Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of ResistanceThis incisive study reveals the fundamental, paradoxical weakness of colonialism and the enduring power of anticolonial resistance. Resistance is everywhere, but everywhere a surprise, especially when the agents of struggle are the colonized, the enslaved, the wretched of the earth. Anticolonial revolts and slave rebellions have often been described by those in power as “eruptions”—volcanic shocks to a system that does not, cannot, see them coming. In Anticolonial Eruptions, Geo Maher diagnoses a paradoxical weakness built right into the foundations of white supremacist power, a colonial blind spot that grows as domination seems more complete. Anticolonial Eruptions argues that the colonizer’s weakness is rooted in dehumanization. When the oppressed and excluded rise up in explosive rebellion, with the very human demands for life and liberation, the powerful are ill-prepared. This colonial blind spot is, ironically, self-imposed: the more oppressive and expansive the colonial power, the lesser-than-human the colonized are believed to be, the greater the opportunity for resistance. Maher calls this paradox the cunning of decolonization, an unwitting reversal of the balance of power between the oppressor and the oppressed. Where colonial power asserts itself as unshakable, total, and perpetual, a blind spot provides strategic cover for revolutionary possibility; where race or gender make the colonized invisible, they organize, unseen. Anticolonial Eruptions shows that this fundamental weakness of colonialism is not a bug, but a permanent feature of the system, providing grounds for optimism in a contemporary moment roiled by global struggles for liberation. |
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Aimé Césaire American Negro Slave anti-Black anticolonial Aptheker Benito Cereno Black Jacobins Black Reconstruction Black Resistance Black slaves blindness blindspot Bois broader C. L. R. James Caracazo Césaire chattel slavery colonial blindspot decolonial ambush decolonial cunning described dialectic Domination Douglass drone Duke University Press Durham earth Ellison enemy enslaved eruption forces Frantz Fanon freedom French G. W. F. Hegel gendered Genovese Grandin Greenlee Grove Press guerrilla Haiti Haitian Revolution Harriet Jacobs Harriet Tubman Hegel hubris human Indian Indigenous insisted invisibility invisibilized James Jordan labor Marx master metaphor Mexico Minneapolis mole mudsill natural Negro Slave Revolts nonbeing ontological oppressed political Race racial racism Radical rebel rebellion Revolution New York riots Saint-Domingue Scott second sight shock slave resistance South Spook Who Sat strategic struggle subterranean tion Toussaint tunnels Turner underground Vintage violence volcano W.E.B. Du Bois walls warfare weapons White Masks white supremacy women words World Zapatistas