For twenty-six weeks in 1997-98, I had the great privilege of joining Dr. Ato Sekyi-Otu’s graduate class on Frantz Fanon, reading through Fanon’s major texts, including Black Skin, White Masks, The Wretched of the Earth, A Dying Colonialism, and Toward the African Revolution, in dialogue with Fanon’s interlocutors, such as Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, as well as with prominent contemporary scholars of Fanon’s work, including Lewis Gordon, Paget Henry, Isaac Julien, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Paulin Hountondji, Françoise Vergès, Stuart Hall, and Sylvia Wynter, among others. Of course we also read with great attention and admiration Ato’s definitive work, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (1996). This class was the experience of my graduate student life. Ato would arrive at 11:00, having already lived three-quarters of his day, after spinning class, and after having prepared what always seemed to be the most timely, wise, and imperative intervention into the week’s readings. There are sentences and phrases from that class that have seared permanently into my brain. Ato argued that Fanon’s work should be approached as a ‘dramatic dialectical narrative’ (Sekyi-Otu 1996, p.4), with an opinionated chorus whose comments on the unfolding action and the fate of the characters reflect a kaleidoscope of shifting emotional tones—sorrow, anger, indignation, love, bitter irony. Irony was a register that, according to Ato, critics of Fanon often overlooked or dismissed too quickly without appreciating how this elusive, doubled-voiced tone reflected Fanon’s orchestration of multiple voices in his work. Through a process of mobilizing a variety of expressions and perspectives, Fanon invited partial truths to emerge – truths no less potent for being numerous, complex, and deeply situated within particular social, political, cultural contexts, and no less urgent for ‘reach[ing] out for the universal’ (Fanon 1967, p.197).

Ato taught his graduate course in much the same way that he read and interpreted Fanon’s work. As if the class itself were an extended ‘dramatic dialectic narrative’, Ato the director staged Fanon’s work as a series of profoundly multi-voiced texts, filled with provisional propositions, revisions, and counter-propositions. For Ato, Fanon was always the phenomenologist, offering ‘increasingly intricate configurations of experience’, providing narratives in which ‘seemingly privileged pictures and rhetorics are reviewed, renounced and replaced’ (Sekyi-Otu 1996, p.5). Ato would take on the voices that are audible in Fanon’s work, ventriloquizing the polyphonic array of arguments and counter-arguments. In his famously deep voice, Ato would echo Sartre: ‘Hell is the Other’.^[1] Ato would then dramatize the counter-point, ventriloquizing an imagined voice for Fanon: ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet’. Here Ato, through Fanon, is viscerally illustrating the imposition of ‘that crushing objecthood’ and experience of nonbeing for racialized subjects in a colonial and racialized social order (Fanon 1967, p.109).

For Ato, Fanon was not the author of a ‘handbook of the revolution’, not a field commander on the programmatic use of violence, not a doctrinal teacher of a step-by-step approach to decolonization. Ato emphasized throughout that Fanon was ‘searching for a method’, scripting and redrafting, working around and through and in spite of the absences confronting him in the European political, philosophical, and psychological traditions. Fanon writes, ‘It is good form to introduce a work in psychology with a statement of its methodological point of view. I shall be derelict. I leave methods to the botanists and the mathematicians. There is a point at which methods devour themselves’ (1967, p.12). And yet, nevertheless, the search for a method must go on. The questions must be worked through, and urgently, with an awareness of the highest of stakes imaginable, in the name of social justice that cannot be deferred any longer. Because, as Ato-via-Fanon-via-Marx continually underlined, ‘‘What matters is not to know the world but to change it’’ (1967, p.17). I remember Ato telling us about the process of preparing his book, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience for publication, and receiving the editor’s description of his book for the back cover. The editor had written (and here I am paraphrasing from my own memory): ‘With the recent flowering of interest in postcolonialism, this book returns us to Fanon…’. Ato was horrified by this description. Ato’s book is situated in, and refuses to look away from, ‘the postcolonial condition, here understood as the determinate experience of post-independence African societies’ (Sekyi-Otu 1996, p.11). The postcolonial condition in Africa was and is not a condition that could be described as ‘flowering’. Whose interests are flowering? At whose expense when, as Fanon predicted, a neoliberal, neocolonial world order is replicating the very terms of dispossession?

