1,720,967 research outputs found
Worlds on the edge: the politics of settler resentment on the Saugeen/Bruce Peninsula
Get PDFWhy is it that, at a time when countless state officials are apologizing for historic wrongs and insisting that Canada has entered a period of reconciliation, many settlers continue to act towards indigenous peoples with unabated aggression and resentment? This thesis attempts to explain the continual reproduction of settler colonialism through an investigation of the processes involved in the formation of settlers as political subjects. Developing a Butlerean account of the subject, the author suggests that settlers are produced through colonial regimes as political subjects with deep and often unacknowledged investments in the reproduction of systems of oppression that provide for their material and psychic position of privilege. While the instability inherent in such systems ultimately threatens settlers themselves – as seen in the collapsing North American middle class – the fragility and precarity experienced by settlers who are targeted by neoliberal reforms often leads them to reinvest in, and aggressively defend, those very systems of power as a matter of subjective continuity.
The author’s inquiry into these issues emerges from his own experience as a settler, and as an attempt to understand what motivates the aggression and resentment that many elements within his own community direct towards indigenous peoples. Because of these motivations, much of this thesis is grounded in discussions about the ways in which the author’s home community, in the southern Ontario riding of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, is predicated in ongoing acts of colonization. From burial ground reclamations, to mob violence, to the problems inherent in combatting white supremacy without at once critiquing settler colonialism, each of the examples brought forward in this thesis attempts to analyze why this community of settlers seemingly throbs with a collective anger and indignation that is continually directed at the Saugeen Anishinaabek.Graduat
Addressing atrocity in the Canadian state: The discourse of ‘legacy’ and the comprehension of historical injustices
No full textAs coming to terms with historical injustices have become a pressing concern for contemporary Canadian politics, a variety of discourses are engaging with what sorts of reparative responsibilities and accountabilities are necessary for harms inherited in the present. Since the late 1980s, reparative efforts in the Canadian state have focused on political recognition, compensation and official apologies for those harmed or otherwise impacted by injustices. Dominant discourse, however, has demonstrated a tendency to frame injustices as sad chapters, isolated moments of poor discretion, or the actions of imperfect individuals in their historical context. Today, monuments celebrating Canadian nation-building legacies are being confronted by their associated legacies of harm, exclusion, and white supremacy. As critical studies of the construction of Canadian identity have argued, narratives of ‘Canada’ and what it means to be Canadian have centred tenets of whiteness, settler colonialism, masculinity and Britishness. Reminders of these cornerstones of nation, and the figures and events that advanced them, populate everyday existence through monuments, place-naming of streets and public parks, architecture, and other heritage sites. In these contexts, nation-building figures and events are often framed as persisting, bearing on our present conditions and beneficial circumstances, while legacies of injustice associated with these figures and events are often framed as an event, a footnote, reduced through sanitized narratives, or not presented at all. The distinction between what endures, and what does not, seems perplexing.
Understanding the continued dominance of these discourses and framings as an obstacle to promoting historical dialogue and accountability, I examine how the concept of political legacies operate in Canadian political discourse—a concept central to what representations of the world are inherited and seen as foundational and valued for the present and future, yet which has been conceptually overlooked as the subject of critical analysis. Advancing this premise through the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Foucauldian genealogy, I suggest that political legacy narratives have the ability to reinforce sanitized narratives of historical injustices in the Canadian state. Through an investigation of recent initiatives and contention surrounding revising, rewriting and rethinking the celebration of problematic pasts in the present, this research aims to develop paths forward for critically analyzing oppressive legacies and rethinking reparative responsibilities for enduring injustices.Graduat
The black homunculus: toward a grammar of black experience
No full textHortense Spillers is renowned for her contributions to the canon of black thought which prefigure contemporary trends in Afro-pessimism. Specifically, her concern with developing a new grammar through which to articulate the experiences of black folks is considered here as imperative to the study of black ontology because of the vexed relationship between black folks and the liberal, humanist grammars endemic to the social sciences and humanities. With particular reference to the work of Giorgio Agamben, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Henry Louis Gates, I develop a linguistic account that justifies Spillers concern for an improvised grammar. I then make my own contributions to this intellectual project by offering the alchemical homunculus, or “little person”, as an allegory for the black body that apprehends the concerns of Spillers, Alexander Weheliye and Zakkiyah Jackson with the process by which black flesh is physically molded into black bodies through the exercise of violence onto black folks with impunity. This account offers an aesthetic principle in which perceptions about black folks result in an exaggerated perception of black physiology that parallels social anxieties around black folks’ behaviour and underly the violent policing of black flesh in a process that culminates in the composition of black bodies, contorted into a form that resembles human bodies but with few of the attendant entitlements that this form has come to be associated with within the modern psyche.Graduat
Trafficking for sexual exploitation: the problems and insufficiencies in North American policy
Get PDFThis work is a theoretical exploration that seeks to better understand the grooming process involved in some cases of domestic trafficking for sexual exploitation in North America. It theorizes the grooming process as a relation of power engaged in a strategy of subjection. The analysis points to how micropolitical deployments of disciplinary techniques restrict the fluidity of agency, enable the habituation of behaviour, modify thought processes, and produce consciousness.
