Decolonial Memory and Climate Debt

I’m in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for the American Studies Conference. While this is perhaps the most progressive, even radical, academic event, it’s heartening to hear how many people have heard of the Rolling Jubilee. And how many love it. At the same time, as ever, it’s useful to look back at our situation from the decolonial perspective. The realization follows that New York is just another North Atlantic island with many of the same problems as places like Puerto Rico or Martinique.

Outside the hotel, the sea comes right the way up to the building here in Condado. Trucked in sand tries to hold it back but where the main hotels are here, there’s somewhere between twenty and thirty years before it floods. Barrier islands are no longer places to live.

On a panel about Caribbean environmental politics, two familiar themes emerged. First, zones of flooding and poverty tend to coincide and diminish the social agency of those who live there. If, as urban ethnographers have argued, you can think of cities as bodies, they also have embodied memories that are revealed at times of crisis. In this sense, they occupy themselves by making visible what needs to be done.

In Martinique, we learned, environmental activists have no issue with seeing the resonances between the current attempts to use carcinogenic pesticides, turn uninhabited beaches into hotels or mangrove swamps to shopping centers and the colonial past, including slavery. In fact, the presentation began with the monument at Anse Diamant to enslaved Africans drowned off the coast of the island.

Anse Caffard. Martinique

The figures are white because that is the color of death in West Africa from where the enslaved probably came. They look forever at the place where the ship went down and, in traditional African belief, the departed would have traveled from there via the underwater world of the spirits to an eventual return to Africa.

On the island today, activists visualize two classes: the béké, or the descendants of the slave-owners and colonists, who control all economic activity; and the people or the MartiniquaisHere is the divide between the one per cent and the 99% in the decolonial context. By decolonial, I mean that the formal colonization is over and yet the influence of the colonizers and their allies is still dominant.

The next point was more thought provoking still. Although groups like Assaupamar, for the preservation of Martinique’s culture and ecology, use the slogan Pays-nous (our country), they also recognize that, whether of African or European descent, they are not the original inhabitants. They stress a politics of responsibility rather than ownership, which the béké class do not–perhaps cannot–recognize.

I know there are many differences but I am also struck by these similarities. Coalitions of the 99% seeking to work past historical differences against a common perception that it is not possible to have the one per cent recognize what is said. Highly racialized cities, with clear segregation that overlaps the flood zones. Remember that people of color were moved to the Far Rockaways in the first place to make way for Lincoln Center so the one per cent could go to the opera.

If we are to acknowledge the realities of climate debt, we have to provincialize New York and see that it is just another flood-prone former colonial port with a race and class problem. Wall Street was the site of a slave market and a wall to keep out the indigenous. The material practices have changed but there are clear resonances that we have to learn to hear. There has been so much discussion of the memories evoked by the boardwalks destroyed in Jersey and the Rockaways. We need to listen more closely.

 

Sandy, Debt and Hunger in the Americas

So much has been happening in the United States and in New York in particular but we should not forget that some of the most acute crisis post-Sandy is in the Caribbean. Haiti and Jamaica are both facing major challenges of hunger and debt respectively. Unluckily for them, these slow disasters were not accompanied by death on the grand scale, which is the main means by which developing countries gain access to Western media. Jamaican debt should be cancelled to allow that country to recover. Haiti needs just about everything.

Sandy hit neither country directly but its heaviest rain bands passed over them both, causing 20 inches of rain in Haiti. The two islands had already suffered from the impact of Isaac earlier in the year and Haiti is still recovering from the earthquake of 2010. Or we could say that Haiti is still recovering from the indemnity imposed on it by the international powers after its anti-slavery revolution of 1791, whose last payment in 1947 just preceded the disastrous US-backed Duvalier dictatorship. It is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, with 54% of the population in abject poverty and 80% in poverty (estimate dates from 2003, pre-earthquake), according to those radicals at the CIA. Despite debt abolition in 2010, external debt has risen to $600 million, equivalent to 50% of the national budget.

The storm literally washed away the agriculture of both countries. The Guardian reports today:

With harvests destroyed in most of the country, Haiti’s entire food security situation is threatened….

Rivers which flooded during the storm washed away topsoil, fruit trees and cultures. Eroded banks gave way and protective walls were shattered. Of the country’s 140 communes, 70 were affected by the storm.

Plantations of corn, beans, sorghum, pigeon peas, bananas, tubers, peanuts, vegetables and rice were entirely destroyed or badly damaged by wind and water. The government, which declared a state of emergency on 30 October, confirmed that over 64,000 heads of livestock were washed away.

Half a million people face hunger, or severe acute malnutrition in NGO-speak. Food needs to get out there fast, and not just those bags of corn and wheat that government sends, but things that people in weakened condition can actually eat. It sounds like a mission Occupy Sandy could take on, as the next  part of its extraordinary relief effort.

In Jamaica, agricultural damage washed away the premium Blue Mountain coffee crop, which might not seem that serious until you consider the financial condition of the country. Jamaica’s foreign debt is so acute that, together with wages, according to the country’s finance minister yesterday, it

absorbs 80 cents out of every dollar and leaves us with just 20 cents to do everything else in the country.

The IMF are back in town, no doubt demanding more austerity from the tiny ruined former colony. First cultivated for sugar by the British, Jamaica became a banana plantation for United Fruit in the twentieth century until still cheaper fruit could be found in Central America. Now it depends on bauxite (aluminum), tourism and remittances from abroad, a classic postcolonial litany.

Over at the Rolling Jubilee, an amazing $100,000 has already been donated to abolish debt, which should eliminate an awesome $2 million of personal debt. Let’s also think how we can help our American cousins in Jamaica and Haiti recover from the disaster that our emissions helped to cause.

 

 

Hope, Crisis and Love: Part Two

Four years ago, there was a financial crisis. People put a huge effort into electoral politics around the theme of hope. Many of those hopes were imprecise, just a sense that things could only get better. A year ago, people took to the squares to renew their hopes by direct democracy. Again, the issues were imprecise but this time by design. The Presidential election this year was not about hope. Perhaps the difference now is that it is the nature of the crisis that is unclear. Is it about energy and climate? Debt? Democracy? The answer that frustrates people is probably the right one: all of the above. So what is the affect of this multi-dimensional crisis if it’s not hope? For Occupy, it’s love.

One of the most dividing terms in the Occupy movement has been “love.” Movement people like to talk about it as a key motivator and form of social engagement. Critics ranging from Zizek to Thomas Frank have looked down on the idea, and warned against the movement falling in love with itself. In other words, what we call love, they saw as narcissism, or masturbation. Trust two middle-aged white guys to tell everyone who they should fall in love with.

To be fair, their follow through was very different. Frank was comparing Occupy to the Tea Party and their “success” in having Ryan nominated as Vice-President. As a grouping resistant to representation, this kind of goal was never mentioned in Occupy. Zizek’s critique was that we could not imagine the future that we wanted. Perhaps that would have been an investment in hope, which predicts a better future. Love is a less certain emotion–it might be great, it might not, but your choice is to go with it because at some level you feel you must.

Psychoanalysis wants to tell you that not only do you not know what you want, what you think you want is a displacement of something else. There’s no doubt that the mechanisms of displacement and disruption (the slip of the tongue) are part of the present mental apparatus. How does this work politically? When the students of 1968 pushed Jacques Lacan on this question, he famously sneered back at them

What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new Master. You will get one.

His meaning was the “revolution” would end up as a new form of reaction. Less noticed has been the exchange in which Lacan admitted to the students that the Oedipus complex on which such negations are based was itself a colonial imposition. It is that complex that disrupts the individual’s claim to know itself by a disruption from the Real. But this Real isn’t really real: it’s a colonial construction of a reality that was certainly experienced as such but, like all constructions, can fall down.

Decolonizing is, then, first a personal project of deconstructing and then reconstructing a mental apparatus that can be something other than the “individual” presumed by the patently collapsed neoliberal economic market. This reconfigured means of relating to others would be what we have struggled to call “love.” We’ve seen a great deal of it in the disaster zone this past week.

The debate is now over how this remaking of a sense of community can be made more permanent and how it can be scaled to a larger arena. The European-Mediterranean movement is ahead of us here. Their continent-wide organizing and community building is much more established and I’ll report back on this tomorrow. In this, there is hope. If a continent so radically divided by religions, languages, politics and history can forge a common movement, then hope is a way to do politics in the present, not some future to come.

And do we need it, the next storm is headed to NY and NJ with tens of thousands still without power, with coastlines totally vulnerable to storm surges, tunnels still flooded.