And yet, some of the enduring phrases that have remained with me all of these years are the ones in which Fanon refuses to be consumed by these ongoing forces of dispossession, misrecognition, negation, or dehumanization. In recalling the formative lessons I learned in Ato’s classes, one quotation from Black Skin, White Masks continues to haunts me: ‘I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness’ (Fanon 1967, p.232). Fanon endlessly wrestles with this fraught word, recognition. For many scholars, Fanon rightly and definitively rejects the politics of recognition for its cunning obliteration of the subject’s agency. And yet Fanon never stops writing about his encounters in everyday life (the good, the bad, the ugly), never relinquishes his enduring wonder about the fine differences within individuals and communities, never completely abandons his affirmation of his own and others’ humanity. Hope and despair intertwine and persist as alternating undertones and overtones throughout his work. This multivocality reflects Fanon’s continuous search for a form of solidarity across differences that must confront and, one day, put to rest the twin spectres of colonial appropriation and erasure.

Ato’s dialectical reading demonstrated for us, his students, a progression from simple to more complex forms of understanding. Such a reading rejects top-down, authoritative pronouncements of truth and other ‘devices of closure’, opting instead for ongoing, strategic self-revisions (Sekyi-Otu 1996, p.152). Ato always insisted that Fanon’s dialectic is not a ‘vulgar synthesis’ (p.201) that incorporates and sublimates particularities in its path; Fanon’s dialectic is a phenomenology of change that accounts for the subtle shifts and changes that characterize political struggles. While Fanon rejects recognition, nothing is ever completely off the table. To return to Ato, speaking through Fanon, in response to Sartre, the profoundly dehumanizing and negating experience of not being recognized as an Other is not the end-point; there is another critical horizon to contend with. Fanon sought out strangers and unpredictable encounters, finding something generative about recognizing and being recognized. These are the profound lessons – even if they are in a sense anti-lessons – that I have carried with me over twenty years.

* * *

Since my time as a graduate student at York University I have been working in the field of Indigenous literary studies, specifically on how Indigenous writers and artists challenge the violent histories of settler colonialism and use forms of expression to imagine and bring into reality Indigenous-centred narratives of cultural and artistic continuance and survivance. One of the most important texts published in Indigenous studies in recent years, proclaiming its debt to Frantz Fanon in its title, is Dene scholar Glen Coulthard’s landmark book, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014). In writing his book Coulthard tunnels deep into the writings of Fanon. There he finds many arguments to strongly reject a colonial politics of recognition, as his subtitle makes clear. He finds Fanon upending that infamous ‘green baize table’, where the colonizer and colonized attempt to ‘peacefully’ settle the colonial problem by instituting bitterly concessionary, neocolonial models of ‘development’ (Fanon 1965, p.61). In this paper I want to further unpack Coulthard’s readings of Fanon and argue why I think there is value in returning to this fraught and ongoing debate on the politics of recognition. I want to test out Otu’s tenacious, even perverse (Sekyi-Otu 2019, p.13) defense of the paradox of ‘left universalism’ and ‘Africacentric’ perspectives as a possible strategy in crafting an open-ended, critically informed conception of recognition in the context of Indigenous studies. I ask whether a(n other) politics of recognition, or perhaps the language of recognition, as a shared sense of responsibility and accountability across Indigenous, settler, and racialized communities is possible, and necessary, in the ongoing project of working towards social justice on unceded and Treaty lands in Canada.

Coulthard conclusively demonstrates how efforts over the last four decades to attain settler-state recognition of Indigenous rights have not accomplished a realization of Indigenous self-determination. Indeed, a liberal, recognition-based approach to Indigenous rights in Canada, which usually includes a ‘combination of land claims agreements, economic development initiatives, and self-government packages’, have resulted in a tightening of social control and a further deferral of Indigenous self-determination (Coulthard 2007, p.437). In thinking about forms of ongoing colonial violence, Coulthard and many other scholars in Indigenous studies have noted that while Indigenous people are often excluded from full participation in Canadian institutions and citizenship rights, a more insidious form of forced inclusion also perpetuates colonial relations of domination.^[2] To be included into dominant structures of society can be a stifling embrace. The academy is one place where this forced participation is very evident. In Chickasaw scholar Chadwick Allen’s words, ‘the so-called ivory tower of the settler nation-state, often critiqued by conservative commentators as promoting a liberal bias toward issues of affirmative action and multiculturalism, continues to function as a ground zero for attacks on all forms of Indigenous intellectual autonomy and on all forms of autonomous Indigenous representation, of either self or others’ (Allen, 2014, p.377). In other words, the appearance of inclusion is also a way to marginalize more effectively. In raising the issue of multiculturalism, Allen touches on a truism especially evident in Canadian cultural discussions: how a critical framework of multiculturalism, so much shaped by Charles Taylor’s discussion of the politics of recognition, has deferred Indigenous people’s search for decolonization, freedom, and self-determination. A politics of recognition within a liberal multicultural framework in Canada harmonizes Indigenous rights within the state’s assertion of sovereignty that traces back to convenient ‘discoveries’ of Turtle Island as terra nullius, one of the founding principles of English common law. As Kanishka Goonewardena puts it in a collectively authored review essay of Coulthard’s book, ‘although less reliant on the sort of overt violence characteristic of earlier strategies’, the liberal politics of recognition ‘still peddles the old colonial wine in a new liberal-multicultural bottle’ (Hallenbeck et. al. 2016, p.112).

Reconciliation is closely bound up in these false politics of recognition. In an era of reconciliation, colonial violence is disguised deviously as recognition, taking on ever more subtle forms. Indeed, as Coulthard argues, ‘recognition-based models of liberal pluralism. . . seek to ‘reconcile’ Indigenous assertions of nationhood with settler-state sovereignty’ (Coulthard 2014, p.3). Coulthard explains that reconciliation was not originally about reckoning with the complex legacies and ongoing realities of residential schools. Rather, reconciliation first was invoked as part of Canadian policy in the wake of the ‘Oka crisis’ in 1990, in effort to shift attention away from the three-hundred-year dispute over unceded lands and territories at Kanehsatake. In other words, reconciliation emerged as part of a larger effort through legal and colonial administrative strategies to assert Crown sovereignty and Crown land title, and to attenuate Indigenous people’s vigorous defense of their lands and rights. In Shiri Pasternak’s words, ‘The discourse of ‘reconciliation’ in Canada extends the politics of recognition by locating colonialism firmly in the past and placing the burden of adaptation on Indigenous peoples, who must further compromise their sovereignty to be consistent with the colonial authority of the Crown’ (Hallenbeck et. al. 2016, pp.116-7). Jessica Hallenbeck and Mike Krebs further argue that Coulthard engages with the work of Fanon in order to challenge ‘Taylor’s ‘politics of recognition’ and the politics of reconciliation in settler colonial contexts’ (Hallenbeck et. al. 2016, p.111).

Indeed, Coulthard repeatedly turns to Fanon in making his critique of the politics of recognition, arguing that in Fanon’s work, ‘recognition is not posited as a source of freedom and dignity for the colonized, but rather as a field of power through which colonial relations are produced and maintained’ (2014, p. 17, emphasis in the original). This ‘field of power’ extends a false politics of recognition and mis-recognition through governmental policy, law, ‘public interest’, corporate interests, and modern-day treaty negotiations, all of which combine to hamper and even asphyxiate Indigenous people’s struggle for decolonization (Coulthard 2014, p.40). Coulthard echoes many scholars in Fanon studies when he states that Fanon was ultimately ‘unable to escape the Manichean logic’ (2014, p.43) that Fanon himself criticized. In other words, for many critics, Fanon could not liberate himself from European discourses that would reassert a vicious, asymmetric power dynamic between Europe and the colonies, between White and Black subjectivities. Yet Coulthard defends Fanon, arguing that Manicheism is never Fanon’s end-point. For Coulthard, Fanon’s ‘’turn away’ from the colonial state and society’ is an energizing call to action for Indigenous communities to ‘find in their own decolonial praxis the source of their liberation’ (2014, p.48). In rejecting the colonial politics of recognition, through his reading of Fanon, Coulthard argues instead for a ‘resurgent politics of recognition’ (p.24) and advocates for ‘collective self-recognition’ (p.48) within Indigenous communities who are searching to decolonize their lands and empower their communities through self-determination.