This thesis also identifies two political problems in current anti-trafficking legislation and policies in North America. The first is that sex work has become conflated with trafficking for sexual exploitation. This conflation does not serve the interests of sex workers, as it has led to legislation that further criminalizes the sex industry, and to an increase in violence and exploitation within it. It also does not serve the needs of trafficked individuals, as it leads to trafficking being misunderstood, and renders anti-trafficking deployments ineffective as a result.
The second is that binary categorizations of consent (as tied to exploitation) in North American trafficking legislation are problematic and theoretically insufficient. Binary conceptions of consent are problematic because: (a) they enable a conflation of sex work and trafficking for sexual exploitation; (b) they force survivors or sex workers to relinquish their agency and identify as “victims” in order to work toward a conviction of their trafficker, or to avoid arrest or deportation; and (c) they emphasize a view of choice/consent that precludes an understanding of how an agent always works within limits that are unique to that individual. They are theoretically insufficient because they rely on liberal understandings of autonomy, which my engagement with Butler, Foucault, and affect theory critiques. This thesis makes the argument that there are varying degrees to which identity and consent are constructed through the production of subjectivities and the reorganization of preconscious thought processes. The “self”, consent, and judgment, are —to varying degrees— produced by external signifiers, institutions, and discourses. Thus, this work points to the need for a more nuanced approach to determine agency, one that does not rely upon binary and static categorizations.Graduat
Syrian refugees in Canada? Interpretation and judgement in the political production of security threats
No full textWhat are we to understand by the term ‘security’ in international relations? This thesis explores the theoretical foundations of security risks and threats in modern politics. Taking Thomas Hobbes and Michel Foucault as the paradigmatic theorists of modern political power, this thesis explains security as an inherently contingent and contextual phenomenon, intertwined and embedded in socio-historical discourses. Each of the three chapters explain how security manifests and operates as a type of discourse (discursive formation) under sovereignty, working to achieve particular social, political, and epistemological ends. The practical focus of this project is a case study analysis of the Canadian Liberal Government’s #WelcomeRefugees project, a government assisted resettlement project for displaced victims of the Syrian civil war. Drawing on the example of the case study, this thesis investigates the underlying political, historical, and theoretical conditions which mobilize and inform modern political regimes of security and risk management.Graduat
Entangled with/in empire: Indigenous nations, settler preservations, and the return of buffalo to Banff National Park
No full textThis thesis mobilizes the concept of “colonial entanglement” to emphasize the deep complexity and unpredictability of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships within what is now known as the Banff-Bow Valley. Responding to various literatures—including Indigenous Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, Political Theory, and Canadian Politics—I posit that the concept of colonial entanglements offers a parallax view of contexts, such as the Banff-Bow Valley, and events like the Buffalo Reintroduction Project. Not only does such a concept reveal how Indigenous nations— both human and non-human—are targeted by the racializing and gendered entanglements of colonizing regimes that seek to break up and replace them, but it also shows how these nations continue to persist and resist despite colonizing efforts to achieve otherwise. In other words, colonial entanglements compel one to also consider how nations like the Ĩyãħé Nakoda also exert influence on other Indigenous and non-Indigenous life in the Banff-Bow Valley—albeit, in different ways and to different degrees.
After unpacking the concept in the first chapter, I use colonial entanglement to show how colonizing regimes and their expansionist modes of relationship react to the Indigenous nations they become entangled with. Using the signing of Treaty 7 and the establishment of a national park in Banff, I reveal how the Canadian state seeks to erect colonizing regimes of property that cater to capital as they transit the Banff-Bow Valley by ‘breaking up’ and ‘breaking from’ Indigenous nations and their expansive modes of relationship. Next, I consider how such reactionary violence is continually justified and legitimated through the articulation and reiteration of state of nature fictions that rely on notions of wilderness and tropes of Indigeneity to delegitimize the enduring presence of Indigenous nations. Specifically, I look at the Indian Act, the prohibition of hunting in the Park, and the Banff Indian Days festival to show how state of nature fictions articulate a supposed transition from a “past state of nature” to a contemporary “state of (dis)possession” entangled with white supremacist and heteropatriarchal forms of power. In doing so, these fictions make and reproduce colonial subjects who buy into and support colonizing violence and breakage that disproportionately targets those Indigenous to place. In the final chapter, I turn to focus on the Buffalo Reintroduction Project. Here, I consider how the project presents contemporary opportunities for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to support and/or disrupt colonizing states of (dis)possession and the state of nature fictions they rely on, while also considering the project’s potential for a politics oriented towards expansive modes of relationship revolving around principles of decolonization and anti-colonial internationalism.Graduat
Coldness and compassion: the abnegation of desire in the political realm
