Mary NYQUIST

Pre-Civility, Indigeneity, and War:
Hobbes and Euro-Colonialism

This talk will begin by exploring interrelations between early modern visual and textual representations of Amerindigenes and “allochronism,” that is, the ideologically charged conviction that Amerindigenes live in a time that is not that of their European colonizers (“allo” meaning “other” or “different from”). Throughout the historical era in which Euro-colonialism and capitalism become consolidated, European Christendom considers itself significantly more advanced, developmentally, than nearly all non-European societies. The belief that Europeans long ago left “savagery” or “barbarism” behind facilitates many aspects of belligerent accumulation and what is now known as “de-development.” It also continues to be an influential ideological meme to this day. Thomas Hobbes appropriates Euro-colonialism’s split, disjunctive temporality in theorizing the original condition of humankind, most often known as the “state of nature.” One consequence of this appropriation is that fear of Amerindigenes’ “savagery” serves to rationalize Euro-colonialist violence, which, ostensibly defensive, is both expropriative and a means of ethnic cleansing. Another is that it racializes a condition believed to be “natural.” In associating pre-civility, naturalness, and racialized inferiority, Hobbes, his Euro-colonialist predecessors, and his contemporaries secure a foundation for a variety of social and economic practices that are often unnamed and only later legitimated under terms that are deemed acceptable. It will be argued, further, that Hobbes’s foregrounding of warfare enables him implicitly to racialize contemporaneous institutional slavery and to bind it to pre-civility. I hope to conclude by clarifying the terms of Locke’s indebtedness to Hobbes regarding racialized Atlantic slavery. In my view, these terms are frequently either misunderstood or mystified in an effort to construct an unproblematically “liberal” philosophical tradition, whether that tradition is being critiqued or defended.
 

Mary NYQUIST has taught in four different units at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada: the Centre for Comparative Literature, the Department of English, the Programme in Literature and Critical Theory, and the Institute of Women’s and Gender Study (of which she was a former Director). Her research centres on 16th through 18th century literature as it intersects with Euro-colonialism, Atlantic slavery, law, and political philosophy. Since the publication of Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago University Press, 2013), Nyquist has published essays on Daniel Defoe, Olaudah Equiano, Shakespeare, the language of liberty and slavery, and three major essays on Hobbes. She is currently completing a book on Milton (tentatively entitled Milton’s ‘Man’: Resistance, ‘Race,’ Reception) and is at work on a manuscript on Hobbes. When these are done, she hopes to do a cross-over study of racialized acts of obeisance that has been solicited by Oxford University Press. For decades she has been an anti-war and anti-racist activist and has recently published a poetry collection, Wet Toes.