Coulthard, along with other Indigenous scholars such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Audra Simpson, Sarah Hunt, Jeff Corntassel, and Jarrett Martineau, among many others, are key architects of Indigenous resurgence. Resurgence is a diverse set of Indigenous-led theories, ethics, and practices that reject federal and institutional models of recognition and emphasize the revitalization of each Nation’s lifeways, languages, social justice models, and systems of governance. In Simpson’s words, resurgence is a refocusing of political energies to ‘a flourishment of the Indigenous inside’ (2011, p.17). Simpson continues that ‘To do so, we need to engage in Indigenous processes’ and ‘we need to do this on our own terms, without the sanction, permission or engagement of the state, western theory or the opinions of Canadians’ (p.17). Resurgence, autonomy, sovereignty, and self-determination continue to be key words in Indigenous studies, and they are strongly centred on Indigenous-led projects that reflect deeply on cultural and political specificities. Coulthard concurs, arguing that for a ‘resurgent politics of recognition’ to be an effective antidote to the zero-sum game of macro-level politics of recognition, it must involve ‘some form of critical individual and collective self-recognition on the part of Indigenous societies’ in order to realize Indigenous self-determination (2014, p.48).

One of the keystone concepts in resurgence is grounded normativity—or ‘Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time’ (Coulthard 2014, p.13). For Sarah Hunt, it is through his theorizing of grounded normativity that Coulthard realizes his vision as ‘an activist and academic who is truly oriented to responsibilities which emerge from the law or teachings of his people’ (Hunt 2018, p.2). What ‘underlies the entire project of the book’ is Coulthard’s ‘deep love for Dene territories – the land, ancestors, spirits, wisdom and human and non-human relations of that territory’ (2018, p.2). For Coulthard, grounded normativity is not about asserting land ownership; rather, it is a vigorous defense of the relationships that inform land-based practices, as well as the political consciousness and mobilization that land inspires. From an Indigenous anti-capitalist perspective, grounded normativity is ‘a struggle not only for land’, but also deeply informed by what ‘the land as [a] system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another’ (Coulthard 2014, p.13). In order to attend carefully to Coulthard’s call to prioritize grounded normativity, an emphasis must be placed on Indigenous people’s lived, felt, and material struggles on the land, always in relationship to the land.

Coulthard’s critique of the colonial politics of recognition in a Canadian liberal framework is thoroughly convincing, yet I am left with questions about whether there is another form of recognition that Fanon invokes that deserves more attention, one that rejects a sharp distinction between macro-politics of contending with the state, vs micro-politics of attending to close, affective spaces of the everyday. Is there something that ought to be reclaimed from the tattered, discredited language of recognition—one that more compellingly foregrounds the more intimate, quotidian experience of recognition that Fanon evokes so powerfully in his work? As Fanon repeatedly emphasizes, language is a nexus of power and a gateway by which we recognize ourselves and others. Through language, the possibility of ‘reciprocal recognitions’ emerges. Fanon writes, ‘I do battle for the creation of a human world—that is, a world of reciprocal recognitions’ (1967, p.218). A world of reciprocal recognitions is a horizon towards which Fanon writes and works. Through a creative, generative process, recognition becomes a complex set of reciprocal relationships, etched by volatile power negotiations and unpredictable encounters, and rooted in a ‘dialectics of experience’, to invoke the title of Ato’s book. Here it is worthwhile noting that building relationships is one of the most important practices that underpin many theories of Indigenous resurgence.

For the remainder of this paper, I want to address some outstanding issues that, I argue, benefit from an alternative conceptualization of the language of recognition, rather than its wholesale repudiation. In thinking through the practice of Indigenous resurgence and the search for self-determination, I have identified three key sets of questions that demand careful attention. The first is, following Indigenous feminist scholars Sarah Hunt (Kwakwaka’wakw) and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg), concerning the role of gender and embodied sovereignty in conceptualizing self-determination and grounded normativity. How to ensure that the defense of land also includes an equally rigorous defense of bodies, scaled to the intimate spaces of homes, families, and relationships? The second is, following the work of Yurok Diné scholar Natalie Knight and Nisga’a scholar and poet Jordan Abel, how can grounded normativity be conceptualized flexibly enough to account for the experiences of Indigenous people who, in Knight’s words, are ‘doubly dispossessed’—not only from their ancestral lands, but also from their relationships with immediate and extended family members, Nations, languages, and knowledges? The third question concerns the crafting of relations of solidarity across differences and the building of comparative cultural frameworks. I want to explore how models of self-recognition and Indigenous resurgence might also include a process of looking outwards to build upon longstanding connections between Indigenous, Black, and African writers and decolonial activists—precisely like Coulthard, who is deeply informed by Dene epistemologies, land, and history, and Fanon, a Black Caribbean thinker who is shaped by and writes extensively about his experiences growing up in Martinique and working in Algeria. In the words of L. Simpson, what are the possibilities in building ‘constellations of co-resistance’ between Black and Indigenous writers, and how does one fashion a comparative framework that illuminates effaced points of connections? How to craft a shared sense of responsibility and accountability across differences to bring about social justice? I should emphasize clearly that Coulthard, Hunt, Simpson, and other theorists of Indigenous resurgence themselves have addressed these subjects and have shown that any conceptualization of resurgence must necessarily foreground these questions as foundational principles. My purpose in raising these issues is to determine to what extent, and how, a politics of recognition may be still valuable as a lens to think through resurgence and the role of reciprocal, self-other relationships.

