I was drawn to Sandy Grande’s essay “Refusing the Settler Society of the Spectacle” for the same reasons I was interested in Natalie Baloy’s “Spectacles and Spectres: Settler Colonial Spaces in Vancouver”: both promise an application of Guy Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle to issues around settler colonialism, and Debord’s book is a touchstone of psychogeography and especially Phil Smith’s mythogeography. Grande is thinking about Debord’s idea of spectacle, but she also sees Michel Foucault’s understanding of surveillance in terms of spectacle as well, drawing (I think) on Jonathan Crary’s essay “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory” (which she cites), and she sets out to use both of these to examine the relationship between spectacle and settler colonialism. “I am particularly interested in the role that spectacle plays in the solidification of the settler state and the consolidation of whiteness, particularly as intensified under neoliberalism,” she writes (1014). She is also interested in “the implications for the nonindigenous settler subject” of settler colonialism; she quotes Albert Memmi’s discussion of “the benevolent colonizer”—that is, “the self-effacing colonizer who refuses the ideology of colonialism but still lives within its confines,” a group that Grande suggests would today be considered white allies (1014)—who, according to Memmi, “can never attain the good, for his only choice is not between good and evil, but between evil and uneasiness” (Memmi 43). Grande contends that “the spectacular portrayal of Indigenous peoples generally and of the #NoDAPL prayer camps more specifically, serves as a site in which to explore the contours of this ‘uneasiness’” (1014).
Grande describes The Society of the Spectacle as a “cautionary text” in which Debord “laments the displacement of ‘authentic’ social relations with their false representations under advanced capitalism” (1015). Debord’s argument—which I have not read, and need to read—“remains remarkably prescient,” Grande states, because “[u]nder neoliberalism, the speed, scope, and power of spectacle has only intensified, reconfiguring the very character of life as not only conditioned by consumerism and commercialization but largely replaced by, exchanged for, and even rejected in favor of its more spectacular simulations” (1015). Everything is for sale, everything is commodified and put on display, including sex, love, intimacy, and marriage (1015). However Grande’s central concern is “how the culture industry (re) produces exhibitions of self and other” that work “to consolidate whiteness and secure settler futurity” (1015). Here Grande refers to the intellectual genealogy of the term futurity, which she traces back to John L. O’Sullivan’s treatise on manifest destiny “as an exclusively settler construct that is incommensurable with Indigeneity” (1015).
I don’t know what she means, so I start looking. In “The Great Nation of Futurity,” John O’Sullivan describes the United States as “destined to be the great nation of futurity” because “the principle upon which a nation is organized fixes its destiny, and that of equality is perfect, is universal,” a “self-evident dictate of morality, which accurately defines the duty of man to man, and consequently man’s rights as man” (O’Sullivan 426). “How many nations have had their decline and fall, because the equal rights of the minority were trampled on by the despotism of the majority; or the interests of the many sacrificed to the aristocracy of the few; or the rights and interests of all given up to the monarchy of one?” O’Sullivan asks (426). The irony of the first clause in that sentence is powerful, if one considers it in the light of settler colonialism, but O’Sullivan’s belief in American equality is absolutely serious. “America is destined for better deeds,” he continues. “It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battle fields, but in defence of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal enfranchisement. Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage, where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another, dupes and victims to emperors, kings, nobles, demons in the human form called heroes” (427). Given that O’Sullivan was writing during the bloody removals of Indigenous peoples from areas east of the Mississippi to what became Oklahoma, removals known as the “Trail of Tears,” his blindness to the bloodiness of colonialism in his country is breathtaking, but it’s no more surprising, perhaps, than the blindnesses of settler Canadians to their own country’s ongoing colonial behaviour.
For O’Sullivan, the past has little interest; it’s the “far-reaching, the boundless future,” which “will be the era of American greatness,” that draws his attention (427). “In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High—the Sacred and the True,” he writes (427). The divine and democratic political principles of the United States will be made concrete in “the glorious destiny” (427). “Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement,” O’Sullivan writes:
Equality of rights it the cynosure of our union of States, the grand exemplar of the correlative equality of individuals; and while truth sheds its effulgence, we cannot retrograde, without dissolving the one and subverting the other. We must onward to the fulfilment of our mission—to the entire development of the principle of our organization—freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our high destiny, and in nature’s eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it. All of this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man—the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of the beasts of the field. Who, then, can doubt that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity? (429-30)
The divine mission of the United States guarantees its destiny, its role as the great nation of the future. That seems to be the way O’Sullivan is using the word “futurity” here—as “The quality, state, or fact of being future,” “the future; a future time” (O.E.D.)—rather than the more complex definition provided by Ben Anderson, who suggests that futurity is the anticipation of the future in the present (777-78). If Grande’s sense of futurity is established by a genealogy that begins with O’Sullivan’s text, then she must be thinking of futurity in the same way. I’ve spent time tracing the source of that genealogy, because denying settler futurity is a key tenet of settler-colonial discourse, and it’s important to understand the different ways the phrase “settler futurity” might be interpreted. For Grande, settler futurity is “incommensurable with Indigeneity,” perhaps because it necessarily involves, as Patrick Wolfe suggests, the genocidal process of the logic of elimination, or the replacement of Indigenous peoples by settlers. To be a settler is to participate in that logic of elimination. I wonder if there’s any way for a settler to step outside of that logic, or if, as Memmi suggests, that is an impossibility.
