This article diagnoses the catastrophe of the present as crisis in motion. Looking to the sphere of circulation as site and source of a multitude of crises in contemporary life, it explores the emergence of crisis not simply in the disruption of movement but in the production of particular regimes of motion. The article tells three stories of crises in motion: supply chain disruption during COVID-19, blockades of colonial circulatory infrastructures, and the disastrous ecologies of extractivism, emphasizing their deep entanglements. This article traces how these crises of lifeworlds are produced by particular configurations of motion that are assembled through imperial infrastructures. Each tale is a fragment of a wider story about the violent motion of expanded reproduction, and between them are common places and peoples in struggle with the entangled crises of premature death, dispossession, and ecological collapse. Yet, in each case, crisis is called to order through refusal. Refusal disrupts racial capitalist and settler colonial circulation as it also opens radical alternatives. Looking to struggles over the imperial logistics of mobility and containment, the paper asks what kinds of collective futures take shape through infrastructure's refusal and repair.
Twenty twenty is marked as a year of cascading global crises, yet the unfolding of time since then reminds us that Gregorian temporal borders cannot contain the forces of life and death any better than Westphalian spatial ones. The first week of 2021 saw 80,300 COVID-19 deaths around the world, massive bushfires burning again in Australia, and the stunning white supremacist attack on the US Capitol, among other disasters. The ubiquity of crises defines our present, even as everyday life has long been unlivable for so many. In The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, Gerald Horne (2018) reminds us that even apocalypse—the biggest crisis of all—is a recurring experience for colonized and enslaved peoples. Yet, the feeling that life cannot or will not go on, at least in this way, may be shared now more widely than ever before. This essay investigates a common thread to the multitude of crises that constitute contemporary life: circulation. In contrast to theories of crisis that see its emergence in the disruption of circulation, I locate crisis in the production of particular regimes of motion. These forms of crisis have their genesis in the organization of circulation toward expanded reproduction. Motion animates all life, but engineering circulation—infrastructuring it—toward accumulation brings premature death. Following a brief engagement with interdisciplinary approaches to theorizing motion through reproduction and infrastructure, the article shifts to follow three contemporary crises of expanded reproduction. I trace how crisis is produced by specific configurations of motion, underpinned by particular forms of infrastructure. I look to crisis in three seemingly distinct realms—supply chain disruption during COVID-19, blockades of colonial circulatory infrastructures, and the disastrous ecologies of extractivism—to demonstrate how crisis is not simply caused by disrupted circulation but by the prior and underlying organizing of circulation. Each case is a thread of a wider story about the violent motion of expanded reproduction. Between them are places, people, and forms of power that repeat in the entangled crises of premature death, dispossession, and ecological collapse. But I also suggest that circulatory crises are transformed from everyday violence against Black, Indigenous, and subaltern people into crisis for capitalist circulatory systems through spatial practices of anti-colonial refusal. The final section of the article engages radical alternatives to racial capitalist and settler colonial circulation that abound. Looking to struggles over the imperial logistics of circulation and containment, I ask what kinds of collective futures are set in motion through infrastructure's refusal and repair.
Moving through Broken Worlds
Stuart Hall (1988) famously conceives of crisis as occurring “when the social formation can no longer be reproduced on the basis of the pre-existing system of social relations.” Lauren Berlant (2016: 393) likewise locates crisis in reproduction. “All times are transitional,” Berlant writes, “but at some crisis times like this one, politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life.” Reproduction insists that life, lifeworlds, and what Beverley Mullings (2021: 152) terms “life-work” in the tradition of feminist social reproduction theory need to be continually remade at a variety of scales—at once intimate and imperial. Bodies need to be fed, cells need to regenerate, populations need to be replaced, relations need to be performed. Even solidarity, according to Ruthie Gilmore (2020), “needs to be remade and remade and remade—it never just is.” Wherever reproduction is the linchpin, crisis is already understood as crisis in motion.
The notion that life is motion has myriad sources. Writing from the territory where I live, Leanne Simpson explores how Anishinaabe lifeworlds are anchored in motion. Simpson (2011: 85) writes that “being enmeshed in the cyclical flux of the earth lodge, Nishnaabeg people traveled throughout their localized territories in seasonal fashion. . . . Our lifeway required cyclical and rhythmical movements. . . . Society and clan structure expanded and contracted like a beating heart or working lungs.” Simpson engages Vizenor's (1999: ix) seminal work on the concept of transmotion, which posits that “natives have always been on the move, by chance, necessity, barter, reciprocal sustenance, and by trade over extensive routes; the actual motion is a natural right, and the tribal stories of transmotion are a continuous sense of visionary sovereignty.” Octavia Butler, who has been described as “a radical Black feminist theorist, historiographer, and researcher across fields and disciplines,” was also invested in motion (Streetby 2018: 720). In her extraordinary novel Parable of the Sower, life is motion. God is change. Like the biblical figure who struggles to find fertile soil to sow seeds for a future, Butler's brand of “radical reproduction” requires that we cultivate change. Butler (1995: 218) explains, “We can focus them, alter their speed or impact, in general we can shape change, but we can't stop it no matter how hard we try. Throughout the universe, the ongoing reality is change.” Indeed, motion is at the heart of Black radical and feminist thought through figurations of fugitivity. For Saidiya Hartman (2017: 468), movement constitutes a form of deeply situated faith in futurity. She writes, “The thought of what might be possible was indistinguishable from moving bodies and the transient rush and flight of black folks in this city-within-the-city.” Huey Newton (2018), likewise, prescribed a form of Black radicalism tethered to change, asserting, “We believe that everything is in a constant state of change, so we employ a framework of thinking that can put us in touch with the process of change.” C. L. R. James too centers social motion in his work. Both empire and its contestation are matters of motion, as he outlines in Beyond a Boundary (1963: 113): “Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement: not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there.”
