Unsettling ‘we’re all mixed-race’: Métis.se/colonial futurity, settler colonialism and the countering of Kanak sovereignty

Abstract

This article aims to uncover the colonial character of the statement ‘on est tous métis’ (‘we’re all mixed-race’) in Kanaky/New Caledonia, a racially and politically polarized space where there is an ongoing struggle for independence led by Indigenous Kanak people. It uses data gathered in semi-structured interviews with self-identified ‘mixed-raced’ people during a six-month stay in Kanaky/New Caledonia before and after the November 2018 referendum for independence. It also uses ethnographic material and, more specifically, encounters with the figure of the ‘mixed-race’ person in political debates, campaigns as well as art and media that signal an investment in the idea that, in Kanaky/New Caledonia, ‘we are all mixed-race’. The article exposes the political discourse of multiracialism as exclusionary and as a mechanism of Indigenous disappearance in the settler colonial context. It also sheds light on the way in which settler anxiety feeds the multiracial discourse. In challenging and deconstructing the orientations towards a multiracial or métis.se future, that individuals and institutions imagine, wish or advocate for, the article aims to call for a desolidarization from modes of thinking and being that support the French colonial project, even when it masks itself as inclusive.