decolonial – Nicholas Mirzoeff

In transfigured night, hear the poet Milton sing “Hail, horrors, hail.” In this disjuncture, in the break and in the wake, the voice of Kwame Nkrumah comes: “We face neither East nor West, we face forward.” We, the would-be decolonized, was his formula in that betrayed beginning of Bandung, whose spirit continues to inspire. His phrase was as resonant for feminists in Iran as African American activists. To face forward is a positioning against racial capitalism, a setting of direction toward the dismantling of its infrastructures. Toward imagining decoloniality.

This place will document my efforts to face forward in order to engage with race as infrastructure, looking at monuments, museums and other display as constitutive of urban form under racial capital. By the same token, the segregated and unequal distribution of services and infrastructure within cities also requires what Shane Brennan has called “visionary infrastructure,” on the model of Grace Lee Bogg’s visionary organizing.

And Nkrumah’s voice comes again in Transfigured Night, reminding his listeners that they are free. But they’re not and he knows it and so do they. He’s asking them to remember the future. That time when there will have been what he called the “total liberation of Africa,” when the infrastructures of racial capitalism have been erased.

Forward is, then, at once a direction towards possession of the self, which is what freedom has meant in the Atlantic world; the formation of a communal sense of being decolonized; and a relation to time that is neither the progress touted by white liberalism nor the revanchism of reaction but a cosmology that relates human and non-human over the span of many lives. That’s not yet. Decoloniality is the future to be remembered.

Then Fanon’s words appear: “O my body, make me a person who asks questions.” What questions does the body ask? In Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah’s two-screen installation Transfigured Night (2015) at the New Museum last summer, where I was thinking all this, it is asked: how did this narcoleptic state happen? How would the disalienation, Fanon’s term, of the body, yours or mine, happen?

Here are some of my questions, now. Has there not been a certain narcolepsy since 11/9, a certain sheltering in place, a certain discombobulation under the constant stream of tweets, executive orders and deregulation that has made it hard to know which way I have been facing? Against, yes. Forward, not always. Is it not now past question that no single moment, whether of voting or direct action, is likely to shift the global direction to authoritarian white nationalism? The city feels restive. Movement in the shadows. An awakening, or better, re-awakening is at hand.

Still showing the Lincoln and Washington Memorials from rom the video installation by John Akomfrah, "Transfigured Night" (2018) — Akomfrah, “Transfigured Night”

On the screens now, monuments. Lincoln. Washington. Visited by the heads of decolonized states in Technicolor archive footage, the remembered brightness of past possibility. Transfigured into the blue-steeled glass of the corporate present. Figures still face forward but Washington’s “liberty” and Lincoln’s “emancipation” are no more present than Nkrumah’s “decolonization,” specters all. But specters return, they are the future, they remember it.

What, then, of the Indigenous whose land was taken for these monuments, whose loss is the infrastructure across the Americas? The territorial acknowledgement has become widespread, as it is in Australia, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. As those countries’ histories suggest, it is not enough. Land redistribution in South Africa was one of Trump’s racist panics in the past election. White nationalists cheered, globally. What, too, of those Cheyenne-Arapaho writer Tommy Orange calls “urban Indians,” seven out of ten of the Indigenous population?

Modern glass and steel skyscrapers in rom the video installation by John Akomfrah, "Transfigured Night" (2018) — Still: John Akomfrah, “Transfigured Night”

Akomfrah ends his installation at what he calls “beginning”. His figure, an African elder, faces forward to the emptiness of gentrified Seattle. The material infrastructure of white supremacy. Race as infrastructure is a set of assemblages that articulate colonial race theory, history as colonial destiny, and the exploitation of labor, made “normal” by what Fanon understood as “the aesthetic of respect for the established order.” The museums. The monuments. The new housing developments with their token “public art” and “parks.” It needs to be articulated as an assemblage, together.

At the foot of the towers, from Luanda to London, Cape Town to Charlottesville, global cities are still networked by what Fanon saw to be “a compartmentalized, manichean, immobile world: the world of statues.” Stone colonialism looks down on people and claims dominance, hierarchy, history, via white supremacy, whether from its towers or from a pedestal. They look down. We look forward. The statues are a weakness, too obvious, too contemptuous. When they fall, it is just the beginning.

Their strategy is still to compartmentalize, to contextualize and to prevaricate. They say: Let’s think about adding a sign? Maybe another monument? A conference? Doesn’t this statue have “artistic merit”? Forward gets past the statues to the world they immobilize.

The opposite of stone colonialism is what the 19^thcentury revolutionaries in England called “the mobility.” Counter to the world of statues, Fanon dreamed of running. Get Out wanted to escape the Sunken Place. It’s Fallism, but it’s more than falling, it’s movement. Forward movement.

