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We are told by Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang, the authors of a landmark paper in postcolonial studies, Decolonisation is not a metaphor, that decolonisation is meant to be unsettling, since after all, its primary task is to re-invade and repatriate stolen Indigenous land and life. It is not a metaphor for other general improvements in education and society.
On the 7th of October 2023, for some academics, this fantasy politics came alive and "decolonisation is not a metaphor" became a mantra, a mantra to celebrate the re-invasion of indigenous land and a mantra to chastise any academic who had previously subscribed to decolonisation work and yet had stayed silent on this day.
The state of much of the academic left on the horrific atrocities committed by Hamas, a violence in which antisemitism was an ideological component, was either public endorsement or private ambivalence and public silence. It is necessary and revealing to examine Tuck and Yang's paper to grasp its significance as a racialised identity politics of resentment, rage and revenge, and its compatibility with the Jewish question that is, with the racist idea that something must be done to redress the harms that Jews inflict on humanity.
In the wake of the 7th of October, "Decolonisation is not a metaphor" has unleashed a pre-existing ideological tendency to reduce Israel proper to a live settler colony, and thus as the world's only illegitimate nation state that can and must be undone. And to conflate all Israeli Jews into a settler camp who, without fully relinquishing their land from the river to the sea, are damned and doomed as lesser human beings and cannot belong to the universal human collective.
In "Decolonisation is not a metaphor" the paper, the battle line of settler colonialism is clearly demarcated. Settlers have stolen the land of Indigenous peoples. Settler colonialism represents the totality of the ills of colonialism more generally. With no spatial distance between metropole and colony. It combines external and internal modes of colonisation, exploitation and geopolitical and bio-political management to ensure, I quote, the ascendancy of a nation and its white elite.
Significantly, settler occupation of Indigenous land is seen as an ongoing structural violence against the native, rather than a series of intersecting events, forces and conditions of existence. Vis-a-vis a post-colonial analysis of Israel-Palestine, then, the events within the years of 1948, 1967, 2001, and the 7th of October 2023, for example, tend to be framed beyond their specific crisscrossing and interrelated empirical detail and instead are pre-to-post moments of an ongoing, relentless process of structural racist destruction, disappearance, and erasure of Palestinians. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why in the International Critical Geographies group, the Palestine Statement, signed by over 1,000 of my geography colleagues, the 7th of October is discussed as a pre-to-post moment that escalated the violence against the Palestinians, with no reference whatsoever to the slaughters, rapes and hostage-taking of Israeli civilians by Hamas.
As for the public cheer of some leftist academics on the 7th of October, including some who signed the statement, the images of literal re-invasion fit the script. People who illegally invaded a country and dispossessed its indigenous population are now fleeing. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.
Or, as Tuck and Yang make plain, decolonisation is inextricably tied to settlement and re-invasion, which is precisely why it is necessarily unsettling. There can be no compromise, no reconciliation, no union, and no settlement between colonial settler and an indigenous native, Tuck and Yang assert, because this takes away from the goal to fully take back stolen land.
In postcolonial research, a two nations two states settlement on pre-1967 borders, which would make the Gaza Strip and the West Bank part of an independent Palestinian nation state, is generally considered an anathema because it is seen to legitimise the settler colonialism of Israel proper.
From the river to the sea, the cry of Hamas, is the cry also of decolonisation.
Implicit in Tuck and Yang's paper is an inverted racialisation of settlers and indigenous peoples. All settlers are guilty, complicit, and have no future as worthy human beings unless and until they give up their land. Settlers are less than human. This operates through an inversion of their observation that settlers racially dehumanise indigenous people. "In order for the settlers to make a place their home, they must destroy and disappeared the indigenous people that lived there. Indigenous people must be erased, must be made into ghosts".
So the implied argument follows. For Indigenous people to retake their home, they must destroy and disappear the settlers that live there. With this in mind in the International Critical Geographies group, the Palestine Statement, the victims of Hamas are the ghosts. Moreover, we are told that the Palestinians have the right to resist, while Israel has no right to self-defence.
In this statement, opposition to Israel's century long crimes of imperialism, settler colonialism and apartheid is absolute. Opposition to the dehumanisation, hatred and disinformation spread on traditional and social media against the Palestinians is absolute denial of antisemitism. Because, we are told, antisemitism is a fabricated weapon used against pro-Palestinian academics and activists, denial of antisemitism is absolute.
I quote "We reject any and all conflation of criticism of the Israeli state or Zionism with antisemitism". Read generously in an instinct to side with the victims of asymmetric warfare, there appears room for only one perpetrator, and this perpetrator is made into a fantasised monster.
In this absolutism, the Jewish question fuses with the narrative of settler colonialism and the goal of decolonisation. Something must be done about the ills that Jews deal out to humanity.
