Decoloniality and Politics of Recognitio

Decoloniality and politics of recognition
among the Indigènes de la République1

Roberto D. Hernández2
San Diego State University,3 USA
rhernandez@mail.sdsu.edu
Received: July 19, 2016 Accepted: September 20, 2016
Abstract:
This article analyses the ways in which Le Parti des Indigènes de la République in France
mobilizes and re-signifies the term indigene (or indigenous), from its original use in the
French colonial context as a word to describe colonial subjects irrespective of place of origin.
In the process, Les Indigènes highlight and make explicit what they call a “postcolonial
colonialism” that continues into the present with regards to France’s relationship to its
former colonial subjects and their children, particularly made evident with France’s
Muslim population. As such, they shatter the normative politics of recognition that other
‘minority’ populations often embrace and instead advance a decolonial praxis of the
affirmation of life, self and being.
Keywords: France, Indigenous, Colonialism, Postcolonial, Decolonial, Recognition.
Decolonialidad y política de reconocimiento entre los Indigenes de la

República
Resumen:
Este artículo analiza las maneras como el Partido de los indígenas de la República en Francia
moviliza y resignifica el término indigène (o indígena), a partir de su uso original en
el contexto colonial francés como una palabra para describir los sujetos coloniales sin
diferenciar su lugar de origen. En el proceso, les indigènes destacan y hacen explícito
lo que llaman un «colonialismo postcolonial» que se mantiene en el presente en lo que
respecta a la relación de Francia con sus antiguos súbditos coloniales y sus hijos, que
se pone en evidencia específicamente con la población musulmana en Francia. Como
tales, ellos destrozan la política normativa del reconocimiento al que otras poblaciones
«minoritarias» muchas veces se acogen y en su lugar proponen una praxis descolonial de
la afirmación de la vida, el ser y el yo.
Palabras clave: Francia, nativos, colonialismo, postcolonial, descolonial, reconocimiento.
1
This paper makes part of research carried out by the author on the meaning of indigeneity in various social
movements all over the world.
2
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley.
3
Chicana and Chicano Studies.
Tabula Rasa. Bogotá - Colombia, No.25: 249-265, july-decembrer 2016 ISSN 1794-2489
Paris - 2016
Johanna Orduz
TABULA RASA
No.25, july-decembrer 2016
Decolonialidade e política de reconhecimento dos Indígenas da República