With respect to my first question concerning gendered conceptions of sovereignty, Sarah Hunt is resolute that a rigorous attention to the scale of struggles over Indigenous land rights be matched by an equally committed attention to struggles around autonomous bodies (‘Rupturing’). Conceptualizing sovereignty in political discussions in ways that are flexible enough to affirm sovereignty over one’s own body have high stakes in light of Hunt’s work on representations of murdered and missing Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit people. The politics of mis-recognition of MMIWG2 in mainstream public discourses is evident in the very term, ‘missing women’. Hunt argues that the phrase ‘‘the missing women’ masks the brutal reality of how they become ‘missing’’ (qtd. in Dean 2015, xix). She rejects the euphemistic turn of phrase, which conceals violence and ascribes accountability to the women themselves for their own disappearance. Instead, she argues that close, critical attention is needed to acknowledge the multiple interrelationships between ‘the defense of our territories’ and the defense ‘of the intimate spaces of our homes and communities’ (Hunt 2015, p.5). Emphasizing how the work of becoming conscious political actors must work in two directions – inward, in addressing close-knit kinship ties, and outwards, in engaging with systems of settler colonial power—she asserts that ‘these sites of resurgence and recognition are not separate, but unfold in the same spaces, within our territories, in relation to the same people, upon the same bodies’ (p.7). Here Hunt is invoking recognition as a way to focus upon the centrality of relationships within paradigms of resurgence.

Indeed, as remarked earlier, a notable feature of many approaches to Indigenous resurgence is a consistent attention to relationality and kinship ties. Focusing on relationality is a very different conceptual starting point than focusing on inclusion. For example, when Leanne Simpson asked Elder Gidigaa Migizi (Doug Williams) about what words or concepts in Anishinaabemowin best capture the idea of ‘nation’, ‘sovereignty’, or ‘self-determination’, he stated, ‘the place where we all live and work together’ (Simpson 2015, p.18). This description highlights the importance of place, while at its core, the statement is ‘about relationships—relationships with each other and with plant and animal nations, with our lands and waters and with the spiritual world’ (p.18). While Coulthard also underlines the key importance of relationships in theorizing resurgence in Dene cosmology and epistemologies, arguing that ‘our cultural practices have much to offer regarding the establishment of relationships within and between peoples and the natural world built on principles of reciprocity and respectful coexistence’ (2014, p.48), Simpson scales the discussion both up and down to account for gendered and embodied forms of sovereignty. For Simpson, sovereignty ‘is not just about land’ and place is not just a location; rather, ‘The land is part of us’ and ‘the word place includes… my body, my heart, and my mind’ (2015, p.19). Simpson is very careful to continually fold the conversation around Indigenous land into a conversation around embodied politics. She further emphasizes that nuanced approaches to sovereignty are the result of Indigenous women and Two Spirited / LGBTQ people consistently intervening in political discussions about sovereignty, insisting that ‘our sovereignty includes our agency within our own bodies and in our intimate relationships’ (2015, p.21). Land is, always, ‘grounded normativity’ and land-based practices; but also ‘land is pedagogy’ (to invoke the title of one of her essays), the teachings that emerge from land that can be transmitted and practiced across time and space.

