Book Review: Patrick Wolfe,Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race

Patrick Wolfe was known for his work on race, and settler colonialism in Australia, the USA, Israel, Brazil and India, and for his advocacy for human rights, self-determination and justice. Traces of History brings together his articles on race making in specific historical contexts and processes published in scholarly journals and anthologies between 2006 and 2012. The volume offers a challenging approach to race and comparative studies in settler colonialism. It dissects the reasons behind colonialism, and its anatomy, adding an historical perspective to the analysis aided by five case studies: the Aboriginal people in Australia; Blacks and Native Americans in the USA; people of African descent in Brazil; Ashkenazi Jews in Western Europe; and Arab Jews in Israel/Palestine.

Wolfe argues that European colonialism proved to be all pervasive in altering the very epistemic fabric of the global South. This phenomenon was not particularly European, Wolfe’s text adds; rather, it reflected the nature of all colonial conquests and systems of foreign occupation. Colonialism therefore emerges as a political reality that involves much forgetting and silencing. This is the task that Patrick Wolfe sets for himself: to question and problematize a still dominant Eurocentric perspective on colonial history. Accordingly, race plays a central role in human stratification – something that Fanon (1963, 1967) argued skilfully in his works.

As Wolfe clearly identifies in the situations analysed in this volume, race as a phenomenon and as a lived-experience negates the right of the other in histories, erasing the latter from the global narrative. Modern settler colonialism, represented by the case studies presented in this book, silences the global South, relegating it to inferiority bereft of legitimacy in history. By ascribing ‘certain peoples as being out of place’ (p. 17), without history as Wolfe emphasizes, settlers have been legitimizing, over the last four centuries, the violence placed upon the sub-human colonized, justifying land appropriation, slavery, labour exploitation and power submission.

Wolfe invites us on an ambitious trip across the world, focusing on racial conflict and racial injustice. With this approach, his text situates race as a social construct within world history. Wolfe explains how this construct shapes and reproduces levels of relationships of inequality into which empires co-opt and subalternize subjects with a variety of strategies: territorial dispossession; enslavement; confinement; assimilation; removal; genocide. At the same time, as Wolfe argues, race and racial thinking require constant ideological maintenance, as people in various contexts rebel, refusing assimilation and collectively disavow indigenous subjectivities.

Rebellions contest colonialism, argues the text, and the associative capital as a domination project in cognitive injustice. However, this point is neither unique nor original, as other scholars have covered this aspect in their own work (e.g. Santos, 2007). Two other aspects of the text are troublesome. While it addresses the problematic of social stratification and marginalization of subjects under colonialism, it fails to analyse in depth the asymmetric penetration of empires and their equally asymmetric impact on subaltern lives writ large. But perhaps more troubling is the exclusive use of western cannons to engage us in the narrative of race and coloniality. Non-western contributors to the debate are either written out of the main text altogether or granted a cursory nod (e.g. Linda T. Smith (1999) and her master work on decolonizing methodologies).

To support that ‘racism is not here to stay’ (p. 271) implies acknowledging that our understanding of the world is all-inclusive and much broader than the western lenses through which we seek to comprehend dominant narratives in contemporary history. It also implies that we have gone or are going beyond the colour line, by recognizing the world as epistemically infinite and diverse. Unfortunately this book comes short here in debating the persistence of the ‘colonial global’ in the constitution of global studies and in recognizing ways of doing non-imperial global social sciences. For social sciences and humanities to address adequately a global turn, this condition has to be taken into account.