Unsettling Diasporas: Blackness and the Specter of Indigeneity

Sandra Harvey (bio)

[T]he wake has positioned us as no-citizen … with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected.

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake

In her much-celebrated The Transit of Empire, Chickasaw critical theorist Jodi Byrd begins a chapter on colonial multiculturalism with a story about land desecration and grave robbing that has stuck with me for years. As she writes, around the turn of the 20^th century, archeologist Charles Peabody hired black workers to excavate mounds within the Mississippian Ceremonial Complex. These were burial sites, sacred land that the Choctaw and Chickasaw tend. The Mother Mound, Ninih Waiya, is the site of creation for the Choctaw who are called to be its stewards (Osburn). The 1830 forced removal of the Choctaw to what is currently called Oklahoma was disastrous not only for the violence enacted on their living bodies but for the violent attempt to sever care between the Choctaw, the land, and their deceased relatives dwelling within the land. One elder described the nightmare of removal in the following way: “We were to cast away the bones of our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, for the wild dogs to gnaw in the wilderness, our hunters could kill no more meat; hunger and disease would follow; then confusion and death would come … The vengeance of the offended spirits would be poured out upon this foolish nation” (Akers, “Removing” 133). When a Choctaw dies, one spirit holds vigil over their remains to ensure proper care. The other spirit, the shilup, travels west to the “Land of Death.” For the Choctaws, forced removal to the west literally meant being relegated to the land of the dead where they would potentially be unable to reach the afterworld (Akers, “Living”).

Peabody’s anthropological craft emerged from the American settler colonial and slave owning project and perpetrated this project’s violence simultaneously upon three peoples: he instigated and oversaw the removal of Choctaw and Chickasaw ancestors from their mounds, and he also recorded exploited black workers in song as they carried out the bulk of the grueling physical labor.¹ What struck me and continues to weigh on me in this story is the ethical/political relationship of black peoples and, in a more abstract sense, blackness, to the mounds, to the sanctity of the land which we inhabit, and its relatives in this so-called “New World.” This essay represents an attempt at contributing to the many traditions and conversations that try to better understand and enact this relationship, its nuances, and the ethical/political possibilities, both those opened up and foreclosed within its contexts. Drawing on the practices and histories of our ancestors and our interactions with the indigenous peoples of these lands, scholars within western hemispheric Black Studies continue to ask ourselves, how does black life fit into (or not) the histories and ongoing conquest and colonization of peoples and their homelands?²

The question is salient, in part, because of how foundational ideas of diaspora have come to be for both black intellectual history and black politics. The term often conjures up an existential pull or directionality, a persistent elsewhere that renders black existence, especially but not solely outside of Africa, permanently and always already “unrooted.” In one sense, this has been reduced to a deleterious trope within certain diasporic black political circles that engage a projection of Africa rather than Africa itself as an actual, present constellation of geographies, global capital, colonial ties, and post-colonial struggles. In these balancing moves, an uninterrogated or a carelessly interrogated loss or alienation and desire for or recovering of Africa, mirroring the trope of black colonial “unrootedness,” is paradoxically ingrained in the episteme of what Congolese philosopher and cultural anthropologist V.Y. Mudimbe calls the European project of “Africanism.” Here, Africa as image or object arises only as either completely inaccessible to the descendants of transatlantic enslavement and other black diasporic subjects, or romantically awaiting rediscovery or historical recovery.

Yet, diaspora has also been the organizing force of Pan African politics, black internationalism, and other black transnational solidarity efforts. It has come to strengthen lateral socio-cultural exchanges between black peoples across Europe, Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and parts of Central and South America. As Paul Gilroy argues of the Black Atlantic, such ties are manifestations of the “desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnic and national particularity” (19). Despite this productive cross-oceanic pull, Gilroy insists that black existence (outside of one’s so-called original or ancestral homeland) demands a connection to place in its immediate locality. Such a claim frames diaspora in terms of “multi-rootedness” rather than “unrootedness.” He notes, for example, that black Britons are “linked into the social relations” of the UK such that “[b]oth dimensions [the diaspora as transnational and its ties to the nation] have to be examined and the contradictions and continuities which exist between them must be brought out” (156). Gilroy teases out the tensions within the binaristic pull between “home” and colonial metropole that constitutes black life in diaspora.

Yet, what if we understood diaspora as one point of a definitional web that does not rely on rootedness, however complicated, in the Western nation-state as its counter point? What if we, in addition to diaspora, turn our attention to the condition of indigeneity, which remains undertheorized in most renditions of diasporic Black Studies? How might considering indigeneity and our relationship to it offer insight into who “we” are and what “our futures” can be? I’d like to stage a conversation about the ways in which diaspora has been positioned in opposition to indigeneity, the two reflected as geopolitical poles. I venture that the work of bringing into view the constitutive binary of diaspora and what I argue is its specter, indigeneity, allows us to interrogate the political and cosmological force of its structure as such and the implications for how we might understand our world otherwise. The goal is to pay attention to the multiplicity of ways blackness is coded and recoded in various colonial, post-colonial, and settler colonial geopolitical intersections.

One of the challenges to posing a conversation between Africanists, post-colonial theorists, migration scholars, Latin Americanists, Black Studies scholars, and Indigenous Studies (including Two Spirit) scholars is not just that each approaches (or dismisses) the idea of “indigeneity” through different conceptual frameworks, different collections of knowledge, and different histories. As scholars, even if we are aware of the work of “other” communities, we have not always taken in their various logics to consider their implications for our own communities. No doubt this article is subject to the same mistakes. However, this failure should not precipitate abandoning the effort. On the contrary, it is indicative of the need for the project itself, given that we are often, as Saidiya Hartman notes, “intellectual strangers” and also—I might add—politically, culturally, epistemically, and genealogically estranged. This article makes an attempt to put into conversation some of these disparate scholarly and political habitus that, while at the level of institution remain siloed, are not so neatly separate in lived experience. I hope it offers additional entryways into thinking about the meanings and relationships between “indigeneity,” “blackness,” and “diaspora.”

