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ABSTRACT
Inspired by “Phantasms in the Halls,” we return to the original call and the violent chaos of the present to extend fugitivity to where it has always been, the university and city, and to consider the settler colonial present. The colonist, the enslaver, the manager, the police have settled into the banalities of work and life such that it may be easy for some to claim innocence when in practice an incommensurable relationality offers the more just, decolonial future. The settler colonial present seen here is urbicidal in the metropole and necroviolent in the desert, leading us to consider whether a settler apparatus might aid in the finding and making of an otherwise future.
Acknowledgements
We thank our families for supporting our work, hearing our stories, and granting us time. We thank Mutiny coffee in Trinidad, Colorado for hosting the inaugural chat with Michael and John. We thank the July ’22 high desert thunderstorms for reminding us of our place. Kathleen McConnell courted our intellectual insurrections across two years and guided us through the maze of quags called “production” aided so timely and kindly by Sohinee Roy. We thank the Advisory Board for supporting ours and other antiracist and decolonial projects. We are indebted to a host of reviewers, Armond R. Towns, who commented on the call, and then our lovely, anonymous reviewers for each contributor. Foremost, we thank Pavi, Angela, Ana, Marco, Drew, Lore/tta, Eda, Nathan, Meredith, Liahnna, Cathy, and Donnie. All of you inspire.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 A term coined by Henri Lefebvre and furthered by David Harvey, embraced globally as shared governance but challenged as well for its centrist, patriarchal biases among others, by Marcelo Lopes de Souza, “The City and the Planet: Notes on Utopias, Dystopias, and a Complex Relationship,” City 24, no. 1–2 (2020): 76–84.
2 The upper- and lower-case distinction is later applied to L/land to call out De/colonial land relations. Across this essay, I refer to the police in the more general sense of a militarization with too-often racist actions. But in this local instance, and because Police Officer Eric Talley was shot and killed, first through the door of the grocery, and because both city and campus Police forces aspire to inclusive public protection, I use the uppercase spelling.
3 Discussed at length as “capitalist, patriarchal, white, secular, modern, liberal” in Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 38–39.
4 Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 3.
5 Mark Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond (New York: Atria Books, 2016), 163.
6 Anna Haupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 35. A related history of the colonization of the global south can be found in Arturo Escobar’s, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1995).
7 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Sholes, Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 23.
8 Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 1 (2007): 450. Hear Michael Lechuga, “An Anticolonial Future: Reassembling the Way We Do Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 378–85.
9 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, U.K.: Minor Compositions, 2013), 63–64.
10 Ibid., 97.
11 A primary theme in Sarah Ahmed’s, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (New York: Routledge, 2000).
12 An extended comment on enclosure and the plantation that persists is found in Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wang (East Lansing: Michigan University Press, 2019).
13 King, Black Shoals, 123.
14 Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-determination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
15 Mignolo, “Delinking,” 470.
16 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 28.
17 For a review of the term and how it has moved through identity formation and political talk, see “The intersectionality wars” including interview quotes from Kimberlé Crenshaw in Vox, May 28, 2019. Accessed October 17, 2022, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/20/18542843/intersectionality-conservatism-law-race-gender-discrimination. Crenshaw’s groundbreaking insights build from Hortense J. Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81.
18 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2006), xi.
19 Adverse possession is a common legal term for illegally occupying someone else’s land, long enough to claim ownership and even over time if the occupation is not contested. It is, then, a process of legal reterritorialization, if the time and law favor resettlement. I use the term beyond its legal usage to encourage adverse position through banal occupancies and border crossings.
20 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xxiv.
21 Ibid., 145.
22 McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (November 2013): 1–15.
23 Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: Norton & Company, 2019).
24 McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” 951.
25 For numerical data among other tallies, see “The Sentencing Project:” https://www.sentencingproject.org/.
26 McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” 958.
27 For a full study of the banality of “biased bots, altruistic algorithms” and “their many coded cousins” found in the material present that encode racial and economic harm and indifference, see Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2019), 7.
28 King, Black Shoals, x.
29 McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” 3, note 7. McKittrick honors the earlier research of George Beckford who established the “thesis” of the “socioeconomic logic of the plantocracies.”
30 Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (London, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 17.
31 Ibid., 23–25.
32 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1997), 42.
33 Ibid., 42.
34 See Lauren Berlant’s enthusiasm for a non-normative sensus communis that “moves the body away from satisfaction with the horizon of conventional experience.” In “The Commons: Infrastructure for Troubling Times,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 3 (2016): 393–419.
35 Ibid., 42.
36 Mark Rifkin, “Settler Common Sense,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 324.
37 Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization, trans. Phillip A. Dennis (CA: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 47–48.
38 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 8.
39 Ibid., 9.
40 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
41 Tim Ingold, “How the Line Became Straight.” In Lines: A Brief History (New York: Routledge, 2007), 152.
42 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Gross Press, 1963), 40–41.
43 Jason De Leon, The Land of the Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
44 Mignolo, “Delinking,” 456.
45 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is an Apparatus?’ and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 14.
46 Ibid., 24.
47 For an overview, see The Indigenous Foundation, https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/articles/the-doctrine-of-discovery-and-terra-nullius.
48 Veracini, Settler Colonial Present, 63.
49 Ibid, 66.
50 Rifkin, “Settler Common Sense,” 334.
51 Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 6.
52 On display at the Rhetoric Society of America Project for Public Place, held in Reno, Nevada, 2019 to foreground the commingling economic developments of a city and campus. The participants saw, through various lenses, the blurring of one realm’s economic futures with the others often applying the same valuation of economic futures (i.e., entrepreneurialism, innovation) and a trove of economic and figurative technologies such as functional matrices of habitable spaces and master planning drives, and then a thirst (as strategic planning) for reinhabited land through imminent domain and looking well past local histories and peoples. See John M. Ackerman, “The Unbuilt City of Reno,” Review of Communication 20, no. 2 (2020): 104–18.
53 la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2017), 32.
54 Ibid., 4–5.
55 Ibid., 32.
56 Ibid., 6.
57 Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 5.
58 Liboiron, Pollution, 7.
59 Ibid., 59.
60 Francesco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (Riverhead Books, 2018), 237.
61 John M. Ackerman, “Violent Clouds: Ashen Memories.” In Rhetorical Climatology (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, forthcoming).
62 De Leon, Land of Open Graves, 71.
63 Found at the Homeland Security Digital Library, https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=721845.
64 De Leon, Land of Open Graves, 83.
65 Catherine E. Walsh, “Closing Remarks.” In On Decoloniality: Concepts Analytics Praxis, ed. Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 99.
66 Walsh, 100.
67 Mignolo, Pluriversal Politics, 26.
68 Ibid., 240–41.