Session 1: “In the wake…”
This is the first dispatch to emerge from the Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide Seminar & Studio,
I will be posting pre-session primers (like this one) prior to each and every seminar & studio session, and posting a summary of the proceedings of each session afterwards.
Folks who want to participate in 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: 19 November 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:
Introduction to Colonialism in Global Perspective by Kris Manjapra
Preface to Toward a Global Idea of Race by Denise Ferreira da Silva
Prologue to Decolonial Ecology by Malcolm Ferdinand
“The Wake” from In the Wake by Christina Sharpe
Pre-Session Primer:
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.
A process (re-)produces or contributes to the (re-)production of something. A cooking process, for instance, produces or contributes to the production of a meal.
An ideology characterizes and qualifies a process and its product. Veganism and vegetarianism, for instance, qualify cooking processes such that some cooking processes and some meals are characterized as being more desirable than others.
The wake of a process is that which a process generates regardless of whether or not it successfully achieves its “aim”. Processes do not always (re-)produce what they “set out” to. A cooking process can be rudely interrupted by an earthquake that destroys the kitchen or a heart-attack that kills the cook. Nevertheless, whether or not the process successfully (re-)produces something, the process leaves behind something in its wake. Certain remnants, residues, reverberations, and arrangements for a meal will persist in spite of the cooking process being rudely interrupted by disaster or death.
In order to understand how Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide are maintained and advanced, I believe that it is necessary for us to be able to recognize how it is that the ideology that characterizes and qualifies a process may be disavowed and the products of a process dispensed with, while, at the same time, the process itself is perpetuated and people are able to take pleasure in and profit from what is left behind in the wake of the process.
“Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming”
Painting by J.M.W. Turner (1840)
For instance, take processes of colonization.
Processes of colonization (re-)produce metropoles and colonies.
A colonialism is an ideology that characterizes and qualifies processes of colonization and their products.
The term “coloniality” names the wake of processes of colonization — the persistence of remnants, residues, reverberations, and arrangements for the (re-)production of colonies and metropoles — all that remains regardless of whether processes of colonization succeed or fail at (re-)producing metropoles and colonies.
To understand the workings of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide, one must understand that processes of colonization needn’t necessarily succeed in creating colonies in order to empower and privilege those who initiate them. In fact, if they are devious enough, those who initiate processes of colonization can maintain and advance their powers and privileges without ever bringing processes of colonization to their logical conclusion in the form of the colony. Colonizers may purposefully arrest the development of the processes of colonization that they initiate, and they may sustain themselves on the remnants, residues, reverberations, and arrangements that emerge in the wake. The dictum of colonizers who are so devious is this: why maintain a colony when coloniality might yield the powers and privileges that one covets?
Writ large, Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide are, in effect, the realities of a Reformed War on Terra — one which has disavowed many of the ideologies of Empire and dispensed with many of the end products of Empire, but continues to perpetuate processes that contribute to the makings of Empire and to sustain itself on the remnants, residues, reverberations, and arrangements that emerge in the wake.
The purpose of this seminar and study group is, in short, to imagine and organize a radical resistance to Empire’s Reformed War on Terra, against the reformers and reactionaries who defend it.
RADICALS
Reject the Ideology,
Dispense with the Product,
Thwart the Process,
& Nurse the Wound
that is the Wake.
REFORMERS
Reject the Ideology
& Dispense with the Product,
But Perpetuate the Process
& Salt the Wound
that is the Wake.
REACTIONARIES
Champion the Ideology,
Relish the Product,
Perpetuate the Process,
& Salt the Wound
that is the Wake.
The reformer and the reactionary are, respectively, the “good cop” and the “bad cop” when it comes to suppressing radical resistance to Empire. The reformer argues that the regimes of “unequal integration” and “managed depletion” that constitute Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide are “progressive” relative to the regimes of wholesale subjugation and reckless depletion that preceded them, and, in so doing, the reformer argues that the radical is an enemy of progress and an agent of chaos who ought to be policed and punished. The reactionary, in turn, threatens the radical with the return of an Unreformed War on Terra, complete with wholesale subjugation and reckless depletion, as punishment for daring to resist reform and, in so doing, the reactionary pressures the radical to seek refuge in the attenuated War on Terra advanced by reformers.
My guiding question, then, is this, “Caught between a rock & a hard place, between reaction & reform, what is a radical anti-imperialist to do and how are they to live and thrive in so doing?”
