Democracies split between imposed dominance and emergent self-determination

Evidence

The elasticity of democracy in the face of heterogeneous challenges can be seen here, narrow and wide, at the edges and to the core. There are competing conceptions of democracy at work in this. On one hand, democracy as imposition, a democracy of the dominant, extending assumptions of racial historicism where those who have dominated suggest the unreadiness to govern themselves of those perceived as not like them, to claim independence, to shed itself of its own repressions and (pre-)occupations until the dominant clear the dominated, declaring them so ready. This is a democracy of loss imposed and immediately denied, loss manifested but unrecognized, the loss of evasions and facile apologies. These are partial and at least in part empty democracies, forced, despairing. … On the other hand, there are emergent democracies invigorated by taking their distance from their own more or less recent experiences with racial death, destruction, and domination. They seek in different and not always appealing ways, but seek nonetheless, to come to terms not simply with those unfortunate histories but more pressingly with the terms of vigorously interactive and transforming heterogeneities. Call this in general the democracy of determination mixed with the other side of denial, of dreams drummed up, often deferred, sometimes dashed.

There is loss here too, to be sure, taken up and evaded. But in the end they seek too the gain of national self-determination, casting away as best as possible from traditions of the dominant and imposed. The democracy of determination, determined and desiderative, seeks to break from a democracy of imposed domination, though nothing guarantees there won’t be homegrown repressions in the wake of such a break and its attendant articulations. These are the themes with which the compelling film La Nuit de la Vérité (2004), for instance, grapples. They are the effects, the outcome of practices of self-willing and collective engagement, not only of resistance but of self-definition also by the racially regionalized in the face of their otherwise overwhelming repression and frustration, debilitating restrictions and oftentimes (self-)destructive reactions and retaliations. Such democracies – in post-apartheid South Africa, if a little uncertainly, more unevenly in the likes of Brazil, and from moment to lurching, destructive and sometimes self-destructive moment in Palestine pushing to break from the grip of Israel’s making – seek to break as much with the conceptual architecture (in Eyal Weizman’s sense in Hollow Land) of debilitating racial characterization as they do with the institutional political edifices built in their name.

— David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 709

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the book’s core contrast of ‘democracy of imposition’ versus ‘democracy of determination’ as analytic categories.
• XREF: connects to: Jameson distinguishes levelling plebeianization from genuine democratization — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 267; Democratic legitimacy depends on citizens’ internalized commitment that imposed systems cannot replace — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 74; Pluralist democracy amplifies the already privileged — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1187 (+2 more)