Who “We” Is

This call also necessarily turns anew to the question of who “we” are, in hopes not of shoring up boundaries but rather of sitting with their necessary and productive porosity and friction.³ The consideration requires attention to the multiple iterations, fault lines, and convivialities within both the “we” of black people (including Indigenous black people) and Black Studies as a field formation that traverses multiple disciplines, area studies, and imperial/colonial institutional power relations.⁴ In the Western Hemisphere, it is critical to be intentional about these questions, specifically because of the ways that the diasporic / indigenous binary in the Americas has been mapped onto the categories of “black” and “Native” and racialized as such. Tiya Miles, Sharon Holland, and Circe Sturm have contested this reductive demarcation through their work on the history and culture of black members of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes who participated in the chattel slave market, had slaves themselves, and also made kin with Africans and Afro-descendant people. Black peoples (including those enslaved by Indigenous families) engaged in the cultural and kinship practices of the Five Civilized Tribes and many times identified and were recognized as Native peoples. In the United States and Canada, these histories are often understood as exceptional; anti-racist scholars and activists alike in the West often commit the mistake of considering that while black people in these particular cases are Native (“by blood” or “by treaty”), most Natives are not black and most blacks are not Native.⁵ The consequences of this assumption are severe at the conceptual and thus political levels. The presumption reifies the boundary between blackness and indigeneity such that at present, academic conferences and activist spaces generally take on the interrelations between black and Indigenous peoples and consider these identities as mutually exclusive in attempts to parcel out what solidarity between peoples might look like. In this way, the intra-relationality of black indigeneity becomes unthinkable in a Trouillotian sense (Trouillot).

I would like to push back on this generalized assumption, and instead to hail as interlocutors black peoples who have no legible (political or cultural) claim to a position of indigeneity. That is, I seek to open up the conversation as a matter of concern amongst black people who are generally identified through the narrative of diaspora. In one sense, this call is anchored in what Tiffany King describes as our conditions as black people “living under relations of conquest” (King, Black Shoals xiii). King prioritizes a conversation amongst black people because, in her words, “I care about Native people’s survival. And I do not care because I have a Native grandmother or ancestor. I care because the Black radical politics that I have inherited cares about Native people … This ethics that eschews and actively resists genocide as an order of modernity and making of the human subject proper is an ethics of Black radical struggle, period” (King, Black Shoals xiii). King attributes this ethics of care not to an identity claim or a claim for political inclusion but to a recognition that the black radical tradition requires a future that wholly ruptures the foundations of conquistador modernity (the modern, Eurocentric and patriarchal idea of the human, the propertization of land, the invention of race and, in particular, blackness as antithetical to freedom) that make black and indigenous life impossible. King hails a black “we” based in a black radical care for the “other” (but not necessarily the other as stranger and even maybe the other as “we”) made possible by her trust in black people and the righteousness of our freedom dreams in as much as they must and do “consider Native freedom” (xiii). One of the most important contributions of this discussion of “we” is that it moves the expectation of concern about colonialism and for indigenous futures beyond the focus on a so-imagined smaller group of black people on Turtle Island who are legally and culturally recognized as also Indigenous. King returns to the Black Studies’ tradition of considering the violence of colonialism as a core component to black freedom and a charge that must be taken up by black scholars and activists in the present.

This tradition, however, is complicated. Even with trust in (or in other cases, desire for) a black peoples—and not simply those living but our ancestors, if one considers them—“we” are often strangers. I do not mean this only metaphorically or ideologically. Alzheimer’s runs in my family. Many of us are obligated to forget. I am haunted by these doubts: Would my grandmother—as ancestor—recognize me now? Do I or how do I want her to recognize me? Do I have a choice? Here, I invoke recognition in the sense that Fanon through Hegel, Audra Simpson, and Glen Coulthard discuss the term. Yet I also emphasize that recognition is both a political process and an actual material question, whether that be limited by the brain’s grey matter or the emptiness of the National Archives. “Making generations,” as Gayle Jones reminds us in Corregidora, or belonging to generations, is risky and often outside of our control (and perhaps desires). Moreover, alienation is different from unrootedness. One lives estranged within relations of subjection, an almost unbearable circumstance for certain. Yet, almost always, it is that sort of alienation that “we” have in common, even if differently. In mediating on purposefully building relations, Keguro Macharia notes, “Queer studies teaches me to distrust community. From here, (Kenya, personal history, Gikuyu supremacy, heteronormative ethnopatriarchy), family is too toxic to be useful” (“Mbiti & Glissant”). Macharia moves away from the filial as heteronormative and towards what he calls we-formations, and the risky, chaotic, erotic work of relating to one another. To the extent that one desires a “there, there” for blackness, for a black “we,” and for the stability that this might afford particularly in the context of the present task of considering indigeneity alongside, within, rubbing up against blackness, I attempt to take up the opportunity to reckon with these conditions of alienation, to remain open or vulnerable to multiple openings and configurations. To expose oneself to these opportunities and risks is to call for a “we” in which the possibilities of ancestry, in all its queerness and estrangement, confront us. Black Studies is an institutionalized reflection of these silos, investments, desires—one that is beholden to the political economic constraints of an ever more privatized, and US-centric academe. Yet it is also one of the fraught places in which “we” struggle for such formations.

The Ungeographic

Black diaspora studies has focused on the Atlantic and its coasts as the points of reference for understanding both black life and black death. Whether it be, for example, through Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, Stephanie Smallwood’s littoral, Saidiya Hartman or Dione Brand’s Door of No Return, Christina Sharpe’s wakes, or Tiffany King’s shoals, these geographical locations, the writers insist, are more than mere positions on a map. They are epistemological and ontological thresholds. That is, the Atlantic and its coasts are not simply borders or boundaries through which subjects of history have passed. Rather, they are people-making (or object-making) geographical constructs that have given form to a key paradox for subjectivity in the soon-to-be-called “New World.” The Middle Passage establishes captive Africans as both objects of commerce and as subjects, but only as pertains to their capacity—if not propensity—for legal or social perversion. The slave trade arranges space and gives meaning by transmogrifying people into commodities.⁶ Indeed, in Saltwater Slavery, historian Stephanie Smallwood describes the littoral as that place where “a human being could fail to be a person” (63).