Vivir Bien: Why Trees Have Standing

There’s a moment in one of the videos from the early days of OWS that stayed with me after we saw it again last month. Chris, a long-time occupier and Direct Action mainstay, leans into the park from the stairs and says

This is the epicenter of a global revolution!

Massive cheers. It would have been more accurate perhaps to say: “this is the node of the planetary fightback at the epicenter of global media.” Less thrilling, though. Watching Thomas Sankara speak in the videos from 1987, you see a confidence in the forward march of history that now seems so long ago and far away. But his agenda of sustainable, regional and peaceful economies is still a viable alternative. You can see emerging a triangulation of how it might–might–be possible to triangulate it into being.

Node one: Africa

Sankara’s claim that Africa could be the center of an alternative economy seems far-fetched in the era of the Troika consensus. But the rebellion by South Africa’s majority is ongoing, not just in the mining industry but also in trucking and now municipal workers. Unemployment continues to rise and South Africa’s credit rating was just downgraded.  And most of the country’s trade is with Europe, so things are going to get worse. The question is whether calls for land redistribution and the nationalization of the mines might lead to a rethinking of what the economy is intended to do. If, as the strikers hope, its primary purpose is to support the living standards of the majority, then everything would have to change.

Node two: Bolivia

In a classic legal essay from 1972, Christopher Stone asked

Should trees have standing?

Meaning can non-human entities have legal rights? As Stone pointed out, corporations do. And each time an extension of rights occurs, it had previously been “unthinkable” to do so.  Stone proposed that “natural objects,” such as forests, rivers and oceans should have rights. Since then, such basic ideas have come to be enshrined in law but always fiercely opposed by the neo-liberals. For it creates a stalemate between the “rights” of the corporation and those of the natural object.

How can such issues be resolved? In Bolivia, a new proposal for legal rights to the planet that would give a clear direction:

Bolivia’s government will be legally bound to prioritise the wellbeing of its citizens and the natural world by developing policies that promote sustainability and control industry.

This principle is known as Vivir bien, or “Living Well.” The proposed law defines it as follows:

Living Well means adopting forms of consumption, behaviour and and conduct that are not degrading to nature. It requires an ethical and spiritual relationship with life. Living Well proposes the complete fulfilment of life and collective happiness.

Bolivia does not have the luxury of considering climate change to be something you can ignore in two Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates (unless you count Romney’s “I Like Coal” sloganeering for West Virginia’s benefit). As the climate changes, Bolivia is running short of drinking water and is also, ironically, at risk of flooding from melting glaciers. Vivir bien is exactly what would motivate the South African grass-roots activism and why should it not?

Node Three: Texas (yes Texas)

While such ideas have routinely been dismissed as “tree-hugging” in the United States, the term is no longer just rhetoric. In East Texas, eco-activists have occupied the trees that have to be cut down for the Keystone XL Pipeline.

There’s plenty of hostility in Texas as you might imagine. Texas land commissioner Jerry Patterson marvelously argues that the pipeline to bring Canadian bitumen to the Gulf:

will create thousands of jobs and lessen our dependence on foreign oil.

Perhaps Canadians aren’t foreign? But what about that nasty socialized medicine they have? Sarcasm aside, it’s direct action in defense of vivir bien that might open a space in which the new legal doctrine of planetary non-human rights could take effect. To the immense benefit of humans–well, most of them. Say 99%?

 

Up the Plebs, Off With Their Heads!

The U. S. often has little to recommend it over social democratic Europe. It is at least a Republic, recent events have reminded us. Monarchs lording it over formerly colonized indigenous people, hunting endangered species and dismissing anyone who contradicts them as “plebs” have reminded us that behind the present obsession with sovereignty are sovereigns or aristocrats, and a sorry bunch they are. To quote Lewis Carroll, as one should: “Off with their heads!”

Sometimes you don’t really need to add much to a picture.

Here’s the idiot “Prince” William having himself carried around Tuvalu with reality star Kate Middleton close behind. It will be said that this is “traditional.” Like the monarchy itself, most such traditions were invented in the nineteenth century, in this case, most probably by missionaries. There’s some confusion online as to whether this happened in Tuvalu, one of the world’s most threatened nations by sea-level rise, or the Solomon Islands, ditto. In either case, farce pushed out tragedy, with discussion about La Middleton’s semi-naked photos dominating even this colonialist parody.

