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On Glen Coulthatrd’s book: Peter Ives, ‘Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, by Glen Sean Coulthard’, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 28, 1, 2016, pp. 139-142.

09Feb16

Abstract: This review describes Coulthard’s use of the work of Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx to provide an assessment of ongoing settler colonialism in Canada and elsewhere. Critiquing the “politics of recognition” represented by Charles Taylor and illustrating the shift from projects of assimilation and overt cultural genocide to those of reconciliation and apology, Coulthard warns that such projects continue rather than alter psyscho-affective attachments to colonialism and its dispossession of land and resources. Coulthard looks to the work of Indigenous thinkers and traditions as well as to struggles such as Idle No More to offer succinct, perceptive political analysis. Coulthard’s use of Marx’s notion of “primitive accumulation” is insightful, complementing his argument that colonialism in the form of a “politics of recognition” indicates a shift in the role of violence. Coulthard’s critique of Fanon’s approach to culture and the sharp distinction between land and labor opens questions that require further investigation.


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