Session 2: “The Double Fracture”
Many thanks to the thirty-six folks, spanning three oceans, who attended the first session of the Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide Seminar & Studio. I deeply appreciated seeing so many names and faces from so many different walks of my life, old and new.
I also want to say thanks to those who could not attend but whose present-absence shaped the conversation. I know that I found myself being ventriloquized by a number of inspiring folks who had expressed regrets at being unable to attend; and I am sure others did as well.
What follows is an impression of Sunday’s session that summarizes and reflects upon a few threads of conversation that I would like to weave into future sessions with the group.
Folks who want to participate in the next session of the seminar & studio can register at the Zoom link below or, alternatively, they can participate asynchronously via this padlet, where they can post thoughts and questions (in audio, video, or text format), comment on the background readings, and add links to supplementary texts and other media. Notes taken during the seminar & studio sessions will also be posted on the padlet.
Upcoming Session Date: 3 December 2023
Start Time : 10:30 LA / 13:30 NYC / 15:30 São Paulo / 18:30 London / 19:30 Berlin / 21:30 Dar es Salaam / 23:59 Delhi
End Time: 12:30 LA / 15:30 NYC / 17:30 São Paulo / 20:30 London / 21:30 Berlin / 23:30 Dar es Salaam / 02:00 Delhi
Background Readings:
Prologue to Decolonial Ecology by Malcolm Ferdinand
“Check My Pulse: The Anthropocene River in Reverse” by Brian Holmes
“Sylvan Sovereignty: Multispecies Struggles for Justice on the Papuan Plantation Frontier” by Sophie Chao
Post-Session Impression and Pre-Session Primer:
After taking a bit of time to warm up to one another and get our bearings, our session kicked off in earnest after I presented a framework for what we might hope to accomplish in community with one another during the Seminar & Studio.
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.
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.
With respect to the last of these terms, “repair”, I proposed an alternative sense which borrowed from the art of kintsugi and the architectural theories of Christopher Alexander. However, although the question of how the descendants of the colonized and the colonizer are called on to contribute differently to repair was put on the table, our conversation focused less on the term “repair” and more on the terms “witness” and “testify”.
Sarah asked us, “Who has access to the choice to bear witness? Who testifies? In which language do we testify (Glissant and Babel!)? Who is the audience? Who listens, and why do they listen? … Who is on trial? Does it matter?”
Pushing us even further, Deann questioned the order and temporality of the conduct of due process.
According to what epistemology, ontology, and cosmology does witnessing precede testimony and testimony precede repair?
Are we assuming the epistemology, ontology, cosmology, and historiography of the colonizer when we regard these as being steps in a linear sequence?
In asking these questions, Deann pointed us toward something that we will encounter in Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race and Unpayable Debt. Silva makes the case that the black arts and decolonial sciences must reckon with “distinctions without separability” and that we must be wary of tropes that ask us to counter colonization and racialization in incremental steps following one after another in linear time.
Going even further, there were critical questions regarding how it is that one bears witness and testifies, especially as we consider the stream of images and commentaries on the current ethnic cleansing of Palestine. On the one hand, as Raya, Jessica, Alexandria, and others eloquently observed, we will need to develop communal and embodied practices to care for ourselves while bearing witness to so much horror, listening to horrifying testimony, and being called to testify to all of it. On the other hand, as Misi observed, we need to refuse the temptation to pursue the fame that comes with being singled out as the star witness and having one’s testimony go viral.
Media artists amongst us, Ryan and Linn in particular, urged us not to equate gazing at streams of images on our devices with witnessing. As we gaze at the stream, we are often watching other’s testimony rather than witnessing, and the testimony that we are being given often has a curated aesthetic that betrays faults in our acts of witnessing. Analyzing the aesthetics of a photojournalist’s image of an armed Libyan coast guardsman standing on a boat after the interception of 147 migrants, Linn and Ryan reminded us of something Rizvana Bradley speaks of in her book, Anteaesthetics, “The modern aesthetic regime is an essential dimension of what makes genocide possible, not least through its concealment of the aesthetic forms genocide assumes. [...] [E]xtraction and containment masquerade as celebratory recognition, and genocide is fashioned as self-defense.”
What goes for the consumption of images also goes for the consumption of statistics, infographics, news reports, documentaries, films, etc. In light of this, one thing that I wondered was whether something like the Bechdel-Wallace test, which measures the representation of women in film and other fiction, could be constructed to measure representations of colonization and its wake.
Consider any piece of media, fictional or factual, that deals with wicked social, ecological, economic, and erotic problems and events that have taken place in the wake of 1452.
Were colonized people and their descendants involved in its making behind the scenes? How? In what capacity?
Did it thoughtfully mention or depict the disturbing realities of colonization and its wake/fallout? How? To what degree and extent?
Did colonized people inform the mentions or depictions of colonization and its wake/fallout? How? In what capacity?
Did colonized people only get to inform mentions and depictions of the horrors of colonization, or did they also get to inform mentions and depictions of transformative resistance and the persistence of peoples and places in spite of colonization?
Were colonized people and their descendants depicted or mentioned in any of its scenes? How many and in how many of the scenes? In what sorts of positions and postures relative to colonizers and their descendants?
Were colonized people and their descendants presented interacting with one another unobserved by colonizers and their descendants ? If so, did they have an opportunity to speak to one another about the disturbing realities of colonization and its wake/fallout?
Recognizing that consuming media does not amount to witnessing, and given that colonization and its wake are inescapable, we asked questions regarding how one goes about witnessing with our bodies in contact with the world around us and without necessarily knowing in advance what we are doing and to what end.
Sticking close to home, I considered witnessing how the demographics of a wealthy white neighborhood in an American city change during the day: parents go to work, school-age children go to class, and the neighborhood becomes, for a few hours, home to a majority Latin American migrant population of cleaners, gardeners, repairmen, construction workers, nannies etc.
Brian suggested making trips to places where people don’t normally go to bear witness and doing just that. He discussed his trips along the Mississipi River where he witnessed natural surroundings suffused with the aftermath of colonial trauma and racial exploitation.
Brian’s remarks on his trips along the Mississipi resonated with Nat’s remarks on the “vanishing isles of Sierra Leone”, and this brought us to some matters that I would like to concentrate on during our next session.
I, for one, felt as if our last session focused a great deal on Global Apartheid and left much to be said about Planetary Ecocide, and perhaps this was symptomatic of the difficulties of thinking through what Malcolm Ferdinand calls the double fracture at the heart of the modern tempest. It seems as if, on the one hand, there is a Global Apartheid defined by the colonial fracture instilled by Western colonization and imperialism that resulted in racial slavery and the domination of indigenous peoples and women in particular and, on the other, there is a Planetary Ecocide defined by an environmental fracture driven by a technocratic and capitalist civilization that led to the ongoing devastation of the Earth’s ecosystems and its human and non-human communities. In reality, however, these are two sides of the same cutting edge that has wounded our planet
During the next session I would like to pick up the conversation where we left off but to focus on the other side of the coin. In so doing, I am also hoping that, following, Q’s provocation, we may think about “remembering, recognizing, resisting, and repairing” as improvements upon the terms “witnessing, testifying, repairing”. Furthermore, following Deann’s provocations, I want to continue thinking about these terms as marking differences without separability. How might we accomplish acts of remembering, recognizing, resisting, and repairing (or, alternatively, witnessing, testifying, repairing) at one at the same time, in a single fluid gesture?
“Negroes hiding in the swamps of Louisiana,” Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873. [Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library Digital Collections]