In these traditions, motion is constitutive of life itself, and crisis takes shape through life's disruption. Leanne Simpson (2015), for instance, describes colonialism as a bomb going off in slow motion which disrupts the rhythms, cycles, and movement of Nishnaabeg life. Yet, alongside these vital visions of life in motion are diagnoses of the violence of colonial and racial capitalist circulation.
For Marx, crisis can emerge with problems in circulation, but a larger kind of crisis lies in the production of specifically capitalist motion. As Nail (2020: 40) writes, “For Marx, everything is in motion, not just capitalism. . . . The issue for Marx is not between capitalist movement and revolutionary stasis. The question . . . is how a specifically capitalist pattern of circulation works.” Capitalism, for Marx, is a regime of motion defined by dispossession and exploitation. Jody Melamed (2015: 77) emphasizes the violent motions of racial capitalism when she writes, “Capital can only be capital when it is accumulating and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups.” Marx's extended focus on motion is associated with volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, but the argument that capitalism is in itself a regime of motion lies at the center of his most fundamental and basic theory of value—it is his “general formula for capital.” The capitalist regime of motion is identical to what he terms expanded reproduction. Here, reproduction is not characterized by a simple circuit of subsistence; instead capital is accumulated, or hoarded, as it moves from M money to C commodity and back to M money form. It is not magic that makes expanded reproduction possible, but theft. Surplus rather than survival becomes the end game of reproduction within a capitalist regime of motion. Or, as Rosa Luxemburg (1951: 34) explains, “Profit becomes an end in itself, the decisive factor which determines not only production but also reproduction.” Theft is typically thought of in terms of labor's surplus, but as Dene scholar Glen Coulthard (2014) argues, if we take colonialism seriously, then expanded reproduction may equally or additionally entail theft of land and more-than-human life. Primitive accumulation is perpetual.
Ruthie Gilmore (2007) reminds us that motion takes different forms that are related but not identical. She insists that capital circulates through captive humans, whose own motion is disrupted by their containment in carceral—and, we should add, plantation—space. Physical movement is critically important, and for Marx even a source of value. And yet, Marx ([1887] 1993: 226) also suggests that capital circulation can “take place without physical movement. . . . A house that is sold from A to B circulates as a commodity, but it does not get up and walk.” This does not make physical motion less important, only more complex. While these forms of motion are not identical, they also cannot be disentangled. Physical circulation has the special capacity to accelerate the circulation of capital. The circulation of legal documents and financial transactions are necessary to sanction the house sale, and these are undeniably material. Luxemburg (1951: 40–41) sees these two forms of motion as necessarily entangled, making expanded reproduction inherently imperial. It is driven not only by “a permanent incentive to reproduction in general,” she writes, “but also a motive for its expansion, for reproduction on an ever larger scale.” For Luxemburg, expanded reproduction inevitably relies on geographic expansion. But what underpins particular configurations of motion? How does the relationship between different forms of motion materialize? And how does motion get organized otherwise?
Infrastructures are quite literally the socio-technical systems assembled to sustain or expand reproduction. Decades ago, David Harvey (1981) argued that crises of capitalist motion can be temporarily resolved through the production of built infrastructure, what he termed a “spatial fix.” Ruthie Gilmore (2022: 490) writes, “In the material world, infrastructure . . . speeds some processes and slows down others, setting agendas, producing isolation, enabling cooperation.” Ever concerned with the complexities of materiality, Gilmore also reminds us that the infrastructures of feeling are material too, “in the sense that ideology becomes material as do the actions that feelings enable or constrain” (490). Assuming a capacious materiality, Berlant (2016: 393) helpfully defines infrastructure as “the movement or patterning of social form,” and suggests that “an infrastructural analysis helps us see that what we commonly call ‘structure’ is not . . . an intractable principle of continuity across time and space, but . . . a convergence of force and value in patterns of movement that's only solid when seen from a distance.” Years ago, Doreen Massey (1993) argued that transportation and communications infrastructures produce “power geometries”—speeding up motion and connectivity for some but in ways that erect barriers or slow the motion of others. Dams, ports, roads, rails, pipelines, prisons, and cables enable and constrain particular configurations of motion, of reproduction.
Imperial infrastructures support the flourishing of some at the expense of others. Infrastructure is vital to biological and social reproduction, but, as Winona LaDuke and I (2020) have argued, “insofar as they are oriented towards expanded reproduction . . . infrastructures dispossess, extract and accumulate.” Anti-colonial and Indigenous writers explore the infrastructural underpinnings of imperialism (A. Simpson 2014; Khalili 2020; Goeman 2022; Spice 2018; Estes 2019; Pasternak and Dafnos 2018; Murphy 2013; Karuka 2019). For Leanne Simpson (2011), it is a colonial hydro dam that disrupts her people's lifeways, their rhythms and motions, by fragmenting the movement of waters and fish. Walter Rodney (1981) provides a breathtaking account of the back-breaking enslaved labor that built the system of dikes and canals, which made the plantation (and human habitation) possible along the Guyanese coast. Omar Salamanca (2020) explains how construction of road systems that segregate Palestinian and Israeli mobilities are vital to land dispossession and the re/production of the wider apartheid system. Even nasty old imperialists can help us to think about imperial motion as infrastructural. Alfred Thayer Mahan—a founding father of classic geopolitics—suggested that the geography of British colonies could be mapped according to a simple logic: the fueling of maritime forces. Mahan (1890) writes that “useful harbors and the conditions of the communications between them constitute . . . the main strategic outlines of the situation.” Infrastructure materializes imperial circulation, and as such becomes a critical site of anti-colonial struggle. Blockades of infrastructure serve as embodied practice of refusal in the arsenal of anti-colonial struggle. Deliberate disruption of rail lines and roads, of pipelines and ports, by Black and Indigenous people is an enactment of refusal that brings the “objective” and “subjective” dimensions of crisis onto common ground through spatial practice. In their spatial and temporal precision, refusal through blockade transforms the ongoing crises lived by colonized people—what Eugene Brennan refers to in the introduction to this special issue as “crisis as tendency”—into a general and temporally precise crisis “as event,” of and for expanded reproduction.
