Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance

By Geo Maher

This incisive study reveals the fundamental, paradoxical weakness of colonialism and the enduring power of anticolonial resistance.

Resistance is everywhere, but everywhere a surprise, especially when the agents of struggle are the colonized, the enslaved, the wretched of the earth. Anticolonial revolts and slave rebellions have often been described by those in power as “eruptions”—volcanic shocks to a system that does not, cannot, see them coming. In Anticolonial Eruptions, Geo Maher diagnoses a paradoxical weakness built right into the foundations of white supremacist power, a colonial blind spot that grows as domination seems more complete.  
Anticolonial Eruptions argues that the colonizer’s weakness is rooted in dehumanization. When the oppressed and excluded rise up in explosive rebellion, with the very human demands for life and liberation, the powerful are ill-prepared. This colonial blind spot is, ironically, self-imposed: the more oppressive and expansive the colonial power, the lesser-than-human the colonized are believed to be, the greater the opportunity for resistance. Maher calls this paradox the cunning of decolonization, an unwitting reversal of the balance of power between the oppressor and the oppressed. Where colonial power asserts itself as unshakable, total, and perpetual, a blind spot provides strategic cover for revolutionary possibility; where race or gender make the colonized invisible, they organize, unseen. Anticolonial Eruptions shows that this fundamental weakness of colonialism is not a bug, but a permanent feature of the system, providing grounds for optimism in a contemporary moment roiled by global struggles for liberation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9780520976689

Geo Maher

Geo Maher is Visiting Associate Professor of Global Political Thought at Vassar College, author of Decolonizing Dialectics and A World without Police, and coeditor of the Duke University Press series Radical Américas.  

Book preview

Anticolonial Eruptions

PRAISE FOR ANTICOLONIAL ERUPTIONS

An urgent effort to make sense of the senseless, helping readers see the rationality behind the tepid liberal responses to the ideological maximalism of settler-colonial racism and violence.

Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth

Maher stitches together a lyrical text comprised of literary and political themes he has combed out of disparate geographies and times that will have you reading in a contemplative hurry. A welcome addition to a growing literature eager to see humanity overcome the worst of itself.

Noura Erakat, author of Justice for Some

This remarkably rich and diverse book not only offers valuable insights into the composition of our colonial present but also points to the long history of explosive thought and action that will eventually bring it crashing down: that of the colonized themselves.

Glen Coulthard, author of Red Skin, White Masks

Maher distills centuries of anticolonial resistance into this short but necessary primer on decolonial cunning. From Caracas to Minneapolis, Maher theorizes alongside and through the dreams of the oppressed.

Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future

While structural violence is omnipresent and ubiquitous, this book is a necessary reminder that it is not, however, inevitable. Geo Maher’s latest book is a necessary telling of the subversive cunning of global rebellion, deftly illuminating the long history and contemporary path of revolution and resistance unfolding around us.

Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule

AMERICAN STUDIES NOW: CRITICAL HISTORIES OF THE PRESENT

Edited by Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez

Much of the most exciting contemporary work in American Studies refuses the distinction between politics and culture, focusing on historical cultures of power and protest on the one hand, or the political meanings and consequences of cultural practices, on the other. American Studies Now offers concise, accessible, authoritative books on significant political debates, personalities, and popular cultural phenomena quickly, while such teachable moments are at the forefront of public consciousness.

Anticolonial Eruptions

Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance

Geo Maher

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2022 by Geo Maher

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-520-37935-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-37936-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-97668-9 (ebook)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

Overview

Volcanoes

1. The Cunning of Decolonization

2. The Colonial Blindspot

3. The Second Sight of the Colonized

4. The Decolonial Ambush

Moles

Acknowledgments

Notes

Glossary

Selected Bibliography

OVERVIEW

VOLCANOES

Resistance by racialized and colonized people is often described as volcanic because it erupts from the underground of nonbeing

George Floyd • Racism • Haitian Revolution • Frantz Fanon • Nonbeing

CHAPTER 1. THE CUNNING OF DECOLONIZATION

Decolonial cunning takes advantage of the blindspots built into colonial racism and the second sight cultivated there to mount a shocking ambush

G. W. F. Hegel • Slavery • Nat Turner • Colonialism • Indigenous Resistance • Anti-Blackness

CHAPTER 2. THE COLONIAL BLINDSPOT

By invisibilizing and dehumanizing their victims, slavery and colonialism fall prey to a self-imposed blindness

Benito Cereno • Slave Rebellions • Outside Agitators • Slavemaster Ideology • Deception

CHAPTER 3. THE SECOND SIGHT OF THE COLONIZED

Slaves, colonized people, and women have always taken advantage of the colonizer’s blindness to cultivate a strategic second sight

Invisibility • W. E. B. Du Bois • Tricksters • Women’s Resistance • Black Spies • Harriet Tubman

CHAPTER 4. THE DECOLONIAL AMBUSH

Rebellions against colonialism, slavery, and white supremacy can be understood as an ambush from the underground

Riots • Police Brutality • Underground • Mudsill • Zapatistas • Venezuela

MOLES

The underground has always provided a launching pad for resistance and a space for building alternative worlds

Vietnam War • Tunnels • Walls • Drones • Migration • Decolonization

Volcanoes

When George Floyd was murdered, Minneapolis erupted. This was the consensus, the lingua franca, of nearly every mainstream media outlet attempting to grapple with the street rebellions that burst forth unexpectedly in May 2020, spreading like wildfire across the US and beyond in the months that followed.¹ This sudden mass uprising shocked everyone except those most intimately familiar with the pressure gathering unseen just beneath the surface. As one Minneapolis resident put it at the time, this was a volcano finally erupting after years of simmering.²

