If your world was built on dispossession, how would you know?

In 2015 K Sue Park states (Teresa K Sue Park, Georgetown Law Professor focused on the creation of the
American real estate system and the historical connection between property law, immigration law, and American Indian law, “If Your
World was Built on Disposession,”
https://escholarship.org/content/qt5k99h2z7/qt5k99h2z7_noSplash_c6ce81376197d7808b3f2466e09a9588.pdf?t=p8rl6l//af)

Each colony agreed to maintain its own government and legal order, but approved twelve articles designed
to govern their common affairs, including such matters as jurisdiction, procedures for membership,
representation and meeting, and proportionate shares of the Confederation’s defense budget
and spoils of war, as well as the “removal of residents from one plantation to another; policies towards the Native Americans,”
or in other words, immigration and Indian affairs (Pulsifer 1861, 3). To aggregate their power, the colonial
federations swore to submit to these Articles, and thereby, to “jointly and severally hereby enter into a firm
and perpetual league of friendship and amity for offence and defence, mutual advice and succor
upon all just occasions… for their own mutual safety and welfare” (Pulsifer 1861, 3). Two aspects of this inter-
federation compact seem especially noteworthy in light of the foregoing discussion.36 First, the New England
Confederation was analogous to the compacts between individuals that formed its constituent units. Like them, it announced
itself as a mutual defense pact, in light of the dangers presented by the hostile relations that they had cultivated with the
tribes in the area, or “the state of nature” Locke described. The purpose of this union was similarly to protect
colonists’ security and property in America, all of which, in 1643, colonists had but freshly claimed. It facilitated
colonists’ ability to hold--but also first to acquire, and then continue to acquire--quantities of goods and land
from indigenous people. Another term for this pattern of continuous creation of property through the acquisition of
indigenous lands is colonial expansion, which the social compact supported at the inter-group level, as well as the individual
level, by making possible the liberal use of violence in transactions with outsiders. The privileges and
violence that the social compact distributed placed the collective threat of violence behind every member of the colonial community
in its acquisitive, extractive, expansionist endeavors. Second, the New England Confederation exemplifies a distinct social compact
formation that ordered a multi-level system of government. We can thus understand Locke’s narrative as encoding a foundational
structural principle that gave rise to a new society in a broader sense, as well as rethinking its character as plausibly historically
descriptive. As higher-order social compacts facilitated intergroup cooperation against an ever-expanding background of trade, or
“Promises and Barter for Truck” and land, the consent that individuals had expressed to form the lower-order compacts were first
once, then twice removed to representatives of the increasingly large imagined communities. The passage of time, or the
famous generational problem, did
not defeat actual consent within the federated social compact—already an abstraction
from the stillfeudal family order-- as
much as spatial, territorial ambition, or expansion did. When direct
participation became impractical within the government that held itself to be of, by and for the
people, consent became synecdochal through political representation. Thus, while the social
compacts founding New England towns and uniting colonial federations were analogous in form,
they also existed in direct relation to one another and transformed the meaning of consent to
political government. By 1700, the growth and proliferation of federations between the originally diverse townships formed by
civil covenants, which had determined “where people settled and lived” and “affected virtually all citizens of seventeenth century
New England,” resulted in increasing civil and political uniformity (Weir 2005, 236, 233). The United Colonies’ Articles of
Confederation emerged in parallel order with the later 1754 Albany Plan of Union, an intercolonial pact that Benjamin Franklin
proposed in order to treat with the Iroquois Confederation.37 Both preceded the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union
ratified by all thirteen of the original colonies in 1781. As John Quincy Adams stated, “The New England confederacy
of
1643 was the model and prototype of the North American confederacy of 1774” (Pulsifer 1861,
xiv-xv). In both of these cases, the parties formed the union without authority or sanction from
the charters given by the Crown, the authority to which they were supposed to defer. Where the
formation of the United Colonies produced tension within this hierarchical relationship, the United States pursued independence
through the Revolution, indexing the growing power and appeal of the colonial expansion these unions supported. Adams, indeed,
refuted the colonies’ debt of allegiance to the Crown by identifying natural law as the source of authority for these federal compacts,
writing, “In both cases it was the great law of nature and of nature's God-- the law of self-preservation and self-defence, which
invested the parties, as separate communities, with power to pledge their mutual faith for the common defence and general welfare
of all” (Pulsifer 1861, xiv-xv). The law of transnational relations, by his account, licensed the Union to organize their forces against
both indigenous nations and the Crown, when it allied with the enemies against whom the colonies had joined forces. In short, a s
the advantages of civil society in the state of nature made social compacts proliferate across
New England, these compacts’ intensification of the state of nature they produced gave rise to a
higher-order compact and the principle of federalism itself, which was finally enshrined in the
Constitution. 38 This emergence of federations signaled the appearance of prototypical modern
state forms, whose consolidation and organization of force raised the stakes of the omnipresent
threat of war in the state of nature. At this inter-group level, the comparison we drew earlier between compacts and
collusion or conspiracy also translates as a project Charles Tilly has called “war risking and state making.” Drawing from the
European, rather than American context, Tilly describes states as “quintessential protection rackets with the advantage of
legitimacy,” and historical war and state makers as akin to “coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs” (1985, 169). However, where
Tilly contrasts this image of states as coercive forces of business against benevolent ideas about the state such as “social contract”
(1985, 169), I have tried to show here how the social contract is not the opposite but the essence of the form that organizes and
directs the violence of the state that Tilly emphasizes. The historical example of New England, I have argued, sheds light on the
Second Treatise by illustrating “the place of organized means of violence in the growth and change of those peculiar forms of
government we call national states” (Tilly 1985, 170), from the law-founding consolidation of violence of the first individual and
federal compacts, to the new orders of violent expropriation, contracts and compacts that emerged under the United States’
expansion efforts, which I will explore below

The Mutual Defense Treaties represent more than an expansion of U.S.

militarism – they function as an extension of Westphalian sovereignty by
establishing another legal order with re-arranged institutions and
landscapes – reducing alliance commitments is NOT enough we must
tackle the logic of U.S. expansion which IS conquest.
Cachola 14 (Ellen-Rae Cachola, PhD in Archival Studies from UCLA, “Archives of Transformation: A Case Study of the
International Women’s Network Against Militarism’s Archival System,”
https://escholarship.org/content/qt4z62v6j5/qt4z62v6j5.pdf//)

