National citizenship and postcolonial racism

ABSTRACT

In the decisive shift from imperial-states to nation-states after World War Two, two related processes took place. There was a wide scale effort to delegitimize racist ideologies. At the same time, state sovereignty across the world was being nationalized. Nationalist ideologies were rendered not only legitimate but practically mandatory in politics. This talk charts this history in order to understand how racism is organized, practiced, and resisted in an era of postcolonialism (i.e. an era when national sovereignty is the hegemonic state form and when the social and juridical distinction between 'national' and 'migrant' are widely accepted). I examine the growing autochthonization of politics and how nationalisms the world over are increasingly reconfiguring the 'national' as an autochthon, i.e. a 'native' of the national 'soil'. Through a discussion of various autochthonous movements I analyze the double move wherein historic colonizers are re-presented as 'migrants’ and today's 'migrants' are made into 'colonizers'. Such a move, I argue, is made possible by postcolonial racisms: the historic articulation between ideas of 'race' and 'nation' wherein ideas of national soil are racialized and racist ideas of blood are territorialized.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonial racisms
• autochthony
• allochthony
• National-Natives

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. My timeline of nation-state formation in the Americas is not the usual one, which dates the emergence of nation-states to the late-eighteenth century in the case of the United States (with its 1776 Declaration of Independence from the British imperial-state), the 1804 Declaration of Independence (from the French imperial-state) by some of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, and the 1819 Bolivarian revolutions in South America declaring independence from the Spanish imperial-state. However, I argue that while the sovereignty of these imperial-states was nullified, these states did not nationalize their sovereignty at this time. Indeed, they did not do so until many decades later (in the mid- to late-nineteenth century) when they gave up the imperial practice of regulating and restricting exit to regulating, restricting, and racializing entrance. For the United States, this took place in 1875 – almost a fully century after its Declaration of Independence – when it imposed its first immigration restrictions against, in this case, people categorized as ‘Chinese coolies’ and female ‘prostitutes.’ For the states that separated from the Gran Colombia (present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama, northern Peru, western Guyana, and northwest Brazil), such controls were not enacted until the mid- to late-nineteenth century (see Sharma 2020 for a fuller discussion of these processes).