Halifax

Seeing Red: Recognition, Reconciliation & Resentment in Indigenous Politics

Free public lecture by Glen Coulthard

2:30pm
- 4:00pm
Friday January 13 2012

See also Glen's Thursday talk "Place Against Empire: Understanding Indigenous Radicalism", 7pm at the Dalhousie Architecture School (Spring Garden Road)

"In his 1887 masterpiece, On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche influentially characterizes ressentiment as a “poisonous”, “festering”, and “impotent” mode of being that is entirely “negative” and “reactive.” Ressentiment is a pathologically other-determined orientation to the world, which, for Nietzsche, signifies the abnegation of freedom as an expression of self-valorizing, life-affirming praxis. To harbour ressentiment is thus a slavish activity associated with the weak and the pitiful; it is an expression of both the slave’s jealous contempt for the strength and power of the master, and of his or her “impotent” desire for revenge. Stripping Nietzsche’s critique of its clearly elitist and conservative connotations and applying it to their respective analyses of contemporary political struggles, political theorists Wendy Brown and Saul Newman have both suggested that when otherwise emancipatory political projects become structured by the logic of ressentiment they risk re-inscribing their own powerlessness in the very efforts they undertake to achieve collective liberation. My paper will engage this important line of criticism in light of Indigenous peoples’ struggles for freedom in settler-colonial contexts like Canada. Drawing on the work of the great revolutionary anti-colonial psychiatrist and social theorist, Frantz Fanon, I will argue the following two points: (1) that ressentiment is an entirely appropriate and legitimate sentiment to hold in contexts where Indigenous peoples are still subject to the ongoing structural and symbolic violence of dispossession and settler-state governance; and (2) that under certain circumstances politically embracing our individual and collective resentment (as opposed to embracing a politics that prematurely stresses the moral superiority of a neo-colonial framework of forgiveness, recognition and reconciliation) can play a cathartic, critically transformative role in the rehabilitation of colonized subjects and in the radical reconstruction of decolonized Indigenous ways of life."

Glen Coulthard is a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation and an assistant professor in the First Nations Studies Program and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Glen has written and published numerous articles and chapters in the areas of indigenous thought and politics, contemporary political theory, and radical social and political thought. His community-based projects have included helping establish (as a founding collective member) Camas Books and Infoshop (Victoria), Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning (Yelowknives Dene Territory), The Frank Paul Society (Vancouver), and participation in the Purple Thistle Institute (Vancouver), among other projects.

Sponsored by:
The Halifax Radical Imagination Project
The Dalhousie Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology
The Mount Saint Vincent Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Fernwood Publishing

A reception will follow in the McCain Building, rm. 1128, Dalhousie (hosted by the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology)

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