Juan Carlos hunting elephants in Botswana

Or this. In the middle of the Spanish crisis, King Juan Carlos, appointed in effect to the monarchy by fascist dictator Franco, managed to break his hip falling off a step.He was elephant hunting at the time. Yes. The “modern” monarch, not averse to enriching himself via Saudi patronage, is sufficiently traditional that he thinks shooting endangered species from a raised platform is a fun thing to do. And he couldn’t even walk up the steps straight. Oh, and did we mention that he is an honorary president of the World Wildlife Fund?

And what about us plebs? The word has gained new currency since public school upper class twit of the year Andrew Mitchell, chief whip for the UK Conservative Party, yelled at police who wouldn’t allow him to ride his bicycle through the security gate at 10 Downing Street:

You’re fucking plebs!

Normally Occupy 2012 is on the side of police critics. Here an extremely entitled man wants a door held open for him to save him a few seconds and reacts with an outburst of class hatred.

It’s Year Two of Occupy. In Year Two of the French Revolution, they abolished the monarchy. In his 1975 lectures on power, Foucault reflected

What we need… is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty….We need to cut off the head of the King: in political theory that has still to be done.

He was referring to the juridical power of the state as sovereign. But there’s a still older problem: the entitled feudal power of the soi-disant aristocrat over the plebs, the colonized and the non-human world. This work we had thought done. It seems we spoke too soon. Off with their heads!

To Walk Asking Questions

This is the theme of a fascinating new book, Occupying Language, by Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini in the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series. The authors situate the present Occupy movement in the context of the insurgent movements in Latin America over the past quarter of a century. From this perspective, to occupy is to walk asking questions. And it’s ok to get lost.

Cover of Occupying Language

The authors develop their project in the colonial context suggested by the original meaning of occupation:

Language is not neutral, and words transport and express concepts and ways of thinking. They can consolidate and perpetuate hierarchies, domination and control just as they can underline equality and strengthen consciousness. Latin American struggles for dignity, freedom and liberation are rooted in more than five hundred years of resistance. Language derived from their struggles comes with historical antecedents.

The book goes on to describe concepts like Territory, Assembly and Rupture that translate easily, as well as more elusive and perhaps productive forms, such as política afectiva (≈affective politics), poder popular (≈popular power) and autogestión (≈collective democratic self management).

Each term is “openly defined” in a short sentence and then given living form in a piece of reportage of the authors own experience with the concept. The rest of the entry analyzes the use and meaning of the term.

Such fascination with language was a commonplace in the early days of Occupy. The word “occupy” was odds-on favorite to be chosen as the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year.And so it proved, with the citation arguing

It’s a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement. The movement itself was powered by the word.

In this project I also undertook a decolonial genealogy of the word. So it’s renewing to see how much energy can still be generated by an attention to the politics of language, now that everyone is “over” Occupy and wishes we would just go away.

Sitrin and Azzellini’s book reinforces some of my own thoughts about our present direction. We know, for example, that many mainstream reporters will declare S17 a failure because there will not have been a new Occupation, even though we no longer intend to do so. Sitrin and Azzellini point out that the global movements have all gone through

a process of reterritorialization…after a few months….Thus, around the world there has been a shift into neighborhoods and workplaces, to focus on local needs yet at the same time come together to co-ordinate.

Whether because of anxieties about the Presidential election, or because people still harbored hopes for a more thorough-going transformation, we’ve not paid enough attention to this process and not given it a high enough value. For Sitrin and Azzellini, the project is one of

Caminar Preguntando (To walk asking questions)….[M]ultiple histories that help create multiple open-ended paths.

This walk leads us into what Benjamin called “a secret rendezvous between past generations and our own.” For Anglo readers, we might understand this as a decentering and decolonial vantage point on the history of the present as understood by those who have been colonized for five centuries.

There are many moments that resonate in this slim volume. One that caught my eye was the discussion of política afectiva. The term came out of the post-2000 autonomous movements in Argentina, meaning “a movement based in love.” This was no easy sell in a place like Buenos Aires, as Toty Flores from the Unemployed Workers Movement recalls:

Imagine being in a neighborhood like La Matanza, which is full of really tough men, men who have lived, and still live, a violent macho life, and we’re talking about new loving relationships. No, it isn’t easy, not even to talk about, let alone practice. This is part of our changing culture, and as we change, we notice how much we really need to.

I was reminded of a visit I had the chance to make to FOMMA, a performance space and center in San Cristobal, Chiapas, where Maya women have used performance to educate their community about domestic violence. Such spaces are amazingly empowering and inspiring, however local their project.