In The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire, Bartholomew Sparrow writes how the imperial legacy of the Insular
Cases was that the “United States did not have to expand geographically; it could rule informally,
instead through other governments, with the help of U.S. forces and international institutions.”
128 The doctrine of the Insular Cases gave the U.S. the ability to “divest itself of territories” such as “Cuba, the Philippines and other
U.S. territories.”129 This quote reflects the adaptive expansion of the U.S. Imperial Archival
jurisdiction before and beyond the Insular Cases, into new eras and regions, much like the
strategy of the Holy Roman empire of allowing nation-states to practice their own sovereignties,
but to institutionalize militarism as a mechanism to assert balance between nation-states. This next
section examines the provenance of the Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs), and its role in defining U.S. bilateral relations with
countries that host U.S. military facilities to enforce regional security arrangements. The records’ authenticity is enforced through
enabling the development of infrastructural and institutional systems that becomes the physical embodiment of the interpretation of
security documented on the record. The records’ meaning of security is then deployed through those institutions, and the people
employed in those institutions, thereby shaping the population’s own understanding of security, as they are being organized to
operate and innovate within that physical, juridical order. However, the rights of citizens within U.S. base hosting nations are not
necessarily protected under the U.S. constitution. In this context, I use the records continuum model to examine the SOFAs as a
record that was created to document a kind of orientalist relationship between nations. The
orientalistic nature of the SOFAs embody the pluralizations of the Treaties of Extraterritoriality which shaped the racist logic that
subjects Asian nations as inferior to western law and Westphalian discourses of security. SOFAs are multilateral and bilateral
agreements on the status of U.S. Armed Forces in more than 100 countries. SOFAs are based on previous treaties
and agreements regarding military defense and political-economic cooperation among countries
in Europe, Middle East, Africa, South America, North America and the Pacific.130 Military researcher
Chalmers Johnson historicizes the SOFAs in Japan and Korea as byproducts of imperial relations between western nation-states
and “orientalized” 131 Asian countries. The Opium War of 1839-1842 and the Anglo-Chinese War of 1856-1860 were examples of
“British gunboat diplomacy that forced China to open its ports to trade.”132 The Treaty of Nanking first allowed British to access
Chinese ports for trade. But, when the British were caught smuggling opium from India across China, the Chinese took away British
rights to port.133 In response, the British asserted a Treaty of Extraterritoriality to legitimize their use of military violence against the
Chinese for resisting their right to access. Kayaoglu writes that extraterritorial courts were the organs of Western
juridical extension in racialized, non-Western countries. Westerners in non-western territory would lobby for
immunity for crimes committed in non-western territory because they claimed that the territory was lawless, or inferior to western
legal judgments of what constituted criminal acts.134 The U.S. inherited Britain’s imperial tactics of utilizing
military violence to assert their power against “Asian Others,” such as in Korea, Japan and the
Philippines, during the Filipino-American War, World War II and the Cold War.135 During the Cold War, South Korea, Okinawa
and the Philippines were sites of major U.S. bases to store weaponry and fuel ships and airplanes, as well as for the training and
Rest and Recreation of troops preparing to go to, or returning from war.136 The Status of Forces Agreements first emerged
during the U.S. Cold War international diplomacy. Some scholars argue that these security agreements emerged to protect the
spread of communism. Others assert that it was to expand and protect democracy and the U.S. capitalist regime137 through
transforming politically divided, war torn countries, to support U.S. intervention in anti-colonial liberation and
the proxy wars, such as in Southeast and East Asia.138 The SOFAs were agreements between the U.S. and “friendly” nations
to host U.S. military facilities in countries that were strategically located where battles were taking place. The SOFAs function
as co-created and binding documents between the U.S. and national governments in Korea, Japan and the Philippines, so
that the latter supports U.S. Westphalian sovereign interests in the region, and also, develops
their capacity to emulate this expression of sovereignty.139 The emergence in SOFAs appeared in
Japan after World War II. After the U.S. dropped the atomic and hydrogen bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the U.S. helped to
shape post-war Japan reconstruction. This was particularly through Article 9 of the Japanese constitution that prevented it from
participating in collective-defense operations overseas.140 In 1951, Japan signed the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation with the U.S.,
which stated that both Japan and the U.S. would come to each other’s defense in case of any attack. It also defined how the U.S.
could maintain jurisdiction over U.S. troops if they committed criminal acts on Japanese soil, but that it could defer to Japanese
jurisdiction if it so chooses. In 1960, this treaty was concluded and amended because of a case in which a U.S. soldier was tried for
killing a Japanese woman.141 This event catalyzed protest in Japan compelling the U.S. Supreme court to defer its jurisdiction to
the Japanese government in order to protect the security alliance between Japan and the U.S.142 The SOFA was
integrated into the amendment of the Treaty, as Article VI, which stated that the U.S. is granted
to use land, air, naval forces of facilities and areas in Japan to contribute to the security of
Japan and the maintenance of peace and security in the Far East.143 This treaty was important aspect of
supporting national security, the core of Japan-U.S. relations, and the basis for Japan’s international relations.144 In this example,
we see how SOFAs tie the landscapes and legal systems of Japan into a U.S. organizational logic of
Westphalian nation-state development. The history of Japan’s political subjugation under the U.S. can be traced back
to the history of western and U.S. gunboat diplomacy in Asia. Japan began to nationalize during the latter half of the 19th century.
It sought to defend its own sovereignty, during at time of increasing western encroachment into Asia, through
emulating the form of power being performed by western sovereign nations. In 1879, Japan annexed
Okinawa, an island off the southern part of three main Japanese islands, and 0.6% of Japan’s territory, as part of its process of
becoming an imperial power in Asia. Japan engaged in the SinoJapanese War of 1894-1895 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-
1905, and World War II of 1939-1945.145 Today, 75% of Japan’s bases are concentrated in Okinawa. The high
concentration of military facilities in Okinawa meant that it functioned as a buffer for wars
between the U.S. and Japan, particularly during World War II. The presence of bases in Okinawa also led to the
instances of sexual violence against local Okinawan women. There have been popular movements in Okinawa to address the chain
of command that leads to the double colonization of Okinawa—colonization by Japan’s national security policies, and also by U.S.
national security policies, which informs Japan’s security discourse.146 After the Japanese occupation in World
War II, Korea began to host U.S. bases in the southern part of the peninsula, while the Soviet
Union controlled the northern part. This was the split between North and South Korea. In the 1950s, North Korea
invaded South Korea, leading to the Korean War. South Korea signed the Mutual Defense Treaty with the U.S. in
1953. This allowed U.S. bases to operate in South Korea. The Status of Forces Agreement updated this
treaty.147 The U.S. invested $12 billion in economic aid to South Korea between 1945-1965. When the South Korean
economy grew, the U.S. pressured them to pay for the U.S. bases stationed in their country. In
1999, South Korea provided $334 million equivalent of direct contributions and $441 million in indirect contributions to U.S. forces'
non-personnel stationing costs.148 Here, we see how war was used to destroy pre-existing institutional and
infrastructural arrangements and then establish another legal order to legitimize the re-
arrangement of institutions and landscapes according to a different order. The legacies of layered imperialisms
contextualize the Visiting Forces Agreement, a version of the SOFA, in the Philippines. The Philippines was a colony of
Spain from 1521-1898. Then, the U.S. took control of it since 1899, after the FilipinoAmerican
War. Japanese occupation of the Philippines lasted from 1942 to 1945. Centuries of being subjected to other
government administrative systems and interests began to shape the Philippine’s co-dependent
future. After the U.S. regained balance in Asia after World War II, it began to participate in the
redevelopment of the Philippines as an independent republic. It developed administrative
systems, deployed international economic development projects, and trained Philippine
armies.149 After the Philippines achieved independence in 1946, it signed the U.S. Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty.
Through this Treaty, the U.S. used the Philippines to host U.S. bases and facilities for the sake
of “their sense of unity and their common determination to defend themselves against external
armed attack, so that no potential aggressor could be under illusion that either of them stands
alone in the Pacific Area.”150 Under the Mutual Defense Treaty of 1947, the U.S. furnished military assistance to the
 Around 23 bases, the 2 largest having been the Subic Bay
Philippines to train and develop their armed forces.
Naval Base and the Clark Airforce Base in Central Luzon, were created.151 In 1986, a pro-democracy,
anti-bases movement compelled the Philippine government to not renew the Mutual Defense Treaty and close the major U.S. bases
in the Philippines.152 However, from 1991 to 1998, the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) was being crafted, to define the treatment
of U.S. armed forces visiting, and not stationed in the Philippines. 153 In 1999, the Philippine government ratified
the VFA, which grants U.S. military access to unspecific Philippine ports for refueling, supplies,
repairs, and rest and recreation (R & R), increasing U.S. military access into the country since
before 1991.154 In this example, we see how imperial interests and war made the Philippines a space of contested power.
However, legal regimes of the neo-colonial state reflected the continuity of old colonial
power that sought to continue the use of the land for foreign interests, such as the
hosting of U.S. military bases. The SOFAs are a product of the history of Imperial Archives’
orientalization of Asian sovereign law. It is also a record of the act of reproducing and automating a
Eurocentric Westphalian discourse of sovereignty, which is the embodiment of system of
government that has racist and orientalist relations with other nations that do not exhibit western
legal and security characteristics. The British and U.S. imperial governments legitimized dominance over Asian
sovereignty through military force and legal discourse. The SOFAs define how U.S. military bases exist in these
countries by addressing provisions such as uniforms, taxes, fees, weapons, radio frequencies,
license, customs and criminal jurisdiction over crimes committed by U.S. military personnel in
Asian soil. 155 The SOFAs are records that capture how the U.S. relates to countries, not under the U.S. Constitution, to be
integrated into the Westphalian international relations. The acceptance of both nations into the SOFA bi-lateral agreements is that it
discursively binds the nation under the U.S. “model” of national security. Through co-creating the SOFA/VFA with
the subject nations of Korea, Japan, and the Philippines, the latter nations begin to emulate U.S.
sovereign power, as it is prescribed within the SOFA. That is, the SOFA is a record that
documents and enforces the reproduction of Westphalian sovereignty between the bi-lateral
nations by integrating a non-U.S. nation into its Imperial Archival apparatus (the legal, institutional and
infrastructural arrangement through which Westphalian jurisdiction is performed). Then, the discourse of militarized
security as it is described in these bi-lateral agreements becomes the official source, as
byproducts of legal archives, through which the possible proofs of security can be achieved.