The logic of the market produces place—the littoral—and subject/object together. This was so much the case that within the littoral, even as the enslaved were commonly able to flee particular slavers, they were rarely able to escape enslavement more permanently. Prices for captives were higher closer to the coast, and as such, there was a strong incentive for others to recapture fugitive slaves quickly and sell them back. As Smallwood notes, “sooner rather than later the commercial tide inexorably returned to the water’s edge most of those who had escaped from European captivity” (55). Identified by their emaciated bodies and estrangement from any local kinship ties, they could escape a particular fort or ship but could rarely escape their status as chattel. Thus, the trade altered geographic points of reference for Europeans and Africans (both captive and those who remain on the continent). If prior to the Atlantic slave market the trading centers of west Sudan were a major focal point, once the slave trade increased, the west coast and its logic became a central organizing space (Smallwood). Belying the very definition of the littoral as marginal, slave trafficking rendered the coast a center of West African life.

The illogic of the periphery-as-center matters for Europe’s projected framing of black and African peoples’ existence in the world as always already detached from origin, and particularly from land as origin. Scholars of the Atlantic, the littoral, and the wake historicize this predicament and yet make sure not to re-claim these geographic configurations as stable ground. On the contrary, it is just this instability, this not fitting into appropriate normative geographies of groundedness, that may serve as a productive force. Leaning into black as ungrounded, as either a geographic non-presence or at least a not fully visible presence, acts as a foil for colonial fantasies of stability, or mastery of space—as do the shoals that disrupt the currents of the Atlantic (King, Black Shoals). Tending to these shoals or the wakes and the understandings of space that they open up is a critical component for a black ethical relationship to land.

The Atlantic as a point of reference focuses diaspora as a central framing of Black Studies. We have seen, as Stuart Hall insists, “the black experience as a diaspora experience” (253). Yet it is worthwhile to ask whether our existence might be more than “diaspora” as such, or rather if our current understandings of the idea of diaspora obscure various modes of black relating to land. Thus far, our nuanced theorizing of diaspora’s transnationality, uprootedness, and multi-rootedness has often referred back to the colonial or postcolonial nation, even when we believe we are undermining it. This idea of diaspora responds to the ways colonial geography has authorized spatial meaning in the world. The black subject emerges as socially and politically legible as a modern subject in the West through this notion of diaspora and uprootedness. However, despite the complex understanding we have of diaspora, we have generally not paid enough careful attention to whether (or how) this experience is exclusive of indigeneity, which hovers closely by as a specter of black life. For certain, terms such as “indigenous,” “native,” “aboriginal,” and “original peoples” emerge through the making of colonial empire and anthropology as institutions of colonial knowledge production.⁷ In its attempts to identify and regulate difference, anthropology employs the idea of indigeneity as a place marker of modernity’s boundaries. Many colonized peoples have taken these terms up for resignification. They refer both to various hegemonic colonial designations and to their beyond.⁸ With this in mind, it is important to look anew at the term and ask after its political (political economic) and ethical and cosmological (or worlding) force. To take indigeneity in relation to diaspora seriously requires rethinking the “point of departure” or “origin” as, instead, multiple points of departure, nodes of movement that of course travel the transits of empire (the Atlantic and the Pacific), but that also exist and make place in excess of colonial logic.⁹ To exist in such an anarchic way with regard to place, creatively and carefully, isn’t an abstract political choice but the condition of existence (worldly and otherwise) for those of us collectively known as black.

Part of the reason Black Studies in the West often undertheorizes indigeneity is the prominence of the notion that captive Africans and their black descendants lost all native ties, having passed through the “Door of No Return.”¹⁰ Our scholarship recites Orlando Patterson’s observation that natal alienation, or the severing of kinship ties, is a central characteristic of the enslaved. We have given less attention, however, to Patterson’s argument that enslavement also involves a loss of one’s nativeness. He explains that natal alienation has “the important nuance of a loss of native status, of deracination” (7). For Patterson, the idea of the “native” is almost entirely folded into questions of kinship and specifically of lineage. Yet he alludes to the fact that it involves more than genealogy. A loss of native status included severing “attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him by the master” (7, emphasis added). Here we see again how kinship and place are related. Note that these violent forms of intertwined alienation seem to be true not just of the transatlantic trade but also more broadly in African and transaharan slave trading societies. For example, Saidiya Hartman offers as a cultural fact that “The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger” (Lose Your Mother 5). In Hartman’s account, with regard to estrangement, place is just as critical as kin. She goes on: “Contrary to popular belief, Africans did not sell their brothers and sisters into slavery. They sold strangers: those outside the web of kin and clan relationships” (5). The stranger was found to be out of their element: their kinship circle and their homeland.

Hartman’s reflection picks up on a critical point made earlier by Sylvia Wynter regarding the importance of kinship as a logic that protects one from the possibility of enslavement. According to Wynter’s rendition of the “Congolese symbolic-representational system,” men and women who had “fallen out of the protection of their own lineages (in which metaphysically normal being was alone possible)” came to be understood as vulnerable to enslavement (33). Here again, lineage or kinship offers actual existence, and dispossession—or the estrangement of one’s familial relationship to place—engenders an ethics of enslavability. Opposed to “slave,” “native” as an anthropological term holds within it metaphysical consequences. Its designation opens up the possibility of inhabiting the status of personhood or “normal being.” The opposite is also true: to enslave is to sever the captive’s native ties.

Deracination, at the level of representation and ontology, is intricately tied to colonial geography, and thus comes to describe the condition of blackness after its passage through the so-called Door of No Return or on the shores of Turtle Island. Yet this is not the product of an automatic alchemy that converted captive Africans and Afro-descendants into a complete objecthood. Rather, in the West, it occurs via the logics of trafficking and processes of law making, Christian messianic theologies, and scientific knowledge production, and via the ways each interacts with the others. For example, in seventeenth-century Virginia, the colonial Assembly sought to repress Powhatan-led resistance after Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion by making a legal equivalence between captured Africans and Powhatans with regard to enslavement. The legislation insisted that “all servants ‘whether Negroes, Moors, Mollattoes and Indians’ were to be considered slaves if their parents and native country were not Christian at the time of their first purchase” (Brown 180). This early legislation is indicative of a series of colonial projections and preclusions. First, by rendering individual Powhatans enslaveable, the Assembly reduced these individuals to the status of captive Africans. In this case, white settler/slave owners surreptitiously projected blackness onto Native peoples as a means of both materially and discursively obviating their threat to settler sovereignty. I say they projected “blackness” because this legislation occurred at the same time that blackness became legally fixed to the position of the slave through the recently passed partus law. This law rendered the black womb as that which produced slaves and not legally recognized and protected kin.¹¹

I argue that blackness, rather than black people, becomes the signifier of enslavement in order to be precise about the structure of the developing symbolic representational system. Blackness, or what Hartman calls the “figurative capacities of blackness,” becomes an abstract signifier of the slave, the non-being or the oxymoronic being-who-lacks-will (Scenes 22). It refers to the black body and black geographies but also to abstract or projected representations. That is, there is nothing (biologically) essential about the black body that renders it or its person vulnerable to enslavement. Rather colonial imaginaries suture blackness to bodies as an effect of exercising sovereignty over oneself as master/property owner (of people and land). One may read the legislation as projecting blackness onto Native peoples, an ultimate affront to Native sovereign claims.

Second, and paradoxically, in locating the justification for enslavement in the captives’ non-Christian parents and “native country,” the legislation momentarily recognized a parallel between African and Powhatan experiences of colonialism. The law references both African and Powhatan ties to kinship and place of origin, a place to which they were indigenous, and (at least at one point) a native status. Not yet can these Anglo colonists easily make the argument that enslaved Africans came from nothing, that they had no history. Moreover, the law conceives of a constitutive likeness between relations and place, if not land. These two conceptual nodes point to a slip in the doctrine of the “colonialism that never happened” (Smith), or the disavowal of the colonialism that occurred in West Africa beginning in the fifteenth century and through the transatlantic slave trade and its afterlife. This particular and short-lived law attempted to exclude both Africans and Powhatans from the status of free human based on the argument that they were not of a Christian country. According to this law, we might infer that Africans actually brought with them a specter of their one-time indigenous relationship to place or land and, thus, origin. Africa stubbornly materialized on the shores of what came to be called Virginia. That is, this legal doctrine superimposed lineage and land onto each other; the entanglement of the two determined one’s enslavability.

The example of colonial Virginia’s attempts to contain both African and Powhatan life exemplifies the ways geography, as a technology of colonial nation-building, works as a practice of subjection with consequences for what is or is not intelligible. Indeed, Katherine McKittrick underscores the importance of this arrangement for the stability of the Western world as we know it. She writes, “Geography’s discursive attachment to stasis and physicality, the idea that space, ‘just is’ . . . not only anchors our selfhood and feet to the ground, it seemingly calibrates and normalizes where, and therefore who, we are” (xi). Yet this sort of “transparent geography,” as McKittrick calls the discipline’s rootedness in positivism, belies the ways conquest and ongoing colonialism as epistemological and material forces shape space. The claim to transparency, then, is a farce that renders illegible or illogical those black relationships to place that challenge the ontological claims of colonial geography and world-mapping. McKittrick argues, thus, that black peoples themselves come to be understood as “ungeographic.” This is because the logic refuses to see the complexities of black relationality or sociality as committed to place in nuanced ways. This nearsighted perspective refuses Africa’s specter on the shores of Virginia.. I am not interested in rendering black life and relationship to space or land legible in any transparent way. Instead, I view transparency’s oversight as a provocation in itself. In other words, what interests me is what it means to be ungeographic. What are the illogical and thus radical possibilities that are opened up for black and African peoples’ relationship to place/space/the world, given our ungeographic rendering? This includes a necessary care for other Indigenous people’s relationships to land (in particular, land as familial relations) and to a worlding that is not loyal to the fantasy of mastery that undergirds the project of positivist geography.

Indigeneity, Race, and the Secular State

If early modern colonial legislation located black and Native difference in their non-Christian “souls,” a product of their intertwined country and kinship ties, modern legal-rational knowledge regimes reduced this difference to the body through the idea of “race.” This understanding of the human and its other becomes a building block that makes possible the rational administration of peoples within the bounds of the nation-state and its political economy. The process of racialization is important not simply because it instantiates a hierarchy, but because it summons subjects (or objects) to serve as beings-for-the-nation, as markers of its sovereign, life enforcing and death making boundaries. Western political theorists have observed this dynamic in Europe’s metropoles regarding citizenship and the so-called “Jewish Question.” As part of the formation of the modern state, the anti-Semitic debate across Europe questioned whether Jewish people could be proper citizens. At the center of the debate were the supposedly competing interests for Jewish people between the will of the rational state and the divine law of G-d. Western statists considered secularism and Judaism as two universal claims about the world that necessarily challenged each other’s sovereignty. Wendy Brown writes that by the late nineteenth century racial liberalism attempted to resolve the issue on (at least) a discursive level by privatizing Jewish difference as race and reducing divine law to a religious choice, or the product of (humanist) belief. Liberalism allows for “religion” to be practiced at home or in a temple as private space, and for nationalism to be practiced in the public sphere. As a result, the sovereign conflict between cosmological difference is reduced or privatized to a notion of race and “identity” attached to the body (Brown). This liberal secularist logic is at least in part where the concept of Jewishness as a physiological race emerges.¹² In this sense, perhaps the most important component of national racialization processes is the calling into being of the secular human. In the metropole, as Talal Asad explains, secularism “is an enactment by which a political medium (representation of citizenship) redefines and transcends particular and differentiating practices of the self that are articulated through class, gender, and religion” (5). Liberal secularism is a universalist political and epistemological claim that reduces difference to a notion of “identity,” of which race is a part, and relegates this to the private sphere for good political subjects to transcend. It thus splits the subject in two: public citizen and private ethnic, racial, and religious individual.

What Brown makes less clear is what relationship these processes of liberal secularism and racialization might have with Europe’s own concurrent colonial and slave management projects. To return to these regimes, we can trace the ways racialization is a core component of the Western nation-state’s sovereignty, which depends on a civilizing mission to create new colonial subjects or tributes. We cannot say that the sixteenth or seventeenth-century captive Africans or their European traffickers inhabited the world through a liberal secular subjectivity. Instead, as argued above, subjection occurred through the enslaved’s loss of native status, natal alienation, and the removal of Africans across the Atlantic. Stephanie Smallwood describes the way some made sense of this commodification and removal: “In some Atlantic African communities it was believed that persons who departed in this way did in fact return but traveled not on the metaphysical plane of the ancestors but rather, transmuted as wine and gunpowder, on the material plane of commodities” (61). This is not simply “social death” as understood in various indigenous cosmologies, but a “kind of total annihilation of the human subject” (61). Emancipation in theory, then, required not simply the removal of chains but a further alchemy of the commodity/subject to a sort of liberal, secular individual able to take up citizenship.¹³ A bad faith liberal order discursively incorporates the black subject as citizen to the extent that blackness as difference is reduced to and contained within the body, and cosmology is reduced to the private realm of culture. It further disavows any ontoepistemic consequences of slavery’s afterlife for Afrodescendents. Within such a logic, to move blackness from the private sphere to the public is to introduce the unwieldy specter of non-sovereignty into the heart of the sovereign national body politic.

This is understandably one reason Indigenous peoples have argued against a designation that reduces them to “an additional special (ethnic) group or class” within the multicultural state, as Eve Tuck and Wang Yang write (2). Yet, herein lies an assumption that has not been scrutinized sufficiently by those making such an argument against the violence of inclusion. This assumption, which pushes back against racialization for those recognized as Indigenous, takes for granted and shores up the racialization of Afrodescendents. This may be the gravest of epistemological violences for the colonized: the invisibilized work of deracination. It isn’t about a loss of identity. On the contrary, it is the creation of the very idea of identity and one’s access to it. Being called into “being” as black within the modern secular liberal world is 1) to maintain a loss of native status, including access to a possible multiplicity of West African cosmological differences with regard to land and kin; and 2) to re-emerge as a subject whose difference is only legible through the language of privatized and minoritized racial identification.

I wonder, too, if this is what is at stake for the white settler state in the marking of “indigeneity.” It is not simply an indicator of time and space—one’s presence in one’s homeland prior to European colonization—but the sovereign threat of a competing universal claim about the very way time and space (place) work together. The onto-epistemological violence that liberal secularism authorizes involves viewing any other cosmology or way of being in the world as a threat to the sovereignty of the nation-state and, therefore, relegating it to the status of nonsense. The making of the liberal, secular state is rooted in the business of colonization and chattel slave ownership, in large part through racialization. Indigeneity as a concept, then, is partly a marker of the way colonized peoples have of inhabiting the world (and beyond) that otherwise is not able to be fully incorporated into the modern, liberal, secular state. This, at its very core, is necessarily in competition with state sovereignty. For Afrodescendants, the stakes of experiencing a loss of native status, then, must be understood in this way—as a forced cosmological transformation that demands the new modern subject’s total fidelity to the secular New World.

The term ontoepistemic signals the conceptual level upon which indigeneity is made to disappear. Shona Jackson uses the term to describe a similar dynamic in post-colonial Guyana. She highlights the bad faith manner in which black nationalist belonging uses indigeneity to make a claim to power through the state. She clarifies that

the term ontoepistemic is used to signal the link between Creole being and the production of discourses that support social being by narratively instituting Creole subjectivity as indigenous. In these discourses, the repetition of indigenous disappearance emerges as a significant epistemological component. (28)

For Jackson, the legibility of post-colonial Creole nationalism depends on the trope of Amerindian disappearance. Particularly problematic is the claim that black Guyanese are the rightful inheritors of the state because they and their ancestors built the state up through their forced labor on plantations. According to Jackson, this claim depends upon a relationship to land through labor that is made legible within a modern capitalist episteme. The claim “makes sense,” as she argues, because black labor produced commodities bought and sold on the market, and its profits contributed to the development of the colonial and post-colonial state. In contrast, Amerindian relations to land are rendered illegible precisely because they do not register within modern labor and commodity market representational systems. Black Creole claims to the state traffic in settler discourse, she argues, as it disappears Amerindians while simultaneously making its own indigenous claims.¹⁴

My interests in this important critique are twofold. First, Jackson raises the critical question of whether the post-colonial state—even when taken over by black people—is capable of being exorcised from colonial relations. The question is critical because the state’s claim to sovereignty renders any other claim, including others’ sovereign relations with land, dependent or disappeared. This move has real and violent ontoepistemic and political-economic consequences for the disappeared. Thus, one must ask how we can act ethically within the so-called post-colonial space/time in a way that does not reify colonial or slave trafficking geographies and claims to humanity. That includes narratives that commit colonized peoples to a hinterland or, I might add to a permanent status as stranger. Second is Jackson’s reading of blackness as the racial identity vulnerable to creolization.¹⁵ It raises the question, not only of the possibilities for subjectivity for black peoples in the post-colony and/or post-emancipation moment, but also for those recognized as Indigenous. Ugandan theorist Mahmoud Mamdani reads each of these positions as political identities in particular because of the ways colonial governance identified and categorized indigenous “ethnic groups” as part of a colonial structure of governance (658). Yet he does not duly consider the ways in which identity, as a form that a subject must inhabit, has been itself the product of a violent transformation. We find ourselves in the post-colonial conundrum, that we are both rightly suspicious of ideas of “primordial” culture or static “tradition” and compelled to tend to the real consequences of ontological and cosmological difference and their consequences.