[i] Kwame Nkrumah, “From now on we are no longer a colonial but free and independent people,” (March 6, 1957), quoted in John Akomfrah’s two-screen installation Transfigured Night (2015). Full text at https://www.myjoyonline.com/news/2017/March-6th/full-text-first-independence-speech-by-kwame-nkrumah.php

[ii]Fanon , Wretched of the Earth, 15,translation modified.

Salt has often been a catalyst by which the interaction of life, colonialism and apartheid can be made visible and subject to change. From India to South Africa and today’s ongoing Palestinian hunger strike, salt is the means by which the inhuman form of colonial oppression can be tasted. To deny access to salt by taxation, price or the regulations of mass incarceration is to colonize human life itself. It is to assert that only certain types of human life are beyond price and have inherent dignity.

In his book Debt, activist anthropologist David Graeber calls gestures like passing the salt “baseline communism.” If you sit at a table with someone, whether in your own home or a dining place elsewhere, and they ask you to pass the salt, you simply do it. You don’t try and monetize the transaction. You don’t demand some kind of reciprocal gesture, like passing the pepper, just because you passed the salt. It is the simple recognition that the request comes from a human being like yourself.

This common interaction suggests that, as Graeber puts it, “communism is the foundation of all human sociability,” not to be confused with the formerly existing state Communism of the Soviet period. Nor is it about the exchange of goods. It’s the basic generosity and hospitality that makes human social life possible. It was this impetus, for example, that led the Native peoples of the Americas to give food to white settlers to their long-term detriment.

In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi protested against the British imposition of a tax on salt in colonial India by walking to the sea in his now-famous Salt March. Arrived at the coast, he picked up a handful of dried salt, deliberately breaking the colonial law. The absurdity of the colonizer prohibiting the colonized from using a natural product epitomized the baseline stupidity of colonialism. It was perhaps his most effective act of non-violent resistance, or satyagraha, and some 60,000 Indians were arrested for contravening the salt laws in similar fashion.

A few years ago, I visited the University of Pretoria in South Africa. I used the example of salt as baseline communism in a seminar. Later, students told me that the university had recently introduced a charge for salt in its cafeteria. It was just a couple of cents, irrelevant to those like myself with means, so I had not noticed. For those without resources, always the Black South African students, such small charges are exactly what prevent them from being able to study.

Shackville at University of Cape Town, 2015

Just as utility debt, rent arrears or a traffic ticket can disrupt African-American social life, as Ferguson has taught us, so could this little salt tax end the possibility of a Black South African student making ends meet. In 2012, Black South Africans earned an average 3000 rand ($224) per month. Assuming that a student might not make that average, it’s easy to see how even small extra charges add up. At Wits University, one of the most expensive, student fees range between 30,000 and 60,000 rand. As a result, only 53% of Black South African students graduate six years after beginning their degree. As many as a third drop out after only a year.

The students did not accept their endless immiseration. When the Zuma government attempted to raise tuition fees by 8%, they rose up, created #FeesMustFall and defeated the increase. The student movement has now turned to decolonizing education, using the slogan “Decolonize the Curriculum.” For Dr Shoshe Kessi of the Black Academic Caucus, “we can’t have a dialogue about Black people’s dignity. That is a given.” And yet it is not. That is why the Palestinian hunger strike is a dignity strike and why the hunger strike is a decolonial action.

In the Palestinian hunger strike in Israeli prisons, the regime has taken to denying the strikers salt. They had been consuming only water mixed with salt, a basic and fundamental nutrient without which life is endangered. Denying salt is denying life. More exactly, it denies social life, which is to say, human life. Graeber describes how communities like those of the Iroquois are divided into halves. The two sides interact in specific ways. You can marry only people from the other side, while you are obligated to bury their dead, just as they bury yours. “Society will always exist,” says Graeber. “Therefore there will always be a north side and a south side of the village.”

The regime wants to deny that possibility. It refuses the principle of hospitality, which capital has mutated into “the hospitality industry,” a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. According to Graeber, there is an Arab story that a burglar accidentally tasted the salt in a house he was robbing. Realizing that he had partaken of their salt, he replaced their property because now he was bound to them. Israel wants to be bound to no one and to deny the possibility of there being common life between peoples of different religions or ethnic backgrounds.

Aarab Barghouti, Marwan Barghouti’s son, launched the “saltwater challenge.” He drank a glass of salt water, like that then being consumed by the strikers, and challenged others to do the same. Thousands have done so, including Yacoub Shaheen, the winner of Arab Idol 2017. In a striking understanding of what is at stake, hospitality industry businesses like the Grand Park Hotel in Ramallah have posted videos of their staff taking the challenge.

What is the meaning of this challenge? It does not raise money like the ALS Ice Water challenge. It recognizes that the “village” of the social world exists, even and especially in prisons. By performing the action of those imprisoned, the challenged do not pretend that their conditions are the same. Rather they recognize that there is a duty of care toward the incarcerated. It is to enact the conditions of baseline communism in the only way possible.