Archives reflect the West’s constant domination over indigenous people –

instead community archiving which leads to shifts in knowledge
production on the personal and academic level – this has the power to
transform Western institutions by unlearning imperial assumptions.
Cachola 14 (Ellen-Rae Cachola, PhD in Archival Studies from UCLA, “Archives of Transformation: A Case Study of the
International Women’s Network Against Militarism’s Archival System,”
https://escholarship.org/content/qt4z62v6j5/qt4z62v6j5.pdf//af)
Among the shifts that technical changes brought to the archival paradigm was the access and interpretation of marginalized groups
of national and government archives. Marginalized people gained a sense of power through developing
social movement organizations that began to question history. They identified how national and
established archives were predominantly reflecting histories of people in power.160 Global
decolonization movements in the 1950s spurred activism in various forms—armed struggle, riots, non-violent civil disobedience, and
cultural, educational, political selfdetermination of indigenous and racialized communities in order to advance social change
experiments in countries that were colonies of European nation-states. This was a catalyst for the Civil Rights movements. 161
African American, Asian American, American Indian and Chican@ communities in the U.S., and other marginalized or oppressed
communities elsewhere, sought to decolonize themselves. 162 Through resisting segregationist laws and advocating for affirmative
action, people from formerly marginalized groups entered into institutions of power, with the vision to change
policies and laws. But the evolution of these decolonization movements would show that they would continue to
question the very nature of the nation-state, and not just seek representation within its parameters. This will be
explored through examining the work of community archives in the U.K., Australia and the U.S. Particular attention is placed on the
will of indigenous community archive creators, and how they seek to define their relations outside of the relations prescribed by
Westphalian sovereignty. U.K. archival scholar Andrew Flinn documents how marginalized communities, such as African,
Asian and Caribbean, Black LGBT, Moroccan and the local East London communities began to
create their own community archives because they did not trust the established archives; instead, they could best
 They created their own archival spaces
represent their histories themselves to inform the national memory.163
outside of institutional auspices because they felt keeping their records within established archives
would misinterpret their history and limit their community’s access to their own records.164 This is how they believed
their identities and narratives could be represented within national memory. In Australia, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Rights Movement questioned the records being kept in state institutions because of the assumption of Terra Nullius within Australian
government legal records that claimed that aboriginal people were not existent, or were sub-humans, part of flora and fauna, at the
time of European settlement.165 The Stolen Generation refers to Australian state policies that stole aboriginal children from their
families and put into White homes to “breed” them to be a whiter color and culture. As a result of these policies, generations of
aboriginals lost connection to their heritage, and to the families and countries where they were from. Despite the violence that these
records represented, aboriginal peoples began to see that these records should be made accessible to them, because they referred
to them.166 It also told them about their history of colonization and trauma they experienced under European Australian settler
state. Therefore, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders began to recognize these records as reasons to create their own
archives that reflect their communities’ processes of resisting these representations and setting value back to their aboriginal
cultures and practices.167 Terry Cook interprets the act of creating community archives as a “shift in core principles…from
dominant-culture language, terminology,” and with an “awareness of the emotional, religious, symbolic and cultural values that
records have” to each community.168 He goes on to further conceptualize community archives as having their own
“juridical significance.”169 Juridical refers to the rules, regulations and best practices understood to be governing a
particular archive, and also, the judicial proceedings, or administration of the law. What would be juridical significance
of U.S., U.K. and Australian social movement archives given the effect of dominant institutional
records on their histories and societal perception about them? As stated earlier, a decolonial episteme critiques
the monopoly of western ideas in defining the law, 170 which also informs how the archive itself
would function. This re-defining of archival nature relates to archival theories such as parallel provenance171 that
recognizes differing ambiences in which records’ origins and meanings are created and
contextualized, therefore signifying the multiple orders that contextualize their plural meanings and interpretations. 172 The
examples of U.K., U.S. and Australian community archives are complex adaptive systems that contemporaneously co-exist and are
embedded within the institutional, infrastructural and legal nature of the Imperial Archive that governs them. But through
community archives different jurisdiction, they produce new records and recordkeeping systems
through different relations of power, as the tacit, ambient force through which they contextualize the explicit records
and information objects that represent their historical memories and identities. Within the apparatuses of the Imperial
Archive, namely higher education, communities can produce records and recordkeeping systems
as kernels through which shifts in knowledge and value systems can be performed to
transform institutions. This is done particularly through changing approaches in social perception and relationality, which
impacts institutional leadership and governance. Another aspect of decolonial jurisdiction is through the recognition of
records and memory systems that affirm a fluency with others paradigms of existence, identity and inter-relationship that
decenters the “official” cultures of the Westphalian order. Kelvin White described how Afro-Mexicans are
underrepresented in Mexican national archives because the archival discipline is based on preserving textual material, reflecting its
founding on Eurocentric practices. 173 Although the Mexican national philosophy of mestizaje celebrates the mixing of the Spanish
European and the indigenous, racism continues to discriminate against those who are darker skinned, such as indigenous, blacks,
and black indigenous peoples. White saw how Afro-Mexicans peoples have passed on their history through songs, corridos or
dances.174 White argues that these kinetic records are evidence of the African presence in Mexico, and their contribution to
Mexican culture.175 Performance Studies scholar Diana Taylor offers a decolonial intervention into archival studies by arguing for
equitable recognition of the Archive and the Repertoire. To build equality between the written record with
performed expression— the assemblage of body, clothing, objects, orality and kinetic practices that a cultural performer
uses to communicate an experience—is to critique the supremacy of the textual or recorded material, over
performed, oral knowledge. 176 This politics of knowledge, she argues, reflects the history of
European colonialism over indigenous peoples in the Americas, and the subjugation of their own ways of
knowing and knowledge practices. Kinetic and oral records, as elements within archives of marginalized communities, “radicalize
public memory” 177 by foregrounding the values that underpin certain ways of remembering, knowing and communicating. Helen
Verran notes how the Aboriginal Yolngu of Australia collects and distributes specific foodstuffs according to a collective memory to
continue and support the survival of their local community. Contrastingly, academic environmental scientists collect data through
their empirical, field research and distribute them as written texts, tables, and graphs for a broader national and international
scientific community. This example reveals different networks of knowledge, and accountabilities, between the scientists and Yolngu
communities. The Yolngu prioritize accountability to their local community, paying attention to how their classificatory actions impact
the people and the environment around them. On the other hand, the scientists’ application of standardized classificatory models is
to collect information for a translocal community, at national and international levels.178 This example reveals different interests
between how classification of the environment is applied and communicated. Yolngu classification is toward local self-governance
that bases its accountability on interpersonal communication, and local human-ecological relations. Scientists accountability are to
apply classifications of the environment according to translocal standards, so that what is found in the local can be understood by
translocal audiences. 179 The difference of the purpose behind classification of the environment is based on what that knowledge
will be used for. Will the local knowledge be used to help people that are locally based? Or, will the knowledge be taken and used in
another context, removed from the peoples and needs it originated from? If we consider the local environment as a kind of archive,
and the various practices of how Yolngu and scientists classify features in the environment according to a specific goal, decolonial
jurisdiction reveals the multiple ambiences that can surround this archive. There is no one way, or a singular ambience, of
interpreting it. 180 However, as racialized and indigenous people’s movements have shown, the recognition of this plural
knowledge is a first step in a longer process of structural change--how can this recognition of
plural knowledge transform how the physical space has been organized according to a singular system of
knowledge that previously relegated the “Other” as inferior? 181 Indigenous rights advocates describe how the Westphalian
nation-state juridical order not only has implications for defining knowledge and memory of a
specific cultural group; it also shapes inter-cultural relations. Taiake Alfred has called for the need to “disconnect the notion
of sovereignty from its Western, legal roots, and to transform it.” He notes how indigenous human rights knowledge
and memory systems of inter-relation are emerging based on “respect, not on imperial, totalizing
or assimilative impulses.”182 Cherokee Scholar Andrea Smith describes American Indian women’s notions of sovereignty
as an “active living process” that “encompasses responsibility, reciprocity” among all living beings and related connections to the
earth, such as “other human beings, buffalo, wolves, fish, trees.” All of these entities and their communities are nations that are part
of a different kind of sovereignty in which there is no competition or domination across differences because each are an “equal part
of the creation, interdependent, interwoven.” Under this sovereignty, no one is excluded--if even one of the individuals or nations are
imprisoned, it would mean that everyone and everything else who is interconnected is also not free. 183 Here, Alfred and Smith
critique totalizing, assimilating, competing and domineering relations that characterize Westphalian hegemonic notions of
sovereignty and international relations, as argued earlier in this chapter. However, Smith recognizes that since global imperialism
and colonization, people of different ethnicities, genders, classes and nationalities have become implicated and complicit within the
laws and structures of the nation-state, causing people to be divided and competing against each other to access scarce benefits.
Therefore, she notes “flexible sovereignty,” that is not about separatism, or the sole focus on advancing a particular group’s interest,
but about relating to other groups. Cultural Studies scholar James Clifford cites Jean Marie Tjibaou, who writes that sovereignty
could never be separatist as an end in itself: "It's sovereignty that gives us the right and the power to negotiate
interdependencies."184 This process of negotiating relations to other groups becomes the transformative
process because it requires unlearning imperial, totalizing or assimilative relations taught living
within the institutions that comprise the Westphalian nation-state. This requires people to
recognize and reflect on how their own heritages may have internalized cultures of capitalism of
the Westphalian nation-state, and they must struggle against those tendencies in order for flexible sovereignty to be
achieved across cultures.185 These indigenous articulations of sovereignty become a different jurisdiction that drives community
archives--activity of racialized and minoritized groups that creates and keep records toward a decolonial vision. This activity is based
on the process people’s social movements transforming out of the hegemonic, objectifying, and assimilative impulses of
Westphalian nation-state’s militaristic and capitalistic relations of production that attempt to socialize them into a particular type of
inter-relation. Community organizing took forms such as identity-based movements to facilitate the decolonization of communities
that had been educated and socialized over multiple generations about their ethnic and cultural inferiority to other groups in
society.186 There was also cross-cultural organizing, such as collaborations across ethnic, gender, class and national lines, in order
to reconnect communities to larger visions of resistance through transformation of governance systems that organized individual
and collective lives within systems of oppression.187 Leah Lievrouw describes how activists use new media to reconfigure, modify
and adapt technologies to resist fixation, stabilization and centralization.188 Similarly, the academy can be seen as a
technology of the nation-state that produces knowledge through its function of facilitating
research and of keeping archives. The university was another terrain for activists to support the larger
struggle for under-represented and discriminated social groups’ human rights through accessing the university and participating
in knowledge production as intervention to “subvert commonsense or taken-for-granted meanings”189
about who they are. These movements produced intellectuals and writers190 who sought to advance social justice through access
to knowledge production and higher education. By shaping disciplinary and professional knowledge, they
would transform an institution within the apparatus of the Westphalian nation-state that is a site
where societal memory, present and future is defined. 191

The assumption that alliances is best described thru the euphemism of

“settlement” parasitically displaces the incoherence of native genocide and
black slavery thru a coherent humanist register – prioritize a discourse of
conquest that challenges the over-representation of Western Man thru the
fraught terrain black/red theorizing
King 16 (Tiffany Lethabo King is currently an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at
Georgia State University. “New World Grammars: The ‘Unthought’ Black Discourse of Conquest.” Theory & Event 19, no 4
[2016] //shree)
It can be argued that this kind of historical amnesia, willful ignorance or North American agnosia about
Columbus’ role in the slave trade and the way that conquest invented and instantiated
Blackness as a form of abjection in the modern world is due to North American quotidian circulations
of colonialist common sense. For many, Columbus and the unfortunate yet inevitable genocide of indigenous peoples
are traditionally treated as unrelated to Black life and death within public discourses of the history of the Americas. Even leftist
critiques of the everyday acts of commemoration and public forms of pedagogy that naturalize conquest are typically
singularly focused on Columbus the murder; not Columbus the enslaver. This results in
a kind of ‘colonial unknowing’ and denial that is evinced in the way that the various news sources produced and
circulated the idea that the supposedly Black vandals were misdirected in their public critique and protest. The tone and framing of
most of the coverage presumed that Columbus and conquest had nothing to do with Black people. While North Americans’
disavowal of the violence of Christopher Columbus as well as the conquistador’s role in the slave trade is certainly a form of colonial
unknowing worthy of interrogation; I am interested in the way a similar form of unknowing is reproduced within contemporary leftist
American
critical theories including (white) settler colonial studies in North America. This article inquires whether or not North

