On relationality
Restorative Community Project Session 4:
A Poethics:
We said:
white supremacy /= Black noise
Settler colonialism /= Indigenous indigenization (Professor Dupaul)
We also know: White supremacy = settler colonialism
Your turn:
Black Liberation:
Give me Equality, PEACE, strength? (acquisition)
Tell me nothing
ALICE WALKER
I am (personalization)
Indigenous Decolonization:
North America
Indigenous People (Context: opportunities, enduring)
Chuck Gentlemoon
“Do you observe different religions?”
From this, can we derive
Black Liberation = Indigenous Decolonization
?
“first history”
Logically, no said our white fathers. So what does it theoretically mean that a project that is in opposition to white supremacy (BL) and a project that is a rejection of Settler Colonialism (ID) are non complementary to each other even though we know that Settler Colonialism = White Supremacy?
Let's take one example:
BL often makes demands for reparations. How is this perhaps anti-indegenous? By appealing to the state (the white man), we are reifying his authority to be a juridical supremacy over land and property (both stolen things), which in turn compromises indigenous sovereignty and the claims of rightful stewardship to these resources.
ID would have it that sacred ancestral lands be returned to Native nations. How is this perhaps anti-black? Displacement of an already vulnerable segment of population would inhibit the liberatory dream of blackness to live in excess of duress.
Two: Your turn
Two: Your turn around
This is what Frank Wilderson calls a grammar of antagonisms:
“The rubric of conflict (ie a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonisms (an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions)”
Meaning, we are a nation of antagonisms. BL cannot exist with WS. ID cannot exist with SC. And as it currently stands, BL cannot exist with ID.
So how do we move forward without paroting the bankrupt rhetoric of political solidarity?
Enter
We begin with the idea of relationality. So perhaps yes, BL is incommensurable with ID. But that incommensurability, is a type of relationship. It creates a connection through the very absence of a connection. It formulates a type of stuckness and/or togetherness, a relationality, in its lack thereof. So what happens when we continue to think through and ask what is the relationality between ID and BL, anti-blackness and indigenous genocide? We are drawing connections. We are building a cartography that maps an otherwise world: a map that connects the unconnectable by way of its many disjunctions. Relationality is the invisible and atmospheric bridge through which we cross the abyss of american antagonisms and hijack the protocols of white supremacy.
“To travel without a map, to travel without a way. They did, long ago. That misdirection became the way. After the Door of No Return, a map was only a set of impossibilities, a set of changing locations.”
“A map, then, is only a life of conversations about a forgotten list of irretrievable selves”
“The early Romans drew maps based solely on itineraries, not attesting to science or geographic study. Simply maps of where they were going. So that a map looked like a graph of horizontal lines of roads heading to a destination.”
“We all carry a personal atlas in our brains (which obliged this psychic gazetteering because it happens to be the most sophisticated, supple map-making device ever created). We flip through it with synaptic rapidity; we crash just so through a wilderness of neurons primed and aligned by experience, traveling a decade in an instant, traversing hemispheres in the span of a few axons, snagging now and then on the nettles of a sad recollection, exhilarated by the sheer expanse of territory covered, surprised at how our brains can organize so much information along emotional latitudes, their very architecture a kind of microscopic merging of all the cartography we have acquired and stored. We are damned by the arrogance with which we ignore the immensity of the territories we presume to tame with our absurdly precise instruments of measure, and redeemed by a cunning, even courageous naivete that persuades us to believe that they are approachable, knowable, chartable.”
“I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World -- without the mandate for conquest.”
So yes, I would like you to draw me this map: