In my review of Mahmood Mamdani’s new book, Neither Settler nor Native – The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, I questioned two dichotomies used to frame his analysis of the colonial process in the United States. These were, first, the distinction between colonialism and racism and, relatedly, the distinction between the expropriation of land and the exploitation of people’s labour. I wondered what is lost when we try to separate out these practices.
In particular, I did not think that we could account for the transatlantic slave trade if such dichotomies were maintained. Thus, I asked: ‘Can anyone whose labour is made exploitable, not always already be expropriated from the land?’ ‘Enslaved Africans were expropriated from land too,’ I argued, adding, that, ‘they were forcibly taken from their societies and put to work as enslaved labour by the same colonial state.’
Professor Mamdani replied to my review with a question of his own, asking: ‘Were enslaved Africans also expropriated from the land ‘by the same colonial state’?’ His answer was
— source thewire.in | Nandita Sharm | 13/Jun/2021