white settler colonial studies’ (as well as other critical theories’) preoccupation with settlement,
settler subjectivity and land make it increasingly difficult to register the far reaching and ongoing
violence of conquest in everyday life? Questions that this essay poses are: Why have we decided that we are done with
the rubric and temporality of Conquest? What if we made a conceptual return to the terrain of
conquest, the conquistador and conquistador modes of life? What happens when we pay
attention to the ways that Black contemporary politics and Black Studies has paid
attention to conquest? I argue that an analytical return to and tarrying with conquest
enables a different kind of conversation and ethical engagement among scholars in
Black Studies, Native Studies, ethnic studies, settler colonial studies, and other critical discourses.
Realizing that the relations of conquest have far from abated encourages a reframing and
rethinking of some of the urgent questions and interdisciplinary concerns that critical theories continue to grapple with in
the neoliberal university. For example, rather than acting on the compulsion to ride the newest
theoretical turn’s intellectual current (i.e., settler colonialism) and apply it as a mandatory
analytical tool in order to demonstrate an analytic agility and relevance, perhaps the impulse to do so
should be probed. For example, I have struggled rather transparently with whether or not to engage settler colonial studies
from the scholarly and political site of Black Studies. At this particular intellectual and political crossroad, which the defaced
Columbus statue tagged with “Black Lives Matter” becomes a place-marker; I am obligated to ask different questions. Rather than
pursuing the current question of the moment “what would it look like for Black Studies take up issues of settler colonialism?” I am
compelled to pursue a different problematic. These concerns center a new question: “how has Black Studies has been talking about
genocide, colonization, settlement and slavery?” And more importantly, why has the Black discourse of conquest remained a space
of “unthought” 8within contemporary critical theories like white settler colonial studies in North America. It’s Bigger than Settler
Colonialism According to the origin story that settler colonial studies tells about itself;
its body of knowledge that marks it as distinct area of studies emerges in the 1990s
primarily out of Australian settler scholarship. As an area of studies it regards settler
colonialism as a “distinct social, cultural and historical formation with ongoing political effects.”9 Its genesis is indebted
to the intellectual labor of Australian scholars like the late Patrick Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini and Ed
Cavanaugh. In 2010-2011, the open access journal called settler colonial studies launches its inaugural issue. With an open access
journal, the field has the infrastructure and capacity to travel transnationally and gain appeal. As a transnational theoretical
movement it travels from Australia and New Zealand to Canada, South Africa, the US other imperial European sites. To date, the
late Patrick Wolfe remains a seminal figure in the field and his body of work continues to influence the burgeoning North American
field of settler colonial studies. In 2006, Wolfe compellingly made the case that settler colonialism was a more apt theoretical frame
and structure from which to think through and “beyond” genocide as a way of conceptualizing the elimination of the Native in settler
societies. Patrick Wolfe theorizes settler colonialism is a “structure” rather than an “event.”10 As a structure, settler colonialism is an
ongoing process that can contain other formations. Wolfe’s work acts as an intervention due to the way it extends the field of
analysis for tracking settler colonial relations. In the article Settler Colonialism and the elimination of the native, Wolfe theorizes
settler colonial relations in a way that gives the structure a kind of elasticity—Foucault’s influence is evident—that allows it to
intersect or work through formations other than the nation-state. According to Wolfe, as a structure, settler colonialism—and its logic
of elimination—looms much larger than genocide. Wolfe proclaims that, “To this extent, it is a larger category than genocide.”11
Using a similar logic and refrain, this essay argues that conquest is a larger conceptual and material terrain than settler colonialism
and far more suited for the regional/hemispheric particularities of coloniality in the Americas and the specific ways diasporic
Blackness gives conquest, genocide and settlement its form and feel. As the unique (and productive) social and theoretical
concerns of Oceanic settler-indigenous relations travelled transnationally and landed in North America, some of the particular
historical legacies and contemporary machinations of relations of conquest in the Americas and the Atlantic were effaced and
disappeared. Writing this critique of settler colonial studies in the wake of Patrick Wolfe’s death makes me reflect on the possibilities
An ethical
and limits of his work in a new way, one less motivated by a form of “gotcha criticism” than one urged by ethics.
engagement and critique of Wolfe’s and other white settlers work forces us to grapple
with white human(ist) and earnest intentions and attempts to enact decolonization in
everyday thought and practice. However, the intended and unintended consequences of white annunciations of
decolonial theory and praxis still require rigorous engagement and scrutiny. Wolfe’s work provides the substance from which to do
this ethical work. Wolfe’s work as well as the work of white male Oceanic scholars caused a marked shift in the way North American
discourses of genocide, coloniality, and settlement resonated in the academy. There was an excitement, particularly among white
male scholars who were not engaged in or connected to the kind of scholarship and activism that Women of Color, specifically the
formation INCITE, introduced in the early 2000s.12 The overwhelming (and at times) uncritical adoption of settler
colonial discourses from an Oceanic context enacted a discursive shift that fields like Ethnic Studies, American Studies,
Native Studies and Black Studies is still contending with. The discursive shift privileges a theoretical and ethical
engagement with settlers, settlement and settler colonial relations that displaces
conversations of genocide, slavery and the violent project of making the human
(humanism). In 2007, Carole Pateman examines the ascendancy of the discursive regime of settlement and the settler
contract within British legal discourse. Pateman argues that the discourse of settlement has been a way of concealing the violence
of Conquest for centuries.13 I am curious about the redeployment of the discourse of settler colonialism in the emerging field of
North American settler colonial studies. I wonder if it is functioning as a ruse and way of distracting
critical theory from grappling with the relations of conquest as well as urgent political
and theoretical concerns of Native Studies and Black Studies and movements concerned
with Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Black Lives Matter. On one level, as the fervor
over white settler colonial studies grows, a form of discursive genocide is performed as Native scholars,
texts and analytics disappear from the conversation. Further an actual discussion of
Native genocide is displaced by a focus on the white settler’s relationship to land
rather than their parasitic and genocidal relationship to Indigenous peoples . Settler
colonialism also suffers from an acute form of aphasia in relation to Blackness and
slavery. Land, space and (white settler) subjectivity become rubrics of analysis that are
elaborated upon and theorized through a resuscitation of humanist continental theory.14
Humanist modes of legibility reassert themselves through Marx’s worker, capitalist,
property and Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power at the level of the individual and
governmentality and biopolitics at the scale of population. Settler colonialism forces its interlocutors
into conversations rife with humanist analogies and discussion of resolutions that Native Studies and Black Studies (specifically
Afropessimists)15 with a steadfast commitment to abolishing genocide and humanist forms of sovereignty would resist. These
analytic and political imperatives within strains of Native and Black Studies are important to preserve within discussions of coloniality
in the Americas. While white settler colonial studies interventions are important—and should not be dismissed—it is also important
settler colonial studies’ primary preoccupation is with the settler’s
to notice the ways that
relationship to land (or terra nullius). This focus on terra nullius and land disappears the
settler’s relationship to violence and the intricate and violent processes of the human’s
self-making. A focus on the settler and their relationship to land displaces the way the
settler also becomes the conquistador /a (human) through Native genocide and Black
dehumanization. Further, genocide or Wolfe’s “structural genocide” often becomes a secondary
and provisional concern of the field. In Wolfe’s own synopsis of settler colonial power the relationship to land is the
privileged site of analysis. In sum, then, settler colonialism is an inclusive, land-centered project that coordinates a comprehensive
range of agencies, from the metropolitan center to the frontier encampment, with a view to eliminating Indigenous societies. Its
operations are not dependent on the presence or absence of formal state institutions or functionaries.16 Further, drawing on Cole
Harris’ work, Wolfe deploys a Marxian analysis in order to draw attention to settler colonialism’s “principal momentum.”17
“Combine capital’s interest in uncluttered access to land and settlers’ interest in land as
livelihood, and the principal momentum of settler colonialism comes into focus.”18
Wolfe effectively categories and names settler colonialism a land-centered project as
opposed to a genocide-centered project. In the well-rehearsed passage from the germinal 2006 essay, setter
colonialism’s land-centered and oriented project is placed in the active, animating and independent clause of the sentence.
Genocide becomes a byproduct and subordinate clause, “with a view to eliminating Indigenous societies”19 that merely functions as
a modifier. If we also think with the figure of the conquistador Columbus tagged with “Black Lives Matters,” we can maintain a focus
on the ways that Native genocide and Black enslavement as a dehumanizing and property-making venture ensured the historical
The conquistador and
and current conditions of possibility (on the land-made property) for conquistador subjectivity.
conquistador relations and modes of life (which can become subjectless discourses) are
the historic and ongoing daily processes of white human self-actualization that require
the making of the Indian as non human well as the making of Black Slave as forms of
property. The making of the Conquistador—as the human—can be tracked
methodologically as bloody, bodily, discursive, sensual (and affective) enactments of
perverse and gratuitous violence as well as theoretically approached and narrated as a
way of deftly and surgically reading the minutia of its quotidian discursive moves and
affectations. Further a focus on conquest can reroute attention to a Black Studies’ critiques
of the human and humanism. I argue that it is in this discourse of conquest that we find Black
Studies lingua franca for staging a discussion with Native Studies as an interlocutor.
Further, Black discourses of conquest fill in the conceptual gaps of Blackness that
currently vex and confound white settler colonial studies. Bringing Black Lives into the Frame through
Conquest and the Human Conquest can be traced as a mode of speech and thinking within the
work of a number of Black scholars. Understanding the mechanizations of conquest from within
Black Studies requires placing an emphasis on the sociogenic making and remaking of
the human (Christian, European Man, economic man, etc.) as an object of study. According to Alexander Wehelyie, Black
Studies has “taken as its task the definition of the human itself.”20 Given the histories of slavery, colonialism,
segregation, lynching and so on, humanity has always been a principal question within
black life and thought in the west; or rather, in the moment in which blackness becomes apposite to humanity,
Man’s conditions of possibility lose their ontological thrust, because their limitations are rendered abundantly clear. Thus, the
functioning of blackness as both inside and outside modernity sets the stage for a general theory of the human, and not its particular
exception.21 Like Weheliye’s project in Habeus Viscus, I use the works of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter as models for the
ways that Black intellectual traditions stalk the making of the human through the relations of conquest. Spillers’ and Wynter’s urgent
questions about how the human is made requires an interrogation of how conquest shapes processes of self-actualization in relation
to Black and Indigenous peoples and our Cartesian concept of land as other than human. I also bring Frank Wilderson’s discussion
of the everyday and banal yet gratuitous violence of the making of Settler/Master/Human subjectivity into conversation with Spillers
in order to think about conquest as an ongoing set of relations. Further thinking about conquest as a set of relations, mode of life,
Examining Spillers
set of relations and forms of thought/knowing deserves a more robust elaboration and theorization.
and Wynter’s work, the discourse of conquest functions as a grammar that endows the
scholars with multi-forked tongues. This toungue’s polyvocality enables a simultaneous
utterance and consideration of slavery and genocide. More importantly, Spillers and
Wynter think about the emergence of the hierarchy of the human species as a
epistemological order that is only able to appear in contradistinction to “human Others”
and the human’s Other. The European-Christian can only rise to the apex of the summit
of humanity through the invention and subjugation of the Native and Black as the
heathen and then eventually the irrational, sensual abject muck in which the last link of
the great chain of being hangs. A part of Weheliye’s exploration of Wynter’s and Spillers’ bodies of work entail an in
depth exploration of the ways they expound upon the bloody and always ongoing process of crafting and recrafting Man. Wynter’s
and Spillers’ thinking provides alternate genealogies for theorizing the ideological and physiological mechanics of the violently tiered
categorization of the human species in western modernity, which stand counter to the universalizing but resolutely Europe-centered
visions embodied by bare life and biopolitics. They do so—in sharp contrast to Foucault and Agamben—without demoting race and
gender to the rank of the ethnographically particular, instead exposing how these categories carved from the swamps of slavery and
colonialism [genocide] the very flesh and bones of modern Man.22 In addition to the violent and mutable procedures that reproduce
Man, Weheylie also locates these processes in the swamp land of slavery and colonialism, specifically genocide.

If your world was built on dispossession what could you do?

Treaties don’t end wars– only the conquest of Natives bodies do. Native
resistance takes the shape of reclaiming lost narratives of colonization.
Brooks 18 Lisa Brooks, a historian, writer, and professor of English and American studies at Amherst College
in Massachusetts where she specializes in the history of Native American and European interactions from the American colonial
period to the present, “Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philipp’s War,” https://yale-universitypressscholarship-com.ezp-
prod1.hul.harvard.edu/view/10.12987/yale/9780300196733.001.0001/upso-9780300196733-chapter-012//af)

Squando’s arrival was particularly significant, since he at first had rejected New York’s offer of diplomacy, leaving,
as the Kennebec leaders reported, for the north. Councils in Wabanaki country had long been underway. The Kennebec speaker
and “chief Sachem” Moxus said, according to Brockholls, that “all the Indians from Piscataqua to Penobscot”
(including Squando “and his men”) had “put themselves under him,” at least for the purpose of this treaty.
That is, he could speak from the grounds of consensus among all of these related peoples. Squando had stepped away from that
consensus, dissenting (as was his right), and had removed himself from the coast, heading inland, an effective diplomatic strategy.
Massachusetts had initially imagined they could compel the Kennebec leaders to “join their forces for the suppression” of Squando,
but the leaders insisted he was beyond their reach. Moreover, even when he (p.344) came in, New York made clear that this was
not a point of negotiation. When Squando arrived at Pemaquid, following further councils in Wabanaki, he rejoined the consensus
and represented his people in the final negotiations that led to peace.37
Following dialogue and “debate” with the commissioners, all the Wabanaki leaders joined those of the
Kennebec in “signing” and consenting to the treaty, which emphasized reciprocal terms,
including mutual cessation of violence and the “mutual return of captives.” It also bound “all” English
settlers to the treaty, recognizing that “all ye English” were “Subjects to ye Same King.” It is important to recognize that the treaty
did not insist or imply that Wabanaki people were “Subjects” of the “King.” The point of the treaty’s first
article was to bind all English to its terms and to recognize the New York commission’s authority to negotiate on behalf of the Crown.
Thus, Wabanaki leaders could be assured of a higher colonial authority with jurisdiction over the New England colonies, to which “all
these articles were carried out on the ground. No more
the English” settlers were obliged to adhere. Importantly,
orders came from Massachusetts authorizing the destruction of Indians after the treaty was
concluded. The treaty also created the grounds for prevention of future conflicts. If any English
suffered injury by Wabanaki people, the “complaints should be made to their Sagamores, for Reparation.” Likewise, should injury be
done to Wabanaki people by settlers, “they were to Complain” to the New York commissioners at the new fort or to Henry Josselyn
of Black Point, the local representative to the treaty.38

Still, as Brockholls observed, a

significant conflict during the treaty negotiations threatened to cause “a
new breach.” Massachusetts sent a late message, in contrast to their earlier communications, requiring new “difficult terms,”
the return of the “vessels” or ships that Wabanaki people had taken. It was likely Penobscot people who had pursued this tactic, for
messages had to be sent to Panawahpskek with this new request. Moreover, the magistrates had instructed Scottow
not to release the “prisoners” until the ships had been returned. Brockholls chastised Massachusetts for this
“imposition,” which threatened to “spoyle all” they “had done” to create a space for negotiations. It was particularly
maddening, he said, for the Wabanaki people who could see their kin held in the cargo holds, to them “a breach of promise,”
given the number of captives they had already released. Six Native people had spent at least a fortnight in the
dark and filthy “hold,” below deck, and even upon signing of the treaty, Scottow would not release them. Brockholls tried in earnest
to accommodate, allowing Madoasquarbet and a Wabanaki woman to check on them, and on the day of (p.345) the treaty signing,
Symon and Madoasquarbet “came aboard to see ye Captives” on Scottow’s ship. According to Scottow, Symon leapt to take a “little
boy out of ye Hold & would have carried him away but being Hindered put him down again.” Many others threatened to “rescue the
Captives by force,” while diplomatic leaders emphasized the promise that had been breached. Finally, Scottow consented to allow
the captives up on deck so that they could see their families. Among them were two “miserable creatures,” most likely the Machias
leader and his wife redeemed from the Azores, who Brockholls said had “too long beene innocent sufferers.” 39
On the arrival of the Penobscot leader Madackawando and “his retinue” on August 18, the
captives were finally released and “carried ashore.” Brockholls acknowledged the Penobscot leader’s generosity
in assenting to “surrender the ketches,” although not grounded in the original terms. With Madackawando’s assent and
signing, the treaty was complete. Brockholls declared, “Wee hope God almighty will give a blessing to the Peace now
made with Indians.” Madackawando could now travel to his relations at Machias, bringing home two of their kin, even as they
continued to grieve the loss of those who had been lost to the slave trade. Symon could now embrace the boy, carry him from the
prison of the ship’s hold, and take him home.40

The next spring, Squando sent a message to Boston to confirm a more “firm peace.” In April 1678,
Boston sent local settlers Nicholas Shapleigh, Francis Champernoon, and Nathaniel Fryer to the peacemaking place of Caskoak,
where they met Squando and other leaders, to finalize terms for settlers to return to the Wabanaki coast. As Baker and Reid have
observed, “In the Wabanaki territory there was no native defeat, total or otherwise. Instead, the
English were expelled” and the war only came to a close with the Casco Bay treaty of 1678, “which obliged English
colonists to pay a tribute to the Wabanakis.” “For the privilege of resettlement,” Massachusetts and local leaders agreed
that each family would give annually “a peck of corn,” acknowledgement to the Wabanaki leaders
whose territory they inhabited. A “bushel” was required of Major Philips of the Saco River, whose mills had been fired at
the outset of war. This was a renewal of original pledges secured by leaders like Warrabitta, but also a formal agreement that
recognized the continuance of Indigenous leadership and jurisdiction, as well as settler responsibility, in what Madoasquarbet called
“our country,” Wabanaki.41

The narrative of war that ends with the death of King Philip suggests that resistance to
colonization is noble, yet foolish and futile. It ends with dismemberment, beloved leaders’
bodies transformed into signs of colonial conquest . What remains, in these narratives, are
only the remnants, contained in circumscribed towns (or reservations) under firm colonial rule and
surveillance. Yet, if we consider alternative narratives, we see the ways in which resistance fostered a space
for collaboration, even across previous geographical and political chasms. This is not to say that resistance was not without
severe risks and losses, to individuals and families, including betrayal and great loss of life. However , it is equally dangerous
to regard the history of Indigenous resistance as an exercise in futility , with successful colonial
“replacement” the only inevitable outcome.42

Likewise, we cannot disregard the power and persistence of Indigenous diplomacy, the ways in which Native people continued to
draw settlers into networks of kinship and exchange. Cascoak endured as a site of negotiations and peace councils between
English settlers and Wabanaki leaders for many decades to come. If we move to consider the nearly one hundred years of war and
negotiation that followed the “First Indian War,” a very different view of the relationship between Indigenous people and settlers in
“New England” emerges: one which must account for the French Jesuits as well as the Puritan fathers; one which must engage with
the many multifaceted alliances that formed among Indigenous people in the wake of colonization; one which acknowledges, as
Baker and Reid do, that “the Wabanakis effectively won the northern extension of King Philip’s War and remained a serious military
threat for decades afterward,” as well as a serious force of diplomacy.43

we cannot repress or replace the stories of Indigenous survival. We must join with tribal
Most important,
scholars and community-engaged historians in recovering the stories of Indigenous persistence
and adaptation in the wake of the impacts of colonization, including these many wars. In Native planting
grounds and fishing places, in executions and in enslavements, in postwar praying towns and children confined to service, colonial
leaders sought to conquer and contain. But in small Native enclaves to the south, including at Pocasset and Hassanamesit, families
regathered and survived. Their descendants still attest to the role of leaders like Weetamoo and James Printer, who enabled the
the fabrics of kinship were and continue to
protection of homelands and their kin. Across Wabanaki and Wôpanâak,
be rewoven. In the reclamation of relations and in the expanse of northern refuges remain—the people who
would not be contained.
Refusal is a redirection to ideas otherwise unacknowledged and renders
transparent how conquest underlies the abstracted knowledge of “neutral”
instrumental propositions
King 17 (Tiffany Lethabo King is currently an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at
Georgia State University. Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight. Source: Critical Ethnic Studies, Vol. 3, No.
1 (Spring 2017), pp. 162-185. Published by: University of Minnesota Press. Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.1.0162. Accessed: 02-08-2017 22:58 UTC //shree)

