Colonial rule produces binary political identities where none had rigidly existed.

Evidence

In order to understand the Rwanda genocide, “whereby it became possible not only to set a group apart as an enemy, but also to exterminate it with an easy conscience” (13), Mamdani proposes to attend to the ways in which both race and ethnicity are legal and political inventions, the sedimented result of a complex legal process. He proposes to “understand the dynamic that polarizes political identities” (23), identities that are “legally enforced and institutionally reproduced” (15) and that had not existed (not in any comparable way) prior to colonial rule. Although distinctions were and are always operative within any given cultural system, they could always fluctuate and change, “shade into one another, with plenty of middle ground to nurture hybridity and ambiguity” (23). Yet, with the kind of polarization that is produced under colonial rule, “there is no middle ground, no continuum, between polarized identities. Polarized identities give rise to a kind of political difference where you must be either one or the other. You cannot partake of both. The difference becomes binary, not simply in law but in political life. It sustains no ambiguity” (23). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 49

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to settler-colonial frameworks on race and ethnicity as legal inventions encountered elsewhere in this batch, and to the reader’s existing interest in how colonialism hardens previously fluid identity categories.