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Part 1
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Chapter 1
Introduction
Sheila Khan, Nazir Ahmed Can and Helena Machado
DOI: 10.4324/9781003014300-2
This book is based on the premise that the project of Western modernity, in its aspects of colonialism and of racial domination and subjugation, extends into today’s societies. Defending this claim and conviction requires thorough investigation able to encompass the various dimensions and the density associated with the creation, maintenance and continued existence of modernity beyond its moment of creation, which is commonly situated by Western thought in the 18th century, the century of Enlightenment. Without detailed research into what Western modernity was and the characteristics of the devices that enabled the global expansion of its principles, it proves fruitless to understand, contextualise and reveal today the mechanisms of racism, racialisation and racial surveillance, principles that guide our work as editors and that of the authors of the various texts collected here. We believe that one of the great dangers facing current social, historical, economic and philosophical thinking about the various phenomena of violence and inequality that haunt our societies is, on the one hand, historical indolence with regard to the interference of the past in divisive issues of the present, from the refugee crisis to the “threats” of terrorism or manipulation of the masses through communication technologies;1 and, on the other hand, the reckless perception of historical legacies anchored to the emergence and survival of the logics of coloniality, imperialism and human racialisation, without which the project of Western modernity would be a jaded and unworkable endeavour.
To leave this cartography of thinking, aspiring to be solid and capable of providing sensitive interpretations of the debate around racism, xenophobia, populism, ethno-racial criminalisation and the surveillance of certain social groups, condemns the possibility of serious and balanced reflection to historical inconsistency. In particular, we need sensitive concepts for the examination of the devices of modernity: domination, exploitation, violence and racial differentiation, which cannot be regarded as the remnants and rags of a distant era. On the contrary, under the guise of a technocratic, technological, scientific, rational and ideological language, the modernity worldview, conquered and constructed in the past tense, inhabits, breathes and infiltrates our current human grammar (El-Enany, 2020; Gilroy, 1987; Lowe, 2015; Melson, 2012).
How and which aspects of Western modernity have implications for our reality are the issues that question us and that, therefore, summon us to a moral, critical and joint commitment towards the importance of embracing research from the perspective of an archaeology of knowledge, and of dissecting the current logics of racism, racialisation (Medeiros, 2020) and racial surveillance (Browne, 2015; Marshall, 2019). This departure point entrenched in our book demands, from us, a gaze that manifests itself not only from a Western geopolitical perspective, but one that impels us to expand our range of study into other realities with different human experiences, which allow us to grasp the analytical richness of other contexts, of other historical, cultural and political dynamics and maturities.
Modernity matters
Understanding how the breadth of modernity is integral to our societies also challenges us to interweave histories, narratives, dimensions and phenomena that reveal, in their fullness, the fact that colonialism never finished and that it has a performative role not yet sufficiently theorised and analysed in the academic world (Sa’di, 2012). The persistence of the legacy of modernity can be seen in the continuation of systemic racism and in the increasingly covert nature of racial discourse and practices, which is revealed so much in the avoidance of direct racial terminology, in the development of a racial political agenda that sidesteps direct racial references, in the subtle nature of most mechanisms of reproducing racial privilege and in the reconfiguration of some racial practices of the past (Shain, 2020).
It is within this awareness of the perpetuation of the legacies of the European empire and its multiple forms of colonialism that we have established a dialogue between different reflective approaches and schools of thought and different cultural and historical situations. Guided by a transdisciplinary methodology and an intersectional perspective in which the concepts of race, gender, class, culture, politics, art, identity and technology converge and enrich each other, this book seeks to understand the complexity and scope of the project of modernity. The narrative of the Western modernity project ushered in one of the most auspicious and glorious times of emancipation, expansion, economic growth and cultural development in the European context. However, together with an era celebrated as unique and original in its guiding principles, it also conceived one of the darkest machines of power and violence that served as tools that originated the slave trade, slavery and the illegitimate appropriation of territories, expropriating, expelling and punishing anything opposing the magnitude proposed and engineered by that narrative. The humus of modernity is the conception of major contradictions and attacks on human dignity, on respect for cultural diversity and on equality in the sharing of both material and symbolic goods. We are not alone in being aware of this nature of oppositions, dichotomies and the back and forth that the project of modern man carries into the global world. Authors such as Albert Memi, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Dubois, Aimé Césaire, Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, Walter Mignolo, Ann Laura Stoler, Lisa Lowe, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Cedric Robinson, Jordi A. Byrd, Simon Gikandi, Paul Gilroy and Nadine El-Enany, among others, are resounding in their insistence on the argument that the genealogy of Western modernity is entirely complicit in the genealogy of a grammar of racial differentiation, racialisation and racism. Accordingly, in order to conquer and grow, it was imperative to colonise, appropriate, subjugate, surveil (Fanon, 2008) and, if possible, eliminate (Wolfe, 2006).2 It is in this context that colonialism and imperialism emerge as mechanisms that care for, protect and reinforce the pillars underpinning Western modernity. As guardians of modernity, colonialism and imperialism, they symbolise and assume the power of colonising mother countries in conquered and plundered lands (Galeano, 2017). For Walter Mignolo, this is a fundamental characteristic in better dissecting the necessary compatibility between the modern and the colonial. According to his thesis, “if coloniality is constitutive of modernity, in the sense that there cannot be modernity without coloniality, then the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality are also two sides of the same coin” (Mignolo, 2007, 464). Boaventura de Sousa Santos will highlight this duality, designating it as abyssal lines, detailing the concept of modernity in the following terms:
Modern abyssal thinking stands out for its ability to produce and radicalise distinctions. Modern Western thinking still operates along abyssal lines that divide the human world from the sub-human, in such a way that principles of humanity are not undermined by inhumane practices. The colonies represent a model of radical exclusion that remains in modern Western thinking and practices today, just as it did in the colonial cycle. Today, as then, the creation and – at the same time – the negation of the other side of the line are an integral part of hegemonic principles and practices (Santos, 2007, 3–10).
