Understanding Displacement, (Forced) Migration and Historical Trauma: The Contribution of Feminist New Materialism

ABSTRACT

Feminist new materialist theory has taken up the challenge of reconfiguring politics, ethics and justice in ways that critically account for contemporary forms of materiality, affect and embodiment at work in the contemporary world. There is much at stake in such a project. The crisis of displacement, we argue, is the crisis of capitalism as it impacts on the biosphere of planet earth, necessitating an approach that can account for all the processes essential to life and living. In this paper our intention is to suggest ways of understanding displacement that unites social and environmental justice, while simultaneously merging ethical, political, ontological and epistemological concerns. Building on the nexus of capitalism and displacement, we investigate the confluence of the necropolitical (Mbembe 2003) and the necrobiopolitical (Bubandt 2017; Cooper 2008) as we sketch an uncanny tableau of more-than-human displacements across various entangled cenes – the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Shadowcene and Chthulucene. Our intention is to displace, trouble and haunt the centrality of the purely human in social work. The unfolding crisis of capitalism, we argue, is a crisis of displacement for all forms of life; a crisis that necessitates troubling humanist formulations of justice, care and ethics.

KEYWORDS:

• Posthumanism
• necropolitics
• anthropocene
• capitalocene
• plantationocene
• shadowcene
• chthulucene

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Delphi Carstens is a Lecturer at the University of the Western Cape. His research interests include onto-ethics, the Anthropocene, Deleuze-Guattarian and new materialist pedagogical interventions, art-science activism and fictioning. His publications include chapters in edited volumes by Palgrave, Sternberg, Bloomsbury and Taylor and Francis. as well as journal articles in The South African Journal of Higher Education (SAJHE), Education as Change, Alternation, CriSTal, Parallax, and Somatechnics.

Vivienne Bozalek is an Honorary Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University. Her research interests and publications include the political ethics of care and social justice, posthumanism and feminist new materialisms, innovative pedagogical practices in higher education, critical family studies, and postqualitative and participatory methodologies.

Notes

1 Politico-ethico-onto-epistemology is a neologism created by queer quantum physicist and US philosopher, Barad (2017), who insists on the entanglement of the political, ethical, ontological and epistemological. Furthermore, in regarding all these as entangled, Barad emphasises the relational aspect of knowledge creation by bringing politics, ontology and ethics to the fore and onto the same level of consideration and importance as epistemology.

2 We prefer the term ‘ justice-to-come’ (Barad 2019; Derrida 2006) to social justice as it connotes how justice is incalculable - how it is never something that can be obtained, predicted or calculated. Justice-to-come encapsulates how justice cannot be sustained once and for all, but is an ongoing endeavour. The indeterminacy present in such a formulation also foregrounds how past, present and future cannot be viewed in a linear sequence, but that the past and future bleed always into the present.

Additional information

Funding

This work is based on the research supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant Number: 105851).