Resumo:
O presente artigo analisa as maneiras como o Partido dos Indígenas da República na França
mobiliza e resignifica o termo indigène (ou indígena) a partir do uso original no contexto
colonial francês como uma palavra para descrever os sujeitos coloniais sem diferenciar
sua origem. No processo, Les Indigènes colocam em destaque e explicitam o que eles
chamam um «colonialismo pós-colonial» que se mantem no presente no tocante à relação
da França com seus antigos súditos coloniais e com os filhos deles. Trata-se do caso da
população mulçumana na França, especificamente. Eles destroem a política normativa
do reconhecimento que outras populações «minoritárias» acolhem e, em troca, propõem
uma praxis descolonial da afirmação da vida, do ser e do eu.
Palavras-chave: França, nativos, colonialismo, pós-colonial, descolonial, reconhecimento.
Indigeneity, as a concept, has been widely grappled with and rethought in last
two decades as many attempt to delineate its content and contours from the
perspective of indigenous studies, cultural studies and post-colonial scholarship
challenging earlier colonial and anthropological discourses. As a starting point,
this article is not about indigenous identity, especially as delimited to the original
peoples of the Americas or globally. While I engage the above debates, this article
takes the framework of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality and decolonial
thought as a point of departure to analyze some of the ways in which Indigeneity
has been taken up by diverse social-political formations in recent years. First, I
should clarify that coloniality, as opposed to classical forms of colonialism (in its
extractive, settler, trader and other variants) draws attention to the continuing
patterns of social, political, economic and epistemic power and domination, set
in motion in and through 1492 despite the end of formal colonial administrations
(Quijano, 2000). On the one hand, some of the articulations from the Americas
and otherwise have allowed us to deepen our understanding of Indigeneity, both as
an analytical category and in reference to racialized/gendered colonial populations
(Coulthard, 2014), while others have instead resorted to ahistorical, contradictory
and problematic articulations that re-inscribe the colonial logics from which the
former have sought to break away (Garroutte, 2003). In particular, however,
this article analyzes the group Les Indigènes de la République (organized first as a
movement and later as a “decolonial political party” in France), as an organization
that has engaged but not been confined to the essentializing racial or biological
identitarian outlooks despite such allegations (Wolfe, 2015). Instead, I argue, Les
Indigènes de la République are important to consider for they re-center colonial
relations of power as formative and essential to any understanding of Indigeneity
and, as such, as necessary to any analysis that portends to be decolonial.
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Roberto D. Hernández
Decoloniality and politics of recognition among the Indigènes de la République
Previously, “the indigenous question” had long been the purview of European
and Euroamerican voyage and frontier narratives and anthropological studies that
problematic presumed the inherent inferiority of populations encountered during
the various colonial enterprises initiated after 1492. The shape and direction of
this conversation has widely varied according to nation-states and even regionally
within said states. In the Anglophone world scholarship from the United States,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand has dominated the literature, and much of
the focus has been more on sovereignty and identity, linked to land rights and
community ties. Elsewhere, the focus has been quite different elsewhere. In Latin
America, for example, the main concerns have centered on ongoing dispossession
of territories and natural resources, as well as indigenous knowledge systems and
epistemologies as alternatives and challenges to the Western-centric rationality
of modernity/coloniality (De Sousa Santos and Menezes, 2009). Much has
been written over how the last several decades have witnessed the rise of global
Indigenous movements from land struggles through the Americas, New Zealand,
and Africa, to specific struggles over water, gas, deforestation, drilling and other
natural resources, all of which are seen as having an “indigenous” character to
them (Hall and Fenelon, 2008; Quijano, 2005). While the above literature has
focused on the indigenous character of said struggles largely in terms of land
base, there is also a second, and I would argue more important aspect to them
regarding the different epistemic points of departure of said struggles (Rivera
Cusicanqui, 2012), a point to which I will return below.
Importantly, many of the above struggles are themselves not new. At one point,
only five or six decades ago, for example, the same struggles were being waged, yet
understood or articulated, particularly by the Marxist left, as peasant struggles over
land tenure or peasant rights, as opposed to those of indigenous peoples fighting
for ancestral homelands. In retrospect, such formulation must be seen as part of the
Eurocentric epistemic racism that imposes its own categories on non-Europeans,
even if from the Left. So arguably such indigenous struggles over land and against
primitive accumulation, dispossession, genocide, and over knowledge production
or the epistemic itself extend back further, a point emphasized time and again
when indigenous peoples the world over emphasis 1492 as central to their struggles
irrespective of the year in which Europeans arrived in there respective territories. A
key example of this lies with the Maori peoples of Aotearoa (more recently referred
to as New Zealand), for whom their first noted encounter with Europeans, Abel
Tasman in particular and later Captain James Cook, did not occur until 1642,
yet 1492 also forms part of their self-affirmed genealogy of anti-colonial struggle.
With that said, the focus of this article has less to do with reifying this category of
the “indigenous” as a particular people or sets of peoples and trapping ourselves
in ontological, racial, and/or cultural debates over an indigenous/non-indigenous
divide, that often grips literature on settler colonialism (Mamdani, 2001) but rather,
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with how the category of the indigenous has been mobilized as a political identity
by diverse “indigenous” peoples towards different ends with regard to political
claims to and against varies polities.
In this sense, the United Nations has also been a venue for the articulations of shared
indigenous concerns, concerns that ultimately arise from modernity/coloniality’s
diverse imperial projects. Nonetheless, articulated as such, the nature of these
discussions has focused on “nation-to-nation” relations, or more specifically in
this case ‘Indigenous nation to colonial nation-state’ relations, which are often
based on a politics of recognition. In an important essay, “Subjects of Empire:
Indigenous People and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada,” Glen Coulthard
(2007), has argued, drawing largely from the work of Frantz Fanon, that such
a premise has resulted in the reproduction of colonial relationships of power in
which issues of land and sovereignty are reduced in practice to concerns with
identity, culture and a colonial sense of recognition or even charity, despite the
presumed legal grounding of sovereignty that Native nations have as is the case
most prominently in the United States. When reduced to questions of identity
and cultural autonomy without political self-determination, the latter continue
to ultimately be premised upon a colonial logic of dehumanization and lack of
recognition, for which recognition is a concession or acceptance of the colonial
rules of engagement so to speak. For Coulthard, then, the politics of recognition
in its contemporary form promises to reproduce the very configurations of
colonial power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for true self-determination
have historically sought to transcend. Through a consideration of colonial
migrants making claims on the State under the banner of the Le Parti de les
Indigènes de la République in France, this paper will analyze an alternative critical
conceptions of indegeneity that are not culturally or identitarian-based, or even
about extractive resource battles, sovereignty or tribal membership such as in
the United States. Instead, Le Parti de les Indigènes de la République foreground
a politics of decoloniality through the development of political cultures, as both
opposed to and a distinct form of cultural politics, whereby the discursive line
between the cultural and political, and the epistemic underpinnings of each is
itself challenged and reconfigured.
Les Indigènes de la République and Self-Recognition

