-
Add a gift card to your order!
-
Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities
Price $29.95Hardcover
Special Order
Mahmood Mamdani
Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes MAHMOOD MAMDANI—the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Harvard University and author of Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity—for a discussion of his latest book, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. He will be joined in conversation by GIL ANIDJAR, a professor in the Department of Religion and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University and author of The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy.
In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.
The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence.
Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors—victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries—based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.