Sitrin and Azzellini remind us that too often such transformative projects are written off as being “identity” or “gender” issues, unlike the “real” economic or class issues. They riposte:

Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya

Responsibility for the other and solidarity are basic conditions of a future society not grounded in capitalist principles.

OWS once knew that very well. There are days where I worry that the focus on confrontational direct action, arrests and civil disobedience seemingly for its own sake rather than as an articulation of a wider idea, has allowed us to forget it somewhat.

When we talk of Democracia Real Ya! that is what we mean. Anti-capitalism, this book reminds us, is a politics of walking and of love.

Sometimes, as Rebecca Solnit has taught us, when you walk you get lost. And she suggests that’s a good thing, a way to let go of our hyper-disciplined OCD selves and wandering to wonder. That might be where we are now.


Recolonizing Everyday Life

I’m writing this post, like all the others, on a Mac computer that proudly advertises it is made from solid aluminum (or aluminium). That aluminum was probably mined from land belonging to indigenous people. Today workers for Spectra Energy began constructing a pipeline that will bring fracked natural gas and its accompanying radioactive Radon right into the West Village, close to where I live. Needless to say the swathes of land being destroyed by this extraction once belonged to the indigenous people here too. The once-heralded immaterial knowledge economy feels a lot less real than this recolonization of everyday life. Wherever you live, it’s right there in increasingly similar ways.

In the swirling moments around 1968, the Situationists declared that there was an ongoing “colonization of everyday life.” Perhaps it’s an indication of what McKenzie Wark has called the “disintegrating spectacle” that this drama can now be visualized. It’s a surprisingly material process, the physical extraction of energy and minerals displacing first the indigenous, and then whomever else happens to be in the way. We are reminded once again that, as Walter Mignolo has put it,

coloniality is modernity.

The endless process of accumulation is revisiting both places and materials that it has already used in a different way to produce this recolonization.

So what’s in my Mac? Making aluminum an incredibly destructive process. Three tonnes of bauxite is required to produce 1 tonne of alumina. It’s nearly all strip-mined because bauxite tends to close to the surface. Only half a tonne of aluminium can be extracted from 1 tonne of alumina. So it’s a six to one waste to product ratio. Mining regions are devastated.

The supply chain for a globalized material like aluminum is not transparent. The nations offering the largest supply include Australia, China, India and Brazil. You’ll be aware of the explosions in Apple’s China plants caused by aluminum dust.

Apple supplier in China after explosion

In Australia, 60% of all mines are either situated on land still recognized as Indigenous or adjacent to it. On the Burrup Peninsula, home to the extraordinary petrogylphs of the Yaburara people, some 90 of the 118 square kilometres has been zoned for industrial development.

 

The pattern in India is similar. India’s Center for Science and the Environment reports:

If India’s forests, mineral-bearing areas, regions of tribal habitation and watersheds are all mapped together, a startling fact emerges – the country’s major mineral reserves lie under its richest forests and in the watersheds of its key rivers. These lands are also the homes of India’s poorest people, its tribals.

The map below indicates mines with symbols and areas of poverty/Adavasi habitation with dark shading:

North-East India: minerals and poverty
The mines are mostly owned by multinational magnates like Vedanta, which generated $14 billion in revenues in 2011 and made a cool $4 billion in pre-tax profits on that. It produced 675 kilotons of aluminum, largely at Jharsuguda. Nonetheless, Vedanta is closing some of its processing plants because it says everything is gone from the ground. This may be taken with a pinch of salt because Vedanta were prevented from mining in the hills at Niyamgiri, a region sacred to the Dongria Kondh, the indigenous people of the area.

The reasons are clear. According to an Amnesty International report of August 2012:

Vedanta’s human rights record falls far short of international standards for businesses. It refuses to consult properly with communities affected by its operations and ignores the rights of Indigenous peoples.

We could generalize that statement to say that the recolonization of everyday life flatly ignores what it considers to be unnecessary restraints on profit generation like rights or existing law.

In Canada, according to a devastating piece by Andrew Nikiforuk, the neoliberal Harper administration has literally rewritten the law to enable the creation of a tar sands pipeline into and across the Great Bear Rainforest. The forest has hitherto been a model of sustainable development, combining:

ecotourism, renewable energy, sustainable forest products, shellfish aquaculture, and the restoration of First Nations’ access to fisheries.