My second question has to do with the experiences and subjectivities of displaced and dispossessed Indigenous people, and whether a model of reciprocal recognition is necessary to affirm Indigenous kinship ties, even when (or especially when) those ties have been severed. While land and grounded normativity are relational in the work of Simpson, Hunt, and Coulthard, for Indigenous people like Knight and Abel, who grew up outside of their communities as a result of the foster care system and the intergenerational legacies of residential school respectively, land remains a point of contention in constructing a sense of belonging through engaged decolonial practice. In her 2018 Ph.D. dissertation, Dispossessed Indigeneity: Literary Excavations of Internalized Colonialism, Knight calls upon scholars in Indigenous studies to engage more thoroughly with ‘the subjectivities of dispossessed Indigenous people’ (Knight, 2018, p.188). Along with her two Black siblings, Knight was raised by adoptive White parents in a rural town in western Washington state (Knight, 2020, p.83). She describes how her own experiences of displacement have hindered her efforts to build relationships with land-based, grass-roots Indigenous activism. In addition, she describes the psychological experience of ‘ontological dispossession’: ‘Without an ability to reclaim ourselves through our nations, our very status as Indigenous human beings feels at best jeopardized, and at worst negated’ (Knight 2018, p.188). Here, Knight is referring to the interlocking challenges of politically mobilizing and finding a sense of being through self-other relationships as a dispossessed Indigenous person living in a city far from her ancestral territories, along with other Indigenous people with a wide range of relationships to their Nations. She writes: ‘At the root of our subjectivity is a need, and a seemingly irreconcilable barrier, to practicing relationships with the land. How I can account for our existence as Indigenous people, if the very core of our Indigeneity has been taken from us?’ (p. 188). Though L. Simpson demonstrates that ‘land is pedagogy’ and, as such, is accessible to Indigenous people whether they are materially located on their lands or not, to what extent can Knight confidently echo Simpson’s assertion that ‘[t]he land is part of us’ and ‘the word place includes… my body, my heart, and my mind’ (2015, p. 19)?

Likewise, in her scholarship, Knight experiences a profound sense of dissonance as she at­tempts to reconcile the incompatibilities between Marxist analyses of class, anti-colonial critique, multicultural politics of difference, feminist theory, and Indigenous theory. Not unlike Fanon, she restlessly moves across these discourses, searching for a method that could address her own experiences. As daunting as this process is in both a scholarly and ontological sense, the yawning gaps in these established academic theories fuels Knight’s engaged commitment to address persistent eli­sions in critical approaches to social justice movements, especially with respect to Indigenous studies. Furthermore, Knight suggests that the language of recognition remains relevant in the wake of racial and colonial legacies of hate, shame, and love, especially when these complex affects and legacies are tangled together.

In ‘Empty Spaces’, a recently published excerpt from his forthcoming book, NISHGA, Abel bravely names his experiences as an intergen­erational survivor of residential schools and grapples with the fragments of his own story to which he has limited or no access. There are multiple resonances of ‘empty spaces’ in Abel’s text, from settler-colonial rep­resentations of empty land in Euro-American literature, to the missing pieces of his family history, to the limitations of scholarly norms that reinforce absences they purport to address. He insists that the project is ‘not about reinscribing Indigenous absence / as it is about rearticulating Indigenous presence’ (Abel 2020, p.258). And yet, many of the research questions that he has encountered in Indigenous studies emphasize the central importance of reclaiming ancestral relationships to land, territory, family, and community in ways that are deeply fraught for Abel, given his intergenerational inheritances. Abel writes: ‘I often wonder what it means that I am writing a project about imagining land / when my own relationship to Nisga’a territory… is deeply fraught’ (p. 257). He further states that: ‘As a Nisga’a writer, I often find myself in a position where I am asked to explain my relationship to Nisga’a language, community, and cultural knowledge. However, . . . my relationship to Indigenous identity is compli­cated, to say the least’ (p. 233). Abel’s aim is to transform these empty spaces into spaces of dialogue by ‘reorganizing, reframing, and repositioning research questions outside of the ‘normative frame­works for modes of presentation’’ (p. 235). ‘Empty Spaces’, a collage that delib­erately leaves traces of its suturing, brings together a series of fragments that are ‘part of an impossible whole’ (p. 255), each with ‘empty spaces’ right at their centres. Above all, this text is Abel’s wrestling with the absence of his Nisga’a father and his attempt to initiate a conversation, even a physical closeness, with his father on the page, through the intermingling of their respective creative practices in haunting, layered images.