So first a note on the Les Indigènes de la République in France by way of introduction:
Originally named the Mouvement de les Indigènes de la République (MIR),
or the Movement of the Indigenous of the Republic, in January of 2010 they
became the Le Parti de les Indigènes de la République (PIR), as the organization
transformed into an official political party. The MIR/PIR (hereafter Les Indigènes)
was born following a call in January of 2005, titled “We Are the Indigenous of the
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Republic,” signed by thousands of people and associations. The call followed riots
after the electrocution death of two Muslim youth fleeing police led to riots in the
banlieues or migrant suburbs (Fernando, 2016). Since then, the organization has
sought to unite and organize descendants of colonial migrants in popular suburbs
in France as militants in its ranks, with the purpose of constructing an instrument
of autonomous political struggle on the basis of a problematic articulated by
questions of racism, colonialism, and imperialism. The chief spokespersons of Les
Indigènes are Houria Bouteldja, a French-born citizen descended from Algerian
parents who were themselves colonial migrants to the metropole, and Sadri
Khiari, himself a Tunisian-born colonial migrant/indigene to France. It is thus
important to recall that both Algeria and Tunisia were colonies of the French
colonial empire, Algeria for well over 100 years from the invasion in 1830 until
independence its 1962, and Tunisia from 1881 to 1956. Moreover, Algeria and
Tunisia have both nevertheless maintained a structurally subordinated position,
politically, economically and socially in relation to France in the global arena
despite formal sovereignty. Beyond neocolonialism this continued structuring,
globally and epistemically, is an example of coloniality as a prevailing political
order that persists despite the end of classical colonialisms throughout most of the
world, with a few notable exceptions.
Les Indigènes de la République is thus a movement is composed principally of
French youth of African, Arab, Caribbean and Asian origin, born and raised
in France, that live the experience of colonial racism and its consequent
marginalization and social exploitation Bouteldja et Khiari, 2012). The notion of
Indigènes (or Indigenous) used here has a particular referent in French colonial
history. The French colonial empire used the term Indigènes to refer to the
colonial subjects in all its colonies across the world. As such, the MIR/PIR have
mobilized around the category of “Indigène” or Indigenous as a way to make
claims based on colonial dispossessions, not just of past French colonialism, but
the continued colonial racism of the present, arguing that there is a “post-colonial
colonialism” that has carried through into the present despite the lack of formal
colonial administrations. Whereas they recognize the formal governmental
institutions as colonial institutions, they are also concerned with the cultural
internalization of long historical colonial epistemes that manifest themselves not
only in contemporary governmental policies of a secular liberalism that makes
claim to an egalitarian universal citizen, but also in the face-to-face relations with
the Indigènes, “the children of colonial migrations,” the youths in the banlieues
(Afro, Muslim, Arab, and otherwise). First mobilized through the Public Appeal
of 2005 and the second declaration, “Who we are,” once the MIR became the
PIR they developed a third guiding document, “Political principles of the Parti
des Indigènes de la République” which provides a synthesis of the key strategic and
organizational questions and constitutes the basis of their current activities.
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In an interview with Said Mekki, Houria Bouteldja was asked: Why do you assert
yourselves as indigenous? Bouteldja responded:
Well, because we are living a neocolonial reality. We are the children of an
illusion that consisted in believing that the independences of our countries
signified the end of colonization. In reality, it was a matter of the first act of
decolonization. We see it as much in the metropolis as in its relations with
its former colonies: decolonization has yet to be finished. Its ideological
and cultural bases still exist. We thus continue to live a different colonial
phase (2009, my emphasis).
This “different colonial phase” is what elsewhere Les Indigènes have referred to
as a “post-colonial colonialism” to challenge the myth that such relations of
power have ended. Yet contrary to Western analytical forms that foreground or
emphasize change or discontinuities as the demarcations or parameters for the
study of seemingly distinct socio-historical phenomena, Bouteldja’s decolonial
lens becomes evident in the emphasis that she places on the continuities of a
colonial logic or episteme that persists despite the formal change in political/
juridical form or status of the denoted colonial subjects. She continues,
We, who experience diverse regimes and systems of oppression, recognize
ourselves in this name because it demonstrates to all the oppressors, precisely
and in a crude way, the reality of the state in which they want to confine us
(2009, my emphasis).
Here, Bouteldja offers a twofold intervention. On the one hand, she is visibilizing
the basis of a self-recognition on the part of Les Indigènes as political agents on
their own terms that in turn authorize and recognize themselves, a form of
epistemic disobedience that characterizes the decolonial turn as distinct from
previous forms of anticolonial politics (Mignolo, 2011). Yet, on the other hand,
she is also pointing out how the French state wants to “confine” the Indigène but
is nevertheless incapable of fully determining the ways in which to subjectivize
them. Herein lies an irony or contradiction that Les Indigènes highlight: the
French Republic at once tries to lock them into a particularistic racial/ethnic
identitarian category that it claims to itself transcend via claims to a universal
humanism and the abstracted notion of a universal citizen-subject. The latter is
positioned also as an aspiration for the indigenous, which implies that they are
simultaneously constructed as backward, primitive and savage, all the while it is
the State that is failing to extend to them the rights of citizenship even despite
Indigenes’ claims to the French polity. The above passage from the interview
further highlights the productive tension the MIR/PIR inhabit between nation
and identity, or rather between an essentialized racial/ethnic identitarian category
that critics, even of the Left, accuse them of reifying yet to which they make no
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claim, and “the indigenous” as a name or category that visibilizes a continued