Grande states that “insofar as spectacle is contingent upon the radical reification of self, an overvaluing of the present, and rupturing of relationality, it becomes the perfect theater for producing anchorless (neoliberal) subjects whose every desire is increasingly structured by capital” (1015-16). Her emphasis on relationality here is important, because it shows how her argument is rooted in Indigenous epistemologies or cosmologies. “As it forecloses relationality by normalizing disconnection,” spectacle “effects an erasure of Indigenous peoples who continue to define themselves through relationship—to land, to history, to waters, to all our relations” (1016). She suggests that the water protectors at Standing Rock “were only rendered visible through spectacle,” and that before they were attacked by police using armoured vehicles and water cannons, “the Lakota peoples hardly existed, virtually erased from public consciousness,” and that even independent media (which I assume were critical of the state’s response to the water protectors) “deployed spectacle as a means of drawing attention” (1016). “The nonspectacular reality was that the majority of the time at the Oceti Sakowin encampment was spent in prayer, cooking, training, eating, laughing, building, teaching, working, washing, cleaning, singing, listening, reading, and tending,” she writes (1016). The spectacle of Standing Rock required the Lakota to act as “stand-ins for the ‘shame’ of America,” she continues (1016). That must be their function as spectacle. In reality, though, Standing Rock “has long served as a site of collective, anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist Indigenous resistance,” with the Lakota on the front lines “protecting against the forces of US imperialism” (1016). That long and multilayered history of “the architecture of settler violence is lost “to the compressed space of spectacular time” (1016).
Next, Grande shifts to defining her terms. I’m going to focus on her definition of spectacle, because that’s the term I’m most curious about. She quotes Debord’s definition of spectacle as the “social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (1019). Through the passive consumption of spectacles, she states, we are separated from the production of our own lives (she cites Steven Best and Douglas Kellner on this point) (1019). Spectacle annihilates historical knowledge, because it is focused on what is new, and it is a form of non-coercive power (she cites Crary here). “Debord’s central thesis or provocation is that life in a ‘commodity-saturated, mass-mediated, image-dominated and corporate-constructed world’ engenders an increasingly isolated, alienated, and passive citizenry that unwittingly relents to a groupthink of market consciousness disguised as individual agency,” she continues, citing Richard L. Kaplan (1019). Kaplan’s analysis, she writes, “illuminates the inherent paradox of spectacle; despite (or because of) its intention to [elicit] emotion and (re)action, spectacle produces alienation and passivity” (1019). Because the spectacle is “both dialectical and self-perpetuating,” the individual and social ennui it produces “searches for relief from the deadening effect and, in so doing, activates the production of ever more spectacular imagery, generating an endless and alienating cycle of (simulated) life in search of the ‘real’” (1019). That search for what is perceived as “authentic” as an antidote to postmodernity is related to settler colonialism, since “Indian-ness” has always served “as a favored foil (antidote) for whiteness” (1019-20). “How does the expressed desire for the imagined Indian serve the propertied interests of whiteness, which is to say settler statecraft?” Grande asks (1020). Her exploration of “expressions of Indian-as-spectacle” is an attempt at answering that question (1020).
That exploration begins with a discussion of reality television shows about life on the “frontier” or in the “wild” as evidence of “settler-desire for the imperialist fantasy of ‘pre-modernist’ times,” a desire which appeases “settler supremacy” (1020). Indigenous peoples are eliminated from view in those programs, which is central to “a deep-[seated] need to continually perform the fabled journey from savage to civilized over and over again; settler-subjects playong out fantasies of the colonial encounter as theater” (1020). Grande cites Lakota scholar Phil Deloria’s discussion of “how the oscillation between settler desire and repulsion for Indian-ness has manifested through the long-standing practice of ‘playing Indian,’” which goes back to the 1773 Boston Tea Party (1020-21). She quotes British media theorist Nick Couldry on the way that “every system of cruelty requires its own theatre” (qtd. 1021). She applies Couldry’s reasoning to settler colonialism:
(a) Settler colonialism is a system of cruelty.
(b) The “truths” of which are unacceptable to democratic society if stated openly.