With the aim of lending consistency to this observation, and although it is not our intention to review the extensive literature already produced on this subject, it is important to emphasise, by way of example, the mindset of Lisa Lowe, who, in her work The Intimacy of Four Continents, notes the following:
This genealogy also traces the manners in which the liberal affirmations of individualism, civility, mobility, and free enterprise simultaneously innovate new means and forms of subjugation, administration and governance. The genealogy of modern liberalism is thus also a genealogy of modern race; racial differences and distinctions designate the boundaries and endure as remainders attesting to the violence of liberal universality.
(Lowe, 2015, 3–7)
The study of this narrative of modernity as emancipating and developmental in nature, demonstrates in co-existence other attributes less worthy of its principles and how those are inexorably maintained and calibrated to preserve its nomenclature and longevity. Without violence, domination and the hierarchisation of the “Other,” the clauses of expansion, exploitation and economic growth in Western colonising mother countries could not have been activated and validated. In this sense, as Nelson Maldonaldo-Torres points out, the lights of Western modernity carry with them the shadows of a heinous and mournful disrespect of thousands and thousands of other human beings who were stripped of their sense of being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) and the awareness of the right to their humanity. The archaeology of modernity brings with it the emergence of an ambitious and thirsty source of epistemological and ontological control of the “Other,’” assuming the act of violence and force as logics protected from any questioning and review. The logic of elimination is, thus, presented as the aqueduct over which flows the whole spring of dispossession, banishment and denial of human and moral rights – the characteristic attributes of the expansionist projects of the Western world.3 In fact, the legacy of modernity is the archive of repeated legitimisation processes of racial hierarchisation, of colonial surveillance over men, women and children, who were denied the right to cultural autonomy and civic emancipation.
Race, racialisation and racial surveillance
Flowing through a logic marked by the interest of territorial domination, driven by a heroic discourse of self-justification and anchored, in practice, in human atrocities and human rights violations, the narrative of Western modernity caustically elevates the creation of race. Modernity cultural and political constructs race as another essential element for human demarcation and hierarchisation, performing race through new semantics and language based on the humanity versus sub-humanity binomial, therefore the understanding of the racial dimension and of the process of racialisation and surveillance of the “Other” is of unquestionable importance for a triangular articulation and survival of modern thought: at the top, Western modernity, as macro-structure; in the middle, the logic of coloniality and imperialism; and, at its base, racial classification designed as the ground for the durability of conquered territories and people. The logic of racialisation is the right and effective key for the strengthening of colonised spaces, slavery and forced labour, but also the armour of a praxis and ideology that modern European thought instrumentalised so as to eternalise, without moral remnants, the experience of colonial and imperialist expansion in the world. Each in their own way, but always without measure or modesty, the various European empires made use of this logic to reap the benefits and advantages that fuelled the hegemony and wealth of their colonising mother countries. The experiences of this modern colonisation and imperialism that the texts analyse here represent various living repositories and testimonies of the force, magnitude and impact that the abyssal experience of modernity has left as a legacy in our present time. Indeed, this force was not only territorial, it was also tentacular, feeling its way into other dimensions such as gender,4 ethnic groups, caste, religion, social class, sexuality, law and the enforcement of these laws through measures of control and surveillance. As Ann Laura Stoler points out, to understand the archive of modernity is to immerse our thinking into a fine-tuned engine, pumped for power, in which the law and logic of domination and elimination were fuelled to serve one single purpose: to dominate, demoralise and strip the racialised “Other” trapped into the category of sub-human:
[W]hat constitutes the archive, what form it takes, and what systems of classification and epistemology signals at specific times are (and reflect) critical features of colonial politics and power. The archive was the supreme technology of the late nineteenth-century imperial state, a repository of codified beliefs that clustered (and bore witness to) connections between secrecy, the law, and power.
(2002, 87)
Control and surveillance were the measures assumed by colonial and imperial powers (Cole, 2000) to enclose in the space of sub-humanity all those who served through their enslaved labour-force the goals of sovereignty and domination, the modern logic of colonial expansion. In Black Skin and White Masks, Frantz Fanon portrays in detail how the gaze of the white man – “the white gaze” – reigned over the lives of those whom modernity had stripped of their sense of mobility, civility and humanity. Simone Browne picks up Fanon’s thought by showing in her book, Dark Matters, on the Surveillance of Blackness, the closed devices that mark the enslaved body, monitored and conditioned by an idea of possession and power when she says,
[T]ake, for example, Fanon’s often cited “Look, the negro!” passage in Black Skin, White Masks on the experience of epidermization, where the white gaze fixes him as an object among objects, and he says, “the white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me.”
(Browne, 2015, 7)
The history of empires was simultaneously a vast legacy of violence and an unbridled string of crimes against humanity. As several authors point out, “[T]he history of empire, is the history of crime and violence. Empires are, criminally speaking, criminal organisations” (Iadicola apud Kakel, 2019, 5). Techno-colonial legacies endure and are imported through other much more refined ...
