Relations beyond Colonial Borders: An Introduction

Abstract

In April 2023, we convened the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs workshop “Relations beyond Colonial Borders: Indigeneity, Racialization, Hospitality” at the Three Sisters Kitchen, a community space in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is a location shaped by multiple colonial histories, Indigenous and racialized peoples contesting colonization, and the imposition of numerous borders including the international division between the United States and Mexico. Tiwa land occupied under the name of New Mexico provided an especially resonant site for our conversations. The workshop brought together scholars, activists, poets, and artists whose work critically engages the border regime and “people in the context of forced mobility.”¹ This forum compiles a selection of writing from the workshop participants.²

Our collective inquiry focused specifically on the correlation of borders and colonialism, as well as the broader dynamics of what Harsha Walia has called “border imperialism.”³ As Walia argues, the border “is less about a politics of movement per se and is better understood as a key method of imperial state formation, hierarchical social ordering, labor control, and xenophobic nationalism.” She describes borders as “an ordering regime, both assembling and assembled through racial-capitalist accumulation and colonial relations.”⁴ The modern border regime is a geopolitical technology indispensable to practices of colonial occupation and imperial management. It is a project that strives to obliterate worlds and forms of life that are uncontainable, incongruous with, and in excess of the world of nation-states. And yet this regime has neither eliminated resistance and struggles against its force nor eradicated other worlds.

With these relations and tensions in mind, the workshop provided an opportunity to examine a number of key questions. How are we to think movement and inhabitation without reproducing the political and legal frameworks that the modern border regime solidifies? Could it be that these irrepressible struggles, resistances, and worlds not only show the violence of borders but also illuminate what remains in their excess? How do Indigenous relational practices unsettle or otherwise challenge colonial border regimes? How do relations to Indigeneity “travel” for those Indigenous peoples who have been displaced or who have chosen to live in places other than their historical homelands? How might the practices of people in the context of forced mobility, who aspire to cross a border to elsewhere or to return to their homes, reflect something other than the desire to settle in a land?

We sought to address how spaces have emerged in response to borders by foregrounding Indigenous practices of relation that disrupt and refuse the borders of settler colonial states and that contest the racial and gendered logic of white supremacy.⁵ For instance, as part of the workshop, Marcella Ernest screened and spoke about her film Across the Lake⁶ at a public event featuring Sinan Antoon, Dani Zelko, and Ernest at the Albuquerque Museum. She reflected on how, as her mother says in the film, “the border changed everything” for the Gunflint Lake community where her family was from. Ernest noted that, living along waterways now bisected by the US–Canada border, “our people have been there 10,000 years . . . [and] when the border was actually created [in 1823, and more forcefully established in 1931], they continued to live there. . . . The border would go through their homes.”⁷ Ernest observes that for most of history there was “no formal border with checkpoints and fencing, nor certainly a militarized border.” Made in the wake of the border’s having dislocated her family, Across the Lake evocatively moves across the currents and at times ice-covered waterways of the two settler states’ boundary lines “to reclaim and to recognize the existence of that place as Indigenous land, rather than one defined by the settler narrative.”⁸ In another workshop presentation, Nikolas Kosmatopoulos theorized the sea as an insurgent terrain that allows for making connections and envisioning shared struggles against the border regimes of fortress Europe and the colonial carcerality of Israel's occupation of Palestine. Kosmatopoulos spoke about Ships to Gaza, refugee boats, and Somali piracy as examples that unsettle the compartmentalized logic and fixity of border regimes as technologies of empire and contemporary thanatopolitics.

Further afield, we considered the specificities of colonial border regimes and imperial state formation, the dynamics of peoples displaced by violence and impoverishment, and the practices of organizing and living otherwise that emerge under such conditions. Mamadou Ba, for instance, recalled his experience of racial subjection and nonbelonging since landing in Lampedusa. He described the ordering of nonwhite bodies in relation to how “liberal democracy's desire for apartheid continues with ‘the migrant,’” who is perpetually excluded. Nasser Abourahme spoke about inhabitation in the context of Palestinian refugee camps as a space of refusal, a temporary space, a claim to waiting, rather than a claim to elsewhere. The interview and brief essays that follow offer further elaboration.

Notes

Works Cited