ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Merry's analysis of the criminalization of everyday life in colonial situations by imperial powers before reviewing the study by King and McHoul of the discursive formation of the Australian Aborigine as subject, and Churchill's account of genocide in the Americas. It explores the poststructuralist elements of postcolonial analysis and what imperial subjection of colonized people amounts to in practice. The violence of the conquest, it points out, has been at the expense of the humanity of the people whose lands have been colonized. The crime of destroying a people is called genocide. By contrast, recognizing them as a sovereign people would have meant that their resistance to colonization would be necessarily seen as a political, and not a criminal, act. Postcolonialism criticizes classical social theory as "Eurocentric" and not just ethnocentric. If racism justifies genocide, it doesn't explain why it might be contemplated in the first place.
