Session 5: “Fugitive Planning + Design for Planetary Abolition”
Once again, I want to thank to all of you who made it to the last session of the AGAPE Seminar & Studio and the many present-absences who shaped the session’s proceedings. I am most grateful for the time that we spent “mending the web”, to borrow a phrase from Nadia Chaney and our kin from the Time Zone Research Lab. It was a profound joy to have participants bring so many different kinds of ancestors into the space to be in community and conversation with us during the session.
At our next session, I would like to pick up on several threads of conversation, including the delicate topic of sanctuary that provoked some unease and disagreement amongst us. To quote a post from the padlet, I would like to consider alternative terms that might we use alongside “sanctuary” to articulate different “guerilla approach[es] to aiding and comforting persons in need of refuge”.
Upcoming Session Date: 28 February 2024
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 for the Next Session:
“‘Smuggling’ – An Embodied Crticality” by Irit Rogoff
“The Geography of Resistance” and “Rethinking African American Migration” from Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
“Unruly Servants: A Profile of Runaways” from Escaping Servitude: A Documentary History of Runaway Servants in Eighteenth-Century Virginia by Antonio T. Bly and Tamia Haygood
“We often speak of the violence of a river overflowing but less of the violence of the banks that confine it.”
“It was as Anyanwu had said. They were in the middle of her town, surrounded by villages. No European would have recognized a town, however, since most of the time there were no dwellings in sight. [...] In much of her own country, one could stand in the middle of a town and see little more than forest. The villages of the towns were well organized, often long established, but they were more a part of the land they occupied, less of an intrusion upon it.”
Colonizers and their proxies often speak of the violence of the forces of nature – of so-called “natural disasters” – but they hardly ever speak about the violence employed by the forces of Empire as they intrude upon and confine nature’s wanderings, dispersals, and migrations. Indeed, colonizers and their proxies maintain that all “solutions” to ecological problems are – first, foremost, and above all else – policies and projects for the management of so-called “natural disasters” and for the “sustainable extraction” (or, rather, the “managed depletion”) of “natural resources”. In conceiving of matters this way, colonizers and their proxies refuse to recognize that many so-called “natural disasters” are, in fact, events during which the forces of nature violently liberate themselves from so many violent intrusions and confines imposed upon them by the forces of Empire.
Osman, a maroon in Great Dismal Swamp. Image by David Hunter Strother in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1856.
Many Indigenous peoples consider events that colonizers call “natural disasters” (e.g., storms, floods, fires, droughts, swarms of pests, outbreaks of pathogens, proliferations of weeds) to be difficult guests who can arrive unexpectedly and whose sudden arrival one must always be prepared to welcome and live with, regardless of their difficulty.
Maroons, or fugitives from colonial slavery, consider the events that colonizers call “natural disasters” to be happenings that enable escape and, as such, these events often serve as triggers for putting fugitive plans into action.
Similarly, what the colonizer takes to be an “inhospitable”, “impassable”, and “unruly” nature (e.g., the Great Dismal Swamp in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina) is the very same nature that Maroons regard to be most suitable for marronage, for the makings of fugitive communities.
Ay, and this very same sort of nature, taken to be “inhospitable”, “impassable”, and “unruly” by colonizers, is that which Indigenous peoples like the Marind in Papua New Guinea are cultivating as allies in their direct actions to claim their lands back.
Of course, we must not limit ourselves to considering those “inhospitable”, “impassable”, and “unruly” natures to be found outside of us, but also consider those purported to exist within us. The racialized and colonized others of Europe are those most often found to be possessed of “inhospitable”, “impassable”, and “unruly” natures that ought to be surveilled, categorized, disciplined, domesticated, and controlled. Indeed, the natural tendency of the Maroon and the Native to resist their racialization and colonization is often said to be constitutive of an “inhospitable”, “impassable”, and “unruly” nature.
In light of the above, I would like us to return to the following research questions.
How can we recognize that we have allies in “inhospitable”, “impassable”, and “unruly” natures and in so-called “natural disasters”? And not just in the rural and wild countryside but in urban surrounds as well?
How can we recollect ethical ways of living with “natural disasters” and with “inhospitable”, “impassable”, and “unruly” natures? And, in so doing, how might we “make kin” with the Indigenous and Maroon peoples who are the keepers of what remains of these ethical ways of living?
How can we resist Empire’s pathological attempts to command and control “inhospitable”, “impassable”, and “unruly” natures and to manage so-called “natural disasters”?
How can we repair the damage that Empire has done to “inhospitable”, “impassable”, and “unruly” natures in its pathological attempts to command and control them and manage so-called “natural disasters”?
What I am calling “Maroon Infrastructures” are assemblages of administrative statements, technical implements, built environments, and dramatic elements that enable us to engage in the practices of recognition, recollection, resistance, and repair that are suggested by the questions above. Otherwise put, Maroon Infrastructures are conditions of possibility for the planetary abolition of the impositions of the border, the plantation, the police, and the prison.
One famous “Maroon Infrastructure” that we might regard as an exemplary case study is, of course, the Underground Railroad that conveyed fugitives from colonial slavery to places where they would be able to design freedoms for themselves. During our next session, “Fugitive Planning + Design for Planetary Abolition”, I would like to imagine the construction of a “New Underground Railroad” and/or alternative Maroon Infrastructures that would enable us to participate in direct actions against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide.
Continuing to think with and through Denise Ferreira da Silva’s distinction between the “Entangled World” of convivial relations and the “Ordered World” of colonial relations, I would like to propose that an “Ordered World” is composed of Apartheid Infrastructures, and that an “Entangled World” is composed of Maroon Infrastructures.
apartheid (n.) from Dutch apart "separate" (from French àpart ) + suffix -heid, which is cognate with English -hood.
maroon (n.) from French marron, simarron, said to be a corruption of Spanish cimmaron "wild, untamed, unruly, fugitive" (as in Cuban negro cimarron "a fugitive black slave"). This is from Old Spanish cimarra "thicket," which is probably from Latin cyma "sprout", and the notion is of living wild in the mountains.
In addition to continuing to think with and through the distinction between the “Entangled World” and the “Ordered World” proposed by Silva, I would also like for us to continue to think with and through the notion of repair that we have received from the poet Derek Walcott and other Antillean artists:
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.
If the Apartheid Infrastructures of the Ordered World are conditions of possibility for dismembering and dispersing convivial relations, the Maroon Infrastructures of the Entangled World ought to be conditions of possibility for remembering and repairing them.