We the Estranged

We are thus confronted with an impasse that is anchored in the epistemological demand for the modern and its outliers, which have been made possible through blackness’s loss of native status as a condition of both colonialism and enslavement. After the archival turn in particular, many black scholars decried our “stuckness” in a dichotomy of existential and epistemological loss and recovery. Once again, questions emerge about who “we” are, how we might know us, and also what sort of ethics guides our orientation to and amongst each other.

In contrast to this consolidation of Black Studies under the metaphor of the trans-Atlantic, or of proximity to the Atlantic and the abandonment of the need to claim a native life, some Afrodecendents in Abya Yala, or what is currently called Latin America, have been forging a different sort of relationship to the place that they inhabit and the peoples to whom they belong. This is true, for example, for black peoples of the Costa Chica in Guerrero and Oaxaca, México. Here I raise this example because in considering it seriously, I believe their interaction with conditions of indigeneity in Mexico might allow us to think the relationship of indigeneity to diaspora and the Atlantic differently. Black people from the Costa Chica have much less access to the cosmopolitan worlds of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, which, as several scholars have pointed out, almost exclusively focuses on the Global North and the Caribbean.¹⁶ Instead, black people in Costa Chica have moved with rather than away from indigeneity in a way that cannot and should not be reduced to “recovery” or fully explained through the language of citizenship. According to the 2015 Intercensal Survey, 64.9 percent of Afrodescendent respondents self-identified as “indigenous.”¹⁷ Their claims challenge long-standing ideas about what the term means, and what politics are made possible by inhabiting the position. First, they challenge the de jure racialization of the category in the Western Hemisphere. They betray any claim to a local homeland on Costa Chica prior to colonization, and they demand that we consider a different temporal organization. Second, the newness of being considered “original peoples” pushes back on the relationship that modernity has with indigeneity as a prologue to the Western State.

Black mobilization in Costa Chica has not been organized around the idea of indigeneity. Instead it initially responded to the consequences of broad erasure of black existence in the modern nation. Anti-black, post-colonial Mexican nationalism celebrates the Indigenous nations in its territory (even if condescendingly) and the mestizo (as a modern resolution of a colonial past settled through a white supremacist best-case scenario of the Casta racial framework). Critical theorist Ricardo Wilson characterizes Mexican post-colonial nationalism as dependent on a “psychic vanishing of blackness,” in which national consciousness seeks to contain a secret of black existence within a psychic crypt or “gap,” denying its presence within the country’s contemporary borders. Blackness itself, in México, is either relegated to a past and forgettable slave economy or externalized as emanating from Central America or the Caribbean. Black Mexicans, as a result, exist in a paradoxical situation of active state neglect and surveillance, that is, of both invisibility and hypervisibility. While their movement cannot be reduced to a call for state recognition—in fact, the rallying demand was for an end to the anti-black violence and erasure they face daily—the push for recognition became in large part a strategy for securing state resources (Hernández-Díaz).

In this instance, it was perhaps at least in part because of the cultural and institutional erasure of blackness in México that the state ultimately recognized black people of the Costa Chica as “original peoples.” The states of Guerrero and Oaxaca responded to black mobilizations through what was available to them: existing legal statutes or dominant discourses aimed at tending to the relationship between the state and conventionally recognized Indigenous nations. For example, to Oaxaca’s preexisting Law for the Rights of Indigenous Communities and Peoples (Ley de Derechos de los Pueblos y Comunidades Indígenas), officials added a clause recognizing “Afromexicans” and “Indigenous peoples belonging to any other community of another state in the republic” (Secretaría de Asuntos Indígenas de Oaxaca 2005; qtd. in Quecha Reyna 163; my translation and emphasis added). Following suit, officials from the Secretary of Indigenous Affairs in Guerrero changed the state’s constitution to include the following language: “This constitution recognizes and protects the ‘Original Peoples’ of the state” including “the Indigenous nations of Naua, Nuu savi, Me’phaa and N’ancue N’omdaa, the communities belonging to them and the Afromexican peoples” (Quecha Reyna 162; my translation). While the dominant narrative celebrates this “multicultural” nationalist move to recover and recognize black Mexicans as the nation’s tercera raiz (the other two are Eurodescendents and Indigenous peoples), it is clear from the state’s response that understanding black difference at the level of a “peoples” or pueblo emerges from the same conceptual and institutional framework it uses in response to Indigenous peoples writ large.

The words indigenous and original are provocative. There is a slippage between the two, which otherwise are used as synonyms in México and in Spanish in general. It is not clear how or if these denominations imply different relationships to land. For example, indigenous has almost always referred to a peoples’ particular relationship to homeland, while original might leave its object open for interpretation. This ambiguity allows for the state to claim “original peoples” as part of the cultural and political project of the nation state. However, the word also connotes a relationship to authenticity, stasis, or that which has not or never will change. This sort of existence, tied to prologue, is legible to the state, particularly in its multicultural formulation (Povinelli). For black peoples, who in their existence in the “New World” become the symbol of the modern and new subject, claiming original status within that so-called New World might come off as illogical or illegible. I want to entertain this illogic as a possible example of the ungeographic nature of what McKittrick has called “demonic grounds.” The term demonic, borrowed from Sylvia Wynter, denotes evil but also describes those troubling locations “outside the space-time orientation of the humunucular observer” (Wynter qtd. in McKittrick, xxv). This consideration also follows Wilson’s question about how “what emanates or escapes from” the racial psychic gap of the Mexican nation can be made “visible in order to activate anxieties that give a slight sense of the contours of the unthinkable intrapsychic gap” (31). To consider a black claim to indigeneity in this way opens up the possibilities of a relationship to place that troubles the stagnation of the label “arrivant,” which Settler Colonial Studies and some Native Studies scholarship demand of black people on Turtle Island. In one sense, it is true that black mobilization in the Costa Chica can be read as falling into the relationship that Gilroy describes as characteristic of the black diaspora: a simultaneous relationship and political/identitarian commitment to México and to Africa; after all, many black people on the Costa Chica refer to themselves as “afromexicano.” However, the community’s designation as “original,” which places them alongside other Indigenous peoples, exists in an ungeographical sense, and perhaps in its reference to Mexico’s black psychic gap, in excess of the state.

Additionally, the origin story black peoples of Costa Chica hold onto contests the accepted narrative produced by Mexican anthropologists, who attribute their beginnings largely to what was made possible through state-sponsored emancipation of slaves and small-scale instances of fugitivity. In an article on “afro-descendant ethno-political mobilization” in the Costa Chica, Mexican anthropologist Citali Quecha Reyna quotes an elder interlocutor who recounted: “Well, there are lots of stories, but one that the oldest elders told me was that there, in front of Port Minizo, there was a shipwreck. They said it was huge and all of the broken pieces of the ship remained there and that a lot of black peoples came down from there. That’s what they told me about how we got here. And it might be why we, here, love life by the sea” (Quecha Reyna 163; my translation). The anthropologist highlights their insistence in telling their children they “come from ships” even as she scrutinizes them, noting that “their origins are diverse, and certainly shipwrecks existed, but they were uncommon” (Quecha Reyna 164; my translation).

We are presented with two questions. First, within the context of blackness and indigeneity in the “New World,” how might we understand the elders’ insistence that they originate from a shipwreck? Second, how must we read the anthropologist’s explanation of this insistence? One aspect that jumps out is the elder’s description of her people’s relationship to place, and in particular, to the littoral instantiated not by a “Door of No Return” but by a shipwreck, ostensibly a mutiny of captives. The origin story speaks of refusal and destruction as a celebratory source of pleasure for its people. It is why they “love life by the sea.” It is also a moment that troubles the sovereignty (or mastery) of the slave owning colonizers. On the one hand, the origin story indicates a living relationship between a people and the ground upon which they emerged as defeating the power of the sovereign. On the other hand, it is questionable whether this new relationship claims sovereignty itself in as much as sovereignty seeks to police and is successful at policing the boundaries of such a stable ground.

The anthropologist explains her interlocutor’s story within the discourse of social construction. She attributes the creation of the “myth” to the group’s needs given the experience of the “first slaves” of the “violent,” “cultural and geographic” “transformation” of the transatlantic slave trade. On the one hand, social construction as a concept indeed counters the multicultural desire for “authenticity” and “timelessness.” For example, Quecha Reyna cites anthropologist Ana Rosas Mantecón who explains, “The construction of heritage is a dynamic operation, rooted in the present, from which the past is reconstructed, selected, and interpreted. It’s not about preserving an immobile past, but inventing a posteriori, social continuity, in which tradition has a central role” (qtd. in Quecha Reyna 164). This is a valuable intervention in that it pushes back on the dichotomy of loss and recovery. Yet it is also a secular humanist reading of the origin story, which otherwise might not be legible within the bounds of transparent geography or linear history. This is to say, what if we did not insist on the exclusivity of the power of humans to shape their own relationships to land (or moments) as inanimate objects or events on a linear timeline? What if we took the origin story at face value?

This does not mean reading the elders as completely outside modernity’s episteme, but it does mean becoming open to the possibility that this grid of intelligibility is not all-encompassing or totalizing. That is, black peoples’ existence straddles both Western modernity and the undoing of its hegemony. The demonic grounds that condition black existence, as McKittrick has argued, are unpredictable, animate, and unstable. Here then, rather than understanding black existence as having “no ground” upon which to stand, we might understand it as an orientation that emerges through ungeographic grounds upon which modern conceits of sovereignty are unsustainable. To insist on the primacy of anthropology or geography’s reading of social construction, as Native feminist Mishuana Goeman charges, “obfuscates the power of land to possess us” (27). Goeman recounts that Indigenous scholar Leslie Silko “reminded us that the earth pushes through the pavement … where no sacred sites are thought to exist, and a sacred stream may still trickle waiting to heal again” (27). Indeed, we may not be the only agential creatures in this world or its otherwise.

Some Opening Remarks

By way of participating in this conversation, I’d like to submit that considering head-on black relationship to, desires for, existence in, and alienation from indigeneity provides us with an opportunity to better articulate both the epistemological force of colonialism, chattel slavery, and post-coloniality, and our desires for a “we” in their eventual destruction. Saba Mahmood clarifies: “Indeed, if the religious [or, I might add, other cosmologies] and the secular are indelibly intertwined in the modern period, each conditioning the other, then the question is not so much how modern society can expunge religion from social life (as Marx envisioned) but how to account for its ongoing power and productivity in material and discursive terms” (15). Likewise, we would do well to account for the power and productivity of the colonial episteme’s dichotomous logic of diaspora and indigeneity and the ways race (and blackness in particular) is mapped onto each.

To push back or decenter a secularism as a total logic regime also has implications for who we are and how we relate to our various origin stories, space/place, time, our ancestors, and each other. Romanticizing this relationship is unproductive, at best, and an act of violence in bad faith, at worst. To take seriously the years of critique from feminist, queer, and trans scholars as well as those coming from critiques of class and multiple geopolitical positionalities, our relations are not always benevolent; they do not always have “our” best interests at heart. In an anecdote she presents in The Transit of Empire about black workers, the colonial anthropologist Charles Peabody, and the Choctaw and Chickasaw peoples and their mounds, Jodi Byrd speculates that black workers understood and took seriously the metaphysical consequences that grave robbing would incite and for which Peabody himself was responsible. She writes,

There is evidence within the evocations [the workers sang] of corn and fire on the one hand, and a critique of the preachers in the cornfield digging up “taters row by row” on the other, that those laborers and their songs provide resistant traces that acknowledge the desecration that is occurring—and a positioning of themselves as tied to the people buried in the mounds. The corn and potatoes reveal the bundles of bodies and skulls of those Choctaws buried at the site. As Peabody forced the laborers to disinter the mounds through terraced rows, each blow of the shovel exposed the dirt-encrusted whiteness of human bones that are evoked so provocatively by these singers as the white flesh of shovel-scored potatoes in the ground. (121)

Such a laborers’ song certainly evokes an ethics of care concerned with the Choctaw and Chickasaw responsibility towards both the land and its inhabitants. This ethics also calls the workers to support the land’s caretakers in their duties. This is a relationship to land, not as visitors, not as always elsewhere, but one that questions and wrestles with the designation of black totalizing rootlessness. It asks, how might we turn our attention to the animacy of alienation in a way that straddles Western modernity and its other, such that being beholden to our relations includes contending with their force and refusing (our or their) possession?