The sections that follow ground these ideas in particular times and places where crises in the realm of circulation translate into crises in the reproduction of life. While these stories trace seemingly distinct worlds, they cannot be pulled apart. The promise of an infrastructural analysis of the crises of motion that constitute our collective predicament is derived from reading them together, as crises of expanded reproduction.
Crisis 1—Logistics of the Pandemic's Path
As the last month of the wretched year of 2020 drew to a close, a dramatic crisis of circulation unfolded at the British/French border. As many as ten thousand truckers transformed hundreds of kilometers of roads in southern England into a massive linear parking lot when the Channel crossing closed. France's refusal to allow usual traffic through was officially prompted by attempts to contain the second COVID strain. Truckers from across Europe who had carefully planned transnational itineraries to make it home for winter holidays were left stranded. No food, no services, and no medical tests were initially on offer. Despite the dependence of national economies on transnational supply chains, little thought has been invested in planning for disruption of this kind or at this scale. For the first few days of the crisis, truckers relied on small provisions they kept in their cabs, and the few filthy restrooms they could find nearby. Eventually, the British army was deployed to manage the scene. Only as COVID tests were processed did the French allow the backlog to ease, but this crisis in motion diagnosed some elements of the power and precarity of supply chain capitalism in our pandemic present.
From panics over toilet paper and the hoarding of essentials, to concerns about shutdowns in China creating disruption to supply for Western consumption, to the geopolitical crisis of PPE, pandemic pedagogy involved mass education about basic tenets of supply chain capitalism. Labor scholar Kim Moody (2020) suggests that “the pandemic has graphically demonstrated the centrality of the ‘human networks’ that keep the global supply chains moving. That is, all those who produce the goods and those that bring them to the factory, the hospital, the supermarket, or your self-isolating home.” Fears of disrupted supply chains led to the designation of “essential worker” that offered a brief opening for the valorization of hyper-exploited precarious workers of color. Instead, corporate public relations stunts performed gratitude to essential workers while refusing meaningful shifts in financial compensation, sick leave, or even access to PPE. It is telling that Amazon's Jeff Bezos—the world's first trillionaire—is a leader in the logistics sector. Bezos grabbed even more wealth through the pandemic and the hyper-exploitation of essential workers, also prompting an explosion of labor actions in the sector. This is critical, but the problem of logistics and disruption speaks to how this calculative management and martial science has remade society and space beyond just transportation and distribution. In fact, the crisis in motion of this moment lies not only in matters of physical distribution but also in the production of life in imperial motion.
Logistics has long been about making live and die by making and containing motion. Logistics had its ancient genesis as an art of war, supplying and sustaining the battlefield. Modern logistics emerged through gruesome imperial circulations such as the transatlantic slave trade (cf. Harney and Moten 2013) and the “movements westward” that devastated Indigenous societies and ecologies on Turtle Island. The “revolution in logistics” took shape in the post-WWII period and saw the harnessing of military methods of “supplying the front” for corporate operations. Before the revolution, logistics was a martial art of moving and provisioning “men and munitions.” After the revolution, “logistics” emerged as a management science of materials movement across production and distribution in both the corporate and military sector (Cowen 2014). Logistics transformed not just “distribution” but racial capitalism itself, its relationship to questions of circulation and containment and to matters of life and (premature) death.
To further ground these arguments, we return to Turtle Island/North America, to a scene of backlog far more gruesome than the first. This brutal backlog took shape at a border of sorts—the border between animal life and meat product at the slaughterhouse gate. Along with prisons, care facilities, and distribution centers, meat processing plants have been ground zero for pandemic outbreaks, with striking impacts on precarious, often migrant, workers, mostly of color. After decades of corporate consolidation, a small number of American slaughterhouses process billions of pounds of meat each year. One single Smithfield's plant in North Dakota produces 5 percent of the nation's pork products, while 98 percent of beef products are processed by just fifty slaughterhouses (Corkery and Yaffe-Bellany 2020). COVID outbreaks occur because of working conditions and productivity demands that make meaningful distancing impossible, because of a lack of provisioning of PPE, and because of the social determinants of health. The outbreaks led to plant closures, creating enormous bottlenecks in the profoundly industrial and logistical meat sector. In the US and elsewhere, the infection and premature death of processing plant workers (not only their labor actions) have been a source of “supply chain disruption,” and the massive “culls” of animal life have been one of the gruesome costs. Millions of nonhuman lives have been prematurely extinguished—sometimes by turning off ventilation systems, the critical infrastructures that support livestock breath, to produce slow, mass suffocation.
As the crisis of corporate killing deepened, Trump responded by issuing an executive order that deemed meatpacking plants to be “critical infrastructure” under the Defense Production Act of 1950. The executive order prohibited their closure by state health authorities and provided meatpacking companies with a legal defense from liability claims by their employees. Perhaps predictably, the order worked to protect infrastructures of expanded reproduction for corporations while sacrificing the social reproduction of essential workers. Yet plants continue to close when outbreaks cannot be discursively contained.