Within Native feminist theorizing, ethnographic refusal can be traced to Audra Simpson’s 2007 article, “On Ethnographic Refusal.” In
this seminal work, Simpson reflects on and gains inspiration from the tradition of refusal practiced by the people of Kahnawake.14
Simpson shares that Kahnawake refusals are at the core and spirit of her own ethnographic and ethical
practices of refusal. I was interested in the larger picture, in the discursive, material and moral territory that was
simultaneously historical and contemporary (this “national” space) and the ways in which Kahnawakero:non, the “people of
Kahnawake,” had refused the authority of the state at almost every turn. The ways in which their formation of the
initial membership code (now replaced by a lineage code and board of elders to implement the code and determine cases) was
refused; the ways in which their
interactions with border guards at the international boundary
line were predicated upon a refusal; how refusal worked in everyday encounters to enunciate repeatedly to
ourselves and to outsiders that “this is who we are, this is who you are, these are my rights.”15 Because Simpson was concerned
with applying the political and everyday modes of Kahnawake refusal, she attended to the “collective limit”
established by her and her Kahnawake participants.16 The collective limit was relationally and ethically determined by what was
shared but more importantly by what was not shared. Simpson’s ability to discern the collective limit could only be achieved through
a form of relational knowledge production that regards and cares for the other. Simpson recounts how one of her participants forced
her to recognize a collective limit. Approaching and then arriving at the limit, Simpson experiences the following: And although I
pushed him, hoping that there might be something explicit said from the space of his exclusion— or more explicit than he gave me—
it was enough that he said what he said. “Enough” is certainly enough. “Enough,” I realised, was when I reached the limit of my own
return and our collective arrival. Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who
benefits from this and why? And “enough” was when they shut down (or told me to turn off the recorder), or told me outright funny
things like “nobody seems to know”— when everybody does know and talks about it all the time. Dominion then has to be exercised
The ethnographic limit then, was reached
over these representations, and that was determined when enough was said.
when the representation would
not just when it would cause harm (or extreme discomfort)— the limit was arrived at
bite all of us and compromise the representational territory that we have gained for
ourselves in the past 100 years.17 Extending her discussion of ethnographic refusal beyond the bounds of ethnographic
concerns, Simpson also ponders whether this enactment of refusal can be applied to theoretical work. Simpson outright poses a
The question that Simpson asks in 2007 is
question: “What is theoretically generative about these refusals?”18
clarified by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in the 2014 essay “R- Words: Refusing
Research.” Arguing that modes of refusal extended into the theoretical and methodological terrains of knowledge production
are productive and necessary, Tuck and Yang state: For the purposes of our discussion, the most important insight to draw from
refusals are not subtractive, but are theoretically generative, expansive.
Simpson’s article is her emphasis that
Refusal is not just a “no,” but a redirection to ideas otherwise unacknowledged or
unquestioned. Unlike a settler colonial configuration of knowledge that is petulantly exasperated and resentful of limits, a
methodology of refusal regards limits on knowledge as productive, as indeed a good thing.19 In line
with Simpson’s intervention, Tuck and Yang posit that “refusal itself could be developed into both method and theory.”20 For Tuck
and Yang, a generative practice of refusal and a decolonial and abolitionist tradition is making Western thought “turn back upon
itself as settler colonial knowledge, as
opposed to universal , liberal, or neutral knowledge without
horizon.”21 In fact, the coauthors suggest “making the settler colonial metanarrative the object of . . . research.”22 What
this move effectively does is question the uninterrogated assumptions and exposes the
violent particularities of the metanarrative. Scrutiny as a practice of refusal also slows down or perhaps
halts the momentum of the machinery that allows, as Tuck and Yang argue, “knowledge to
facilitate interdictions on Indigenous and Black life .”23
Affirming the method of refusal in the face of the conquistador’s alliances
refusal is informed by a misanthropic skepticism of the
overrepresentations of Man as human or post-human that diverges from
civil and procedural protocols – unlocks native and black thought that is
never talked about in the academy.
King 17 (Tiffany Lethabo King is currently an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at
Georgia State University. Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight. Source: Critical Ethnic Studies, Vol. 3, No.
1 (Spring 2017), pp. 162-185. Published by: University of Minnesota Press. Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.1.0162. Accessed: 02-08-2017 22:58 UTC //shree)

Native feminist politics of decolonial refusal and Black feminist abolitionist politics of
skepticism informed by a misandry and misanthropic distrust of and animus toward the
(over)representation of man /men as the human diverge from the polite, communicative
acts of the public sphere, much like the politics of the “feminist killjoy.”4 Throughout this article, I deploy
the term “feminist” both ambivalently and strategically to mark and distinguish the scholarly
tradition created by Black and Native women, queer, trans, and other people
marginalized within these respective communities and their anticolonial and abolitionist
movements.5 Until a more useful and legible term emerges, I will use “feminist” to mark the
practices of refusal and skepticism (misandry/misanthropy) as ones that largely exist outside more
masculinist traditions within Indigenous/Native studies and Black studies. “Decolonial
refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” depart from the kinds of masculinist anticolonial traditions that attempt to reason
Native/ Black man to White Man within humanist logic in at least two significant ways. First, neither participate in the

communicative acts of the humanist public sphere from within the terms of the debate .
Further, they do not play by the rules .6 Specifically, the Native and Black “feminist” politics discussed throughout
launch a critique of both the logic of the discussion about the human and identity as well as the mode of communication. In fact,
practices of refusal and skepticism interrupt and flout codes of civil and collegial discursive protocol to
focus on and illumine the violence that structures the posthumanist discourse. Attending to the

comportment, tone, and intensity of an engagement is just as important as focusing on its

content . The particular manner in which Black and Native feminists push back against violence is important. The force,
break with decorum , and style in which Black and Native feminists confront discursive
violence can change the nature of future encounters . Given that Black women who confront the logics of
“nonrepresentational theory” are really confronting genocide and the white, whimsical disavowal of Black and Native negation on the
Refusal and skepticism are
way to subjectlessness, it is understandable that there is an equally discordant response.

modes of engagement that are uncooperative and force an impasse in a discursive

exchange. This article tracks how traditions of “decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” that emerge from
Native/Indigenous and Black studies expose the limits and violence of contemporary nonidentitarian and nonrepresentational
this article asks whether Western forms of
impulses within white “critical” theory. Further,

nonrepresentational (subjectless and nonidentitarian ) theory can truly transcend the

human through self- critique, selfabnegation, and masochism alone. External pressure, specifically the kind
of pressure that “decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” as forms of resistance that enact outright rejection of or view
“posthumanist” attempts with a
“hermeneutics of suspicion,”7 is needed in order to truly address the
recurrent problem of the violence of the human in continental theory. While this article does not
directly stake a claim in embracing or rejecting identity per se, it does take up the
category of the human. Because the category of the human is modified by identity in ways that position certain people
(white, male, able- bodied) within greater or lesser proximity to humanness, identity is already taken up in this discussion.
Conversations about the human are very much tethered to conversations about identity. In the final section, the article will explore
how Black and Native/Indigenous absorption into the category of the human would disfigure the category of the human beyond
Engaging how forms of Native decolonization and Black abolition scrutinize the
recognition.
violently exclusive means in which the human has been written and conceived is
generative because it sets some workable terms of engagement for interrogating
Western and mainstream claims to and disavowals of identity. Rather than answer how Native
decolonization and Black abolition construe the human or identity, the article examines how Native and Black feminists use refusal
and misandry to question the very systems, institutions, and order of knowledge that secure humanity as an exclusive experience
and bound identity in violent ways. I consider the practices and postures of refusal assumed by Native/Indigenous scholars such as
Audra Simpson, Eve Tuck, Jodi Byrd, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith to be particularly instructive for exposing the violence of ostensibly
nonrepresentational Deleuzoguattarian rhizomes and lines of flight. While reparative readings and “working with what is productive”
about Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work is certainly a part of the Native feminist scholarly tradition, this article focuses on the
underexamined ways that Native feminists refuse to entertain certain logics and foundations that actually structure
Deleuzoguattarian thought.8 Further, I
discuss “decolonial refusal” in relation to how Black scholars
like Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Amber Jamilla Musser work within a
Black feminist tradition animated by a kind of skepticism or suspicion capable of
ferreting out the trace of the white liberal human within (self- ) professed subjectless,
futureless, and nonrepresentational white theoretical traditions. In other words, in the work of Sylvia
Wynter, one senses a general suspicion and deep distrust of the ability of Western theory

— specifically its attempt at self- critique and self- correction in the name of justice for
humanity— to revise its cognitive orders to work itself out of its current “closed system,”
which reproduces exclusion and structural oppositions based on the negation of the
other.9 Wynter’s study of decolonial theory and its elaboration of autopoiesis informs her understanding of how the human and its
overrepresentation as man emerges. Recognizing that humans (of various genres) write themselves through a “self- perpetuating
and self- referencing closed belief system” that often prevents them from seeing or noticing “the process of recursion,” Wynter works
to expose these blind spots.10 Wynter understands that one of the limitations of Western liberal thought is that it cannot see itself in
the process of writing itself. I observe a similar kind of cynicism about the way the academic left invokes “post humanism” in the
work of Jackson and Musser. Musser in particular questions the capacity of queer theories to turn to sensations like masochism
within the field of affect studies to overcome the subject. Further, Jackson’s and Musser’s work is skeptical that white transcendence
I read Jackson’s and
can happen on its own terms or rely solely on its own processes of self- critique and self- correction.
Musser’s work as distrustful of the ability for “posthumanism” to be accountable to Black and Indigenous peoples or
for affect theory on its own to not replicate and reinforce the subjugation of the other as it
moves toward self- annihilation. Both the human and the post human are causes for
suspicion within Black studies.