Sandra Harvey is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Footnotes

1. In this essay I purposely do not capitalize “black” or “native” as a reminder that the ideas of blackness and nativeness are contested and refigured grounds. In contrast, I capitalize “Indigenous” or “Native” at times to differentiate between ideas of nativeness or native peoples and Native people as recognized by the U.S. federal government.

2. These conversations have also drawn on moments of academic work and histories of political organizing. Regarding activism, for example, the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Brown Berets, and the Red Guard of the late 1960s and 1970s modeled police patrols after those of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and like the BPP implemented social support actions including food programs, legal support, and health clinics. Activists formed coalitions to demand a Third World College at San Francisco State and University of California, Berkeley. These efforts brought forth Ethnic Studies programs in California and across the United States. The Third World alliances emerging during a time of colonial resistance in Africa and Asia focused attention on the importance of a critique of colonialism even within the metropole. Also, black historians and literary scholars have documented the experiences of black Indigenous peoples in the United States. See for example Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind; Sharon Holland and Tia Miles, Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds; and Andrew Jolivette, Louisiana Creoles. More informally, the open access journal Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society frequently showcases scholarship focused on the intersections of anti-blackness and settler colonialism. This scholarship seldom has drawn on black and indigenous scholarship focused on Latin America.

3. I am prompted to think through the term “porous” in Tiffany King, The Black Shoals; the idea of “fault lines” in SA Smythe, “Can I Get a Witness?”; and the term “frottage” in Keguro Macharia, Frottage.

4. I use the term “fault lines” following SA Smythe. I also thank them for the multiple conversations we have had about the need for this article to consider, once again, the “we” of both black peoples and Black Studies.

5. Even this argument is called into question by those who assert that the descendents of Indigenous people’s black slaves should not be considered citizens of their nations and that they should not benefit from rights and privileges of citizens. Their very inclusion, so goes the argument, is the result of colonial treaties that undermine the sovereignty of Indigenous nations.

6. In using this term, I call attention to the various dimensions embedded within it, as explored by Saidiya Hartman. First, the insistence on the word scene refers to a spatialized representation of a moment of subjection. Second, the subjection of the slave involves a calling into being as subjected to the terror of the master’s violence at the master’s will. Hartman describes such scenes as “inaugural moments” and the “primal scene,” by which she means “that the terrible spectacle dramatizes the origin of the subject and demonstrates that to be a slave is to be under the brutal power and authority of another” (Scenes 3).

7. See Braun and Hammond (Race, Populations, and Genomics) on anthropological and linguistic practices that give rise to the idea of “native” or “indigenous” as indicating exclusive “ethnic” groups. The practices upheld Western science as the authoritative system of knowledge production and led to understandings of ethnic groups as populations and later distinct races.

8. Here I am not referring to a beyond that transcends the colonial but to a beyond in the sense that the colonial is not successful in its totalizing attempts at mastery. One engages in ways of being that exceed colonial containment. These include otherwise cosmologies but also those ways of being that are produced and yet disavowed through colonial symbolic orders.

9. I draw on Jodi Byrd’s term “transit of empire.” She argues that “Indianness” constitutes a transit of empire, “a site through which US empire orients and replicates itself by transforming those to be colonized into ‘Indians’ through continual reiterations of pioneer logics, whether in the Pacific, the Caribbean, or the Middle East” (xiii).

10. There are two bodies of literature that focus more directly on the idea of black indigeneity. They include scholarship of Africa and the politics of autochthony and Caribbean creole culture. In the interest of space and due to the author’s limited expertise, this article does not address the latter form. I do, however, welcome conversations about its intersections with the fields of Black and Native Studies in the Americas. The article briefly engages the latter work on creole ways of being but recognizes further attention is needed.

11. This is interesting to think about given the ways settler and slave owning political thinkers continued to project blackness onto Native peoples in Virginia. See Thomas Jefferson’s differentiation between the “noble” natives beyond the borders of the United States and those within the sovereign borders of Virginia who, he argues, are mostly black.

12. Even the socialist critique of liberal secularism, which calls for the abolition of even privatized “religion,” emerges within the metaphor of skin. In “On the Jewish Question,” Marx calls for the birth of the truly free “man” by shedding religion “as snake-skins cast off by history” (Marx 213).

13. Saidiya Hartman writes, “The transformation of black subjectivity effected by emancipation is described as nascent individualism not simply because blacks were considered less than human and a hybrid of property and person prior to emancipation but because the abolition of slavery conferred on them the inalienable rights of man and brought them into the fold of liberal individualism” (Scenes 117). Given this legal legibility, it was the civilizing mission of certain abolitionists and the Freedmen’s Bureau to make proper subjects out of the emancipated.

14. Tiffany King critiques the centrality of labor for understanding black life during formal slavery and post-emancipation. See “Labor’s Aphasia.”

15. Jackson also describes East Indian claims to state power through creole identity. Yet, she argues, in this case, creole is almost always used as adjective rather than noun. Further, the Caribbean cultural archives Jackson reviews contain predominantly black authors.

16. See Feldman Black Rhythms of Peru; Walsh “Shifting the Geopolitics”; Greene, “Entre lo indio”; and Anderson, Black and Indigenous.

17. 2015 Encuesta Intercensal (Intercensal Survey) cited in Wilson II, The Nigrescent Beyond.

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