Review Essay: Expanding Settler Colonial Theory
Adam
Dahl. Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of
Modern Democratic Thought. University Press of Kansas, 2018. 272
pp. ISBN: 9780700626076.
https://kansaspress.ku.edu/978-0-7006-2607-6.html
This is a thought-provoking book that probably makes
an important contribution to Dahl's specialist field of political science, but
it is neither an intervention in American Studies nor Critical Indigenous
Studies and so may be of limited usefulness to readers of Transmotion--with
the decided exception of the final chapter (published as an essay in Polity
in 2016), devoted to William Apess. This chapter is of general interest both
for its innovative approach, which brings together the arguments developed
throughout the book, and for the successful pairing of unexpected texts, which
is a consistent strength of Dahl's method. Elsewhere, Dahl overwhelmingly
addresses settler political theorists in the interests of illuminating the
central contradiction of US settler colonialism: that settler political
sovereignty, grounded in the right to self-government based on labor devoted to
the "improvement" of expropriated Native land, requires the disavowal of the
violence of dispossession and also the denial of Indigenous land rights based
not on political reasoning but inherited racialized cultural prejudices.
I am reminded of Peter
Fitzpatrick's quite brilliant philosophical treatment of similar legal
contradictions in Law as Resistance: Modernism, Imperialism, Legalism
(2008), in a review of which I described how Fitzpatrick
addresses the imperial Western claim
to universal jurisdiction, a 'self-universalizing' claim that promotes European
power especially in relation to 'discovery' and colonization. However, this
self-proclaimed universality depends upon the categories of civilization versus
savagery in order to enact the constitutive exclusion of the 'savage' and 'barbarous'
which, if included in the category of the 'universal' would destroy it (Madsen
573).
Such constitutive paradoxes are central to Dahl's project,
particularly the tension between assertions of logically stable political
reasoning and the destabilizing impacts of cultural reasonings, the ultimate source of which is, of
course, the definition as terra nullius of all Indigenous territories
unclaimed by Christian nations under the Doctrine of Discovery. In his address
to the Eleventh
Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (May 2012),
Seneca Elder Oren Lyons made clear the ongoing obstacle to the active
realization of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples represented by the Doctrine of Discovery: "The 'Doctrine of Discovery'
initiated from the papal bulls of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are
responsible for over six centuries of crimes against humanity, setting a standard
of exploitation that nation states now call 'international law'" (Lyons 1).
International
law, or at least theorizing of the legal rights possessed by American colonists
in relation to British imperialism, forms the basis of Dahl's central
historical argument, and yet the foundational Doctrine of Discovery receives
very cursory treatment. Indeed, Dahl's omissions dramatize most
clearly his settler focus: in a book about constitutionalism in the US, there
is no mention of Native constitutions, not even those that fit the restricted
historical scope of his study. On the Chickasaw Constitution of 1856, nothing.
Cherokee Removal and the Marshall decisions--yes--but the
Constitutions of the Cherokee Nation (1827 and 1839)--no. The Choctaw
removal Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek (1830)--yes--but the Choctaw
Constitution of 1834? So, it seems a little disingenuous, in the closing
discussion, to make a claim to contribute to the decolonizing of democracy by
promoting historic Native influence on constitutional thought without taking
into consideration what Indigenous nations have historically already achieved. The portrait of Native America that emerges
from the book as a whole might be described using Gerald Vizenor's term,
"Native victimry." And--a relevant point for scholars with an interest in
Vizenor's work--there is no mention at all of his constitutional writing.
As I will explain later, the absence of any attention to Gerald Vizenor's
political writings on democracy, Native sovereignty, and constitutionalism is
both highly conspicuous to a reader of Transmotion and regrettable. Consequently,
I have found the primary value of Dahl's book in the linkages that I make with
the work of other scholars outside the rigorous limits that he has imposed.
With all due respect for the principle that reviewers should not criticize a
book for failing to be the one they themselves would write, I have to say that
Dahl offers little to readers from scholarly fields peripheral to his own. At
the same time, his book offers fertile ground for building a network of allied
ideas based on each reader's particular interests. The intertextual network
forming in my mind as I read seemed important enough not only to keep me
reading but to keep reaching for other books as I made my way through Empire
of the People. The remarks that follow essentially map out my route, in a
kind of dialogue between Adam Dahl's main arguments (which, in fairness to him,
are presented in some detail) and my "yes, but what about...?" responses.
The title of the dissertation from which the book
originates, Empire
of the People: The Ideology of Democratic Empire in the Antebellum United
States
(2014), is much more accurate than the book title in terms establishing
readerly expectations of the historical period under discussion. Dahl addresses the period that encapsulates the Revolution, from the
mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. The inclusion of Walt Whitman's
1871 Democratic Vistas extends the timeline, but otherwise discussion is
rigorously confined to this period. This temporal focus is both an advantage in
terms of coherence and precision but it also creates significant weaknesses,
especially when Dahl could very profitably look back from his location in the
early republican period to American colonial models and influences that would
supplement his overwhelming use of British and European political theorists
(more about that shortly). Provocatively, Dahl shifts discussion away from the
documents of the "American Creed" in his meticulous readings of texts that are
unexpectedly chosen and quite surprising in the relevance that he exposes: the
Northwest Ordinance (1787) in his first and second chapters, the opening of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America in the third chapter, Ralph
Waldo Emerson's writings of the 1840s in the fourth chapter, and Whitman's
poetry and prose in the fifth. William Apess is the less surprising subject of
the final substantive chapter. The book is organized into three Parts: two
introductory theoretical chapters set out Dahl's central arguments concerning
federalism and empire; US settler colonialism and democratic culture occupy the
following three chapters (on dispossession, Manifest Destiny, and slavery,
respectively); the final Part consists of a single chapter on Apess's
Indigenous critique of the basis of settler sovereignty, and an "Afterword"
that offers some thoughts on the potentials for decolonizing democratic
theorizing.
Motivating these chapters is the central argument that
federalism is not, in fact, antithetical to empire but rather organizes a
certain kind of settler colonial empire (46); that is to say, US federalist,
democratic theory is mutually constitutive with settler colonialism and, like
the US empire, is equally grounded in colonial violence and the disavowal of
Native dispossession. This line of argument allows Dahl to shift his account of
dominant modes of democratic political thought away from the concept of popular
sovereignty encapsulated in the notion of "the People" and its consequent
erasure of Native presence. Rather, using writings by Richard Bland, Virginia delegate
to the First Continental Congress, and Thomas Jefferson's "A Summary View of
the Rights of British America" (1774), Dahl explains the theory that internal
colonial autonomy derived from the idea of equality between settlers and
metropolitan subjects. Consequently, settler birth-rights transferred in the
process of migration--together with "contractual colonization" or "the
labor theory of empire" (32)--produced an understanding of settler
sovereignty as grounded in the performance of colonizing labor: the work
required to create permanent settlements. He points out, perceptively, that
this set of ideas created the notion of a "federal empire" (32) based on what
he calls "federative replication": the principle of both settler colonial action
and its organizational form (Dahl 25, 72). A surprisingly marginalized
presence in this discussion is Craig Yirush's important 2011 book, Settlers,
Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory, 1675‑1775, which makes the same basic argument:
that
[i]n the wake of the Glorious
Revolution, then, a view of Empire crystallized in English America which was
based on the equal rights of all of the King's subjects; the grounding of those
rights outside the realm in the efforts and risk taking of the settlers
themselves; the confirmation of these rights in charters and other royal
grants; the subsequent acquisition of territory from the natives by purchase or
conquest; and the transformation of what the settlers saw as a 'wilderness' into
flourishing civil societies (77).
Yirush also devotes an entire chapter to one of Dahl's
chosen texts, Richard Bland's The Colonial Dismounted: Or the Rector
Vindicated. In a Letter Addressed to His Reverence Containing a Dissertation
upon the Constitution of the Colony (1764). However, Yirush's book is not
cited in connection with The Colonial Dismounted and, indeed, Yirush's
work is relegated to a few isolated endnotes. This is unfortunate, because
Yirush offers a detailed and nuanced account of the period between the Glorious
Revolution and the American Revolution to show how these guiding ideas emerged.
This is important because, certainly in Puritan apologies for migration and
tracts that promoted migration to New England, as well as documents like the
1691 Massachusetts Charter, the notion of equality and equal rights between
metropolis and colony is not obvious. Focusing on republican figures like
Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, Dahl does not consider the
issue of conceptual provenance, which would seem to be key to his assertion
that such ideas had lasting cultural as well as political impacts. As Yirush
observes, "Most histories of early American political thought ... begin ... with the looming imperial
crisis in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, as if the ideas that drove
opposition to imperial reforms from the mid-1760s on had no antecedents" (4).
This is where Dahl's first Part begins, with a
discussion of democracy in relation to empire, constitutionalism, and
federalism, in the context of the Imperial Crisis of the 1760s and 70s. He
argues that contradictions within the theory of empire allowed settlers to
interpret their right to self-rule as being entirely consistent with and equal
to their status as citizens of the British Empire (34). In this balancing of
imperial and provincial/settler sovereignties, Dahl finds the settler colonial
roots of US federalism: the idea of a central federal government that is
combined with protections for each colony. Out of the associated debates and
conflicts over the location of the imperial center--Westminster or North
America, the metropolis or the colonies--the concept of colonial equality
emerged as crucial to the discourse of democratic sovereignty, but this debate
over "equality" was complicated by diverse interpretations of the meaning of
equality in the context of colonial dependency. General resistance to the
notion of dependency motivated a new idea of empire, a vision of federal
imperialism that distributed authority equally across "constituent units of
empire" (27)--i.e. the American colonies--as shown in such documents
as Benjamin Franklin's "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind" (1751)
and his Albany Plan of 1754. Franklin proposed that on the basis of continual
demographic expansion (the trope of translatio imperii), based on unlimited access to free land, eventually
more British subjects would live on the US side of the Atlantic than in
Britain, thus shifting the balance of power to a new western empire. Added to
this, the settler allegiance to a notion of social mobility tied to spatial
mobility and property ownership underpinned the idea that the stability of
republican institutions must depend on the availability of land to support an
agrarian populace, and so the removal of Indigenous peoples to make land available
was an integral part of this American idea of empire.
Royal prerogative versus settler sovereignty provides
the context for Dahl's analyses in chapter one concerning the central role of
land and settler attitudes towards land in the aftermath of the Seven Years War
and the Royal Proclamation 1763. Dahl focuses on the Northwest Ordinance (1787)
and the question it sought to answer: will the Northwest Territory be governed
by the Continental Congress or by Virginia via its royal charter? Thomas Paine's
views, set out in Common Sense (1776) and Public Good: An Examination
into the Claims of Virginia to the Vacant Western Territory (1780),
confirmed the notion of terra nullius and opposed the influence of
corporate land companies, promoting instead the argument that possession of the
western land must serve the "common good" as a common right of all citizens. As
Dahl points out, these arguments serve as the logical complement to the idea
that, after the Revolution, both political and territorial sovereignty will be
transferred to "the People." The mechanisms by which settled territories would
be incorporated as republican states into the federal Union are discussed
through the 1780 land resolution, Jefferson's 1784 land ordinance, and James
Monroe's Northwest Ordinance (1787). The latter determined that new territories
would start as colonies, dependent on federally appointed governors until the
population reached 5,000 inhabitants--Dahl refers to this as a period of
"imperial tutelage" (37)--and then would be incorporated with the same
rights as all other states in a process that Dahl calls the "embodiment of
imperial federalism" (37). The most important element of this model was the
mechanism for an ongoing process of colonization, which could be extended to distant
territories (and Dahl notes that Jefferson had his eye on South America). This
structure offered a mechanism of colonization that was no longer organized
around colonial dependence on a metropolitan center. But despite appearances to
the contrary, Dahl perceptively argues, this mechanism did not eschew colonial
violence; on the contrary, the Northwest Ordinance institutionalized the
expropriation of Indigenous lands despite avowed equality between Indigenous
peoples and settlers. Dahl notes that Henry Knox acknowledged Native land
rights and proposed a policy of land acquisition based on Native consent via
purchase and treaty or peaceful assimilation, with dispossession through
military conquest as a last resort (for Knox, the avoidance of military conquest
distinguished US colonization efforts from the brutality practiced by Spain and
Britain). As Dahl rightly emphasizes, though, settlement itself was seen as a
strategy of Native dispossession rather than federal incorporation. The chapter
ends with an interesting comparison with features shared by other British
settler colonies of the nineteenth century, through the theories of Edward
Gibbon Wakefield concerning what Hegel termed "systematic colonization" (Dahl
41), in order to propose that the status of the Northwest Ordinance, as the
model for the British concept of "an empire of settlement," is a kind of "Magna
Carta of the Colonies" (45, 46). Here, Dahl could have taken into account, or
at least gestured towards, much earlier English theorizing of American
colonization. During the Elizabethan period, for instance, the arguments made
by Richard Hakluyt in his Principal Navigations (1598-1600)--and
also by his contemporariess--established many of the points that are highlighted in Dahl's
treatment of Wakefield's theories.
The second chapter explains Dahl's central concept of
"constituent power," as opposed to "constituted power," by borrowing Andreas Kalyvas's conceptualization of the difference between authority delegated by "the People" to institutionalized
representatives (constituted power) and the "constituent power" of popular
authority "to begin, end, or modify those institutionally delegated powers"
(Dahl 48). The "coloniality" of this constituent power lies not only in the
authority to establish new republics but additionally to eliminate existing
regimes of sovereignty. In this, Dahl locates the settler justification to
expropriate Native lands by disavowing Indigenous governance that is found to
be in a "savage" state and on "vacant lands," and via the "Vanishing American"
trope. Through John Locke and Thomas Paine, Dahl reads the intersectionality of
the "sovereignty clause" and "emigration clause" of the 1777 Vermont
Constitution as an instance of this constituent power: in the context of the
Vermont Republic's erasure of both British imperial sovereignty and that of New
York. He then analyzes justifications for the establishment of new republics
along the Trans-Appalachian frontier in the 1770s and the following decade,
highlighting concrete examples of the use of colonization (on the vacant land
that enabled the claim to settle in "a state of nature") as the basis for the
exercise of constituent power through democratic consent. This discussion makes
excellent use of Jean O'Brien's concept of "firsting" (colonial settlement as
the "first" civilized occupation of land) and "lasting" (the discourse that
casts Indigenous inhabitants as the last of a vanishing race) to apply the
concept of constituent power to the Wataugan claims to settler sovereignty.
Dahl argues that the threat of imperial disintegration implicit in the exercise
of this constituent power--the settling of new republics independent of
congressional authority--was mitigated by the Northwest Ordinance, which
redefined self-determined settler expansion as a mechanism of consensual
incorporation into an expanded territorial federal empire by prescribing the
republican form of new settler states. This argument is elegantly summarized in
Dahl's quotation from Antonio Negri: constituent power is "absorbed,
appropriated by the constitution, transformed into an element of the
constitutional machine" (Insurgencies, qtd in Dahl, 64). The power of
representation to instantiate a settler regime and to erase Native presence is
conveyed in Dahl's treatment of Jefferson's famous concept of the US as an
"empire of liberty." Dahl engages this concept in the context of Jefferson's
1785 Land Ordinance, which divided land into square-mile parcels and created a
territorial geography that both commodified land and also rooted democratic
sovereignty in the land. As Dahl explains, this reconceptualization of land was
a powerful counterpart to historical colonization, achieved through Jefferson's
use of the mythology of the pre-modern, "Vanishing," Indian. The erasure of
Indigenous relationships to land, fundamental to this process, Dahl clarifies
through an account of Native opposition to the settler concept of land
commodification articulated by Tecumseh (Shawnee) and Black Hawk (Sauk), and
their critical exposure of the treaty system as a form of colonial violence
that is representative of corruption and inequality rather than expressive of
popular consent.
Here, Dahl's focus on republican democratic thought
neglects the settler colonial actions of the Founders as land speculators. For
example, Benjamin
Franklin was a major investor in the Grand Ohio Company (1769), which notably petitioned King George III for 2.4
million acres in the Ohio Valley (Franklin n.p.). And George
Washington's career as a surveyor of the Ohio Valley would provide relevant
context for the discussion of the Northwest Ordinance: Washington's half-brothers were among the
organizers of the Ohio Company (1747), formed to obtain
royal grants to lands in the Ohio Valley, and "[b]etween 1747 and 1799 Washington
surveyed over two hundred tracts of land and held title to more than sixty-five
thousand acres in thirty-seven different locations" (Lehrman Institute, n.pag.). Such details are particularly relevant in view of the motif that runs throughout Dahl's book concerning the
role of land surveying as a conceptual mechanism of settler colonial remapping
of territory. Even more conspicuous in Dahl's exclusive emphasis on
democratic relations of consent is neglect of what Philip Gorski, in American
Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present
(2017), calls the American tradition of "prophetic republicanism," which Gorski
traces back to New England Puritan reliance on apocalyptic biblical rhetoric to
justify the expropriation of Indigenous lands through the theology of sacred
covenant relations. At this point, it may seem that I am asking for an entirely
different kind of book but Dahl repeatedly gestures towards covenant-regulated
communal relations--in connection with the Watauga Compact and the
Cumberland Compact, for instance, in this chapter. Here, too, reference to
(studies of) earlier colonial models of federation could be more than alluded
to and more fully integrated into Dahl's discussion. The Mayflower Compact is
briefly mentioned in the introduction but John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian
Charity" (1630) and, significantly, Puritan justifications for colonial settlement--such
as John Cotton's sermon addressed to the departing Winthrop fleet, "The Divine
Right to Occupy the Land," later published as Gods Promise to His Plantation
(1630)--would seem to be very relevant, given the unremarked references to
the "providential gift" of vacant land found, for example, in Dahl's quotations
from the Federalist Papers also in this chapter. Although Gorski's
project differs significantly from Dahl's, focusing more on an analysis of the
intersections among American traditions of religious nationalism, civil
religion, and radical secularism that have produced "prophetic republicanism,"
I found reading the two books in conjunction very rewarding.
In Part Two, Dahl turns from discussion of democracy
in constitutional contexts to cultural forms and democracy as a social state,
with specific reference to the emergence of the ideology of Manifest Destiny
and the controversies surrounding slavery. Focused primarily on the nineteenth
century, this section could have made profitable reference to studies like Alyosha Goldstein's essay "Colonialism,
Constituent Power, and Popular Sovereignty" which, appearing in 2014 would have
been unavailable for inclusion in Dahl's 2014 dissertation but could easily
have been incorporated into his 2018 book (he does reference Goldstein's 2008
essay on "Proprietary Regimes, Antistatism, and U.S. Settler Colonialism"). I have opted to highlight this essay because
Goldstein covers the same period and much the same conceptual ground, arguing
that "[t]hroughout
the long nineteenth century, it was precisely the fraught and unsettled
relations among the practices of constituent power, popular sovereignty,
colonialism, and slavery that conveyed the spuriousness and impossible
grandiosity of US claims to sovereignty as absolute, exclusive, and
indivisible" (150). Where Goldstein's
essay goes on to "suggest some specific ways in which indigenous [sic] peoples challenged and disrupted
US settler claims to constituent power and national coherence while also
reimagining their own terms of political belonging" (149), Dahl is concerned
with showing how settler expansion provided coherence to emergent democratic
theorizing. Thus, he begins in chapter three with Tocqueville's Democracy
in America (1835, 1840; unfortunately, the bibliography does not provide
details of the translator or editor) to show Tocqueville's erasure of colonial
violence and Indigenous erasure through his constructivist mapping of the
natural environment that--as Dahl explains with reference to Patrick Wolfe's work--functions
as a "container" for US democratic politics. Tocqueville's privileging of
American over Spanish and Russian colonization depends on this disavowal of
American violence, Dahl argues, in favor of an account of the treaty basis of
American colonization in contrast to colonial militarism in the South (Spain)
and Northwest (Russia). He references Tocqueville's appeal to "Providence"--"his
imagery of indigenous [sic] absence in Democracy reinforces the notion
that North American land providentially belongs to white settlers" (Dahl
83, emphasis added)--and notes Tocqueville's dating of the origins of US democracy with the
founding of the original colonies, quoting Tocqueville's identification of
Puritan congregationalism with the model of consensual self-government (see my
point above). Rather than developing these ideas, Dahl uses them to exemplify
the arguments he has already established concerning the destructive and
constructive powers of constituent settler sovereignty. There is a certain
repetitiveness in the discussion of Tocqueville, which is marked by continual
returns to earlier points,
suggesting to me that tighter editing may have created
space for a much more expansive discussion of the ways in which Tocqueville's
text intersects with those analyzed in Part One, to sketch a specifically
American tradition of democratic thought: with roots in New England
congregationalism, its peculiar styles of rhetorical thinking, and its
Elizabethan imperial origins. A related omission that illustrates this
repetition is the cursory treatment of Tocqueville's use of the Doctrine of
Discovery--which is not defined until fifty pages later in the context of slavery,
and then exclusively in terms of Lockean political theory and the infamous US
Supreme Court decisions of Chief Justice Marshall--that
leads immediately to an account of terra nullius that simply repeats the
discussion in the preceding chapter. Instead, Dahl could have drawn on Joanne
Barker's account of Marshall's powerful role in introducing the Doctrine of
Discovery as the foundation of US federal Indian law; as she writes: "Marshall
invoked [the Doctrine of Discovery] as though it were a well-founded legal principle of
international law. It took on the force of precedence because
Marshall invented a legal history that gave it that status" (Barker 2005, 14;
see also Oren Lyons, quoted above). Rather, in this section of the book Dahl
reorients existing interpretations through the lens of settler colonial
studies. Chapter three treats Tocqueville's observations about race and
race-based slavery in relation to the erasure of Native political formations to
argue that the difference between settler colonialism and chattel slavery as
systems of domination lies in the settler desire for Native land as opposed to
black labor, and consequently this difference emphasized black bodies as an
obstacle to assimilation into white settler social structures, which was not
the case for proponents--like Tocqueville--of Native "vanishing" through acculturation. More interesting to me is
Dahl's discussion of Tocqueville's writings about French colonial expansion in
Algeria, for which US settler colonialism provided the precedent.
On the subject of precedents, chapter four's analysis
of Manifest Destiny displays the results of Dahl's neglect of a deep historical
account of the American "mission" and the claim to be a "redeemer nation." A
single endnote gesturing to Ernest Lee Tuveson's 1968 book, Redeemer Nation:
The Idea of America's Millennial Role inadequately fulfills this function.
Instead, Dahl approaches Manifest Destiny in relation to the "safety valve"
theory of colonization, where bountiful available western land provided an
outlet for escape from eastern urbanization and industrialization, and as a
necessary ideological component of US democratic empire, which situated itself
against both European feudalism and Indigenous tribalism. He illustrates this
mechanism firstly through a reading of John O'Sullivan's coinage of the term in
the context of the annexation of Texas (1845) and the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo (1848); secondly through the logic of "consensual colonization"
exhibited in key documents related to Indian Removal in the 1830s (Dahl 114);
and, finally, through Ralph Waldo Emerson's romanticization of expropriated
"nature" as a source of democratic impulses in his political writings of the
1840s. In all three groups of texts, "consensual colonization" relies on an
intersection of interests, on the parts of both of settlers and Natives, which
facilitates agreement that reconciles--and promotes--US expansion,
Native elimination, and the principles of popular democracy.
Expropriated Native land is at the center of Dahl's
treatment of American slavery in chapter five and his account of the conflict
between the "survey" system that favored elites, and so encouraged a kind of
aristocracy reminiscent of feudalism, and the "homesteading" system that
promoted free labor and free soil policies. The first, which served federal
financial interests by raising revenue, is opposed to the latter, which
situates the federal government's use of land in the interests of popular
sovereignty. Through this opposition, Dahl develops his arguments concerning
chattel slavery. Very provocative in this connection is his link between
Abraham Lincoln's racialized vision of the western territories as a "safety
valve" for poor whites leaving slave-holding states and the arguments about
Manifest Destiny in his preceding chapter. The political views of Galusha A.
Grow (Speaker of the House of Representatives, 1861-1863 and supporter of the
Homestead Act of 1862), Lincoln, and Lincoln's Secretary of State William Henry
Seward preface the chapter, which then engages in detail with Walt Whitman's poetry
and his essays in Democratic Vistas. The relation between free labor
(i.e. neither chattel nor wage slavery) and settler colonialism is highlighted
by the enabling assumption of the availability of sufficient free land for
ownership and cultivation by settlers, and Dahl's point that land is rendered
"unfree" by both the restrictions of an aristocratic plantation society and
Native ancestral rights, in contrast to settler labor that renders land "free."
In this context, Dahl makes a powerful case for Whitman's centrality to
ideologies of settler colonialism as resultant of "how he attached
radical-democratic principles of popular sovereignty to broader frameworks of
settler expansion" (Dahl 143). His interpretation of Whitman's theory of the US
democratic "empire of empires" is a point of conjunction for many of the terms
Dahl has analyzed in previous chapters. To this, he adds Whitman's perception
of the performativity of language--exemplified by the power of the words
of the Declaration of Independence to create the US nation--put into the
service of settler colonialism in a number of ways: most particularly, Whitman's
own "personification of the settler-citizen as the force of democratic
expansion" (146) and his deployment of Indigenous languages (notably through
the use of Native names) that are assimilated to a democratic settler identity
within Whitman's use of the "Vanishing American" myth. Thus, in this chapter,
Whitman represents the apotheosis of settler-colonial thinking in his
theorizing of territorial expansion as not just a political and economic
necessity to the nation but also the moral and cultural source of the American
democratic ethos that has global implications for the future direction of
history.
Dahl's project shifts gears in Part Three, titled
"Unsettling Democracy," which deals with counter-narratives and comprises the
final chapter, devoted to a lengthy consideration of William Apess and "the
paradox of settler sovereignty." Dahl defines this paradox in terms of
"attempts to draw the boundaries of popular sovereignty [that] can never be
done by purely democratic means, [so] law and sovereignty always rest on
violence and exclusion" (157): illustrated by his account of Daniel Webster's
"Plymouth Oration" (1820). To my mind, and probably for most readers of Transmotion,
this is the most interesting section of the book. Here Dahl turns his full
attention, and all of the arguments that have been developed throughout, to a
Native political theorist. His account of Indian nullification develops an
interpretation based on Apess's fundamental opposition to settler sovereignty,
and provides a political-theoretical reading that would be nicely complemented
by Philip F. Gura's detailed biographical narrative of the Mashpee Revolt in
his Life of William Apess, Pequot (2015). Dahl's treatment of the text
is nuanced; he offers an intelligent and well-documented response to David J. Carlson's
view that Apess sought a compromise solution--based on "Indian liberalism"--to
the issue of Mashpee desire for territorial sovereignty and an end to the
imposed paternalistic "overseer" system that deprived them of control over
their ancestral lands. Pointing out that liberal conceptions of "rights" do not
recognize the foundational violence of settler colonialism, Dahl uses Fanon to
particularly good effect (echoing his earlier references to French-colonized
Algeria) as a basis for his argument that colonialism creates a binary
conception of political space (liberal settler versus occupied Native space)
that generates the subject category of "the settler," defined by "notions of
equality and popular sovereignty" (Dahl 159). However, it is also here that the
settler focus of the book is most clearly revealed, when Dahl writes: "This
chapter extrapolates [Fanon's] point to suggest that the political subjectivity
of settlers – marked by notions of equality and popular sovereignty
– are similarly produced through practices of settler conquest" (159). I
confess that I had to read this sentence more than once. Happily, in this
chapter, Dahl in fact fails to show how settler conquest produces settler
political subjectivity. Rather, in a detailed and persuasive account of
prevailing debates about states' rights and federal constitutionalism, he
argues that Apess's interventions in Indian Nullification of the
Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe; or, The
Pretended Riot Explained (1833) and Eulogy on King Philip (1836)
must be read through the concept of "nullification" as at once a refusal of US
settler sovereignty and a powerful narrativizing strategy that performatively
exposes "democracy's constitutive exclusions" (160). "As a result," Dahl
concludes, "nullification becomes an indigenous [sic] concept that marks the
limits of settler authority and asserts the political autonomy of Indian
communities" (160). In this chapter, significant argumentative traction is
provided by Native political theorizing, represented by the work of Robert
Nichols, Audra Simpson's Mohawk Interruptus (2014), Joanne Barker's Native
Acts (2011), and Glen Coulthard's Red Skin, White Masks
(2014). However, these voices are muted by the stylistic habit (here and
throughout the book) of acknowledging sources with an endnote that simply
provides the author's name and title; there is little effort to contextualize
references and so there are few opportunities to engage substantively with
complementary arguments, and I was disappointed that the usefulness of the
notes as a resource is further weakened by the fact that they are not indexed.
Having said that, this chapter is a tour de force, presenting nuanced and
insightful readings of Apess's texts that leave no doubt concerning their
exceptional revolutionary power.
In
the absence of this chapter, one would be hard pressed to agree that the book
achieves Dahl's ambition to furnish "the basis for a decolonial theory of
democracy that de-normalizes settler experiences as the unsurpassable horizon
of democratic politics" (184). Certainly, it is with insight that Dahl offers
contexts within which to situate the foundational role of settler conquest in
discourses of US democracy and to theorize possibilities for decolonization.
The Afterword, subtitled "Decolonizing the Democratic Tradition," where he
explicitly addresses this latter issue, is especially disappointing for a
reader of Transmotion who, presumably, has an interest in the works of
Gerald Vizenor. The absence of any reference at all to Vizenor's crucial
interventions around the concepts of Native sovereignty and tribal
constitutionalism is, to me, quite shocking. Dahl makes two primary points
related to his concept of decolonized democracy. Incidentally, one might ask
whether this is a misleading issue; given Dahl's interest in relations between
democracy and constitutionalism, a decolonized concept of constitutionalism may
have been a more productive problematic to engage. To develop his first point,
that of "a nonsovereign conception of democracy that sheds the desire to define
self-rule in terms of control and mastery" (Dahl 187), he bases his discussion
on Joan Cocks's book, On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions
(2014), and her account of Taiaiake Alfred's idea of Indigenous
counter-sovereignty. His second point concerns "a relational conception of
democratic identity that avows the constitutive influence of indigenous [sic]
political ideas on the Western democratic tradition as well as the productive
role of relations of colonial domination in shaping democratic thought and
culture" (Dahl 189). He relies primarily on the work of the Argentine-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel, and the American feminist
political theorist Iris Marion Young to develop his discussion of
"transmodernity" as a world-system of democratic federalism. Here, Vizenor's
concept of transmotion is a very notable absence but more egregious is Dahl's
secondhand description, via Young's account, of Iroquois federative governance
as a constitutional model. There are two further problems here: first, Dahl
explicitly refuses to acknowledge well-documented critiques of the so-called
"Haudenosaunee influence theory," like Philip Levy's meticulous interrogation of
the work of Donald Grinde and Bruce Johansen in "Exemplars of Taking Liberties"
(1996). This refusal to take account of opposing viewpoints weakens the power
of Dahl's arguments. Secondly, and much worse, is Dahl's recourse to abstract
speculation about potentials for the "constitutive influence of indigenous [sic] political
ideas on the Western democratic tradition" (189) when the example of the new
Constitution of the White Earth Nation, for instance, would provide fertile
material for concrete analysis. Granted, the theory of the influence of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy's Great
Law of Peace on the US Founders fits well with his timeframe, but I had
expected to find at least an abbreviated discussion in Dahl's endnotes of The White Earth Nation: Ratification of a Native Democratic Constitution
(Vizenor and Doerfler
2012), Vizenor's remarks in his 2013 interview with James Mackay about the
circumstances of his writing of the Constitution and the historic documents
that provided his model, as well as Vizenor's theoretical discussions of Native
sovereignty, for example in Fugitive Poses (1998), and some of the scholarship inspired by Vizenor's work on the
White Earth Constitution, such as Joseph Bauerkemper's
essay "The White Earth Constitution, Cosmopolitan Nationhood, and the Fruitful
Ironies of Relational Sovereignty" (published in this journal in 2015), as
well as the essays by David Carlson and Lisa Brooks in the 2011 special issue
of Studies in American Indian Literatures devoted to
"Constitutional Criticism," edited by James Mackay. Indeed, Alyosha Goldstein's 2014 essay, cited above, does
precisely this in the conclusion where Goldstein proposes:
Against the numerical weight and majority rule
of settler popular sovereignty,
indigenous [sic] sovereignty
exposes the US nation-state as perpetually fragmented and incomplete, if
nonetheless preponderant and lethal. The White Earth Nation's decision to draft
and, in 2013, adopt a new constitution – which deliberately enacts
indigenous [sic] sovereignty
in a manner distinct from the Native national constitutions written under the
auspices of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 – provides one form
that indigenous [sic] democratic
constitutional self-making might take (152).
Comparison
with this essay highlights the extent to which Dahl is not interested in
Indigenous issues in any fundamental way, except to lend traction to his
analyses of settler political theory and settler colonial history. Two elements
of Goldstein's work offer particularly striking contrasts. First, Goldstein
positions Indigenous sovereignty in relation to "the unruliness of [settler]
constituent moments [Jason Franks's "enactments of 'the people' that 'invent a new
political space and make apparent a people that are productively never at one
with themselves'"] that assemble multiple dispossessions and their provisional resolution
on behalf of the greater good of 'the people'" (149). Secondly,
and linked to this destabilizing effect of Native sovereignty, Goldstein
explicitly refuses the narrative of settler triumphalism and corresponding
Native victimry; for example, his concise and cogent interlinking of the major
legislative and judicial moves that followed the Northwest Ordinance of 1785,
culminating in the Indian Appropriation Act of 1871, serves the argument that "rather than indexing the
historical triumph of settler sovereignty, this act, and legislation that
followed in its wake (such as the Major Crimes Act of 1885, the General Allotment
Act of 1887, and the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924), can be understood as failed
measures to extinguish indigenous [sic] sovereignty, whose ongoing exercise and
remaking instead illuminates the perpetual frustration of US aspirations" (151,
emphasis added). To my mind, along with the Vizenorian resources mentioned
above, this essay--together with Goldstein's introduction to Formations
of United States Colonialism (2014),
and his 2008 essay, "Where the Nation Takes Place: Proprietary Regimes, Antistatism,
and U.S. Settler Colonialism"--is among the essential contextualizing
resources alongside which Dahl's book is best read.
In
concluding, I have to admit that Dahl's book has got inside my head and under
my skin--how else to explain the sheer length of this review? Even though
the prose is sometimes theoretically dense to the point of opacity and can get
bogged down in abstract terminology, the ideas and arguments provoke thought
and productive connections with complementary scholarship. One of the questions
that has haunted me since reading Empire of the People is: when is a
doctoral dissertation not a doctoral dissertation? The simple answer: when it
is published as a scholarly monograph. The more complicated subsidiary question
then arises: how is a monograph different to a dissertation? According to the
oft-quoted authority on this question, William Germano,
a good dissertation is an original contribution to knowledge. No one would
disagree with that. But he goes on to explain: "From a publisher's
perspective, the good dissertation is a work of intellectual substance that
makes a contribution to the author's field and that can reach enough readers
to support the investment necessary for publication" (Germano 9-10, emphasis
added). Although I am not a political scientist, I am sure that Dahl's book
makes an important contribution to his field; as an informed but more general
reader, coming to this book from a literary-historical-cultural environment, I
am not convinced that Dahl really opens up his arguments to the wider academic
readership to which Germano refers. That work of generalization, of finding
hooks to allied scholarship that extends, enriches, and complicates Dahl's
contribution, has been left to his readers. That is rather unfortunate for the
wider relevance of Dahl's project but it is quite fortunate for those like
myself who can find in this book threads with which to weave a greater
intertextual network--comprised of each reader's own conceptual connections.
Dahl has provided fertile ground for this kind of exploration and expansion.
Deborah L. Madsen, University of Geneva
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