiotic linkages that legitimize settler colonial sovereignties. Archives of Indigenous resurgence provide a lens through which to read settler colonial sovereignty for what it is: a myth, and to more precisely understand the meanings used to make sovereign claims. As this chapter will demonstrate, US sovereignty is racialized in the sense that it cannot be justified without drawing on white supremacist narratives that intern Indigenous peoples within a teleology of a multicultural and racially diverse nation-state.

Approaches to Empires, Nation-states, and Their Sovereignties

Settler colonial claims to sovereignty rely on a dichotomy between empires and nation-states. Unfortunately, within the social sciences, many dominant approaches view nation-states and empires as diametrically opposed political structures. Empires are spatially shifting and hierarchal (Brubaker, 1996; Du Bois, 1945; Gellner, 1983; Malešević, 2017). Nation-states, on the other hand, are supposed to maintain relatively stable borders, equal citizenry, and contain political entities that are congruent with existing nations and nationalisms (Gellner, 1983). Dominant approaches have also debated if the United States is an empire, nation-state, or both (Kumar, 2010). Some claim that the US state bestows sovereignty in multiple tiers (Ferguson, 2005) which allows for the political and national unit to appear congruent on one tier and not another. More recent work within sociology has argued that this is, in fact, the structure of both empires and nation-states, even “civic-liberal nations” such as the United States (Go, 2017). The United States has, therefore, been categorized as an “empire-state” (Jung, 2011) or a “liberal empire-state” (Go, 2017). A focus on the distinction between nation-states and empires could be replaced with analyses of the

…shifting lines of differentiation and exclusion, the proliferation of practices of power over subject bodies, logics of territorial expansion, contraction and reformation, and the layering and complexification of hierarchical distinctions within the space of the state. (Go, 2017, p. 81)

While many in the social sciences now agree that the United States is an empire, the dichotomy between nation-states and empires informs both approaches to sovereignty and constructions of US sovereignty. ²

Recently, cultural sociologists have argued that, “without reintroducing the cultural component into the conception of sovereignty, we cannot readily understand, for example, the checkerboard of nationalities that typically feature in empire” (Adams & Steinmetz, 2015, p. 271). Yet much of the sociological literature on settler colonialism and empire focuses on the realities of colonial dominance, either through tracing the structures and processes of settler colonialism (Glenn, 2015) or the relational impact of empire across contexts (Go, 2016). Because the United States is an ongoing settler colonial project, understanding the continual contestation of sovereignty within the United States is crucial. Work within Native and Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies has taken seriously considerations of sovereignty, foregrounding it as “the answer to the question of where or with whom ultimate or supreme power lies in a place of relation” (Warrior, 2008, p. 1686). The use of the term sovereignty has been critiqued from within Native studies by scholars who find it to be “so tangled up in Euro-Western dynamics that its use in Indigenous discourses on governance cannot be justified” (Warrior, 2008, p. 1688). In this formulation, sovereignty denotes hegemonic and institutionalized forms of power that are not applicable to all Indigenous political philosophies. Theories in this vein start further underlining the incommensurability of Indigenous sovereignty with US state sovereignty (Barker, 2005). Gaining insight into poststructuralism, others conceptualize a “third space of sovereignty” where Indigenous sovereignties overwhelm understandings of time, space, and identity available within dominant understandings of US politics (Bruyneel, 2007).

There are various definitions and frameworks among Hawaiian scholars about what sovereignty is and on what grounds it can or should be claimed. The Hawaiian word “ea” has many meanings but is usually translated as “life,” “breath,” and “sovereignty” (Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, Hussey, & Wright, 2014, p. 3). However,

…unlike Euro-American philosophical notions of sovereignty, ea is based on the experiences of people on the land, relationships forged through the process of remembering and caring for wahi pana, storied places. (Goodyear-Ka’ōpua et al., 2014, p. 3)

Other facets of Hawaiian sovereignty movements identify strongly with juridical understanding of sovereignty (Sai, 2008). This approach hinges on the use of international law and occupation theory to describe how the Hawaiian Kingdom is an existing nation-state that the United States illegally occupies to the present day. ³ Kanaka Maoli scholars have also argued that although “prolonged occupation and colonization are two mutually exclusive statuses” in international law, colonialism is “more than just a legal status but a set of social relations” (Goodyear-Ka’ōpua et al., 2014, p. 19) and can be analyzed as such:

Consider: it is important to name an incident of harmful force by one individual against another as assault and battery in a court of law. But that does not preclude using other language to describe, heal from, and analyze the manifold repercussions of that beating. Likewise, one might consider that a prolonged U.S. occupation of Hawai‘i enables the ongoing hegemony of a settler society – settler colonialism – with varying aspects and effects. Kanaka Maoli continue to assert both national and Indigenous identities. (Goodyear-Ka’ōpua et al., 2014, p. 19)

Within settler colonial societies, racialization attempts to convert national and Indigenous identities into racial categories which denote membership in a multiethnic or multicultural nation-state. Racialization in statist politics, therefore, disrupts Indigenous difference (Whyte, 2016) when Indigenous peoples are represented as racial groups which can (or must) have a vested interest in the US settler state sovereignty (Lawrence & Dua, 2005). ⁴ US empire-state sovereignty can, therefore, be considered a racialized sovereignty, not only because groups are differentiated and excluded on the basis of race (Go, 2017) but also because some groups are homogenized and forcibly included in the state through race (Arvin, 2019), especially as race becomes the dominant semiotic landscape through which settler-colonists understand indigeneity. ⁵ This serves settler colonialism in a fundamental way because within settler colonial contexts settler-colonizers seek to not only exploit the land and its people but also replace Natives as such (Trask, 1999; Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). This occurs through violent genocide with the goal of elimination (Stannard, 1993; Wolfe, 2006) and by possession through whiteness (Arvin, 2019; Moreton-Robinson, 2015), and other constructions of “fictive kinship” which “recodes [Native] dispossession as [settler colonial] inheritance” (Casumbal-Salazar, 2017, 22). Race is a central component of this coding process that contains distinct logics of race as applied to Native peoples, Black people, and other racialized groups (Wolfe, 2006):

Indians and Black people in the US have been racialized in opposing ways that reflect their antithetical roles in the formation of US society […] As opposed to enslaved people, whose reproduction augmented their owners' wealth, Indigenous people obstructed settlers' access to land, so their increase was counterproductive. In this way, the restrictive racial classification of Indians straightforwardly furthered the logic of elimination. Thus we cannot simply say that settler colonialism or genocide have been targeted at particular races, since a race cannot be taken as given. It is made in the targeting. (Wolfe, 2006, pp. 387–388)

Strategies of dispossession through inclusion that subjugate peoples and nations have an analogous territorial counterpart. The United States also homogenizes territory through projects of colonial mapping (Fujikane, 2018; Razack, 2002; Temin, 2016) and by declaring that occupied, purchased, annexed, or otherwise acquired territories are a part of the United States (Fojas, 2014; Immerwahr, 2019).

While scholars may seek to overcome the empire/nation-state dichotomy to more carefully attend to processes of rule, as the following case shows, the dichotomy itself and the denial of US empire within it is a tool of rule in which race is central (Jung & Kwon, 2013). Various actors attend to and carefully work to position the United States as a nation-state without an imperial history in order to maintain certain sovereign claims. Settler-colonists of the United States have put forth the image of the United States as a nation-state rather than an empire ruling over a collection of settler colonies. The cultural work required to produce this resignifies peoples and places in ways that cover over the ongoing processes settler colonialism within a larger project of violent conquest. Applying theories of resignification to the cultural work of empire highlights how such work can be undone. The work of decolonial resignification can limit and overwhelm settler colonial efforts at erasure.

Semiotics in Settler Colonial Contexts: Colonial and Decolonial Resignification

This chapter contributes to more cultural modes of theorizing colonialism and sovereignty by using theories of signification as organizing tools for understanding meaning and narrative within da...

Table of contents

• COVER
• POLITICAL POWER AND SOCIAL THEORY
• SENIOR EDITORIAL BOARD
• TITLE
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENTS
• ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• Introduction: Toward a Global Historical Sociology of Race and Racism
• Empire and Racialization: Reinterpreting Japan's Pan-Asianism from a Du Boisian Perspective
• Race and the Diplomatic Bureaucracy: State-Building in Nineteenth-Century Bolivia as a Response to Transnational Racialization Threats
• Abolition as a Racial Project: Erasures and Racializations on the Borders of British India
• Race, Nation, and Resistance to State Symbolic Power in Rwanda since the 1994 Genocide
• Seeing African and Indigenous States and Societies: Decolonizing and Degrouping Race Scholarships' Narratives of Conquest and Enslavement in the Early Modern Atlantic World
• On the Ecomateriality of Racial-colonial Domination in Rhode Island
• Colonial and Decolonial Resignification: US Empire-state Sovereignty in Hawai‘i
• The Ghost in the Algorithm: Racial Colonial Capitalism and the Digital Age
• Index