colonial present. Importantly, Bouteldja does not say “the state in which . . . they
confine us.” The State “want[s] to” confine the indigene, yet Les Indigènes resists
and subverts this confinement.
Later in the same interview, Mekki further asks: “What is it that makes the
“indigenous” a politically pertinent category?” To this question, Bouteldja follows:
The triptych of ‘colonialism, imperialism, superior ideological norms that
should be imposed on all’ continues to exist. It has been made fashionable
again by the arrival of ‘neo-cons’ to power in all of Europe. The word
‘indigenous’ works as a painful reminder of this truth and our declaration
of resistance to it, in terms of political thought… (2009)
For Les Indigènes then there is an important inversion of the discursive relation of
forces and terrain of struggle in that it is no longer a question of colonial subjects
seeking recognition from the state, but rather the indigenes that invert and reflect
back the colonial gaze and become the ones who actively and poignantly serve
to remind the French colonial state, past and present, of its own entanglement
and imbrications in a centuries old colonial logic and enterprise that is at once
rooted in antiblackness and anti-indigenousness. Yet here I would argue that
contrary to simplistic frames through which the purveyors of colonialism have
sought to contain even the critical decolonial thought emerging from said loci of
enunciations of its diverse colonial subjects as forms of racial essentialism, anti-
blackness and anti-indigenous operate at the level of a symbolic order and have
less (if anything) to do with fixed racial/ethnic identities and more to do with
foregrounding the biopolitical dimensions of colonial power and dominations.
In this context, one might ask, although Mekki does not necessarily do so in the
same way, what then exactly is the Indigenous or indigeneity for Les Indigènes?
Bouteldja continues: “The word ‘indigenous’ is a destroyer of myths: the myth of
the universal and egalitarian republic” (Mekki, 2009). It is a reminder, as a young
Salvadoran poet in Oakland, California once put it while narrating her families’
history of migration to the United States, “we are here, because you went there!”
In other words, both the Pipil indigenous migrant and the Algerian-descended
French citizen work to disrupt the notion or myth of a universal abstract migrant
that migrates irrespective of context; that is, the idea that one simply emigrates
from one home country and immigrates to a receiving country without any
presumed historical links or reasons for the chosen trajectory or route, and of
course much less any colonial ones. “Moreover,” Bouteldja elaborates, the word
Indigène or Indigenous “establishes the link with the [colonial] status that our
parents had . . . and it teaches us that the struggle for liberation continues to this
day here [in France] as it does there” in the abstractly “sending” formerly colonial
countries (Mekki, 2009). As such, rather than a racial/biological identity that
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exists solely in the Americas, or the colonial corollary of blackness as one confined
to the continent now referred to as Africa, the “indigenous” emerges as much as
a lesson to other unpoliticized Indigènes that their illusions with recognition and
citizenship will inevitably go unfulfilled beyond any mere symbolic incorporation,
for a sociogenic principle of dehumanization will always inform their relationship
with the Republic and other nation-states and their colonial logics of power.
So while the Les Indigènes are both of the colonies and of France proper, the
PIR highlights the colonial condition or situation as a starting point for an
engagement in the political field, not in terms of a racial or ethnic identity
or even a claim to cultural autonomy that has been at the heart of much of
what the “politics of recognition” has meant for Indigenous communities
in other contexts, but rather as a political culture or decolonial attitude of
unapologeticness in their claim to the political arena itself on their own terms,
not those of the Republic, nor even those of whom Les Indigènes calls the White
Left. Such understanding of Indigeneity is also in contrast to the recent claims,
for example, made by politically-motivated, white supremacist Anglo-Saxons in
the United Kingdom or other white supremacists in the United States who have
also sought to mobilize the term indigenous in their respective contexts, yet who
obfuscate this relationship by invoking a cultural conservatism that begins with
exclusion on non-white peoples from a perspective of power. It also differs in
part from that of Native Americans for whom the question of culture is assumed
though contested, yet the idea of presumably equal nation-to-nation recognition
is primary in shaping indigenous political cultures in the United States despite its
settler colonial history and the continued breaking and disregarding of existing
treaties with Native nations (Keefer and Klassen, 2005).
Houria Bouteldja again elaborates on Les Indigènes’ understanding of and approach
to their political subjectivity when asked about the political programme of the PIR:
We are a political group that is not ideological, undivided by the false
ethnic and religious conflicts, critical of the historical and Sarkozyst
republic, critical of the tendentious interpretation of secularism, etc. . .
. The more we advance towards the assertion of ourselves . . . the more
we become objects of criticism, particularly of the left that would like to
recuperate us within a logic that considers that our struggle is in the end
secondary compared to what they define as the principal questions that
differentiate them from the right (Mekki, 2009, my emphasis).
Although her remarks here can be construed as anti-traditional, or against
cultural communities’ cohesion, and indeed they have also been paradoxically
accused of being both anti-traditional and religious fundamentalist, instead this
passage, with its critique of secularism included, points to how the Les Indigènes
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is a broader assemblage of communities united by their shared albeit distinct

