Race, Ethnicity, Indigenous Peoples and Politics

L14 - Approaches to Anti-Blackness and Coloniality

Date: Jun 3 | Time: 03:45pm to 05:15pm | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Anna Agathangelou (York University)

Session Abstract: This panel examines the ways in which histories of anti – blackness and coloniality punctuate contemporary social movements, inform and shape technological interactions and find expression though subject formation and in instances of ongoing environmental degradation. Agathangelou and Ahmed argue that enslavement and colonialism are pivotal to the development of modern global politics, in this way shaping the Black and colonized subjects as non - subjects. Azadah’s work examines how white-settler fears of alliances between Indigenous and African slaves in the late-18th and early-19th centuries led to a concerted effort towards severing the bonds between these communities via institutional mechanisms of law and policy centered on anti-blackness. Amponsah’s work focuses on racially charged posts and how these reveal a pattern of white rage, from seemingly average people and that these public displays of white rage force the realization that the post-racial is a myth. Whitney then, brings to light how coloniality found expression in processes of knowledge production, land dispossession, and capitalist accumulation to create conditions for environmental degradation and persisting social inequalities in Canada. These approaches interrogate historical moments of colonization and anti-blackness that shape and inform the contemporary readings of Black and Indigenous politics today. Themes explored on this panel examine the intersections and entanglements between processes of capital accumulation, land dispossession, and enslavement that have generated conditions for fluid and transformative racisms in the legal realm, social inequality in emerging techno spaces and ongoing environmental exploitation.

On the Question of Bodies and Flesh and Global Racial Capitalism: Anna Agathangelou (York University), Mishall Ahmed (York University)
Abstract: We argue that enslavement and colonialism are pivotal to the development of modern global politics. There is a nexus between enslavement as a structure of racial violence predicated on the ongoing theft of the life and labor value of Blacks and the colonization of “racially inferior” peoples, whereby certain groups necessarily continue to generate value for global capitalism without ever acknowledging the necessity of the “total violence for the extraction of the total value, that is, expropriation [and obliteration] of the productive capacity of the conquered lands and enslaved bodies” (da Silva 2014: 83). In engaging with this nexus of enslavement and the global racial imaginary through these authors, we show how global capital and the nation state presuppose something “irrational” the “outside” the social and juridico-political arrangements of the social contract of property and the historical process, thus allowing certain aspects of enslavement or ongoing primitive accumulation to be “presupposed” but never acknowledged that every time capital requires the commodification of labor power, it must in effect repeat at the grammar level the abstraction of life as its making and the “so-called primitive accumulation” as a double process (Agathangelou 2018; 2019; Agathangelou forthcoming). We conclude by focusing on the relationship between this history of imperialism and the racist mythologies of the nation-state; such an emphasis is crucial if we are to understand the racialized theorizations and conceptions of the global order.

Severing Bonds Through Anti - Blackness: Examining the Telations Between Indigenous and African Enslavement: Kushan Azadah (York University)
Abstract: This paper examines historical issues of antiblackness and coalitional politics in the settler-colonial context of the Southern United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. First, I examine the ways in which Africans and Indigenous peoples-built networks of solidarity and communal resistance to their common experiences of enslavement in the early-18th century. This includes their work alongside one another, shared communal living quarters, production of collective recipes for foods and herbal medicines, sharing of cosmologies and worldviews, and intermarriages predicated on matrilineal traditions of Southeast native communities. Then I examine how white-settler fears of alliances between Indigenous and African slaves in the late-18th and early-19th centuries led to a concerted effort towards severing the bonds between these communities via institutional mechanisms of law and policy centered on antiblackness. Here I analyze the use of slave codes, miscegenation laws, and bounties on escaped slaves. After examining both the integration and disintegration of these two communities, I draw on the works of key Critical Indigenous Studies and Black Feminist scholars to argue the importance of grappling with imperial epistemologies using a decolonial praxis grounded in alternative ways of knowing and being. In agreement with many black and indigenous feminists, this entails a constant awareness to the ways in which knowledge about black and indigenous bodies is continually (re)produced and mobilized, and then critically engaging with a decolonizing of those knowledges in the multiple, fragmentary, and shifting locations in which they (re)emerge.

I’m Only Here for the Comments : A Case for Understanding Comment Sections as Virtual Technologies of Violence: Evelyn Amponsah (York University)
Abstract: In this paper, I am interested in online comments sections of racially charged posts. I suggest that the comment sections, reveal a pattern of white rage, from seemingly average people and that these public displays of white rage force the realization that the post-racial is a myth. I equate the participation of White people’s rage in online in comment sections to participation of white people in lynching post-cards. Lynchings were community events that encouraged the participation of men, women, and children in-order to cement national narratives of dehumanizing Black people, in order to reinforce White positionality. I argue that comment sections- particularly on videos of state violence toward black people- also allow white people to participate in discourses that reinforce their positions of white supremacy by virtue of not being the bodies represented in the videos.

Situating the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada's Climate Change Crisis: Megan Whitney (York University)
Abstract: My paper will discuss the limitations of the Anthropocene framework in addressing issues of environmental degradation and social inequalities in Kashechewan First Nation, located on the James Bay Coast in Northern Ontario. My paper will discuss how processes of knowledge production, land dispossession, and capitalist accumulation in Canada have created conditions for environmental degradation and persisting social inequalities. My paper will analyze how the emergence of "Man" as the universal subject of the Anthropocene marginalizes First Nations women, and the importance of situating the 2019 "National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women" within interventions that aim to address climate change. In the context of climate change in James Bay, I will discuss how the Anthropocene theory is not able to address the most pressing environmental issues that find their points of emergence in the devaluation of Cree knowledge, and the loss of land-based history and culture in a rapidly changing climate.