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Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.168 pp.
In an intellectual climate where scholars are increasingly wary of catego- ries like "custom," "tribal," and "traditional," Mahmood Mamdani's lat- est work offers a satisfying unmasking of colonial constructions, and an antidote to their legal and political legacies. As a scholar whose work fre- quently straddles the border between law, politics, and culture, Mamdani has a reputation for revealing the rational bases for otherwise unconscio- nable histories. From his examination of the Rwandan genocide in When Victims Become Killers (2001), to more recent works examining politics, identity, and terrorism such as Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror (2004) and Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (2009), Mamdani convincingly traces the philosophical foundations of community, citizenship, and policy to evi- dence the influence of colonial categories. His latest work stems squarely from this tradition, offering the added value of comparative analysis, and demonstrating the holding power of "native" as a political identity in the post-colonial world.
Indeed, while decades of anthropological literature on the technolo- gies, philosophies, and legacies of imperialism have located the origins of racism in practices of colonial rule, Mamdani asserts that racism is only half the story. In Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity, Mamdani ar- gues that colonial authority from British India to the Dutch East Indies was specifically based on two different axes of discrimination-"race" and "tribe"-through which natives and settlers were legally distinguished, differently ruled, and confined to separate social and political destinies. Mamdani further argues that the shift from direct to indirect colonial rule, rather than lax control over colonized populations (which promises of "non-interference" might suggest), masked colonizers' vast ambitions to renegotiate the native's subjectivity. Binding the movement to indirect rule with parallel shifts-from civilizing missions to projects of protection, from assimilationism to a preoccupation with defining and managing dif- ference, and towards a new form of govern mentality dependent upon an emerging settler/native binary-Mamdani powerfully asserts that "the native was the creation of theorists of an empire-in-crisis" (6). No longer under the clear control of crown rule, colonial subjects became objects in need of stricter rule and, therefore, necessarily...