colonial situations vis-à-vis the French colonial republic. Nevertheless, I would
extend the analysis and posit that their analytical and political import for other
communities of struggle against the various tentacles of coloniality lies in that
such assemblage of differential colonial situations is one that is not limited to the
French colonial context. It is in fact global, for they help to critically re-invigorate
our thinking about Indigeneity with a grounding in a decolonial analytic beyond
a Western-centric recognition politics frame that operates through the lens of
nation-state sovereignty on the one hand or cultural recognition and autonomy
on the other (itself premised on essentialized racial/biological categories of ‘the
other’). In other words, Les Indigènes give us a basis to re-insist on a continued
colonial present in the lived experiences of subjugated populations both in the
(former)-colonies and the metropoles. One that is at once as political as it is
cultural, challenging such divide to expose the racial/colonial character of
domination in the present. Moreover, the “secularism” that the PIR references is
for them understood not as yet another French universal gift to humanity that
Aime Cesaire (1955) long ago debunked as part of a self-delusion of the West, but
rather the very specific secularization of Christendom, perhaps more aptly called
post-Christianism, that constitutes the broader religious-cosmological order of
modernity/coloniality proper. This secularized Christian worldview has itself
been imposed on diverse colonized populations irrespective of whether it has
been the French, British, Dutch or other colonial enterprises at its helm, all in
the name of a presumed Enlightened secular turn. Nevertheless, such secularism
veils the Christian cultural character of many western states, invisibilizing it as a
norm, while “cultural” rights to others outside said norm must still ultimately be
granted by the Christian secularist regimes.
To adhere to a politics of recognition, be it political or cultural, is thus to
acquiesce to a fundamental contradiction. First, it is to accept or take for
granted that it is the State that is the one capable of or bestowed with the power
to in effect do the “granting” of recognition. It is maintained by a unilateral
and unidirectional, hierarchical relationship of power by which one entity can
dictate the terms of recognition, even if the representatives of the State are
nominally of the Left as has been the case in France. The problem lies in that the
presumption of recognition implies a horizontal flattening if power despite its
architecture being inherently top-down. Instead, seen a different way, from the
perspective of the colonized to be exact, to recognize and assert oneself based
on ones own collective criteria as Houria Bouteldja proposes, is to disrupt the
flow of power. Such assertion or self-recognition in itself constitutes a moment
of self-determination in that it is the Indigènes authorizing themselves, as an
expression of a belief and commitment to the collective Indigène outside the
logic of a Hegelian search for recognition of the master. It is at once a political
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and a cultural self-affirmation that seeks to challenge the presumed divide

between the cultural and the political. This second aspect on its own, while
potentially liberatory, does not come without its own risks and limitations.
Following Fanon, the Indigènes who continue to adhere to a politics of
recognition will fail to establish themselves as truly self-determining. In other
words, they will not be determinants of the terms of their own self-recognition,
nor will processes of engagement with the State ever be in full accordance with
their own cultural values. One clear example can be found in Canada, where
the Supreme Court “has consistently refused to recognize First Nations peoples’
equal and self-determining status . . . based on [its] adherence to legal precedent
founded on the white supremacist myth that Indigenous societies were too
primitive to bear ‘abstract political rights’ when they first encountered European
powers” (Coulthard, 2013). Thus, even though the Courts in the Canadian
and various other contexts, arguably the United Nations as well, has extended
or “granted” extensive protection for certain “cultural” practices, these have
occurred in some cases in the form of ceremonial or subsistence rights within
the context of the internal state polity. The courts have nonetheless consistently
refused to challenge the racist premise of the inferiority of Indigenous peoples
and knowledges, thereby rendering them legible only as “cultural” communities
and not knowledge producers or proper political subjects with the right to self-
governance and political autonomy in their own right. Also in Canada, the work
of Taiaiake Alfred (2005) and others has further shown how the “institutional and
discursive fields within and against which Indigenous demands for recognition
are made can subtly shape the subjectivities and worldviews of the Indigenous
claimants involved” (Coulthard, 2013). Alfred maintains the position that “how
you fight determines who you become when the battle is over” (2005, pp. 22-23).
So if one begins from a starting point of seeking State recognition one is doomed
for failure for they will be unable to articulate positions not delimited by the
parameters of established state discourses.
Cultural Politics, Political Cultures and Decolonial Praxis

Coloniality in part works through a mutually-constitutive or hetero-archical
arrangement of power that consists, among other things, in the development of
a linguistic hierarchy between European languages and non-European languages,
but that also privileges communication and knowledge or theoretical production
of the former while subalternizes the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture
but not of knowledge or theory (Mignolo, 2000). As such, the extension or
recognition of “cultural” rights qua cultural rights continues to manifest itself
within an ordering of power and subjectivity that renders colonized, indigenous
subjects as folkloric subordinates to an abstract western, presumably secular
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and universal citizen-subject. With the above conceptualization of culture in

a context of coloniality in mind, herein lies the relevance of the distinction
between “colonialism” and “coloniality.” Coloniality allows us to understand the
continuity of colonial forms of domination or colonial situations after the end
of formal colonial administrations; but also the cultural formations within and
both produced and/or articulated in and through the encounter with colonial
enterprises and structures in the modern/colonial world. Coloniality of power
thus refers to a crucial structuring process in the modern/colonial world that
articulates peripheral locations in the international division of labor with a global
racial/ethnic hierarchy, whereby Third World migrants are inscribed as inferior
within said racial/ethnic hierarchy. Consequently, their cultures themselves are
seen to incarnate said inferiority such that they become the target that state
institutions’ work on in order to facilitate presumably necessary and inevitable
assimilation into the dominant culture, which at once relationally constructs
itself as both the norm and superior.
Cultural politics, in turn, has been seen as the use of the visual arts, literary
production, and other forms and mediums of artistic production in the service
of an otherwise self-standing political programme or organizational goals. Randy
J. Ontiveros broadly defines cultural politics as “the arena of creative expression
where personal and collective values get articulated” (2014, pp. 32-33) and where
people can recast cultural and aesthetic elements governed by the imagination
and the senses. Indeed, while we can widely acknowledge the role of various
media and other art forms employed for political purposes, we must also have
conceptual clarity and indeed a rethinking of what constitutes ‘politics’ and ‘the
political’. Drawing from Enrique Dussel’s innovative thought in Twenty Theses
on Politics (2008), I situate the political not solely as the realm of governance
and subjectivity, electoral or otherwise, but rather as a multi-layered terrain that
precedes the ethical in its consideration of how to engage well with others and
instead foregrounds the question of who is legitimately acknowledged as human
or a people in the first place who deserve to be treated ethically.
Arguably, coloniality then can be also understood as the processes of
dehumanization that have entailed the denial of consideration for ethical behavior,
let alone rights, or Arndt’s famous proclamation of the right to have rights. It is
the creation, in the face to face, of what Georges Balandier and Frantz Fanon
aptly called “colonial situations” as opposed to territorial colonialism proper as
classically understood, in a way that evades the territorial-juridical trappings of
nation-state and legal frameworks which are themselves always already internal
mediating mechanisms for a global coloniality. By “colonial situations” I thus
further mean the cultural, sexual, national, economic and epistemic oppression
and exploitation of subordinate racialized/ethnic groups by dominant racial/
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ethnic groups with or without the existence of colonial administrations. In this

regard, the political is an architecture for the ability to breath, to exist, to love
and to live; that is, to simply be, with dignity, free of human constraints. Culture
then, can be rethought as the realm of existence in which people experience and
express a sense of being as passed down through knowledges and practices across
generations of ancestors and ancestors before them. Yet, if that very sense of being
has been denied to communities that have experienced dehumanization, then the
very act of being-in-the-world, of self-affirmation and self-authorization on one’s
own terms, becomes a political act that strikes at the heart of the modus operandi
and raison d’être of modernity/coloniality. It is at this critical juncture that lies
the decolonial praxis of Les Indigènes de la Republique.
In an interview with Danielle Obono, one of the original founders and also a
spokesperson for Les Indigènes, Sadri Khiari, states the following:
We do not have the [inferiority] complex of those who think they have
no right over France, nor the feeling of impotence of those who become
paralyzed by fear of co-optation because they consider themselves victims
of a Machiavellian conspiracy against us by dark forces (2010).
For the PIR such a position that internalizes the cultural construction of the
indigènes as inferior is a defeatist pessimism and an intellectual and political cul-
de-sac that amounts, for a lack of better terms, to a form of “left-wing infantilism”
where everything is assumed to always already be subsumed into a general state
of despair from which there is no exit. Moreover, it leads to a conceding of power
to the State or colonial power where engaging in the political field is thus seen as
pointless. Khiari continues:
We are neither desperate isolationists for whom everything is rotten and
who weave with threads of bitterness their own cocoons ‘among their
own kind,’ thus excluding themselves from politics. Autonomy is not
separatism, but rather the construction of a relation of forces. We are not
maximalists, nor are we apocalyptic, but we will not do the ‘belly dance’
to seduce either. However, we are conscious that the realization of our
dreams will not come all at once like a magic trick, that many battles will
be necessary -- a transformation of the philosophical, moral, cultural, and
political relation of forces (Obono, 2010).
Khiari draws distinctions between themselves and “isolationists” who they see
as those who have abandoned the political field, but also from maximalists who
hold on to rigid exigencies that ultimately render them politically inefficient.
He further differentiates from cultural fundamentalisms that hold apocalyptic
or millenarian views not always fully grounded in the political terrain at hand
and from celebratory multiculturalists who optimistically if not naively believe
261
that the state will grant them extended rights and access if they follow the correct
party line, which he equates with doing a belly dance or a cultural ‘seduction’ so
to speak. The PIR makes no illusions about the political reality that confronts
them. Instead they seek a broader ‘transformation’ of the various spheres of life
itself. In this position, they are more in line with Enrique Dussel’s reformulation
of politics and the political that challenges the long-standing axiom inherited
from Rosa Luxemburg, which postulated a dichotomy between reform and
revolution. Dussel breaks with orthodoxy to propose an understanding of the
reality and the need for political transformation, which itself can be partial or
total, but never exhaustive for it too will inevitably lead to new exclusions, even if
inadvertently (2008, p. 109). For the PIR, it is similarly not an either/or scenario
from which the Left then misunderstands them as either reformists on the one
hand or fundamentalists on the other. Instead, they seek a transformation in all
walks of life, ones that evades and ultimately breaks with the accepted political
limits of both the Eurocentric right and left.
In this last regard, the PIR are neither Marxist nor anti-Marxist, they are
simply starting from a different set of political and epistemological premises
and assumptions, and operating under a different logic even if they ad here to
tenets/elements that may appear partly of the Left such as their ‘Leninist’ take on
organization. As Khiari notes,
for a long time migrants and their children looked to the left and the
far-left… moreover still today -- the majority of colonial migrants and
their children have voted for the left. That does not mean in any way that
they recognized themselves massively in the left and its struggles but, more
prosaically, that the left seemed a lesser evil or, at least, they would not lead
to the racist policies advocated by the right (Obono, 2010).
The structuring of the political field between nominally right and left wings
obfuscates the colonial/racial logic that undergirds both sides of the political
spectrum. The establishment of a political party of the indigenous that explicitly
names itself decolonial while operating in the electoral field was a self-conscious
attempt to make visible the colonial racism of both sides, ‘to make visible on the
public stage this other conflict that is the racial [colonial/epistemic] question’
(Khiari quoted in Obono 2010). The transformation from movement into a party,
whose foundation is indigenous thus serves to highlight the decolonial loci of
enunciation of the PIR against a racial/colonial oppression, which itself is always
already gendered, in the heart of the self-proclaimed model liberal secular society.
Moreover, entering the terrain of the political-electoral field, without any
illusions as to
toits own limits, was an acknowledgement of the role of a formal
party in being able to shape the national discourse regarding France colonial past
262
TABULA RASA
and present. Khiari explains ‘We are also convinced that such change cannot be
realized without our own independent will, that is, without our own party, a
party that represents all of the “indigenized” populations, a party in which we
will be masters of our own thinking, of our political priorities, of our alliances,
of our “agenda”’ (Obono, 2010). Thus, for the PIR it is clear that Indigenous is
not a racial or biological identity or status but a social and political condition that
one can be placed into at the hands of the prevailing political order. For Khiari,
‘non-whites are excluded by the whole political system and … this exclusion is
the principal incarnation of the neo-indigeneity’ (ibid). Indigeneity emerges then
as a self-affirmation of one’s colonialized status, albeit, not a passive acceptance,
but rather an acknowledgement and a challenge to it at the same time. It is thus
a negation of the negation of ones humanity and as such it is a decolonial praxis
of affirmation of life and being.
In a sense, Les Indigènes mirrors back to France the ways in which their own colonial
enterprise ‘made’ or created the indigene as an inadvertent way of recognizing
their own status as colonial settlers however much they deluded themselves to
be the harbingers of civilization. Through the category of the Indigenous, the
French were recognizing they were not from the territories being colonized,
distinguishing themselves from the various locals or indigenes, from whom their
own respective heterogeneity was an irrelevant afterthought. Nevertheless, the
affirmation of Indigeneity is a negation of the negation of the humanity of the
colonial subject and provides fertile terrain for further obfuscations of specific
racial distinctions between the presumably different racial categories of Black and
Indigenous. Is neo-indigeneity an antidote then to anti-blackness? The verdict is
still out, but what the affirmation of the Indigenous does is that it foregrounds
the shared condition of colonial subjects amongst otherwise divided African,
Caribbean, Asian and Muslim migrants and citizens alike, opening up the terrain
to a horizontal and decolonial politics of accompaniment among all.
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Decoloniality and politics of recognition

among the Indigènes de la République1

Received: July 19, 2016 Accepted: September 20, 2016

Decolonialidad y política de reconocimiento entre los Indigenes de la

Decolonialidade e política de reconhecimento dos Indígenas da República

Les Indigènes de la République and Self-Recognition

claim, and “the indigenous” as a name or category that visibilizes a continued

is a broader assemblage of communities united by their shared albeit distinct

and a cultural self-affirmation that seeks to challenge the presumed divide

Cultural Politics, Political Cultures and Decolonial Praxis

and universal citizen-subject. With the above conceptualization of culture in

ethnic groups with or without the existence of colonial administrations. In this

Bouteldja, H. y Khiari, S. (2012). Nous Sommes Les Indigènes de la République, París:

Mignolo, W. (2011). Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto.

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