My third question is about the potential of fashioning an alternative politics of recognition in order to build a viable comparative framework that illuminates connections across cultural, racial, and continental differences, demonstrating shared histories of resistance across Black and Indigenous communities and social movements. An inspiring thread in this conversation involves scholars reigniting conversations about foundational decolo­nial theorists—such as Fanon, C. L. R. James, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o—and showing the links between ‘Third-’ and ‘Fourth-World’ struggles for decolonization. The term the ‘Fourth World’ is from Secwepemc activist and intellectual George Manuel’s co-authored book, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (1974), referring to Indigenous peoples whose communities and territories are contained within settler colonial nation-states. Of course, Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks is a stand-out example of precisely this kind of project. He uses Fanon’s theories of decolonization in African contexts to reject a colonial politics of recognition in Canada, and to articulate new directions in Indigenous resurgence. In addition, in his Introduction to a new edition of The Fourth World (2019), Coulthard illuminates Manuel’s role in creating links between Red Power movements in North America with global decolonization movements in the 1970s and 1980s. In other words, Manuel remained resolutely committed to place-based, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist Indigenous struggle—but in a global context. In 1977 he traveled to Sweden, where he proposed and helped conceptualize what would become the UN Declaration of Rights of the Indigenous Peoples. He was inspired by African decolonization struggles and, in 1971, he had the opportunity to travel to Tanzania to discuss with governmental officials and with the people of Tanzania what a postcolonial social order might look like (Coulthard 2019, p.xiv). He also traveled to New Zealand, Australia, and Sweden, working closely with Maori, Aboriginal, and Sami peoples in those countries to model a vision of decolonization and Indigenous self-determination. In Coulthard’s words, these global exchanges between ‘Third-’ and ‘Fourth-World’ activists ‘provided Indigenous organizers with an appealing international language of political contestation structured around the concept of self-determination—economically, politically, and culturally—that they not only inherited but also fundamentally adapted and transformed through a critical engagement with their own local, land-informed situations’ (2019, p.x).

Coulthard acknowledges that Manuel was a complex figure, as he was a part of a generation of Indigenous leaders whose vision of decolonization became tragically compromised and hampered by the Canadian state’s imposition of a colonial politics of recognition. Manuel’s work on designing and implementing the Constitution Express in 1980 provides an example of this complexity. The Constitution Express—a train that traveled from British Columbia to Ottawa—was a demonstration by Indigenous community representatives and activists who opposed Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s plan to repatriate the constitution without the consent of Indigenous peoples. As a result of Manuel’s and other Indigenous activists’ advocacy work, section 35 of the 1982 Canadian Constitution reads: ‘Aboriginal rights are hereby recognized and affirmed’. However, as Coulthard emphasizes, Manuel’s goal was never inclusion, and securing ‘constitutional recognition of Aboriginal rights… was not his original or ultimate objective’ (2019, p.xxvii). Indeed, his vision of recognizing Aboriginal rights always included jurisdictional powers for exercising those rights; however, the constitution only recognizes those rights in a passive, top-down way. As a result of this fundamental mis-application of Manuel’s vision, in Coulthard’s view, the ‘cross-fertilizations’ between global Indigenous and African decolonization movements that occurred through the international advocacy and solidarity-building work of the 1970s have become more submerged in recent years (p.xxx). Since that time, Indigenous people have focused their efforts on negotiating with their respective nation-states for recognition through land claims negotiations, self-government agreements, modern-day treaties, and corporate and governmental programs of economic ‘development’, instead of continuing to foster those international connections.

I would suggest that the language of recognition helps bring back into focus the long history of coalition work between ‘people in Africa, the global South, and Indigenous Peoples of the Fourth World’ and the even longer history of mutual influence in Black and Indigenous radical traditions (Simpson, Walcott, and Coulthard 2018, p.88). Just one week before the conference ‘Partisan Universalism’ in Ato Sekyi-Otu’s honour at York University in October 2019, I attended the conference ‘Afrocentrism: Decolonizing Academia’ in Vancouver, on the unceded, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish peoples, where Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o, Stō:ló Elder Margaret George, and Acholi poet Juliane Okot Bitek engaged in a brief dialogue. Ngûgî spoke Gikuyu, the language that landed him in prison in 1977; Elder Margaret spoke Halq’eméylem, describing how she was raised by her grandparents on Stó:lō territories and now lives within the Tsleil-Waututh community; and Okot Bitek spoke Acholi. Okot Bitek is the author of the award-winning book of poetry, 100 Days (2016), and daughter of celebrated Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek, although she grew up in exile in Kenya away from her ancestral home in Gulu, Uganda, before moving to Canada as a young adult. This confluence of voices and languages was a momentous occasion, almost unprecedented; yet it is a moment that already arrived more than four hundred years ago, a moment often forgotten, effaced, or rendered illegible. I am speaking of a crossroads in Black, African, and Indigenous histories, experiences, and visions of social transformation.

