Colonial rule transformed fluid ethnic distinctions into rigid binary identities.

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

Category: Causal Relationships

• ADDENDUM: Connects to ‘Grafting & Growth’ insofar as both concern how institutions reshape naturally-pliant systems into rigid infrastructure — here legal polarization hardens ethnic categories into binary political identities.
• XREF: Echoes ‘Things Fall Apart’ in the library: pre-colonial Igbo society had fluid, status-based distinctions that colonial administration hardened into rigid binaries.
• DEEPTHINKING:

Related

• Colonial rule produces binary political identities where none had rigidly existed. (similarity 0.94)
• Colonial rule manufactured political identities that it then naturalized as culture (similarity 0.86)
• Colonial law transmuted cultural communities into political ones (similarity 0.80)
• Race versus ethnicity is a colonial legal construction (similarity 0.80)