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Recuperating Binarism: a heretical introduction

In the contemporary Western academy, especially in the USA, the repudiation of binarism partakes of a certain sacredness. Not only are its premises unquestionable, though they certainly are. More strictly, and in keeping with Durkheimian fundamentals, the repudiation of binarism expresses membership of a collectivity that constitutes the source and origin of righteousness. Hence the heat that typically accompanies its enactment. An identification is at stake. In notable contrast to the customary wordiness of scholarly interchange, the repudiation in question is typically expressed with emphatic brevity, the charge of binarism constituting one of the more conversation-stopping items in academic theory’s inventory of reprimands. Despite the semblance of consensus, however, a dissenting positionality persists. As one who argues that settler colonialism is premised on a zero-sum logic whereby settler societies, for all their internal complexities, uniformly require the elimination of Native alternatives, I have regularly been accused of binarism – though not once by a Native. Why should it be that the spectre of binarism, so disturbing to nonNative sensibilities, should be less troubling to Natives? More provocatively, could it be that the repudiation of binarism represents a settler perspective? To the extent that this may be the case, the heat that the issue generates is revealing. It takes us directly to the affective dimensions of settler subjecthood, a conflictual realm that many of the essays in the first volume of this special collection opened up. To situate settler subjecthood historically, we can start with the frontier. For all its empirical inadequacy, the concept of the frontier has the virtue of expressing the protean fact of a historical coming together of societies that had previously been mutually discrete. Prior to a certain point or points, their separateness had been unqualified. In our theoretical enthusiasm at the complexities, hybridities and transgressions that the study of frontiers opens up, therefore, we should not lose sight of the fact that, for all the holes and inconsistencies in the concept, its primary referent is stable enough. Behind all the indeterminacy, the frontier is a way of talking about the historical process of territorial invasion – a cumulative depredation through which outsiders recurrently advance on Natives in order to take their place. Go back far enough, in other words, and there can be no disputing the existence of an unqualified empirical binarism. The question is not, therefore, one of the ground for binarism, but one of where and when – if at all – the originary binarism became dissolved or transcended. Significantly, scholars of the doctrine of discovery have not questioned the polarity of Natives and Europeans, so we can take it that the requisite historical rupture – assuming it occurred – was postponed for some centuries in the wake of Columbus. A breakthrough, if such it can be called, came in the USA in the form of the Marshall court’s concept of domestic dependent nationhood, which decisively compromised the inconvenient