Note: In this two-part article, the author unpacks the underlying racist structures that define the West-Non West duality, a discrimination that runs across myriad aspects of social organization narratives. The first part is a theoretical understanding of this concept, which not only produced the ‘black body’ as against the white Europeans, but the segregation went on to define the colonial cityscapes too. These elements, the author further argues also lie at the heart of the present-day neoliberal order’s obsession with security, both domestic and international.
The intersection between security and globalization is a production of a specific Western philosophical project which determined who is a Being, justifying colonial practices according to a specific binary. Over time, security discourse has been reproduced and reinforced in multiple forms and its implementation enabled the design of a specific global order in contrast to a constructed threat and an 'evil' axis. The two-part essay aims to discuss how, from its origins, security discourse legitimised violence perpetration over the Black body and his exploitation for the Western economic wealth. Therefore, the paper intends to trace the entanglement of security and violence firstly exploring its theoretical origins through the philosophical construction of European rational hegemony over the non-Europeans.
The second part of the essay examines the implementation of this discourse in the colonial and post- colonial contexts, using the case studies of Johannesburg and Equatorial Guinea, to demonstrate how the construction of security evolved and currently permeates the contemporary societies of these two African contexts. Each chapter’s subtitle is a quotation of the influential postcolonial thinker Frantz Fanon from “The Wretched of the Earth”, which work powerfully illustrates how violence, in its multiple shades, was intrinsically embedded in the colonial project.
I. Introduction
The intersection between security and globalization is a production of a specific Western philosophical project which determined who is a Being, justifying colonial practices according to a specific binary. Over time, security discourse has been reproduced and reinforced in multiple forms and its implementation enabled the design of a specific global order in contrast to a constructed threat and an 'evil' axis. This essay aims to discuss how, from its origins, security discourse legitimised violence perpetration over the Black body and his exploitation for the Western economic wealth. Therefore, the paper intends to trace the entanglement of security and violence firstly exploring its theoretical origins through the philosophical construction of European rational hegemony over the non-Europeans. The second part of the essay examines the implementation of his discourse in the colonial and post-colonial contexts, using the case studies of Johannesburg and Equatorial Guinea, to demonstrate how the construction of security evolved and currently
permeates the contemporary societies of these two African contexts. Each chapter’s subtitle is a quotation of the influential postcolonial thinker Frantz Fanon from “The Wretched of the Earth”, whose work powerfully illustrates how violence, in its multiple shades, was intrinsically embedded in the colonial project.
II. “The native represents the negation of values” (Fanon, 2008)
The analysis of security discourse in globalization requires an action of “unpacking” to unfold the philosophical construction behind it. This process starts in trying to disentangle questions regarding “who creates new boundaries and securities by which to live, why these are created, and against or with whom” (Meyer and Geschiere, 1999). In the context of the Global South, the answer for these questions implies a postcolonial analysis of the fragmentation and securitization of the space in the ex-colonies. The word “colonialism” per se, as Mudimbe emphasizes (1988), derives from the Latin word colére, that means to cultivate and design; hence, colonialism formally means organization,
arrangement. In this paragraph, the paper will explore how specific Western ontological construction justified the ego conquiro, fragmentation and occupation of certain geographical spaces. The analysis of securitization, here meant as a colonial practice, requires an enquiry on the philosophical project which justifies the European colonization. In “On the Coloniality of Being”, Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007) explores the question of race and the colonial experience deconstructing the Western notion of fundamental ontology, produced by philosophers like Heidegger who deeply influenced postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida. Starting from the theoretical work of Emmanuel Lévinas, and later on, through the concept of coloniality of Walter Mignolo and the work of Frantz Fanon, Torres emphasizes the connection between Western fundamental ontology with power and ultimately with violence and the need for a rethinking of
ontology in light of coloniality.