In March 2012 the administration bundled together an extraordinary assemblage of deregulation into one package and passed it as an omnibus bill, undoing not only the rainforest protections but almost all aspects of environmental monitoring that might hinder the operations of Big Oil.

The distinguished marine ecologist Ragnar Elmgren of Stockholm University called it “an act of wanton destruction…the kind of act one expects from the Taliban in Afghanistan, not from the government of a civilized and educated nation.”

Leaving aside the cultural hierarchy implied in this statement, which is a tad unfortunate to say the least, what’s notable is that this recolonization–or perhaps more exactly, reversion to colonizing conditions–has no exception for the EuroAmerican “white” person.

The Fourth World can be permitted a wry smile. The West Village, home to Sarah Jessica-Parker and other glitterati, is now not only subject to the mad NYU expansion, which will put construction in the area for twenty years and leave it looking like downtown Omaha, but now it’s getting a fracking pipeline. So as much as the global city likes to present itself as an oasis from the actual conditions created by financial globalization, they have now returned to sender.

As I mentioned, it’s happened before. Nikiforuk calls the tar sands product by its traditional name: bitumen, also known as asphalt. It’s that filthy dark black stuff they use to coat roads. And in the beginnings of the industrial period, they used it as part of the immaterial labor of the day. For artists always searching for a true black, bitumen appeared to be a great discovery. So in museums all over the world you can see early nineteenth century paintings that are gloomily dark and cracked. Bitumen never fully dries, so it expands when warm and contracts when it cools, creating the cracks and allowing it to spread across a canvas. The great canvases of Romanticism in particular are literally smeared in oil.

The most famous example is The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault.

Géricault “Medusa”

The coal-smoke yellow and impenetrable gloom of the canvas are the gifts of fossil fuel painting. Ironically, the subject concerns a shipwreck of a colonial voyage to Africa that led the survivors to cannibalism. Once again, the recolonization of everyday life has us cannibalizing ourselves, dying for fuel in a tragic farce.

Foucault Tourism

Today to Cockatoo Island: penal colony within the convict colony, industrial reformatory, factory, shipyard, UNESCO World Heritage site and now a venue for the 18th Sydney Biennale. The extraordinary bricolage of colonial punishment, industrial production and knowledge economy cultural production makes for one of those slightly dizzying jet laggy experiences you have only while traveling.

My British forebears did know how and where to build prisons, you have to give them that. The island is isolated in the middle of Sydney harbor, with the prison itself located on top of a steep cliff. Recent excavations have uncovered minute solitary confinement cells, which have a distinctly contemporary look in this Abu Ghraib era. The officials built themselves sandstone residences with a Georgian feel but placed at the highest point to give them a panoptic viewpoint. Grain silos dug into the rock still have chain rings, to which the excavating prisoners were linked while working. The prison was created right at the end of the transportation era in 1849–convicts were not sent to New South Wales after 1850, although they went to Western Australia as late as 1868.

As has often been pointed out, these colonial punishments add a totally different complexion to the idea that European jurisprudence had moved from physical punishment to mental discipline by the early nineteenth century. My view has been that revolutionary action in Europe won workers there a certain (if limited) reprieve from punishment; but colonial punishment intensified in the later nineteenth century as imperialism abandoned all pretension of colonial self-government in favor of direct rule from the metropole. That did not preclude the disciplinary formation of colonized subjects, as the reformatories attest.

In 2000, a group of Aboriginal people occupied the island and claimed it as sovereign territory. You can still see their murals, using the Aboriginal flag as a motif. Using the colonial doctrine of terra nullius, Isabell Coe and others asserted that Britain had never formally claimed the island, a claim rejected by the courts as “inconceivable.” Really? A deserted island on the edge of the harbor? Regardless, Coe created a tent embassy on the island and asserted sovereignty. The occupation of occupied indigenous land and the counterclaim to sovereignty was a powerful performative act.

This, then, is no ordinary post-industrial site to hold an art exhibition. The artists whose work was shown here seemed to be aware of the challenges and many rose to the occasion. I liked Jonathan Jones’s simple approach:

Jones mixed typically British crockery with sea-shells that might be found in an Aboriginal midden in what is now New South Wales. The intermingling is simple but effective.