(c) Those truths must be “translated into ritual that enacts, as ‘play,’ an acceptable version of the values and compulsions on which that cruelty depends.” (Couldry, qtd. 1021)
Reality television is an example of a theater of cruelty where “the rituals of everyday life under settler colonialism are ‘enacted as play’” in order to legitimate is practices and institutions (1021). According to Grande, “mediated performances that erase or perpetuate gross caricatures of Native peoples have systemic impact” that damages Indigenous peoples (1021). She writes, “as mediated, spectacularized versions of ‘the Indian’ dominate the collective consciousness of settler society, it functions to erase the lived experience of Indigenous peoples: hypervisibility = invisibility. In other words, spectacle facilitates ‘imperialist nostalgia’ and the passive consumption of Indigenous performance at the expense of actual Indigenous voices and histories” (1022). Thus Standing Rock protestors became hypervisible while Lakota people remained invisible (1022).
“While Indigenous peoples have long lived the material realities of US imperialism,” Grande continues, “settlers are only recently beginning to contemplate the impact of authoritarian rule and capitalist accumulation” (1023). Television programs that feature the lives of the wealthy present spectacles of wealth rather than lived experience, mitigating and normalizing social and economic inequality (1023). This phenomenon explains the rise of Donald Trump as a political figure (1024). Because he shares little with his base, “the presentation of his own whiteness has to be so spectacular” (1024). Meanwhile, the “intensification of cruelty under neoliberalism” has drawn “the liberal subject (i.e., ‘benevolent colonizer’) into its theater, raising the bar for even more spectacular productions of American exceptionalism, which is to say settler supremacy” (1024). So Trump’s rallies normalize white nationalism and the far right (1025).
Grande quotes Memmi’s suggestion that “colonization can only disfigure the colonizer” (qtd. 1025; 147) and that settler subjects ends up with an impossible choice: to either live in guilt, shame and anguish at the way they benefit from injustice, or to choose to confirm the colonial system (1025). For Grande, “therein lies the essence of settler ‘uneasiness’” (1025). “The apparent hopelessness of the setter problem raises important questions about the structure and potential of social movements, coalition building, and the possibility of transformation,” she contends (1025).
Grande suggests that Standing Rock presents a vision for an Indigenous future, but that to realize that vision, “it is up to all of us to see and work past the glimmer of spectacle, to resist the cult of the immediate, and to do the more deliberative work of history, earnestly connecting past with present” (1025). Doing this work “requires a collective refusal to participate in the theater of cruelty and choose instead to dismantle the settler consciousness that enables it. Such efforts entail working beyond and below the surface, keeping an eye toward the processes by which relations of mutuality are either abandoned or eroded by relations of capital—to in effect, decolonize” (1025). This definition of decolonization is not the same as the one presented by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, on which many writers and scholars seem to rely. Indigenous peoples are important in that struggle “because they represent the most enduring and resilient entities that present a competing moral vision to the settler order” (1026). “Settlers desiring to be accomplices in the decolonial project need to assume the stance of advocate (not spectator) for Indigenous rights,” Grande continues, and for the transformation of settler consciousness (1026). The alternatives to neoliberal capitalism are Indigenous, she suggests, citing Glen Coulthard, because Indigenous struggles are “built on history and ancestral knowledge” and “the responsibility to uphold relations of mutuality” (1026). “Attention to these teachings requires resistance and refusal of the fast, quick, sleek, and spectacular in favor of the steady, tried, consistent, and intergenerational,” and a replacement of individualism with relationship (1026). She quotes Debord: “the spectacle is ‘the reigning method of social organization of a paralyzed history, of a paralyzed memory, of an abandonment of any history founded in historical time,’” and this “‘false consciousness of time’” must be refused (1026). To refract social justice movements “through an Indigenous lens compels us to be attentive to both the larger ontological and epistemic underpinnings of settler colonialism; to discern the relationship between our struggles and others; to disrupt complicity and ignite a refusal of the false promises of capitalism,” Grande writes. The agenda for the anti-capitalist resistance was set long ago: “It is about land and defense of land. Land is our collective past, our present, and our future. This is our one demand” (1027).
Grande’s essay suggests the ways that Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle might be useful for my research, and I should read it sooner rather than later. However, I was surprised at being reminded about Alberto Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, a book I read in 2019 but had forgotten about. It is central to my research, and I need to return to it, particularly for the paper I’m working on right now. Memmi’s book might be the key to that paper’s argument, and yet had I not read Grande’s essay, I would have forgotten that key existed.
Works Cited
Anderson, Ben. “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 34, no. 6, 2010, pp. 777-98.
Baloy, Natalie J.K., “Spectacles and Spectres: Settler Colonial Spaces in Vancouver.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 2016, pp. 209-34. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2015.1018101.
Grande, Sandy. “Refusing the Settler Society of the Spectacle.” Handbook of Indigenous Education, edited by Elizabeth Ann McKinley and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Springer, 2019, pp. 1013-29.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized, expanded edition, Beacon, 1991.
O’Sullivan, John. “The Great Nation of Futurity.” The United States Democratic Review, vol. 6, no. 23, 1839, pp. 426-30. https://hdl.handle.net/2017/coo.31924085376634.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630/15554.
Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006, pp. 387-409.
