Snippet: Crusoean Violence

In the 15th chapter of Daniel Defoe's classic 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, titled "Friday's Education", the titular character describes the process by which – lacking a mutually understood verbal language – he was able to successfully communicate to the native character Friday that he was to be Crusoe's slave by threatening to murder him:

By-and-by I saw a great fowl, like a hawk, sitting upon a tree within shot; so, to let Friday understand a little what I would do, I called him to me again, pointed at the fowl, which was indeed a parrot, though I thought it had been a hawk; I say, pointing to the parrot, and to my gun, and to the ground under the parrot, to let him see I would make it fall, I made him understand that I would shoot and kill that bird; accordingly, I fired, and bade him look, and immediately he saw the parrot fall. He stood like one frightened again, notwithstanding all I had said to him; and I found he was the more amazed, because he did not see me put anything into the gun, but thought that there must be some wonderful fund of death and destruction in that thing, able to kill man, beast, bird, or anything near or far off; and the astonishment this created in him was such as could not wear off for a long time; and I believe, if I would have let him, he would have worshiped me and my gun.

This is but one of several instances where Crusoe compels Friday to watch him kill a bird or an animal in order to establish Friday as Crusoe's slave, and that he himself is the island’s sovereign. While Friday responds by kneeling down before Crusoe, it was not to worship him or his gun, as Crusoe so arrogantly assumes at first, but simply to "pray me not to kill him."

Such repeated acts of killing in the novel comes to take on an air of pageantry. And indeed, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Crusoean violence was the chosen medium in which international law, capitalist accumulation, as well as explicitly universalist European discourses of civilization and progressivism became diffuse throughout the world, just as they had on Crusoe's tiny island. James Hevia, writing about British imperialism in Qing China, refers to this mode of violent persuasion "imperial pedagogy", observing that physical and epistemic violence, the invasion of both soldiers and capital, and other "means of coercion and enticement" were inseparable in their role of, as Hevia argues in explicitly Deluzean terms, deterritorializing and reterritorializing the Qing Empire. The Chinese were to learn "how to function properly in a world dominated militarily and economically by European-based empires." [1]

Be it through the unsubtleties of gunboat diplomacy or naked threats of mass murder, it is through acts of violence that colonial subjects are produced. Demonstrations of violence, rich with semiotic value, are thus interpellative. We might recall Louis Althusser's famous example of a police officer hailing a person on the street, shouting, "Hey, you there!" Turning to look back, and thereby recognizing the authority of the police officer, the person becomes a subject. (cite) While the foundational act of violence may be brief, in the space of colonies or other zones under the hegemony of a colonizer, targets of such threats are made to feel what the historian Tomiyama Ichirō has termed a "premonition of violence" (bōryoku no yokan). Interpellated subjects become silently compelled to assume their place in colonial hierarchies through the unspoken understanding that not to do so would put them in grave danger. In this, even as treaty and law replace the spectacle of violence, peaceably normalizing the asymmetrical relationship, violating the terms of such peace can result in an immediate return to violence. 

The mutually constituting relationship between violence and the law (often thought to be the antithesis of violence) was recognized by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin observed the "primordial and paradigmatic" nature of violence in the law, with all juridical systems having been established by force and only "preserved" thereafter by the ever-present threat of violence against those who violate the rule of law. Moreover, as Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and more recently, Giorgio Agamben have contended, the sovereign who produces the law exists outside of normal legal parameters and maintains a monopoly on the use of violence.  [2] Paradoxically, that sovereign thereby shares a liminal space with those categorically rendered the exception to the rule of law, such as pirates or legally colonizable peoples rendered 'natives'/'barbarians'/ 'savages' (both of whom Robinson Crusoe violently asserts his sovereign authority over on his island). It follows then that just as the law reflects the will of the sovereign, the rule of the sovereign is established and maintained in perpetuity through the violent enforcement of their will.

