• • • low end theory

For all the homage paid to heterogeneity and difference, the bulk of ‘post’-colonial theorizing is disabled by an oddly monolithic, and surprisingly unexamined, notion of colonialism. This would seem to spring from two distinct sources. The first is a pervasive Eurocentrism - or, as we might better term it, Occidocentrism - on the part of academic theorists, for whom colonialism figures, narcissistically, as a projection (the Western will to power, etc.). The second consists in the historical accident (or is it?) that the native founders of the postcolonial canon came from franchise or dependent - as opposed to settler or Creole - colonies. This gave these guerrilla theoreticians the advantage of speaking to an oppressed majority on the supply of whose labour a colonizing minority was vulnerably dependent. For Amil Cabral (1973: 40), for instance, genocide of the natives could only be counterproductive, creating ‘a void which empties foreign domination of its content and its object: the dominated people’. Analogously, (in this regard at least), when Frantz Fanon asserted (1967: 47) that ‘colonization and decolonization are simply a question of relative strength’, he was referring to relative capacities for violence, on which basis the colonizer was ultimately superfluous. Given certain African contexts, especially in the 1960s, the material grounds for such optimism can reasonably be credited. But what if the colonizers are not dependent on native labour? - indeed, what if the natives themselves have been reduced to a small minority whose survival can hardly be seen to furnish the colonizing society with more than a remission from ideological embarrassment?

Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology