American Empire and the Fourth World

Since the US election, I have been thinking more about North America. I’ve been thinking about what it means for those of us who focus on foreign policy and imperialism issues to focus on those parts of the world that are affected by these things. We try to present the voices of people there who never get heard, to present stories about the consequences of what ‘our’ governments and ‘our’ corporations are doing, to try to motivate people here to pressure those institutions to give people in the third world some breathing room.

Since the US election, I have been thinking more about North America. I’ve been thinking about what it means for those of us who focus on foreign policy and imperialism issues to focus on those parts of the world that are affected by these things. We try to present the voices of people there who never get heard, to present stories about the consequences of what ‘our’ governments and ‘our’ corporations are doing, to try to motivate people here to pressure those institutions to give people in the third world some breathing room.

I’ve been wondering whether I also need to become more knowledgeable about this continent itself, its own history and culture. It is, after all, things here that need to change if people in the poor countries are going to have a fighting chance.

So I’ve been studying America. Starting before the elections with books I’ve mentioned, like Thomas Frank’s ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas’ and Seymour Hersh’s ‘The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib’. I’ve just picked up a couple of others. One is an interesting novel by Paul Lussier called “The Last Refuge of Scoundrels”, which is a re-interpretation of the American Revolution. The other is “American Empire and the Fourth World”, an enormous and very impressive and important book by Anthony Hall. Hall’s book is about the complicated interaction on the North American continent between the project of the American Revolution, which was based on exterminating the indigenous and turning their land (and knowledge and culture) into private property, and the project of the indigenous themselves. But Hall’s book introduces a side of the history that is difficult to grapple with. He talks about the differences between different kinds of imperialism. Because if the American project was one of extermination, British imperialism on the continent – which led to the creation of Canada – sought to use the indigenous. The indigenous, like any people under attack would, made the alliances they had to in order to survive, and did survive as peoples, with languages, cultures, and a whole matrix of rights enshrined and protected in a series of laws. Hall sees potential for subverting the whole imperial project in this matrix. I’m reminded of Ward Churchill’s essay, ‘Why I am Indigenist’ where he describes how indigenous rights are subversive of most of the kinds of oppressive relations on the continent.

I’ve only just started the book but I already recommend it as a must-read. I’ll be writing more about it here.

Author: Justin Podur

Author of Siegebreakers. Ecology. Environmental Science. Political Science. Anti-imperialism. Political fiction. Teach at York U's FES. Author. Writer at ZNet, TeleSUR, AlterNet, Ricochet, and the Independent Media Institute. View all posts by Justin Podur