This model of power referred by Mignolo as coloniality, which emerged after the colonization of the Americas, determined a pattern of modern identity, built inside the capitalist framework and according to an idea of race hegemony. That is why coloniality survived colonialism and still determines, shapes and structures social relations. European Enlightenment and Renaissance justified the idea of European biological superiority and what Torres refers as a more subtle sense of
scepticism toward the non-Europeans, which played a fundamental role in European modernity. This imperial attitude, as indicated by Torres, characterized by scepticism led to a questioning of the very humanity of the colonized people. The Cartesian differentiation of mind and body, human and nature, (the res cogitans and res extensa), provided a new modern conceptualization of the relation
of mind, body and soul, which unprecedently characterized and determined the anthropological foundation of the dichotomy between the colonized and colonizer. This dichotomy provided the foundation of the formulation of ontological exclusion linked to the black body which became the point of departure of the Fanonian philosophical disquisition. Here, Torres briefly but crucially explains the ontology of being defined as a "subordinated ontology". The black body has been recurrently portrayed as lacking authority, thus effeminized but at the same time also as a threat: a sexual beast inclined of raping, particularly the white woman. Indeed, according to Fanon, the settler considered the black body evil, insensible to ethics, a “corrosive and deformed” element. He represented not only the absence of values but “the negation of values” (Fanon, 2008). Thus, the black body, in Fanonian words, being the “absolute evil”, had potential for ‘killability’ and ‘rapeability’ (Torres, 2007).
III. “The colonial world is a Manichean world” (Fanon, 2008)
The notion of the subordinated ontology is the precondition for explaining the colonial organization.
In “The Wretched of Earth” (2008), Frantz Fanon illustrates how skepticism was implemented in the social structure. He indicates the colonial world as a Manichean world, a world divided in two, justified by the settler’s presumptions of the native as a sort of “quintessence of evil” (Fanon, 2008). This divided world is composed. on one hand by the settler’s town, which is: “covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. The settler’s feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you’re never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even.
The settler’s town is a well-fed town and an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things” (Fanon, 2008).4 On the other hand, the native town is understood as “the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live
there on top of each other, and their huts are built on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light” (Fanon, 2008). The two towns are reciprocal exclusive and no conceivable. Fanon in representing the relationship between settler and colonized proposes an alternate depiction of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, where the settler is the oppressor, the “white policeman” while the colonized is the exploited subject. This violent demarcation, so neatly depicted by Fanon, has an economic function: to form a precapitalistic society governed by the foreign race and served by the black body to ultimate the European
industrial development (Mudimbe, 1988). The city of Johannesburg represents a concrete example of how spatiality is reconfigured according to the need for satisfying the economic demand and of controlling the black body. During the blossoming of the city, after the discovery of gold in the late 19th century, the urban space was immediately organized to reach a racial equilibrium among the mine-workers. Indeed, since its beginning, the British administration implemented policies which ensured intense exploitation of the Black workers and their segregation from the White communities with the ultimate goal of maximal capitalist exploitation (Van Onselen, 1979). Thus, as
Achille Mbembe (2008) stated, the Black worker in Johannesburg represents the disposable body, the “superfluous element”, the “radical other” for the construction of the Western industrialization, societies, enlightenment, progress. Native administration was also deployed to counter the national resistance. Indeed, in such multicultural space, cultural contamination and exchange of ideas were seen as threats. The city became an unpredictable political space subjected to the insurgency. Indeed, beside the multiple policies of segregations, the creation of specific suburbs for Black workers away from the city center (such as Soweto), as any multicultural urban space, the contacts of different cultures was inevitable and it was precisely in Johannesburg that two crucial figures as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, respectively developed their ideas on anti-colonialism (Hyslop, 2008).
References:
Appel, H. (2012). “Walls and White Elephants: Oil extraction, responsibility and infrastructural violence in Equatorial Guinea.” Ethnography, (March).
Fanon, F. (2008). “Concerning violence.” The Wretched of the Earth. London. Penguin.
Ferguson, J. (2006). “Governing extraction: New spatializations of order and disorder in neoliberal Africa.” Chapter 8 in Global Shadows: Africa in the neoliberal world order. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Mbembe, Achille. (2008). "The aesthetics of superfluity." In Nutall, Sarah & Mbembe, Achille (eds.), Johannesburg: the elusive metropolitan. Johannesburg: Wits University Press (p. 37-67)
Hyslop,J.(2008). “Gandhi, Mandela and the African Modern.” April 2008, Paper Number 33. Hook, D. and Vrdoljak, M. (2002). Gated communities, heterotopia and a “right” of privilege: a ‘heterotopology' of the South African security-park. Geoforum, 33(2), pp.195-219.
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). “On the Coloniality of Being”. Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, Issue 2-3, p. 240-270.
Meyer, B. E., & Geschiere, P. E. (1999). “Globalization and identity: Dialectics of flow and closure.” Blackwell Publishing.
Mudimbe, V. Y. (1988). “The invention of Africa.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Murray. Martin. (2011). City of extremes: the spatial politics of Johannesburg. Durham & London: Duke University Press