In our time, in the era of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide, what are the freedoms that are denied to peoples by colonialism and racial capitalism? Ay, and how can we form communities that can function as trellises that enable the most abject victims of colonization and racialization to reach those freedoms?

What do we mean by the term community? What makes community for us? Who are we? What makes us?

In curious and troubling ways, we have spent much of our time talking about our responsibilities with regard to our world as if they were individual responsibilities and not responsibilities that are bound with others who are not of our own generation, with our elders and our juniors, with our dead ancestors and our yet-to-be-born descendants.

Those who identify with the forces of Empire are obsessed with home security: securing a home and securing the comforts of home from the surround. Organized against the forces of Empire, those who identify as or with Maroons make themselves at home in the surround.

The agents of Empire would have us believe the lie that it is imperative for us to feed more precise data into our machines and models in order to more accurately predict favorable and unfavorable outcomes.

The truth of the matter is that our choices regarding what to measure, when and where to measure, and how precisely to measure are often responsible for prematurely or belatedly resolving outcomes in favorable or unfavorable ways.

Countering Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide means two things. First, it means (re-)constructing and maintaining convivial infrastructures that would enable the migration of peoples from the Grey Zone to the Green Zone in defiance of colonial bordering regimes. On the other hand, it means sabotaging and abolishing the colonial infrastructures that are employed by the Green Zone to extract, extort, and exploit land, labor, matter, energy from the Grey Zone.

“Maroon Infrastructures” are assemblages of administrative statements, technical implements, built environments, and dramatic elements that enable us to engage in direct actions to abolish the impositions of the border, the the police, and the prison.

Looking at the matter from one side, the task is to deconstruct the “Ordered World” — the colonial world with its determinate demographics, separable geographic locales, and historiographic eventualities.

Looking at the matter from another side, the task (re-)construct an “Entangled World” — a convivial world characterized by demographic indeterminacies, geographic non-localities, and historigraphic non-eventualities.

There are waves of colonization; then there are decolonial movements; and then there is the (de)colonial continuum composed of the social fabrics affected by these two alternating vibrations.

Waves of colonization rend and tatter social fabrics; they are destructive vibes, bad vibes.

Decolonial movements weave and mend social fabrics; they are reparative vibes, good vibes.

Simply put, the bad vibes and the good vibes don’t jive.

It all clicked for me with a quote from Bertolt Brecht, “We often speak of the violence of a river overflowing but less of the violence of the banks that confine it.”

Consider, for instance, the Grand Canyon, whose natural, yielding banks have given way to the flow of the Colorado River over the course of millennia, and contrast that with the Old River Control Structures engineered along the Mississippi River, violently keeping that great river in check, at least until the great river finally rages against with enough force to violently wreck its engineering.

Borrowing terms from the conduct of due process in pursuit of justice, I proposed that we might come together to learn (i) to bear witness to the disturbing realities of colonization and its wake/fallout, (ii) to testify to the disturbing realities, and (iii) to contribute to the repair of that which has been disturbed by colonization and its wake/fallout. 

But as we unpacked these terms — witness, testify, and repair — we realized that these terms, in their conventional senses, proved untenable and that we either had to make new sense of these terms or discover better ones. 

The magnanimous intellectual doesn’t out-read others but, rather, reads-ahead for others and then backtracks in order to read-in others, providing others with intelligence that will help them determine what they ought to read for themselves.

I’d like to begin by marking a distinction that I think will be very helpful for us throughout this seminar and study group: the distinction between (i) an ideology, (ii) a process, (iii) the product of a process, and (iv) the wake of a process.

When I use the term reparations, I am referring to an art of making amends rather than a science of finding equivalents. Indeed, I am actually referring to a very specific art of making amends that eschews the finding of equivalents: the sublime art of making reparations, as I imagine it, is the art of kintsugi writ large as a metaphor for radical cultural transformation.

Reflecting upon the publication of my new book, Twin Killers: Dispatches Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide, this dispatch sets the stage for future endeavors by summarizing the picture of the prevailing world system that I have been painting here on the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds blog over the course of the past two years, as my abstract theoretical writings gave way to more historical and contextual writings.

No university can become a global university without the backing of an imperial nation-state and/or (neo-)colonial corporate enterprise. And the reverse is equally true: imperial nation-states and (neo-)colonial corporate enterprises need global universities to administer knowledges in ways that maintain and advance their own aims and interests.