While this crisis is horrific, logistics comes into play long before the movement of livestock from the farm to the slaughterhouse. Today, logistics drives the very design of the pig or cow itself. The Ikea “flat pack” has reshaped furniture to facilitate low-cost, long-distance movement, shifting the labor of assembly onto the consumer. Likewise, the logistics of swine and cattle production have reshaped the very form of the pig and cow to enhance the efficiency of the supply chain toward expanded reproduction. For supply chain management, “the pig” is one stage of pork (as commodity) in the cycle of value realization. The logistical pig has been refigured as a life-form toward that end. In the corporate meat sector, every aspect of the cycle of life has been reorganized by supply chain management and its software so that the animal fits the system of motion. As one industry textbook explains, “Logistics not science is the underpinning of a successful breeding policy” (Knap 2012: 7972). This includes everything from ovulation synchronization for reproductive efficiency to the timing of insemination and the weaning of sows and cows to fit trucking schedules, themselves organized to maximize efficiency at processing facilities. Swine hips are standardized to fit the machines of slaughter.
In the meat supply chain, livestock is subject to more and more logistical refashioning, though this sector was also a key innovator in modern industrial logistics. Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line, but witnessed a system where carcasses were suspended from a moving trolley in Gustavus Swift's Chicago slaughterhouses. Swift's “disassembly line” accelerated the circulation of meat and capital before being adapted to the auto plant. Meat processing has long been at the forefront of corporate logistical life. The invention of cold storage rail cars provided a mobile spatial fix to the distance between settler cities and the feed lots on the Plains. Cold storage allowed for cattle to be moved after slaughter, making transport more efficient and accumulation more expansive; frozen packages of beef are easier to move than living, breathing cattle. But with a corporate meat supply chain organized as a conveyor belt—not only after animal death but for the production of animal life—any significant disruption can quickly become system failure.
This dreadful example suggests that logistics makes forms of life and death in motion. Logistics organizes movement into, through, and beyond production. Both a management and martial science of movement, logistics aims to maximize the circulation of capital through materials movement. Crisis in motion takes shape not only in the crucially important sector of “distribution.” Rather, logistics produces forms of life in motion that are defined by crisis.
In arguing for a productive conception of logistical power, I am also inviting us to think about the logistical crisis of the COVID pandemic differently. Jennifer Terry (2009) has argued that all wars have their “signature injury”—the particular damage to soldiers’ bodies that derives from widespread use of historically specific weapons technologies. Similarly, we might question how the organization of motion through logistics and its infrastructures produces signature injuries at a planetary scale. Could this pandemic be a signature injury of logistical life? Did the novel coronavirus have its genesis in habitat destruction, rapid global suburbanization, industrial agribusiness, and supply chain infrastructures that constitute racial capitalism today? To consider this question more carefully and to attend to the profoundly colonial contours of crises in motion, the article now moves to look at infrastructure's imperial afterlives. The second story of crisis also begins in the summer of 2020.
Crisis 2—Infrastructure's Afterlives
On August 29, 2020, the head of Canada's first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, hit the ground. Montreal activists “toppled and decapitated” his statue during an action calling on political leaders to defund police services (Rudin 2021). A few weeks earlier, Black Lives Matter activists in Toronto queerly covered their Macdonald in pink paint, eliciting a formal public thank-you from Indigenous leaders in a show of anti-colonial movement solidarity. Local media reported that Toronto's Macdonald “has been covered up ever since, and inside this enclosure, you can see a bag over the father of Canadian Confederation's head” (Warmington 2020). East coast activists in Charlottetown doused their Macdonald in blood-colored paint as did organizers out west in Victoria, while in the capital city of Ottawa, Macdonald was placed under state surveillance, with CCTV cameras and police patrols to protect his body (and the settler colonial body politic) from disfiguration.
As monuments to colonial and racial capitalist violence came crashing down around the world, entangled movements for Indigenous Land Back and Black Lives Matter on this territory too had had enough. They insisted that Canada's first prime minister could no longer be allowed to stand—neither physically as statue in the city, nor symbolically as heroic figure in history. In official pedagogy, Macdonald is remembered as the nation's founding father, but the patriarch's decapitation announces another biography of an engineer of genocide.
These competing accounts collide on the railway tracks. Macdonald insisted that a transcontinental railroad would be the “spine” of his new colonial state—the skeleton for a new body politic. At the height of what Karuka (2019) calls railroad colonialism, Macdonald took to build an iron road from coast to coast, connecting scattered British colonies of North America. First envisioned in the mid-1800s as a key link in British imperial circulatory systems to the Far East, the rail would compete with the growing westward reach of the rising US empire, unload surplus population, and maintain imperial hegemony. More than metaphor, this socio-technical spine would support a vast continental reach of settlement and circulation and become the vital physical backbone upholding settler economy and legal jurisdiction. MacDonald's iron spine indeed became the backbone of a new settler colonial body politic, but what kind of beast did it build?
