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On the Genealogy of Modern State-Sponsored Terrorism and Genocide: Reflecting on Jean-Marie Teno's Le Malentendu Colonial (2004)

Olivier Tchouaffe, Department of Radio, Television, and Film, University of Texas at Austin
evs103@psu.edu

This paper reflects on Jean-Marie Teno's Le Malentendu Colonial(2004) to analyze the spatial and logical map of the German genocide of the Herrero in Namibia between 1904 and 1907 and the extermination of Jews during World War II and their implications in the global expansion of capitalism from colonization to the contemporary economic conditions of Africa. Teno claims that these genocides cannot be understood using a thematic unity but within the broad dimension of modernity, nation-state, and racism embedded in the global circulation of capitalism and its production of a regime of meaning and difference over which the recognition or denial of difference are expressed through genocide or a politics of recognition marked by the conditions created by the reproduction and the acceleration of the modern capitalist expansion since the beginning of the Twentieth century.