In order to capture this crossroads, I am drawn to Leanne Simpson’s term ‘constellations of co-resistance’, which she discussed in a panel with Glen Coulthard and Black studies scholar Rinaldo Walcott, that asserts a powerful legacy of solidarity between Black and Indigenous social movements and intellectual traditions (Simpson, Walcott, and Coulthard 2018, p.81). As the speakers’ contributions to the discussion demonstrate, articulating these relationships is not automatic or easy; conversations about place, belonging, and embodiment have unfolded very differently in Black and Indigenous Studies to date. The task requires a lot of deep listening, careful thought, and ethical self-positioning. For a White, Scottish-descended, settler scholar such as myself this requires an adamant commitment not to re-centre whiteness in crafting this comparative framework. The challenge is to build viable critical frameworks that compare histories of occupation and resistance while recognizing their particularities. ‘Constellations of co-resistance’ provide a model for building such a framework of ‘coresistance and solidarity between radical resurgence and the Black Radical Tradition’ (Simpson 2017, p.229). As Simpson points out, ‘constellations exist only in the context of relationships; otherwise they are just individual stars’ (p.215). Moreover, ‘the constellated and emergent relationships from within grounded normativity between radical resurgence, generative refusal, and reciprocal recognition, might create the potential for heightening nationhood, indigeneity, and freedom’ (p.213). This rich dialogue and building of solidarity continue today – in strong affiliations between Black Lives Matter, Indigenous struggles for sovereignty, and other anti-racist coalition movements. It is also palpable in the precise, if yet still emergent, textual braidings of Indigenous and Black connections in works by writers like Glen Coulthard, Leanne Simpson, and George Manuel, as well as in works by Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek, Natalie Knight, Dionne Brand, Cheri Dimaline, M. Nourbese Philip, Daniel Heath Justice, Wayde Compton, Tasha Spillett, Whitney French, and Tyla Miles, to name only a few who have drawn out these connections in their writings.

My efforts to reconsider the politics of recognition is not an effort to reclaim the ‘colonial politics of recognition’ that Coulthard so effectively critiques. Rather, my purpose is to ask whether, in rejecting a politics of recognition, a macro-political notion of Indigenous politics comes too sharply into focus, thereby obscuring more intimate scenes and encounters across differences in everyday ‘dialectics of experience’, to again invoke Ato’s title. What emerges is a paradox, at once a defense and critique of recognition. In this I am inspired by Ato’s determination in his recent book, to work paradoxically in defending both ‘left-universalism’ and ‘Africacentric’ perspectives. I am also inspired by Fanon, whose rigorous critique of a false politics of recognition is matched by his unending curiosity about the Other. For well-being, mental health, existential affirmation, and love, Fanon writes of the ‘antennae with which I touch and through which I am touched’ (1967, p.32)—a sense of openness to the world, even though in the context of racist encounters, he feels the collapse of that antennae more often than not. I am aware that there is a profound gap between the grounded, intimate, relational kind of ‘recognition’ that I am summoning through my reading of Fanon, and the politics of recognition as diagnosed by Coulthard. However, Fanon demonstrates that recuperating a language or practice of respectful recognition as a model for creating cross-cultural exchanges is possible, and necessary. The language of recognition invites a model for establishing reciprocal relationships, and giving back is a key tenet in Indigenous studies. Recognition depends upon an ethics of self-positioning, combined with a rigorous responsiveness to the other. Above all recognition occurs in and through language. In the opening sentences of Chapter One of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes: ‘I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language… For it is implicit that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other’ (p.17). ‘Exist[ing] absolutely for the other’ is different from the imposition of a colonial politics of recognition, but also different from the embrace of self-recognition. ‘Exist[ing] absolutely for the other’ is recognizing the potential (too often not realized) of the ‘open door of every consciousness’ (Fanon 1967, p.232). It is about a principled commitment to a politics of difference at the crossroads of intellectual traditions, languages, races, cultures, continents.

The register of Fanon’s voice shifts often, emerging from a painful crucible of affective and material realities to which he is subject, but from which he imagines another world. In this imagined other world, the work of language makes possible a ‘battle for the creation of a human world—that is, a world of reciprocal recognitions’ (1967, p.218). Thus the restless search for new methods continues. My dog-eared copies of Black Skin, White Masks, Red Skin, White Masks, and Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience will remain close by, ready for another re-reading.

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