Rail infrastructure made the settler state possible, and it did so through imperial logistics of creative destructive anchored in dispossession, displacement, and hyper-exploitation. In this era of the railway barons, infrastructure expansion became an extraordinarily lucrative means of expanding reproduction. A massive public-private partnership, the railroad was financed by land theft. Enormous tracts of Indigenous land were granted by the Dominion government to the railroad companies. The railroad recruited settlers through their own Department of Colonization, as well as by selling land to private colonization companies. White settlers were incentivized to settle, with proximity to whiteness the means for sorting settler racial hierarchies. Black migration was specifically and actively discouraged by both informal and formal means. Banks and bankers feasted on this infrastructure of enclosure. Through it they circulated capital extracted from the theft of bodies, labor, and lands throughout the colonized world. Banks like Barings, with capital accrued through slavery and colonialism, provided critical capital for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in its final stages of construction and to this day are commemorated in the name of one of its premier stations. Revelstoke station—now a world-famous ski resort—was named after Lord Revelstoke, also known as Edward Baring, to acknowledge the bank's crucial capital injection into the infrastructure (Cowen 2020). In a strange and delicious coincidence, Revelstoke ski resort features a famous hill called “kill the banker.” The railroads were also bound up in complex racialized labor regimes that particularly impacted Chinese and Black workers. As in the US, the most dangerous parts of construction were assigned to Chinese workers. Underpaid and relying on their own provisions and medical care, Chinese workers died at a rate of two per kilometer in the treacherous Rocky Mountains. Black workers were recruited as porters with conditions of work that rivaled those of slavery (Matthieu 2010). The rail carried white passengers into intimate fantasies of racial subservience, and it carried racialized workers to premature deaths.
Across Turtle Island, railroads became the key infrastructure in the colonial war against first peoples. On both sides of the medicine line, the railroads enabled land theft. A key rationale for the Canadian rail was its role in asserting the border against American invasion. Lands were cleared for the coming railroad, while the railroad also became a colonial weapon to clear the land. Rail was critical in the extermination of the buffalo that had roamed Turtle Island, from Alaska and the Yukon Territories down through Georgia. In just a few decades, herds were hunted to near extinction with devastating consequences for Indigenous peoples whose lifeways were profoundly entangled with the buffalo. Settler states saw the buffalo slaughter as logistical warfare to clear the plains through extermination of Indigenous peoples’ food supply. This is painfully clear in US Colonel Richard Irving Dodge's directive to “kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone” (Smits 1994). Daschuk (2013: 162) has further documented how, with the disappearance of the buffalo, officials “denied food, as a means to ethnically cleanse a vast region from Regina to the Alberta border as the Canadian Pacific Railway took shape.” Deliberate starvation was used to force Indigenous peoples off their territories and into reserves. When organized resistance to colonial dispossession took shape in the 1885 Uprising, the transcontinental railroad transported Canadian militia forces to the front lines of colonial wars against Cree and Metis people, providing the definitive logistical advantage.
The construction of this massive colonial infrastructure demanded assembly of another. Colonial circulatory infrastructure required colonial security infrastructure. What is now the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) was created in 1873, initially as the North West Mounted Police, a paramilitary force created to protect the colonial order both “internally” where settler jurisdiction had already been asserted and “externally” where it remained an ambition. In fact, the name change indexes that achievement. Dhillon (2015: 8) argues that the Mounties have carried out “genocidal extermination, subjugation, and physical containment of Indigenous communities.” They were deployed on the Canadian frontier to “ensure the negation of Indigenous sovereignty and to implement effective policies of containment and surveillance” (Nettelbeck and Smandych 2010: 357).
The force was also specifically created to clear the way for the railroad and to protect the infrastructure as it was built. Protecting the infrastructure of colonization was thus a critical means of conquest. In 1885, Mounties saw their jurisdiction expanded at the direct request of the president of the CPR—to protect the infrastructure as it laid new tracks west of the Rockies. Mounties were also deployed to break the strikes of rail workers laying tracks through the mountains. Later, in 1920, when Macdonald's genocidal residential school system became compulsory, Mounties were charged with ensuring attendance. Mounted police were also a part of transnational imperial struggle. Precisely because of their expertise in “counterinsurgency” warfare against Indigenous people on the plains, they were deployed to fight the Boers in the 1899–1903 South African war. Today, the RCMP website proudly proclaims, “The two regiments consisting of North West Mounted Police members had experience dealing with counter-insurgency during the North-West Rebellion. Consequently, they achieved many successes in battle.” Colonial infrastructure required the protection of martial force, and—as Mahan insists—martial force required infrastructure to enhance and extend that force.
Over 150 years later, these same railroad tracks remain a site of acute struggle over colonial violence. Just a few months prior to Macdonald's decapitation, the railroad became the stage for a momentous standoff between the settler state and Indigenous peoples. On February 6, 2020, the same Mounted Police formed to protect the infrastructures of settler “civilization” violently raided the unceded territory of the Wet'suwet'en Nation to clear the way for corporate construction of a natural gas pipeline. Arresting land defenders and leadership, destroying community infrastructure, and interrupting ceremony, the raid went on for days. Under Wet'suwet'en law, authority over the nation's unceded territory lies with hereditary chiefs from five clans in a system of governance that long predates colonization. All five hereditary chiefs rejected the construction of the pipeline on their territory. In direct response to their calls for support, dramatic and sustained actions proliferated. Indigenous people and their allies blockaded the national rail network, launching the #ShutDownCanada movement. Coast to coast occupations of rail lines and ports, highways and bridges, and central city streets by Indigenous land defenders and their allies had impact. Flows of commuters and commodities that rely on rapid circulation ground to a halt. Standing in solidarity with the Wet'suwet'en and standing immediately atop the transcontinental tracks, Mohawk land protectors offered teachings about the original treaties that past and present infrastructures trespass. Materially invoking the infrastructural violence at the heart of Canada's colonial problem, Mohawk land protectors created the space and opportunity for moving forward differently.
If the contemporary crisis of colonial violence circulates through imperial infrastructures, how might a reckoning with this ongoing unfolding of infrastructural injustice lay the tracks for a different road forward? And how might we draw out the wider imperial ecologies in these accounts of crisis?
