Colonizing states manufactured internal homogeneity while colonial states managed difference

Evidence

Comaroff (1998:329) distinguishes between colonizing states in Europe that concerned themselves in their metropolitan conditions with “manufacturing homogeneity’ and colonized states devoting themselves to “managing difference,” regulating the threat of heterogeneity, of anarchy (statelessness). Fabricating homogeneity in the metropoles, at home, it might be said, was predicated upon displacing heterogeneity to the outside. … The colonial state accordingly turned “savages” dialogically and governmentally first into “colonial subjects,” by subjecting them to colonial rule and regulation, and then again into “units of labor.” And in doing this, the colonial state transformed “savages” ironically into legal persons (cf. Baker, 1998). The ambivalence of colonial subjectivity is revealed here, for “legal persons” were extended little more than formal personhood. These are persons for or really “before” the law, regulable units or administrative entities rather than fully human beings. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1721

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens the metropolitan-manufacturing-homogeneity versus colonial-managing-difference distinction, a useful analytic contrast for race and state formation.
• XREF: Connects to Omi & Winant’s racial formation and racial-state discussions across the vault, and to similar colonizer/colonized distinctions drawn elsewhere. — connects to: Nazi empire differed from colonial empires by destroying difference rather than managing it — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 50; Colonialism can be internally duplicated within a colonized country; Post-colonial states grew more differentiated and competitive, not more unified — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 29 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Post-colonial states grew more differentiated and competitive, not more unified #epitomizes (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 29
• Colonialism can be internally duplicated within a colonized country #expands (0.82)
• Colonial rule manufactured political identities that it then naturalized as culture #corroborates (0.78) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 45