Our method unravels respectable social science research that

masquerades as “rigorous” and “productive” engagement
King 17 (Tiffany Lethabo King is currently an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at
Georgia State University. Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight. Source: Critical Ethnic Studies, Vol. 3, No.
1 (Spring 2017), pp. 162-185. Published by: University of Minnesota Press. Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.1.0162. Accessed: 02-08-2017 22:58 UTC //shree)

As an example of how the protocols , codes of conduct , and politesse of postcolonial

“business as usual” unfold in the university, I reflect on my encounters as a student and now
professor in the graduate classroom, reading scholarly texts, listening, and taking part in scholarly

critique and the collegial repartee that occurs at academic conferences. Within these scenarios,
I have observed the decorum of supposedly “engaged and rigorous” critique proceed in
the following ways. Often postcolonial interventions into colonial or critical theory travel through phases, stages of
progression, and levels of engagement with continental philosophy. First, in order to demonstrate your scholarly due
diligence, capacity for rigor, and abstraction, you must learn and rehearse the origins of and become
fluent in the language , idioms, and grammar of Deleuze and Guattari or whichever white scholar is in
fashion . Second, you must figuratively inhabit and empathize with the white scholar’s very personal
and particular existential and ethical questions (even if you cannot relate to her particular kind of

situatedness or experience). It is often in graduate seminars where you have been asked— and we have been trained as
faculty— to have you think about what it must have been like to be Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
in the moment in which they lived. Imagine the trials and tribulations of being a European bourgeois male maverick in the academy
and civil society. In other words, youmust internalize and perform this worldview as if it applies to
you. After you internalize and perform, the third thing that you are allowed but by no means required to do is list the problems with
this theory or worldview. Once you have identified the problems, even irreconcilable ones , you are

encouraged to make an intervention or slight adjustment to the discourse or theory by asserting

that you will now put Indigenous or Black life at the center of this body of thought . The
challenge or intervention usually reads as “what if we put Native or Black studies at the center of Deleuzoguattarian thought?”
Although we may become disillusioned with and challenge a metanarrative, we are rarely encouraged to do what Eve Tuck does
when she “Break[s] Up with Deleuze.” We are often prevented from getting to this stage of exasperation or justified disgust because
we are not allowed to stop, look at, and more importantly feel the violence of Western turns in critical theory. Because of
academic respectability politics that impose a kind of bourgeois politesse on all
“communicative acts,” be they in person or in writing, it is impolite and more importantly
irrational to be rendered devastated, enraged, mute, or immobile by the violent terms on which
continental theory proceeds. One must tolerate that Deleuzoguattarian rhizomatic movements require Indigenous genocide.
In fact, it is a necessary evil in order for the West to model the kind of unfettered nomadic movement that Deleuze and Guattari
The neoliberal temporality of productivity also requires that scholars keep moving
privilege.
unaffected in the midst of the violence. In fact, one is required to work through and repair or do damage control
for Deleuze and Guattari. This is what a “good scholar” does: puts Black or Native studies at the center of rhizomes rather than
contesting the very terms in which lines of flight become epistemic entities. But how do we perform or act otherwise in the face of
this kind of violence? I am not arguing that academics should not read Deleuze and Guattari. As scholars committed to decolonial
thought, we should read their work and understand how genocide and colonialism flow through it. However, we can read without
becoming seduced and attached to the work. I turn again to the writings of Black and Native feminists as an example of what this
critical disinterest and refusal might look like.32 As Simpson and Tuck and Yang argue, refusal can reroute one set of
concerns and questions and redirect them toward other pursuits. Better yet, disenchantment and pessimism can
compel one to perceive or think about new questions. Refusal and misandry can move you out of the

circuit that the corporate university imposes on critical thinking: know , internalize ,
perform , disagree , and then center yourself .

This results in a re-thinking of thinking that problematizes spatial logics of

objective mastery
Marzec 1 (Robert, Teaches Postcolonial Studies @ SUNY Fredonia, An Anatomy of Empire, symploke 9.1-2 (2001) 165-168,
muse//shree)

Retrieving crucial foundational shifts in history that determine the order of existence in our present marks the first aspect of this
archival study of empire, or, to use Spanos's term, "anatomy." The second involves the interrogation of not only accepted
discourses, but cutting-edge movements of critical thought as well, an aspect of scholarship that good cautious scholars take as
a principal charge. In the work of Edward Said, for instance, Spanos traces a movement of thought that inadvertently leads to a
major oversight in the field of postcolonial criticism empowered by Said's insights. Fleshing out the influence of colonization
along the full continuum of being, Spanos throws into relief the repercussions of Said's emphasis on geopolitical imperialism and
subsequent failure to give full weight to the ontological origins of occidental imperialism. This gesture enables Spanos to reveal
the extent to which the
relay of imperial ideologies is enabled by a centuries-long colonization of
the notion of "truth" itself, a colonization governed by a logic of mastery that stems from Imperial
Rome and that "derives from thinking being meta-ta-physica [" above ," "beyond," or "outside"
things in contextual, temporal flux]." Similarly, Spanos finds it highly disabling that critics have come
to take Foucault's emphasis on the period of the Enlightenment as evidence for concluding this moment in history
to be a "mutation" in thinking resulting in Western Imperialism proper." Consequently,

postcolonial theory in general heedlessly contributes to a failure to consider the full

jurisdiction of imperialism . The widespread impulse to emphasize the period of the Enlightenment as if it were the
cradle of true imperial practices is symptomatic of the very disciplinarity that Foucault calls into question. This reconfiguration of
critical thought enables Spanos to "unconceal" the ontological force of American contemporary imperialism, and to resituate the
war in Vietnam as an event that reveals the violent metaphysical imperative of "mastering" informing the idea of America. In
constructing his counter-memory archive, Spanos finds the origins of this impulse to master reality in the Roman transformation
of Greek thinking. The early Greek thinking of being as temporal and groundless (notable in
philosophers such as Parmenides and Anaxemander) undergoes a hardening process that results in

the colonization of lived events for purposes of intellectual manipulation: the Greek logos
as legein (words) is transformed into Logos as Ratio (the Word of Reason); the agonistic Greek [End Page 166]
understanding of truth as a-letheia is annulled in favor of the Roman circumscription of truth as
correctness (veritas). More than a challenge to accepted periodizations of imperialism, Spanos's compelling insight here
shows how colonization begins at the site of thought itself , that it has been a way of thinking holding
dominion for far longer than commonly considered. Thinking, he reveals, has come to be governed by an

impulse to reify being as a thoroughly controlled spatial image , "a 'field' or 'region' or 'domain' to be
comprehended, mastered, and exploited" (191). This change naturalizes and universalizes an
instrumentalism that transforms the "uncalculability of being" into a utility, into a
"world picture" that can be grasped in a technological age that conceals the nothing at the heart of the social order for
purposes of reducing being to a disposable commodity . Consequently, the instability and the
antagonism offered by the heterogeneity disseminated by the movement of temporality is re-
presented as a problem to be surmounted and eventually "solved" with the imposition
of "a final and determinate solution" (191). The power of this triumph of instrumentalist
thinking lies in its ability to throw all foundational inquiry into oblivion. In its ubiquity, this
instrumentality affects the very people attempting to offer opposition to the dominant order, for
within the problematic of contemporary criticism, one is either characterized as engaging in a form of "high

theory" that uses a language that fails to speak to the world at large, or one resists by taking
"real political action." Thus, ontological analyses are doubly ostracized. This constitutes an incredible handicap to
opposition that limits resistance to the
oppositional thinking in the post-Cold War era. Spanos writes: [F]or an

political, means a time of defeat . But for the oppositional thinker who is attuned to the
ontological exile to which he/she has been condemned by the global triumph of technological thinking it also
means the recognition that this exilic condition of silence constitutes an irresolvable
contradiction in the "Truth" of instrumental thinking --the "shadow" that haunts its light--that demands
to be thought. In the interregnum, the primary task of the margin-alized intellectual is the re-thinking

of thinking itself . . [I]t is the event of the Vietnam War--and the dominant American culture's inordinate will to forget it--
that provides the directives for this most difficult of tasks not impossible. (193) This "silencing" of an ontological engagement--
what Heidegger referred to as "the forgetting of being"--parallels the silence surrounding the event of Vietnam on the part of
American media and the intellectual deputies of the dominant Cold-War culture. If represented at all in the dominant American
imaginary, the war appears as an embarrassment, a failure on the part of America to maintain its exceptionalist national self-
image that has been part of the character of American identity as far back [End Page 167] as the Puritan "errand in the
wildnerness." This prevailing view of Vietnam--made manifest most explicitly when President George Bush announced that the
American people had "kicked the Vietnam syndrome" by "winning" the Gulf War--is part and parcel of the reigning philosophical
view of the American order: the Hegelian-informed view that we have reached the "end of
history" with the form of democracy known as "free-market" capitalism (an economy of ordering that
not only governs Western nation-states, but seeks to rule "Third World" cultures as well). Having "reached the end" implies
that one has solved and mastered the contradictions hindering the socio-political domain,
that one "stands above" the fray and movement of difference. It is at this point that we come to see Spanos's most significant
contribution to critical inquiry. His building of a counter-memory archive, through the refusal to separate the
ontological from the sociopolitical, enables him to reveal the full reign and power of
an American exceptionalism that presents itself as benign. The power of this current order of
reality lies in its ability to separate the many "sites" that constitute the continuum of
being. By presenting Vietnam, free-market democracy, Puritanism, the Hegelian "end of history,"
and the Roman transformation of Greek thinking as unrelated , the order disables the critical thinker from
"unconcealing" the depth of its control. This disciplined split--the logic of the "interregnum"--continues to
consume and disable the full potential of resistance. The split afflicts the most formidable thinkers, even
Spanos's own intellectual master guides, Heidegger (who's emphasis on ontology overlooks the socio-political) and Foucault
(who's primary focus on the socio-political register generates its own blindness to the power of ontological domination).
Questioning this logic of the interregnum demands what one would hope scholarly research to always
offer as a matter of course--a reconsideration of the ways in which we think in the present. This
requires that the scholar who wishes to rub against the imperatives of the interregnum
rethink the very movement of thought. In that rethinking we must confront without apology the increasing
rapaciousness of not only the self-congratulatory nature of American rhetoric, but the growing, insidious neo-imperial movement
of transnational corporations that have come to extend the logic of mastery beyond national borders. As such, living in the
interregnum presents the critical scholar with a singular intellectual burden--one, according to Spanos, "most difficult but not
impossible."

