White hallucinations

Abstract

In this paper, the concept of white hallucination is developed through the prism of a recent debate about the permissibility of defending colonialism. The latter is, unsurprisingly, steeped in colonial nostalgia and a defence of free speech. These arguments, however, have to be related to the operation of whiteness itself. White hallucinations concern the psychopathological tendency of whiteness to incessantly reinscribe its mastery of the world. Cases for defending colonialism expose whiteness as a delusion that is reasserted by demanding 'proof' against its normativity while simultaneously discarding alternative knowledge claims made by testimonial epistemologies of colonial subjugation and dehumanization. The argument further unravels whiteness as a position-without-positionality that seeks to maintain its normativity and supremacy by aligning itself with rationality, objectivity and humanity as such and subjugating non-white perspectives, experiences and knowledges to the spectre of nonexistence. KEYWORDSWhiteness; colonialism; epistemicide; Frantz Fanon; free speech because white men can't police their imagination black men are dying Claudia RankineA Case for Colonialism. No matter how one reads this title of a recently published (and soon retracted) peer-reviewed academic article, the suggestion that there is such a thing as a reasonable and sincere defence of colonial enslavement, conquest, genocide, exploitation, subjugation and dehumanization immediately moves beyond the rhetoric of innocent provocation. Although it is easy to dismiss this as mere academic clickbait that should not be dignified with a substantiated response, leaving the case unchallenged arguably risks becoming complicit in its normalization. Typically, then, the controversy around the argument and especially its retraction solicited a range of responses that, while not agreeing with the argument itself, nonetheless opposed its retraction as a censorious violation of the virtuous endeavour of knowledge production. The whole affair could have been easily dismissed as further insulating the academic bubble if the suggestion that arguments such as this should be debated rather than discarded did not find

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