The Dialectics of Domestication: Domestic Colonialism and Internationalist Criticism in North America

• Author / Creator

  Kujala, William Jalmer

• This dissertation offers a reconstruction of the concept of domestic colonialism as developed by revolutionary thinkers in the US 1960s. While rhetorics of occupation and colonial extraction are still prevalent in North American politics, the actual conceptual framework of domestic colonialism is routinely dismissed in the human sciences. I argue that this dismissal largely relies on two readings of the concept that, ultimately, are one-sided: as a social scientific theory of racism, on the one hand, and as a rhetorical strategy, on the other. I argue that ultimately it needs to be considered a concept aimed at dialectical critique, a form of political knowledge aimed at clarifying the stakes and impediments to emancipatory struggles for self-determination in North America. More specifically, it was a rubric of political judgment that pushed against domesticating readings of revolt as containable and answerable within the scope of domestic' politics. It was a dialectical concept in that it worked at the edges of available languages of politics, stretching them to make sense of novel historical predicaments. In turn theorists of domestic colonialism read revolt as exposing the presence of the internationalwithin' the domestic, the impossibility of enclosing domestic' politics as such in North American political orders structured by racial subjugation and colonialism. I argue that theorists of domestic colonialism offered a signal contribution to the critique of domestic politics as such, re-reading it as in fact a violent but incomplete process of domestication. The domestic colonialism concept, considered as an intervention in the interpretation of insurgency in the 1960s, enacted a de-domestication of political analysis premised on an immanent contradiction between the assumption ofdomestic' politics and the necessarily `international' and imperial forms of power required to maintain it. Therefore examining this concept in context offers an important contribution to critical international political thought through a sustained critique of the conceptual distinction that typically undergird the division of disciplines within political science: that between domestic and international politics.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • domestic colonialism
  • internal colonialism
  • critical theory
  • social criticism
  • colonialism and anticolonialism
  • US political thought
  • internationalism

• Graduation date

  Spring 2023

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-dmvy-2b69

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.