Crisis 3—Imperial Ecologies
In the summer of 2020, as city streets were alight with demands for a racial reckoning and as the pandemic continued to devastate and mutate, the Amazon burned at an unprecedented pace as part of our deepening climate crisis. This extraordinary ecosystem had been in the unmaking for many years and is now projected to collapse later this century, yet summer 2020 marked dramatically increased rates of destruction. Protection of the Amazon, 60 percent of which is claimed by Brazil, is crucial to the continued existence of life on earth as we know it. Home to Indigenous and African descendent peoples who are fiercely defending their homelands, the Amazon—“the lungs of the earth”—is the source of a fifth of the world's oxygen supply (Gonzales 2019). The moisture that evaporates from the Amazon rains on farmlands across South America and up to the US Midwest. The species diversity within the Amazon is unparalleled on the planet. It is the extraordinary scale, ecological complexity, and abundance of the rainforest and its main river that led Jeff Bezos, in 1994, to rename his fledgling distribution platform from “Cadabra” to Amazon. You can find untold riches and resources in the Amazon, or at least you could. But it is not just the rest of us earthlings that rely on the critical Amazon ecosystem; Amazon the corporation does too.
In the Amazon, a geopolitics of infrastructure is remaking critical planetary ecologies. The fires themselves have garnered global media attention, but less prominent in the coverage is the way that deforestation is taking shape to make way for an extractive industrial economy financed and underpinned by infrastructure development. Deforestation closely follows the development of new road and rail infrastructure; satellite images show how roads cut into and fragment forest canopy and intensify traffic in the Amazon. Infrastructure serves as vector for deforestation, with 95 percent of it taking place within five and a half kilometers of roadways. Infrastructure furthermore enables development of more infrastructure; energy, industrial agriculture, and extractive systems become possible when transportation makes new lands accessible. Cattle ranching has become the largest land use driving of deforestation in every country with jurisdiction in the Amazon, accounting for 80 percent of the current deforestation rates, but it is transport infrastructure that underpins this industrial transformation. Amazonian infrastructure expansion was a linchpin in Bolsonaro's broader economic plans (Holmes 2019). Brazil is planning “to build a series of big new hydroelectric dams and webs of waterways, rail lines, ports and roads that can overcome logistical obstacles standing in the way of exporting commodities and other goods.”
Brazil is arguably a key stage for US and Chinese imperial competition through infrastructure. Brazil recently signed on as a member state of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (Ennes 2020), and Chinese banks are already heavily invested in Brazilian infrastructure projects (“Chinese Banks Expand in Brazil Eyeing Infrastructure” 2015). China's presence is growing, while it is also “shifting from a focus on extracting raw materials toward financing infrastructure necessary to produce and transport them.” Key plans and deals for infrastructure expansion in the Brazilian Amazon have also been unfolding in the United States. New trade deals were established in 2019 between the American and Brazilian governments, and infrastructure investment is the vehicle for economic cooperation. In September 2019, Brazil's infrastructure minister reported on talks with the US: “We have major programs of concessions in all areas that will transform our infrastructure, logistics and competitiveness” (Wemer 2020). A year later, a $1 billion (USD) MOU was signed between the two countries. An interim report from March 2020 described a key goal of the agreement being to close the gap between China and US investment in Brazil's “growing infrastructure construction,” of which China accounts for 7 percent and the US only 2 percent.
US finance is heavily implicated in the development of Amazonian infrastructure. Grim (2019) goes so far as to name US-based Blackstone—the world's largest asset management firm—as the “driving force behind Amazon Deforestation,” with major stakes in an enormous terminal and highway project to support industrial agriculture expansion. BlackRock—an offshoot of Blackstone that manages more than $6 trillion in investments—has invested heavily in industrial Brazilian cattle. JBS (n.d.), “the world's largest animal protein producer” (as the website proudly proclaims) and, after Nestle, the world's largest food corporation, is implicated in both the destruction of the Amazon and working conditions that are “akin to slavery.” Despite its loud claims to invest in sustainable supply chains, BlackRock increased its stake in JBS in 2016 by $41 million, and again in 2018.
This infrastructural incursion into the Amazon is fueling the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian people and provoking widespread resistance. Pereira da Silva and Cordoba (2020) write, “The strategy of Bolsonaro's government and its allies in congress is very clear: to take 9.8 million hectares from Indigenous and traditional territories in the Amazon to seize more land for agribusiness.” When it comes to the Amazon's peoples, that Brazil blatantly undermines their self-determination appears to be more the rule than the exception. Dias (2019) writes, “For more than a century, a series of Brazilian governments have sought to move into the country's interior, developing—or, to be more precise, colonizing—the Amazon.” In 2019, while the fires burned, Bolsonaro's presidential spokesperson tried to allay concerns about Indigenous peoples of the Amazon while recentering the focus on “national interest” when he explained that “the Indians will be consulted, but national interest must prevail.” This colonial stance is unchanged from the Brazilian state in 1975, when road construction through the Amazon saw the murder of thousands of Indigenous Amazonian people. In 1975, Col. João Tarcísio Cartaxo Arruda explained, “This road is important and must be constructed, whatever the cost. We will not change its layout, and the only burden for our battalions will be to pacify the Indians” (Dias 2019). Perhaps more surprising than the colonial continuity within Brazil is the extraordinary convergence in colonial discourse between Brazil and Canada. While Canada's Justin Trudeau is often cast as the progressive boy toy of leaders on the world stage, his words—almost interchangeable with the Bolsonaro regime—should give pause. At the height of Indigenous-led resistance to the Transmountain pipeline, Trudeau insisted, “[The Transmountain pipeline] is in the national interest and it will get built” (Global News2018).
