balatonchrimes-recognitionpower-2017.pdf (1.34 MB)
Recognition, power and coloniality
journal contribution
posted on 2017-08-01, 00:00 authored by Sam Balaton-ChrimesSam Balaton-Chrimes, Victoria SteadVictoria SteadRecognition has emerged in recent decades as an almost universally valued moral and political horizon in intercultural contexts. Recognition claims underpin myriad social struggles, and forms and practices of recognition also animate the management of alterities within both formal and informal arenas. Recently, critical Indigenous scholars Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard have posed a fundamental challenge to this moral and political horizon. Writing particularly in response to North American settler colonialism, they argue that the politics of recognition has functioned, not to ameliorate colonialism’s negative effects, but to reproduce them. We seek here to respond to the important provocation posed by Simpson and Coulthard’s scholarship, and to extend their critiques into new geographic and empirical terrains. Specifically, we draw on the notion of coloniality to establish a comparative frame that can bring both settler and non-settler postcolonial contexts into dialogue. Doing so highlights a multiplicity of forms of recognition relationships, as well as of sites and structures of power beyond the settler state. It also illuminates a complex, unstable middle ground that can exist between recognition and its absence, which provides a productive ground from which to engage with the possibilities of being against, or beyond, recognition.
History
Journal
Postcolonial StudiesVolume
20Issue
1Pagination
1 - 17Publisher
RoutledgeLocation
Melbourne, Vic.Publisher DOI
ISSN
1368-8790eISSN
1466-1888Language
engPublication classification
C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journalCopyright notice
2017, Institute of Postcolonial StudiesUsage metrics
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