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[1] Such violence simultaneously plays a suturing role, in that drawing in states across Africa and Asia into explicitly Eurocentric -- and yet purportedly universal -- systems of order such as international law, discourses of civilization, etc., those very systems become universalized.

[2] As Anthony Anghie has shown, this includes the ability to declare wage war. According to Anghie, as the Spanish jurist Francisco de Vitoria believed that "the power to wage war is the prerogative of sovereigns", Indigenous peoples of the Americas ("Indians"), who he argued categorically lacked sovereignty, likewise lacked the legal ability to wage war or, for that matter, resist colonization by force of arms. 

Settler colonial genocide

Still in the thick of writing, and back briefly to finish up some research. Some thoughts though: my last chapter discussed the role of Capron, Clark, Lyman, etc., in the colonization of Hokkaido. While unfinished/unpolished, the chapter fundamentally readers 'settlerness' or the ability to truly pioneer (rather than occupy) as a fundamentally white, Western possession which was bestowed upon Japan by these white American advisers. For example, Lyman's metaphor of Japan as 'sleeping beauty' and America, the handsome prince, or Capron's delight in breaking what he termed the 'virgin soil' around Tokyo.

Capron and Clark in particular served as conduits of American indigenous policy, and advised the Japanese government on the Homestead Act and the nationalization of the soil and any flora or fauna which resides upon it. Policy papers prepared at Kuroda Kiyotaka's request formed the cornerstone of policies which dispossessed the Ainu of their land and restricted them from hunting and fishing. They were forbidden from so much as cutting trees on their own land.

These laws, based on European and American equivalents, lead to famines in the 1880s. Somewhat troublingly, knowledge of these famines comes in the form of petitions and warnings to the Hokkaido and national governments, including Ainu community leaders who travelled to Tokyo. Policymakers were warned of Ainu so desperate for food that they waded into half-frozen marshes to collect molluscs or reduced to eating leather. Meanwhile, statistics show that Ainu populations were in a free fall.

I've found that the government response to this catastrophe was, in some cases, quite literally replying to members of the Ainu community who petitioned them by saying that the Ainu were simply losing the survival of the fittest, followed by a range of excuses, half-truths, and dismissals/self-apologetics. While it's a bit of a stretch, one could imagine that some bureaucrats and policy planners in the 1870s may have been unprepared for the human consequences that nationalization policies ostensibly designed to 'protect' Hokkaido's fish, its forests, and so on, would have on the Ainu. However, the subsequent state-level dismissal of warnings that large numbers of Ainu who were on the verge of starving to death as their productive land was stolen by settlers speaks to something else altogether. At some point, we have to question to what degree the famines in Ainu communities in the 1880s and 1890s were not simply conscious neglect, but the desired outcome of resource nationalization policies.

Moreover, the logic that it is the march of civilization which is naturally leading to the decline of Ainu populations and their eventually extinction as a race, besides naturalizing this larger colonial process, also renders Ainu biological life as antithetical to the very essence of civilization. Academic knowledges, spread from Europe and America to Japan from the 1860s to the 1890s, central to the 文明開化 movement of rendering Japan Westernesque and thereby 'civilized' made it its mission to observe the Ainu under the scientific gaze of the academy, and Ainu bones became the most authentic way to measure (sometimes quite literally) the worth of the Ainu. However, whether through mixed marriages, adoption, or rape, many Ainu communities were increasingly multi-racial, with many people who were raised Ainu having Japanese, or in the case of Karafuto Ainu, Russian roots. The skulls of long-dead Ainu were hunted by anthropologists, seen as a purer source of data by which the Ainu could be understood as a race than living Ainu. This was, moreover, a task seen as imperative given the imminent extinction of the Ainu as Hokkaido was settled/'civilized'. These skulls became increasingly valuable on the open market, sold to universities in Japan and overseas, especially as 'supplies' began to run out. Ainu life was rendered utterly useless, with communities left to starve to death, while the corpses of Ainu became valuable commodities.