A more complex approach was taken by Lebanese artist Khaled Sabsabi in his installation “Nonabel.” You enter a darkened air-raid shelter and see the reflection of a young boy in water projected onto the circular walls. All of a sudden, the image changes dramatically and a montage of Arabic calligraphy and sound installation made me jump, although the phrase being used in the piece apparently means: “if you destroy the image of violence, it will disappear.”

Khaled Sabsabi “Nonabel”

Finally Alec Finlay brought the location of imperial domination up to date with his sound and sculpture installation. To quote his description:

Finlay takes the fluctuations of the stock market and represents them as the ‘buzz’ of Australian honey-bees (recorded by sound-artist Chris Watson), broadcast from 10 multi-storied wooden hives. Each hive stack bears the acronym of a major stock exchange – New York, Toronto, Sao Paulo, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Sydney – and produces a stream of audio, a buzzing that varies in density and volume in accordance with economic activity.

It was a remarkable sound, rising and falling with the market activity.

Alec Finlay “Swarm ASX”

What made it all the more powerful–although I suspect unintentionally–was that I came upon this piece in the Convict Precinct, just after reading a sign placed by the Sydney Harbor Trust. It described how, when the prison was first established, the prisoners were confined in wooden boxes at night. Is this what the favorite corporate slogan “thinking outside the box” actually means? That if you don’t produce useful ideas, we’ll put you in a box? Bees are said to form colonies. Others describe them as democracies or societies. Finlay also makes nests for “unproductive” wild bees out of books about bees. It’s layered symbolism like this that does important imaginative work, as we would do well to remember in our messaging and imaging in directly political contexts.

Reconstructing Haiti 1801/2010 and on

Reconstruction in the US after abolition was, whether it knew it or not, following the pattern established by Haiti during its revolution. So it seemed like a good time to take a look and see how reconstruction after the disastrous earthquake of 2010 has been going. The headlines are bad: multinational sweatshops and mining are moving in, very little of the promised aid has been disbursed, debt continues to be a burden. The glimmer of hope comes from the literally grassroots work of the Haitian peasant movement. It is as if nothing has happened since 1801: capital wants to see a restoration of the plantation, while the peasants want land, water and sustainable employment.

The Haitian revolution was long and violent. By 1801, it was clear that the formerly enslaved would win. Toussaint Louverture issued a constitution, which intensely disappointed his own side. For Toussaint, large scale cash-crop agriculture was vital both to the formation of a nation-state in general and to repaying his loans to the United States in particular. The formerly enslaved were to work as laborers for a wage.

The subaltern rank-and-file revolted against their own revolution, in search of small plots of land they could farm collectively and create a long-term guarantee against re-enslavement, whether as chattel or wage slaves. Toussaint felt compelled to repress the revolt, and even assassinated his own nephew Moïse who was its leader. The Trinidad radical C. L. R. James later saw this as the defining failure of the revolution in his classic The Black Jacobins (1938, reissued 1968).

CLR James

Although Pétion, later President of Haiti, did indeed begin an experiment with land redistribution, until the imposition of a massive indemnity on the country by France in 1825 did away with it. The indemnity of 150 million French francs is widely held to have decimated Haiti’s nascent recovery from the revolutionary wars and pushed it towards the poverty with which it is now synonymous. At the time of the disastrous earthquake in 2010, Haiti had once again accumulated extensive external debt of about $1.8 billion, mostly due to the antics of the U. S.-backed Duvalier dictatorship. Although the IMF and World Bank were pressured into cancelling about $250 million of that debt, the bulk remains.

A group of intellectuals, led by Etienne Balibar and Noam Chomsky, reiterated in 2010 the call made by former President Jean-Baptiste Aristide in 2003, for French reparations to Haiti. Needless to say, given that Sarkozy was then President of France, this did not happen. But finally, two centuries after the citizens of Haiti had done so, the op-ed intellectuals began to call for small-scale sustainable agriculture as the way ahead for the country.

At the Rio+20 summit, some information did emerge about what has happened since 2010. The UN has come to be seen as a neo-liberal occupation force. Mining companies have moved in. The Guardian reports:

More than a third of Haiti’s north – at least 1,500 sq km – is under licence to US and Canadian companies.

It’s such a small country, but there is allegedly copper, silver and gold up there and very little of the environmental legislation that is so bothersome to mining elsewhere.

Map of Caracol from the NY Times

The one major financial investment to date is by a South Korean company who intend to create a maquiladora site in Coracel. Needless to say, the plant will use heavy fuel oil for electricity generation (built by the US) and is situated on prime farm land and at a key watershed.