Centering debates on the juridical processes of violence ignores the

collapse of justice into law enforcement is the logic of obliteration that
provides justification for the state’s deployment of deadly forces.
Da Silva 14 (Denisa Ferreira DA Silva, “No Bodies,” https://www-tandfonline-com.ezp-
prod1.hul.harvard.edu/doi/pdf/10.1080/10383441.2009.10854638?needAccess=true//)

From the juridical point of view, the killing on site/on sight of favela residents — regardless of whether or not they are involved in drug
trafficking — could be read as an instance of Kant’s jus necessitatis (right of necessity), which applies to a subjectively determined act, the kind
that is altogether beyond condemnation (inculpable), but which is ‘only to be adjudged as exempt from punishment (impunibile).52 We are
familiar with jus necessitatis in criminal cases when selfpreservation (self-defence) is used to justify the
killing of a person — as in the case of the police officers who were acquitted of the killing of Amadou
Diallo.53 My argument in the preceding analysis, however, is that justification, as in the case of these occupations of Rio’s economically
dispossessed black and brown territories, precedes the deployment of the state’s deadly forces . This is not, however, because
the state has now acquired some kind of subjective dimension, but because selfpreservation (as a duty and right) is already
articulated the writings of the modern sovereign. Neither a pre-existing nor a thus named enemy, I think, justifies deployments
of racial violence. For racial violence, as defined here, refers us fully back to necessitas; the in/difference justifying
these occupations is neither (god-) given nor the effect of after the fact dehumanisation. This in/difference, which marks an ethical
position, is always-already signified in the bodies and territories of the racial subaltern subject which social
scientific instruments of racial truth write as expressions and producers of affectable subjects , those of human
beings whose particularity/difference the formal (exterior/spatial) tools of racial knowledge produce as subject of necessitas (outer-determination)
and not life (selfdetermination). For this reason, I do not think that Giorgio Agamben’s rewriting of biopower is an appropriate guide for the
analysis of the mechanisms of racial subjugation at work in the global present. While his formulation of biopower returns to the ‘problem of
sovereignty’ without reinscribing interiority through a rearticulation of legitimacy, his recuperation of the state as the absolute locus of power, by
returning total violence to the writing of the political, negates (articulates and disavows) exteriority in a double strike. On the one hand, Agamben
returns sovereignty to the relationship with the subject’s naked body. For ‘bare life’, the one ‘who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’ does no
more than to demarcate the very borders of the polis (an ethical-juridical space), where sovereignty emerges as absolute authority.54 Recalling
Foucault’s description of royal punishment, with imagery of the ‘bare life’ in the Nazi concentration camp, he disassociates his formulation of
biopower from Foucault’s mapping of the mechanisms of productive regulation through which universal reason governs and produces (individual
and the social) bodies. On the other hand, he resolves the political back into the social (the political space of the nation-state) where the sovereign
exercises its legitimate (legal and moral) authority. Nevertheless, when Agamben dismisses Schmitt’s friend/enemy pair, which situates the
political in the relationship between sovereigns (modern states), he retrieves the political back from exteriority, which the social threatens to
signify, by writing it in potentiality. Because it names a self-productive exclusion, bare life does not refer to the outside of the law, but to when it
operates in its suspension: ‘An act is sovereign,’ Agamben explains, ‘when it realises itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be,
letting itself be.’55 Self-determination and selfpreservation, the sovereign’s distinguishing attribute and highest duty, are deployed, but now
protected in potentiality, as self-relation, which takes place between the sovereign that is and is not there — in what he calls the ‘zone of
indistinction’. For Agamben, the ban, the kind of relation the exception signifies, ‘is the form of pure reference to something in general, which is
to say, the simple positing of a relation with the nonrelational’.56 Even if I concede that the occupations of Rio’s favelas may be read as ad hoc
declarations of the state of exception, the key difference between Agamben’s bare life and my reading of racial violence, I think, resides in how
he writes the ban as an act of dehumanisation, the stripping off of legal and moral protection (the ‘ban’), that which produces the bare life, the
naked body before which sovereignty appears as naked (total) violence. Beginning with the conception of the body, I read the human body as
inscribed by the arsenal of scientific reason, the instruments of productive violence, always-already comprehended by the tools of raciality,
namely social scientific signifiers of human (racial and cultural) difference. For Agamben deploys the body to signify life (as zo or ‘the simple
fact of living common to all living beings’):57 ‘If it is true that the law needs a body in order to be in force, and if one can speak, in this sense of
‘law’s desire to have a body’, democracy responds to this desire by compelling law to assumed the care of this body’.58 That is, the political
decision that distinguishes biopower, he argues, refers to ‘the value and nonvalue of life’ as such — that is, a bare life without law and culture.
This difference is explicit in his analysis of the Holocaust, in his account of Hitler’s decision on the non-value of Jews, homosexuals and others.
Though Agamben acknowledges that racial knowledge (nineteenth century science of man) provides the Nazi regime with formulations which
allow that the ‘care for life would coincide with the fight against the enemy’,59 he argues that racism as a political ideology marks the ‘paradox
of Nazi biopolitics and the necessity by which it was bound to submit life itself to an incessant political mobilization could not be expressed
better than by this transformation of natural heredity into a political task’.60 Much like Foucault’s, his use of the Nazi model of racial power
limits readings of racial subjection as a political fact. For the reduction of racial signification to ‘natural heredity’, of the body as a thing without
history and without science — which is consistent with the post-World War II move to ban the racial from modern vocabulary — only renders
raciality a political matter, following the logic of exclusion, when racial difference is used to excuse personal and collective prejudices and
agendas. What, then, comprehends racial violence — the fact that before racial subaltern subjects the state
exercises only its right to self-preservation? My excavations of modern representation in an earlier project revealed that the
deployment of the tools of raciality has instituted globality as a modern onto-epistemological horizon. Unlike historicity, the preferred ontological
descriptor that writes modern subjects as self-determined (interior/temporal) things, the political-symbolic arsenal that
confectioned globality institutes post-Enlightenment modern subjects as racial things, universal entities that signify necessitas, thus
establishing an unresolvable distinction between the self-determined I and its affectable others . There I also
show how critical analyses of racial subjugation miss the more insidious effects of raciality because they rely on the logic of exclusion, which
assumes that universality does encompass every mode of being human, that racial subjugation only persists because modern social configurations
have yet to realise (fully) its universal claims. What the notion of racial violence does is to capture the workings of the most insidious power
effect of raciality, the logic of obliteration, which is inscribed in the very production of racial subaltern subjects
as the affectable I. Not surprisingly, the neoliberal program’s embracing of the logic of exclusion, which is to be corrected with inclusive
democracy measures, renders this raciality’s powereffect all the more apparent. Yet it consistently escapes our critical eyes because it does not
require the naming of racial difference, the specification of the many ways in which the racial subaltern subject fails to express or actualise post-
Enlightenment principles, that which the logic exclusion has trained us to recognise as the manifestation of racial power. Neither is the camp an
appropriate metaphor for the favela nor does the refugee refigure the residents’ political (ethical-juridical) position. Racial violence,
unleashed in the in/difference that collapses administration of justice in/to law enforcement , immediately
legitimating the state’s deployment of its forces of selfpreservation, does not require stripping off signifiers of humanity . On
the contrary, this collapsing is already inscribed in raciality, which produces humanity, the selfdetermined political
(ethical-juridical) figure that thrives in ethical life, only because it institutes it in a relationship — united/separated by the lines of the
Classical table — with another political figure (the affectable I) that stands before the horizon of death. For this reason, I
think, neither Agamben’s ban nor Schmitt’s friend/enemy pair are useful tools for the critique of racial subjugation. Raciality does its
work because it is a referent of necessitas , the ruler of the stage of exteriority; its delineation of ethical life resists
both postmodern deployments of historicity to write the racial subaltern out of moral fixity and neoliberal
measures of inclusive democracy which promise (once again) to realise universality in all corners of the globe. As
such, it undermines political projects that — because grounded on the transparency thesis, the ontological tale that announces ethical life — fail
to recognise raciality’s political/symbolic task, its effect of power, which is the very writing of its boundaries. Put differently, because raciality
prefigures the impossibility of both gestures, the critique of racial subjugation should target the very delineation
of the territory of justice — that is, the ethical text sustaining our demands for recognition and legal redress
should become the object of radical critique. When writing against renderings of nomos as a signifier of law, Carl Schmitt provides a useful tool
for such critique. His objective here is to recuperate earlier articulations of the concept, in which nomos signifies the original ‘measure’, land
appropriation which ‘grounds law’. ‘In every case,’ he argues, ‘landappropriation, both internally and externally, is the primary legal title that
underlie all subsequent law.’61 Nomos, he argues, ‘is the immediate form in which the political and social order of a people becomes spatially
visible … the landappropriation as well as the concrete order contained in it and followed from it’;62 it is the signifier of ‘order and orientation’.
In this formulation of the origins of political power, Schmitt removes the political authority from the Weberian (interior) region of meanings
(motives) and, along with it, dismisses the ‘problem of legitimacy’ — the one which Foucault sees as intrinsic to the notion of right. Defining
nomos as ‘the full immediacy of a legal power not mediated by laws’ as the ‘constitutive historical event — an act of legitimacy,
whereby legality of mere law is first made meaningful ’,63 he inscribes sovereignty on to the territory,
thereby bracketing readings of law and the state as signifiers of interiority , as actualisations of the rational thing’s
self-determination — as Hegel writes both of them. In Schmitt’s rendering of nomos, I find the possibility for a reading of
globality as a site of deployment of the modality of subjugation, racial violence, in which juridical and
disciplinary power merge. That is, it allows for an approach to the political that comprehends instances of racial violence, such as
occupations of Rio’s favelas, as moments of political/symbolic ‘land-reappropriation’. For these inscribe on to these territories — through the
legitimate killing on site/sight of their residents — a kind of ‘order and orientation’ (ethical life) that does not comprehend the favelas and their
residents. Legitimacy is always already given — in exteriority — to these deployments of total violence because raciality
renders the decision to kill residents of Rio’s favelas just because it is deemed necessary for the
reinscription of the state’s authority. Because it functions, a priori, immediately (always-already) in representation, the
deployment of architectures and procedures of security — occupations, military interventions, torture, summary executions,
and so on — need no further justification. For raciality assures that, everywhere and anywhere, across the surface of the planet, that
ever-threatening ‘other’ exists because already named; as such, it is an endless threat because its necessary difference consistently undermines the
subject of ethical life’s arrogation of selfdetermination.

And so I ask you, if your world was built on dispossession, what will you
do?