In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu interviews Olivia Harrison, author of a new book entitled, Natives Against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France which takes on the appropriation of the figure of the “native,” or in the French case, the “indigene” to serve progressive and indeed revolutionary causes, but also its appropriation by the alt-right both in France and internationally to drive a reactionary program against so-called anti-white racism.

The conversation covers a lot of ground, from a discussion of the basic premises of the French Republic, to unpacking the long history of anti-racist struggles in France, to the period of the late 1960s and 1970s, where we see in particular the figure of the Palestinian, and of the American Indian, play enormous roles in the radical imaginary.

Olivia discusses the ways things like the “Great Replacement Theory” signal a convergence of US and French anti-right “nativism,” and use photographs, films, and poetry to show the complexity of this terrain, perhaps best illustrated by the collaboration between French avant-garde film maker Jean-Luc Godard and the pre-eminent Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish.

Olivia C. Harrison is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on postcolonial North African, Middle Eastern, and French literature and film, with a particular emphasis on transcolonial affiliations between writers and intellectuals from the Global South. Her publications include Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2016), and essays on Maghrebi literature, Beur and banlieue cultural production, and postcolonial theory. With Teresa Villa-Ignacio, she is the editor of Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2016) and translator of Hocine Tandjaoui’s proem, Clamor/Clameur (Litmus Press, 2021).

OLIVIA C. HARRISON

We know, of course, how colonized territories were settled. They were settled by the poorest, most marginal sometimes, criminal, surplus populations. There is that inbuilt fear, right? I don't want to narrate this in psychological terms, but I do think that there's a way we can understand how these discourses have worked. How is it that these discourses that don't actually make sense when you read them work? It's because they offer a solution. So it's not the fault of globalization in neoliberalism that you don't have a job. It's because of these people at the gates, right? So it just taps into these very primal kind of ways of thinking about threats to one's own well-being.

So what I want to do now actually is track this obsession with the figure of the American Indian in colonial discourse. Let's say, even in French literature and art, because it's all over the place, right? The "Noble Savage" from Montaigne's Des Cannibales (The Cannibals) to the present. And weirdly to the extreme present.

Jean Raspail narrates really tragic circumstances, but in this really disdainful prose where he's making the connection weirdly between these Reservations and the French banlieue. It's pretty crazy. So it's very strange because you also have this desire, and he says it most explicitly, this desire for this kind of mythic figure of the redskin. And in those moments, I see a desire for indigeneity. As if he were thinking, well, how can we retrieve this ourselves in France? Because he'll talk about the churches and basically all the French traditions that are being lost as if they were these kinds of Indigenous aspects of French culture that were disappearing in this kind of decadent modernity and in the face of the colonization of France by immigrants.

Speaking Out of Place, which carries on the spirit of Palumbo-Liu’s book of the same title, argues against the notion that we are voiceless and powerless, and that we need politicians and pundits and experts to speak for us.

Judith Butler on Speaking Out of Place:

“In this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times. This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”

David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of literary criticism and theory, culture and society, race, ethnicity and indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. His books include The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, and Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Truthout, and other venues. Twitter @palumboliu
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