Red Skin, White Masks - Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition - Grand Format

In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Couhhard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism.
Coulthard demonstrates how a "place-based' modification of Karl Marx's theory of "primitive accumulatio throws light on Indigenous—state relations in settler—colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon's critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.