Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

22 I Ramnath
Of course, defining any group as a nation is not without
its own risks as the political stakes of identification rise,
even if a community is culturally, linguistically, and genealogically
distinct, with shared historical experience and
aspirations. But here too it's the specter of suteness-the
pressure to establish your own, or to resist the aggression of
someone else's-that calls fo rth the enfOrcement of internal
conformity, elimination of dements who fa il or refuse to
contorm, and relentless policing of boundaries, including
those of hereditary membership, fo r which task the control
of female bodies, sexuality, and reproduction is essential.
What about the geographic boundaries? Aside from
the unambiguous wrong of dispossession, indigenous land
claims constitute an argument for a way of relating to place
and biosphere that counteracts the ecologically destructive
logic of late capitalist consumer society. Statehood aside,
calls for sovereignty in this sense can amount to a way of
securing spaces in which other logics can prevail and other
modes of existence can be protected. Even if we hypothetically
establish a connection between territory and ethnic
identity, establishing a qualitative relationship of people to
places, and places to identities, does not by definition require
enforcing the separation of homogeneous categories
of people assigned to fixed, exclusive plots of land.
Could collective demands for self-determination then
be distinguished from the demand for a state? Nationstatehood
was only one possible fo rm that shared memories,
visions, and social/place relations could take. In practice,
"nation" has also been used as a blazon of symbolic
solidarity, a committed choice of ethical affiliation. Ihat it's