Session 11: “Seeing Like a Smuggler”

Written By Muindi Muindi

Thanks, as always, to everyone who made it to the last session of the AGAPE Seminar & Studio and to the many present-absences who shaped the session’s proceedings.

Upcoming Session Date: 16 June 2024

Start Time : 10:30 LA / 13:30 NYC / 14:30 São Paulo / 18:30 London / 19:30 Berlin / 20:30 Dar es Salaam / 23:00 Delhi

End Time: 12:30 LA / 15:30 NYC / 16:30 São Paulo / 20:30 London / 21:30 Berlin / 22:30 Dar es Salaam / 01:00 Delhi

Background Readings for the Next Session: 

Towards the end of our session, Xin Wei observed the following, “maybe some relationships work like the earth in which you take root (family?) but does not determine how you take shape, others like a trellis on which you rely that enables you to reach far beyond what you could on your own (institutions, long-term / profound friends), still others like occasional rain and sun / shade that inspire  (or inhibit) you to grow in some  way (occasional friends/ enemies), etc.”

We had spent the session trying to do the work of distinguishing community from family, on the one hand, and from the polis, on the other. Our aim was to locate community in an elsewhere and otherwise defined by a commonality, communality, and communism that was neither familial, nor political, nor harmonious.

  • A community that is not familial in the sense that Hortense Spillers remarks upon in her lecture, ”The Family: Our Beloved Crisis" -- that is to say, in other words, a community that does not bind us by way of filial sentiment and duty. For Spillers, when forms of filial sentiment and duty come to define community above all else, a fascism or racism privileging bonds of blood and soil is just around the corner.

  • A community that is not political in the sense that Fred Moten and Stefano Harney make sensible when they mark the difference between policy/policing/politics, on the one hand, and planning, on the other -- the corrective and correctional character of the former being arrayed against the communal and communistic character of the latter.

  • A community that is not harmonious in the sense that Amaro and Q brought to our attention during the session. To paraphrase Amaro, “Your community does not only include the friends whom you love and are happy to rely on, but also all the enemies whom you hate but begrudgingly make common cause with in pursuit of a desired change.”

To get at what this non-familial, non-political, non-harmonious/dissonant community might be, we turned to Saidiya Hartman’s writings on how community was formed amongst enslaved Africans in the Settler States in and through their everyday acts of resistance. It is worth quoting Hartman at length on this topic.

The sense of black community expressed by "having a good time among our own color" depends upon acts of identification, restitution, and remembrance. Yet the networks of affiliation enacted in performance, sometimes referred to as the “community among ourselves” are defined not by the centrality of racial identity or the self-sameness or transparency of blackness nor merely by the condition of enslavement but by the connections forged in the context of disrupted affiliations, sociality amid the constant threat of separation, and shifting sets of identification particular to site, location, and action. In other words, the "community" or the networks of affiliation constructed in practice are not reducible to race -- as if race a priori gave meaning to community or as if community was the expression of race -- but are to be understood in terms of the possibilities of resistance conditioned by relations of power and the very purposeful and self-conscious effort to build community. 

Despite the "warmly persuasive" and utopian quality that the word "community" possesses, with its suggestion of a locality defined by common concern, reciprocity, unity, shared beliefs and values, and so on, it cannot be assumed that the conditions of domination alone were sufficient to create a sense of common values, trust, or collective identification. The commonality constituted in practice depends less on presence or sameness than upon desired change -- the abolition of bondage. Thus, contrary to identity providing the ground of community, identity is figured as the desired negation of the very set of constraints that create commonality -- that is, the yearning to be liberated from the condition of enslavement facilitates the networks of affiliation and identification.

In other words, despite “community among ourselves” depending upon a “desired change” that has a political aspect to it, “the abolition of bondage”, Hartman finds that it is not properly political. The non-familial, non-political, non-harmonious/dissonant community that the enslaved formed to counter the depredations of racial capitalist slavery does not aim to formulate anti-slavery policies and to police abolitionist politics by forming an abolitionist political party. The aim of this  “community among ourselves” is to plan and facilitate everyday acts of resistance by and through the creation of temporary autonomous zones where freedom is  exercised. The resistances that were the means and ends of such community were “engendered in everyday forms of practice” and “these resistances are excluded from the locus of the ‘political proper.’” 

To return to the metaphor with which this text opened, this non-familial, non-political, non-harmonious/dissonant community amongst the enslaved could be considered a trellis enabling the enslaved to reach freedoms beyond what they could otherwise achieve on their own. 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 in spite of the impositions of colonization and racialization?

Muindi Muindi
Next

Session 10: “Community Among Ourselves”