Get PDFThe concept of compassion has recently held a controversial role in political thought. Critics have tied it with the condescension and latent self-interest of pity, while proponents have asserted it as the ethical posture from which to approach the suffering of others. This thesis looks at the role of compassion in the political sphere, arguing that political compassion involves a decentring of oneself as the primary subject of political action, looking instead to forego one’s own desire and to replace it with the desire of another. It pays particular attention to the thought of Hannah Arendt, who excludes this self-sacrificing compassion from the political sphere, due to the importance of speech to political action, and in turn, the importance of muteness to compassion. To Arendt, political speech intends to performatively bring one’s uniqueness into the world, whereas compassion performatively denies this subjectivity and is fundamentally unpolitical. She asserts that not only do public displays of compassion destroy their very value, but moreover, that a focus of compassion and suffering in the political sphere overshadows the need for cool, sober discourse between equals. I argue that, even in accepting Arendt’s definition of the political, there is space for compassion as a political labour. While Arendt asserts the need for speech and action in the political sphere, she conflates the free will involved in the plurality and uniqueness of the content of speech with the uniform, natural will to speak. Her articulations of the political realm, which require one to make oneself heard among equals, invoke at that same moment an immediate need for the labour of others foregoing their own desire to speak and act, to instead passively listen. Instead of being a realm exclusively to manifest one’s will, the political instead requires a reciprocity of desire, and its [email protected]
Habitual politics and the politics of habit: Bergson, modern advance, and the need to depart
Get PDFThis project addresses the problem of monovalent interpretations of habit’s role in a creative means of living within the literature. Analyses tend to opt for an either/or logic, in which the majority of research conducted reflects a detrimental, constraining role for habit as regards creativity while responses to this dominant position still operate under a singularly-positive understanding of habit. Introducing a multivalent conception of habit is a component within the broader purpose of challenging dominant conceptions of political improvement or “progress” (acknowledging how historically- and contemporarily-loaded such a term remains), while leaving open the much-needed potential for change. The research demonstrates the dangerous, immobilizing interaction between individual habit formation and the modern, linear teleological focus on political prediction and destination. Concurrently, it points to the benefits to creativity habit can provide when individual habituation is immersed in a different sense of political engagement. This bipartite argument is made through a Bergsonian method, built up from the intuitive primacy of flow and becoming and their decomposition into apparently stable forms and relations. Inspiration is drawn not only from the works of Bergson, but also Deleuze, Heidegger, and successors. By examining the multiple lines internal to habit, the research prescribes the importance of a balanced approach to the direction of political effort between a sense of improvement which advances to livable destinations and a sense which departs from unlivable locations. This is not a balance of the middle way, but of the constant passage between polar extremes (a both/and logic of habit) and individual negotiation amongst free and constrained political actions. By opening up the complexities of habit, subsequent work can interrogate further social and political elements which enable the persistence of teleological ideology and develop new political mechanisms to promote meaningfully diverse engagement and openness to the radically unpredictable.Graduat
Haptic performativity: exploring the force of bodies and the limits of linguistic action in silent protests
Get PDFThis thesis engages with the tension between political action and political speech in political understanding. This tension arises in a context whereby speech is represented as the sine qua non of being political and the way to change the conditions of being political; specifically, this thesis explores this tendency within a linguistic account of performative action (where action is understood through/as language effects). Against this backdrop, the thesis develops a notion of haptic performativity—performative action where the action (or doing) occurs without or in spite of linguistic (de)legitimation. Here, haptic performativity begins answering how marginalised populations act politically when defined by a lack of voice. To develop this notion—centering forms of action that occur in absentia of linguistic legitimation—the thesis: 1) reveals the disjunctive relation between deeds and speech with linguistic Performative Speech Act (PSA) theory; argues that 2) PSA theory reveals the inability for speech to convey the full force of bodily deeds within/through language; and, thereby, explores 3) how bodies or actors defined by a lack of social standing (or linguistic efficiency as a subject) remain politically impactful. Thus, while linguistic performativity gestures to the assembling power of speech (the power of already assembled subjects), conversely, haptic performativity testifies to the disassembling force of bodies who revolt without speech (the force of actors who are yet to be subjects). The thesis ends by bringing this haptic perspective into a contemporary context: the place of the body in the Black radical tradition of thought and the force of silent protests in the Black Lives Matter Movement.Graduat
The great forge of nations: violence and collective identity in fascist thought
No full textThis thesis analyzes the origins and development of conceptions of the relationship between violence and politics characteristic of twentieth century fascist thought. It critiques existing approaches to fascism and fascist ideology in the interdisciplinary field of fascist studies and proposes and employs an alternate approach which centres and emphasizes the flexibility and mutability of fascist thought and denies that any particular complex of beliefs or concepts can be said to constitute an ‘essence’ or ‘heart’ of fascist ideology. Morphological studies are offered of four discursive traditions in fascist and fascist-adjacent thought with respect to violence and politics: German military theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the ‘new’ French nationalism of the fin-de-siècle; the genre of ‘future warfare’ around and after the First World War; and the work of Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt. The thesis concludes with some consideration of the continuities and discontinuities made apparent in the morphological studies, an argument that those results vindicate the initial framing, and some avenues for extending them into areas of concrete contemporary relevance.Graduat
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