Saturday, February 25, 2023

Indiana, A Colonial State?

 I first had this thought in law school during my International Law class. In the textbook was an article on how transnational companies exploited Third World countries, which sounded very much like how General Motors exploited Indiana's factory towns of Anderson, Muncie, Marion, and Kokomo. Then came the takeover of Indiana banks by out-of-state banks, and the way the Republicans have led the state into low wage jobs in an attempt to attract foreign companies.

Reading Andy Lamey's Theories of Justice Is decolonization progressive? complicates for me the issue of how Indiana recovers from being a colony.

Since Mills published his article “Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy” in 2015, National Public Radio has offered advice on how to “decolonize your bookshelf” and stickers bearing the slogan “decolonize your syllabus” have appeared for sale on Etsy. An idea such as decolonization is surely catching on when it is the subject of an explainer in Teen Vogue (“What Decolonization Is, and What It Means to Me”). Mills may not have inspired these popular calls to decolonize, yet they echo his suggestion that colonialist ideas need to be rooted out of some of our most intimate intellectual spaces. As the project has gone mainstream, however, it has also come under new scrutiny. Is decolonization, in its present guises, really so progressive? 

One of the most ambitious counterarguments to this movement is presented by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò in his provocative new book, Against Decolonisation. Táíwò, a professor of African political theory and philosophy at Cornell University (not to be confused with the Georgetown philosopher of the same name, whose work was also recently reviewed in The Point), takes aim at Mills and laments how a concept that once referred to escaping political and economic subjugation by powerful states has come to mean something far less precise. According to Táíwò, “because modernity is conflated with Westernism and with ‘whiteness’—and all three with colonialism—decolonisation (the negation of colonialism) has become a catch-all idea to tackle anything with any, even minor, association with the ‘West.’” Táíwò argues that such undisciplined uses of “decolonization” have a perverse effect, stymieing attempts to understand, let alone improve, the situation of formerly colonized peoples.

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Táíwò is a fearless and original thinker and, at times, a polemical one. To be sure, Táíwò in his ferocious mode is often witty (one chapter is called “Decolonise This!”) and scores some tidy hits, though sometimes Táíwò lets his polemical gifts carry him too far. (“Here is the deal,” he writes, “the world, the so-called West or Global North, does not owe Africa”—overlooking the many obstacles to African development, such as heavy-handed interventions in African economies by Western-dominated entities like the World Bank, and subsidies to Western farmers that price out their African counterparts.) But Táíwò’s excesses should not overshadow his insights. These are especially on display in his less scathing moments, in which he comes not to destroy decolonization but to take it over, by channeling its liberationist energies in a more productive direction. The race-based account of writers such as Mills, Táíwò points out, is complicated by colonialism’s white subjects—the Irish, Québécois and Afrikaners, for example. Many discussions of colonialism in Africa also pass over in silence what Táíwò terms “the single outstanding colonial issue in the continent,” the occupation of Western Sahara, which has been ongoing since 1975, and which features an African aggressor, Morocco. The fact that most African borders were originally drawn by colonial powers is often cited as evidence of colonialism’s ongoing presence. Táíwò counters that countries such as Nigeria, Cameroon, South Sudan and Eritrea have redrawn national borders since the colonial period, suggesting that the continent’s current borders also reflect African influence.

If Indiana lacks the ambition to be anything but a doormat for other states, then all I am doing here today is aggravating my tunnel carpal and wasting time better spent on my fiction writing. It seems to me that the state needs to do more to foster native businesses - access to capital, financial and intellectual, seemed to be lacking in the past. The State of Indiana also needs to more to promote its culture. We let surrounding states develop gaming industries before us because of the fear of our moral decline. Sorry, there was always immorality in Indiana. We refuse to legalize marijuana while surrounding states do so, and create jobs and tax revenue, for similar "moral" reasons. Meanwhile, we have too many Hoosiers dying from opioids.

We used to pride ourselves on our Midwestern common sense. What we have done with that common sense is to turn it into an excuse for not dealing with the state's problems which threaten its future.

sch 2/4

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