Jean Anil Louis-Juste (1957-2010)

There are glimmers of hope, even if one of most effective intellectual advocates for change, sociology professor Jean Anil Louis-Juste was mysteriously assassinated just prior to the earthquake. He created reading groups like the Gramsci Circle at the State University’s School of Human Sciences and Ethnology, where he taught. He wrote and taught in Kréyol, the local language that emerged out of slavery. Anil had advocated for a $5 a day minimum wage, especially at his university, and for an a new environmentally-centered education program and citizenship. He noted that the ecological disaster in Haiti has accelerated, rather than improved:

In the 1920s, we had 20% of the country covered with forest. In the 1990s,we had less than 2%. We are about 60% short of the land we would need to live in equilibrium with the environment.

The Mouvement paysan de Papaye (Peasant Movement of Papaye) are another. They advocate for sustainable agriculture, health care, education and a self-supporting Haiti.  MPP’s website appears to be down at the moment but others report on their work educating farmers how to conserve water through the dry period and to create irrigation. However, this is slow work, 60 peasants at a time.

But the multinationals won’t stay once the easy money from the Clinton foundation dries up.

The MPP have been working on this for two hundred years.

Occupy is ten months old today.

“We Are All Children of Algeria”

This is the name of an online multi-media project that I made in collaboration with design intellectuals Craig Dietrich and Erik Loyer that went live today. The project looks at how to decolonize visuality; or, to put it affirmatively, how to visualize a society after colonialism. It uses the central example of Algeria and its decolonial struggle from 1954 to the Arab Spring. Here I want to talk a bit about how this project both laid the ground for my involvement with the Occupy movement and for the shape that Occupy 2012 has taken since. While this is a tad narcissistic, this is a blog a) and b) there might be relevance for other people thinking of taking on similar work.

In this project, “Algeria” is also a metaphor for the contested border between North and South in the formation of financial globalization and thus exists in many places other than the geographic space known in English as Algeria, in French as Alger and in Arabic as al-Djazair. In the book, I wove a tight narrative that tried to hold these pieces together across about forty pages. When I came to make this section into a digital project, I thought it would be a simple task: cut the text into pieces and add the films, photographs and other images.

At the first meeting I had in LA with the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, which designed the software used for “We Are All Children of Algeria, they asked me a  question that threw all that out of the window: how did I want to design the project? What was the concept? I didn’t think I had one but I found myself saying that it was about a demonstration. Or what is called a march in the US. This was, it turned out, what you might call a retrospective realization about where the work was actually going.

So I took the title from chants used at French anti-fascist marches that I had been on as a student in Paris back in the 1980s. As part of solidarity, crowds chanted “Nous sommes tous enfants d’immigrés” or “We are all children of immigrants.” French anti-fascism was not notional: then and now the National Front were racist and violent. Their targets were “Algerians,” meaning any person who is from or descended from North Africa–or in any way sympathetic to them.

When I began the project in the summer and autumn of 2010, I felt that I needed to justify the very idea of marching, or simply putting bodies into public space, as not being totally outmoded. Now of course it seems that this tactic, far from being redundant, has been key first to the extraordinary movements in North Africa and the Middle East and now to Occupy. So that in and of itself seemed to prepare me for Occupy and to be part of the movement.

Although I got involved fairly early, I at first felt that I did not want to make academic work about Occupy at all. When I decided that as part of a strategy to develop my own sense of commitment and understanding that I did want to write about it, I took the performative or artistic model of the durational project, rather than just say “I’m writing [yet another] book about Occupy.” I wouldn’t have done that before thinking how to make a digital project.

It’s also enabled me to do something to the way that I write, which, when it works, seems now to be able to speak to both activists and academics. Again, I say this not to claim some spurious status for myself but to encourage other, younger artists, writers, performers and intellectuals to embrace the challenges of such cross-platform projects. As this way of thinking and imagining is so much more familiar to you, you will do far more exciting and ground-breaking things than I can conceive.

There’s so much lazy reluctance in academia to be involved with either the intellectual or political forms of the present moment. I can count the other (full-time tenure track) faculty that I see at Occupy events or meetings where they are not speaking–well, let’s just say easily. On the other hand, the design and programming group involved in ANVC are all in different ways productive intellectuals and engaged activists. Enough said.