Fanon, Coloniality, and the Struggle for Indigenous Recognition in Canada

Grounded in the struggles for self-determination of the Dene Nation in Canada, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, by Indigenous-Canadian political theorist Glen Coulthard, seeks to unmask the seemingly progressive politics of recognition in Canada.Remaining in conversation with Marxist thought, and not shying away from prescriptive considerations for activism, Coulthard powerfully weaves through the histories of Indigenous anti-colonial resistance, the theoretical insights of Frantz Fanon, as well as Indigenous scholarship, in order to illustrate the pernicious coloniality behind the politics of recognition. 1 A transdisciplinary fusion of theory and praxis, Red Skin, White Masks is an important contribution to the ongoing decolonial turn in critical theory and the academy in general.The first chapter, "The Politics of Recognition in Colonial Contexts," orients the discussion by revisiting Fanon's critique of G. W. F. Hegel's dialectics of recognition as mainly developed in Black Skin, White Masks (New York:1. Coloniality is here understood as the "long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism."See Nelson Maldonado-Torres, "On the

Ethnology · Indigenous · Political science · Sociology · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights