Colonial Etiology: Globalism and the Debate Between Black and Native American Studies

Abstract: “Colonial Etiology: Globalism and the Debate Between Black and Native American Studies” outlines the debate between Black and Native American Studies. First, this article intervenes in this conversation by arguing that the debate is structured by a mutual misrecognition. In this mutual misreading, both fields interpret the other’s object of study and theoretical metaphors as providing the protocols necessary for transcending subjection and entering civil society as a subsidiary of whiteness, antiblackness, and settler colonialism. This misrecognition can sometimes result in etiology, where both fields ask: which came first, racial slavery or settler colonialism? This form of etiology reinforces the misrecognition between the two fields in tautological causation that begins and ends, in any case, with the colonial and viral spread of White Christian Europe and Greco-Roman culture. Second, the author argues that this shared etiological tendency nevertheless reflects a profound and unifying, un-flinching paradigmatic critique that attempts to hold the West responsible and culpable for significant global crimes. The author shows that when we view the theories and metaphors of Blackness and Indianness together, not as signs in friction but as two halves of a symbolic whole representing the Earth itself, these metaphors and the communities they represent reveal the telos of European philosophy as the desire to colonize and enslave the globe and life itself.