"Decolonisation is not a metaphor" is not per se a paper about the history of stolen Indigenous land. It is a cry against the settler in toto, and more specifically against the settler touching and tainting decolonisation. When metaphor invades the colonisation, it kills the very possibility of decolonisation, Tuck and Yang warn. Since it re-centres whiteness, it extends innocence to the settler and it entertains a settler future.
"Decolonisation is not a metaphor" is about recognising how the structural racist violence of settler colonialism extends from the ongoing occupation of Indigenous land to settler moves to innocence, which include settler nativism in which settlers claim to have native blood, and a focus on decolonising the mind as if, Tuck and Yang deride, it were the sole activity of decolonisation to allow conscietisaation to stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land.
Beware Tuck and Yang's message of the white settler dressed in politically progressive garb. "Decolonise (a verb) and decolonisation (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses or frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist and even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption, adoption and transposing of decolonisation is yet another form of settler appropriation".
The politics of decolonisation here is a separatist project that belongs to indigenous people. Any joint strategic work can neither reconcile present grievances nor foreclose future conflict.
Tuck and Young continue: "The absorption of decolonisation by settler social social justice frameworks is one way the settler, disturbed by her own settler status, tries to escape or contain the unbearable searchlight of complicity of having harmed others just by being oneself. The desire to reconcile is just as relentless as the desire to disappear the Native. It is a desire to not have to deal with this [Native] problem any more".
The settlers once more are essentialised, are made into the same monster, from the settler who advances a politics of annihilation to the settler who wishes to reconcile with Indigenous people. Both, it is argued, reflect an innate tendency of the settler to erase the Native.
Hence, it follows, either a cheer for the 7th of October or silence. All Israeli Jews are seen as fair targets from Netanyahu and his far right coalition government, eliminationist politics for one Greater Israel to the peace and reconciliation efforts of Israeli Jewish leftist activists, because both reflect different degrees of a genocidal tendency to erase the native.
Returning to the International Critical Geographies group, the Palestine Statement. Israeli Jews are absent, both as victims of Hamas and as a resistance movement inside Israel. Solidarity is made with everyone but Israeli Jews who oppose the Israeli state violence against Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
As one signatory to the statement remarked on social media, of the young people at the Nova Music Festival attacked by Hamas, sometimes partying on stolen land next to a concentration camp where a million people are starved has consequences.
And later, there's no Israeli left. It's just different gradations of genocide.
Tuck and Yang's seminal paper is a call for an ethic of incommensurability, an epic that recognises that settlers and natives are not comparable as people, in contrast to aims of reconciliation, because settlers and natives can never be united as human beings.
"Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonisation look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonisation for the settler?... Decolonisation is not obliged to answer those questions. Decolonisation is not accountable to settlers or a settler future. Decolonisation is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous futurity".
What's more, the answers to these questions necessitate, they say, moves that may feel very unfriendly. "Decolonisation is not a metaphor" represents a racialised identity politics of resentment, rage and fantasised revenge in which monsters are made out of human beings and conflict is not released, but is locked in, leading us into a total war with no end and without end, with the fantasy of total victory and the probable reality of total defeat.
Decolonisation here reflects a wider anti-racist imagination that gives credence to the notion that race is real, that reifies race, rather than challenges the social construction of the idea of race and its real world consequences. It is an anti-racism which does not escape the ideology of racism. Indeed, it is a racialised identity politics that requires its racialised enemy for its own existence in verifying race and implying a racial essence, purity and authenticity to both settler and native. Both peoples are without independent agency to meet together in the dream and pursuit of freedom.
Relegated to a footnote in their paper, yet highly significant: Tuck and Yang state that racism is an invention of colonialism. Furthermore, while talking, Tuck and Yang briefly concede that not all settlers are white. They later elaborate on the colonising trick, presumably of supposedly real white settlers, to quasi-assimilate the immigrant refugee, or migrant, a quasi assimilation into whiteness which can revert back at any moment.
"Decolonisation is not a metaphor" understands the world as the export of a European colonial project of white supremacy. And from the context that the United States as a white over black structural racism.
However, as Robert Miles reminds us, while colonialism was an integral moment in the history of racism, it was actually the articulation between the capitalist mode of production and the nation-state rather than between capitalism and colonialism that mapped the primary set of social relations within which racism has its origins and initial effects.
The history of Zionism as a nationalist movement and as a colonial settler state project whose fate was tied to the unprecedented genocidal antisemitism of the Holocaust is erased in favour of an approach to Zionism through the Jewish question. Antisemitism is banished as a form of racism, as a racism against the Jews, but represented as a racist weapon of Zionism and Israel against the Palestinian plight, as a racism of the Jews.
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