Thursday January 12, 19:00 –21:00 Free Public Lecture
Dalhousie University Architecture School Auditorium (Spring Garden Road)
Glen Coulthard: “Place Against Empire: Understanding Indigenous Radicalism”
”My talk will assess the critical utility of Marx’s “primitive accumulation” thesis for developing an understanding of the dynamics that continue to shape the settler-colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state in Canada. In Marx, “primitive accumulation” refers to those colonial-like state practices which gave birth to the capitalist mode of production by forcefully stripping–through “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder”–non-capitalist producers, communities and societies from their means of production and subsistence – the land. According to Marx, this gruesome process established the two necessary preconditions underwriting the capital-relation itself: it forcefully opened-up what were once collectively held territories and resources to privatization (dispossession), which, over time, came to produce a “class” of workers compelled to enter the exploitative realm of the labour market for their survival (proletarianization). While primitive accumulation originally involved this dual process for Marx–dispossession and proletarianization–the weight attributed to these constituent practices by those working within the Marxist tradition has not remained equal. The theft of labour, not land, has tended occupy the radical imagination of most Marxists. I argue that any account of primitive accumulation which refuses to correct this limited perspective by situating the ongoing role played by Indigenous land dispossession within our critiques of capitalist accumulation and anti-capitalist resistance will (1) only serve to strengthen the interests of settler-colonial and therefore capitalist power, and (2) will risk overlooking what could prove to be invaluable glimpses into the Indigenous place-based ethical practices and preconditions of a more humane and sustainable world order.”
Glen Coulthard is a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation and an assistant professor in the First Nations Studies Program and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Glen has written and published numerous articles and chapters in the areas of indigenous thought and politics, contemporary political theory, and radical social and political thought. His community-based projects have included helping establish (as a founding collective member) Camas Books and Infoshop (Victoria), Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning (Yelowknives Dene Territory), The Frank Paul Society (Vancouver), and participation in the Purple Thistle Institute (Vancouver), among other projects.
Sponsors:
The Halifax Radical Imagination Project
The Dalhousie Platypus Society
Fernwood Publishing