These transnational ties forged by colonial infrastructure and its protection are precisely what prompts this circuit in the south. Today in Brazil, bovine life is implanted into the Amazon landscape in a process of agro-industrial colonization underpinned by infrastructure. But this is not the first time a massive infrastructural incursion has served to replace Indigenous peoples and ecosystems with settlers and extractive bovine industry. It is not even the first time in this article. As in the Amazon, colonization of the central plains transformed complex ecologies into landscapes of capitalist agribusiness, and here too, this colonial transformation relied on infrastructure. Winona LaDuke (2017) emphasizes the scale of nineteenth-century colonial ecological destruction: “There were then more than 250 types of grass, along with profusions of prairie dogs, purple corn flower, prairie turnips, mushrooms, and a host of other species listed today as endangered or protected. . . . Those 50 million buffalo have been replaced by farms and 45 million cattle.” Karuka (2019: 40) describes how “railroad colonialism transformed bountiful prairie lands into massive monocrop areas for beef, pork, and grain production.” The railroads were critical here but so were logistical innovations in their use. Gustav Swift may have inspired Ford with his disassembly line, but it was his refrigerated railcar that allowed processed beef rather than live cattle to be shipped east—linking the industrial cities of the east with increased efficiency to the farms of the western frontier.
The deep entanglements between these three stories of crisis continue to unfold. In 2007, JBS, the Brazilian global meat giant, already financed by US investment firms, entered the US livestock market through a buyout of Swift and Co., the firm founded by Gustavus Swift. In another extraordinary convergence, COVID-19 outbreaks at their Greeley facility have been among the largest in the United States. Gilmore argues that all life is geographical, and perhaps so too is death. The geography of COVID outbreaks in the meat supply chain points to a much longer and larger crisis of sovereignty and food systems in the imperial logistics of social reproduction. The plant, which employs more than three thousand workers, is located in the northeast corner of Colorado, on Indigenous lands that remain deeply contested to this day.
In 1803, in what Nick Estes (2017: 117) describes as the “largest real estate transaction in world history,” known today as the Louisiana Purchase, the US “bought” an enormous tract of land from France. It was, in fact, Barings Bank (of Canadian railroad fame) that financed this deal. The Sioux Nation or Oceti Sakowin eventually signed peace treaties with the invading American settler state to bring an end to the wars against them. Greeley is within the lands of the Fort Laramie treaties, which provided this “temporary reprieve” and a “25-million-acre territory” for the Oceti Sakowin. With the buffalo slaughter and settler invasion, Estes describes how this vast land base was steadily diminished. By 1876, Congress abolished treaty making with Native Nations, and in 1877 it illegally ceded the Black Hills and created the present-day reservation system. Foregrounding the invasion of rail and hydro dams historically and oil pipelines more recently, Estes traces how settler violations of the Fort Laramie treaties provide context for the extraordinary Standing Rock uprising, and the ongoing legal action to restore these Indigenous lands. Indeed, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 remains at the center of a land dispute that the Smithsonian suggests “brings into question the very meaning of international agreements and who has the right to adjudicate them when they break down.” They report on the 1980 Supreme Court ruling that awarded more than $100 million in reparation to the Sioux Nation, on the grounds that the US had illegally appropriated the Black Hills. The payment was refused, and Chief Spotted Tail instead insisted, “We'd like to see that land back.”
These specific lands figured in all three stories of crisis—as the site of COVID outbreaks in processing plants, as Indigenous homelands subject to the violent dispossession of railroads and police force, and as a vital complex ecology that has been devastated and remade into a zone of extractive corporate agriculture. The beef, the bankers, and the borders also repeat. Multiple threads of entanglement in fact make it impossible to pull these crises apart. The borders of these stories of crises in motion deliberately give way—they wind through and into each other. They are all stories of the crisis of expanded reproduction.
Imperial logistics may be able to manage more circumscribed crises of distribution. With ready access to disposable “essential workers” and to Indigenous and Afro-Amazonian people's lands, the sector can even thrive in a context of quarantine, as Bezos's trillions suggest. But logistics cannot manage the crisis of life that its own logics and infrastructures produce. Anti-colonial movements are organizing to interrupt lethal circulation and to organize motion otherwise. The final section of this article shows how they are regenerating reproduction through refusal.
Regenerating Reproduction
Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite writes, “That moment of utter disaster, the very moment when it seems almost hopeless, too difficult to proceed, you begin to glimpse a kind of radiance on the other end of the maelstrom” (McSweeney n.d.). This capacity to see possibility through the depths of catastrophe and to do so from a place of investment is exquisite and humbling. Estes crafts a similar path through the crisis of settler colonial infrastructure. Estes (2019) writes that “new pipelines are creeping across the continent like a spiderweb, with frightening speed, but in the process, they are also connecting and inciting to action disparate communities of the exploited and dispossessed.”
The catastrophe of current times is clear. Across these three entangled stories of expanded reproduction, I have lingered in the violence: the necropolitics of contemporary supply chains, the colonial afterlives of its infrastructures, and the destruction of planetary ecologies that have us hurtling toward apocalypse. But what marks this moment is not just crisis but the movements creating possibility for substantial and sustained transformation. At each of the many sites we have encountered, fierce struggle confronts efforts to expand imperial reproduction. From Amazon workers to the Amazon, from the streets of Montreal to the central plains, these “disparate communities of the exploited and dispossessed” are saying no and investing instead in motion's fugitive forms. In their refusal of the status quo, these movements make possible other forms of motion.
Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson (2014) pursues the concept of refusal in the context of colonial dispossession, suggesting that it is distinct from “resistance” in that it rejects outright the entire paradigm of colonial thought, value, and action. Refusal is the rejection of settler state legitimacy and authority, she argues, and it opens up “a possibility for doing things differently” (7). Tina Campt (2019) also sees refusal as “a rejection of the status quo as livable and the creation of possibility in the face of negation.” For Campt, it is “a refusal to recognize a system that renders you fundamentally illegible and unintelligible . . . using negation as a generative and creative source of disorderly power to embrace the possibility of living otherwise.”
In her engagement with the spatial practice of refusal, Leanne Simpson (2021) tells stories of the beaver. She explores the work of this beautiful creature that blocks some flows, enabling whole new ecologies to flourish. The blockade is a “counter logistical” practice of refusal that exemplifies this perspective of having both disruptive and generative effects. Blockades have long been mobilized against colonial infrastructure to disrupt colonial circulation. At a recent forum with leaders in the “Land Back” movement, Kanahus Manuel, a member of the Secwepemc Women's Warrior Society, explained, “Blockades have been one of our go-tos as Indigenous people when we're talking about direct action” (Yellowhead Institute 2020). Manuel situates the power of the blockade in the context of extractive logistics: “I think about the resources extracted without our consent. It's always about getting these raw resources from Indigenous territories out to the global market.” Manuel further suggests that the blockade isn't only about blocking but about also building. She continues, “The blockade is a place where we as Indigenous people, our sovereignty, our jurisdiction and our territorial authority, confront the assumed colonial authority and jurisdiction. They think they own the land, but we know we own the land, and the blockade is where we meet.” At the same forum, Mollie Wickam, spokesperson for the Gitemd'en clan of the Wet'suwet'en people, spoke to the creative capacity of blockades. “It started as a blockade. We set up a blockade, the RCMP came in and raided, got an injunction against us. But we are still living out on the territory and it's a resurgence that spread from coast to coast.” She continues, “When we shut down the road . . . as soon as Wet'suwe'ten people had control over their territory . . . the waters run clear again, the animals return. And you can actually live as a free person. I don't know how many people have actually experienced what that feels like. We've felt it.”
Manuel contributed to this extraordinary discussion from the front lines of a blockade, in a kind of mobius strip of theory and action. This blockade is one installation of the Tiny House Warriors, a group that Manuel founded. They build very small homes, directly in the pathway of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project, strategically placing them next to proposed “man camps” to challenge the rampant violence they concentrate on Indigenous women. The tiny houses are also being equipped with off-grid solar systems. Village sites “operate under the authority of Secwepemc law to reassert collective jurisdiction and title over the whole of our unceded territory” (Tiny House Warriors n.d.).
Dakota scholar Kim Tallbear (2016) has noted the leadership of women and gender nonconforming folx in Indigenous resurgence and theorizes the tight relations of care and courage that fuel its feminism. Winona Laduke and I (2020) have termed this kind of feminist assemblage of systems to sustain decolonial life “alimentary infrastructure.” Alimentary infrastructure is life-giving in its design, finance, and effects—it refuses expanded reproduction and supports the regeneration and becoming of ecologies. Metis scholar Jordan Kinder (2021) describes an enriched sense of “embodied infrastructure” in the work of the Tiny House Warriors. Kinder describes their practice as “a return to harnessing flows in ways that foreground Indigenous epistemologies and ways of being,” one that “disrupts resource logics and their operations.”
Refusal also animates the contemporary abolition movement. In fact, if movements for land back through blockade are about building as much as breaking, we might consider movements for abolition as plotting radical reproduction. Abolition is not simply a resistance to the violence of policing or an effort to reform carceral systems, it is a rejection of the infrastructures of coloniality—the “infrastructures of feeling,” on Gilmore's terms, of white supremacy and the physical infrastructures on which they are built that produce premature death. Dismantling violent infrastructures that terrorize some as a means of protecting the reproduction of others remains a key to abolition precisely because organizations like the RCMP were founded on the protection of primitive accumulation through infrastructure expansion, and this continues to this day. Black Lives Matter–Toronto cofounder Sandy Hudson (2020) provocatively questions, precisely when in the RCMP's history did they depart from their “literal original purpose of terrorizing Black & Indigenous communities?” Abolition demands that reckoning.
At the same time, movement leaders regularly repeat that abolition is about more than dismantling carceral infrastructure; it is about cultivating alternatives. “What if abolition is something that grows?” asks Gumbs (2008) in Critical Resistance's collection Abolition Now! Ruthie Gilmore (2018) insists that “abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. . . . Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.” This positive vision of abolition as already here becomes clear in an example that BLM-TO cofounder Janaya Khan offers. In response to a community member's question about existing examples of transformative justice that do not rely on calling police, Khan suggested, “First and foremost, we need to look at models that already exist,” specifically citing the experience of elders (Khan and Newbold 2018). Khan then explains that there is much to learn from the survivance of Black trans sex workers, and their creative work in assembling alternative infrastructures of community safety. Khan explains, “When a client is violent or dangerous, they can't call the cops. Sex work is not decriminalized here. In fact, it's heavily criminalized. And so, Black trans sex workers have invented and implemented safety strategies in order to keep each other safe because it's not an option to call the police.”
Movements that are making and marking our moment are working to build a future from the “fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities” that survive the violence of imperial motions. They are diagnosing the crisis of expanded reproduction—and refusing to seek inclusion on a sinking ship. Instead, they are working—as Octavia Butler encouraged—to shape change. Leanne Simpson (2014: 13) writes that decolonization is something her ancestors “set in motion.” Only in that motion, and in the alimentary infrastructures that support and sustain it, may we move toward the radiance beyond the maelstrom.