What is obvious to some is unthinkable to others, however. While those closest can often feel the rumbling, for many others volcanic metaphors bespeak shock and surprise, the sudden bursting forth of previously invisible forces. Something deeper, even subterranean, is at play, surging like so much molten lava, waiting to break the surface and unleash hell. To be clear: we are speaking of people, not nature, though sometimes the difference between the two is not so clear. Think of the proper name Katrina, or the perceptible weight of unnamable forces that impose themselves in a way that can only be felt as a force of nature, in part because they seek consciously to naturalize themselves.³

For Ta-Nehisi Coates, this is the case with racism, depicted so often as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature that one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men. ⁴ For Coates, there is some truth here: growing up Black means experiencing race as so totalizing and immutable a force that it may as well have been a brute fact of nature. The galaxy itself could kill me, he writes, and no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but . . . the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment.⁵ But if racism seeks to portray itself as a force of nature, and indeed accomplishes its most brutal work through this naturalization, do we err dangerously by granting it what it wants, even in disastrous form?

For some critics, to compare racism to a natural disaster, as Coates does, runs the risk of accepting the truth of its categories, succumbing in the process to pessimism, fatalism, and despair.⁶ But what if both positions are wrong? What if metaphors of natural disaster portend not the permanence of white supremacy but explosive resistance against it? What if the question is not only of racism as a natural disaster but also of the racialized and colonized people it produces as themselves disastrous beings who, in their very unmoored nature, might offer an unexpected path out of our age of ruin?⁷ What happens, in other words, if we refuse to foreclose on the potency of natural disasters, calling white supremacy’s bluff? If racism is a force of nature, then those who resist it do so with the power of an irrepressibly seismic reaction beyond all possible moral condemnation.

Such disastrous beings can throw even the permanence of nature into chaos. Slaves planning an 1810 uprising in Virginia referred to the planned revolt as an earthquake, and one conspirator was overheard to remark that he was entitled to his freedom, and he would be damned, if he did not have it in a fortnight.⁸ Frederick Douglass famously argued that rational argument meant little in the face of the structural irrationality of slavery. Confronting such a system therefore demanded not cool reason but zealous action, for which Douglass turned to seismic and more broadly meteorological metaphors: For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.⁹

These questions resonate deafeningly today. If you could hardly blame those slaves who crept through the night to set plantation houses ablaze, striking terror into the heart of the American South, the same is true today as fire is again applied as a mechanical, indeed a natural response to police violence: to the Minneapolis Third Precinct building after George Floyd’s murder, to police vehicles nationwide in the weeks that followed, and to the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was shot dead by Atlanta police less than a month later. So natural a response, in fact, that some 54 percent of Americans agreed that protesters were justified in burning down the Third Precinct. If it is a central pretension of Western modernity that nature is a vast prison that stands opposed to human liberation and freedom, then here we find something far different, turning such notions on their head.

From Native Hawaiians defending the literal volcano at Mauna Kea to those water defenders congregating to resist the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock under the banner Water Is Life (Mni Wiconi), to speak of nature in this way evokes, not inert matter, but dynamic relation.¹⁰ As the revolutionary Indigenous collective known as the Red Nation recently put it in their long-awaited manifesto The Red Deal, There is something about the weather, and we don’t need a weatherman to tell us that this points toward both climate crisis and the winds of political resistance blowing in the present.¹¹ This is far from fatalism or despair, and even with the judgment of the gods reversed, Coates’s terms still apply: you can’t subpoena this earthquake either, there’s no slowing this whirlwind, and you certainly can’t blame a volcano for erupting.

  •  •  •

Resistance is everywhere, but everywhere a surprise. Why? What explains the downright shock among the powerful when confronted by the most human of demands—for life, freedom, and equality? Any system of domination relies, to some degree at least, on the pretension that those in power deserve to be there, that their rule is by definition legitimate and good. And more often than not, those in power are persuaded by the comforting stories they tell themselves. This book is about the kind of hubris that such comforts produce among the powerful, and that blinds them to those who would oppose their rule.

If power is everywhere naturalized, however, this is doubly true where it depends on, and is upheld by, naturalized divisions within the human itself. Slavery depended on the idea, no matter how absurd, that slaves were happy in their chains, just as generations later, advocates of Jim Crow insisted that Black Americans were content as second-class citizens. More broadly still, colonial domination was justified by the post hoc rationalization that colonized people benefited from, and in fact needed, European tutelage on the path to civilization. But when people are disqualified from humanity, we expect very little of them, much less something so human as to fight for freedom. The hubris involved is thus both more specific and far more profound as a result, and resistance all the more unexpected, shocking, and explosive.

The Haitian Revolution was an eruption like no other, and for those in power it was more shocking than any natural disaster. As C. L. R. James put it, The colonists slept on the edge of Vesuvius, but for centuries the same thing had been said and the slaves had never done anything.¹² His description was no aberration. The history of panicked reactions to anticolonial and slave resistance is rife with volcanic and other seismic metaphors. More than a decade before Douglass famously insisted that the slaveholders are sleeping on slumbering volcanoes, if they did but know it, the nineteen-year-old Black abolitionist James Forten Jr. had given a rousing speech in Philadelphia urging his audience to continue to warn the South of the awful volcano they are recklessly sleeping over and the terrible tempest to come.¹³

When the French painter Jean-Baptiste Chapuy sought to capture the essence of a burning Cap Français in what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue, he drew directly upon his own prior renderings of eruptions at Mount Etna and Mount Vesuvius in style as in message. The same colors, the same brushstrokes once used to capture the sublime force of nature now depicted "the eruption of slave violence