Decolonizing cartography and ontological conflict: Counter-mapping in Colombia and “cartographies otherwise”

Discussions in decolonial literature have recently drawn on the concept of “ontological conflict” to reflect on the conflictual entanglements of diverse cosmologies. In Latin America (as elsewhere) these conflicts are frequently of a territorial nature, with indigenous and black communities making claims to communal land rights as indispensable part of their respective ways of being-in-the-world, which the post-colonial state has increasingly begun to acknowledge, often in the form of new political constitutions. In this article I examine the role of cartography in the resolution of such ontological conflicts; in particular a participatory mapping exercise in Colombia known as “social cartography,” which aims to challenge dominant cartographic representations and empowering local communities vis-à-vis the state. At the same time, I reflect on the limits of such an emancipatory vision and on the ways in which Colombia's version of counter-mapping has been coopted by dominant power. Inspired by the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality framework, I contextualize this experience within other radical mapping exercises, or “cartographies otherwise,” in places such as Australia, Palestine and the Straits of Gibraltar, to finally suggest that the art of decolonizing cartography may be seen as a tool of Hardt & Negri's project of a multitude in resistance.     

Evictability and the Biopolitical Bordering of Europe

Migration and border scholars have argued that the Europeanization and securitization of borders and migration have led to forms of population regulation that constitute a questionable divide between EU and non‐EU groups, as well as between different non‐EU groups. This paper argues that these processes have impacted not only centrifugally, on non‐EU populations, but also centripetally, on the “intra‐EU” divide regarding minorities such as Europe's Muslims and Roma. I explain how a de‐nationalization of the concepts and methods of migration and border studies—beyond methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism—sheds light on the under‐researched impact of the EU's external border regime on minoritized EU citizens. I introduce the notion of “evictability” to articulate this de‐nationalization and discuss the case study of Europe's Romani minority to show how contemporary forms of securitization further divide Europe bio‐politically along intra‐European lines.     

Submergence: Precarious Politics in Colombia's Future Port‐City

This article examines popular politics under precarious conditions in the rapidly expanding port‐city of Buenaventura on Colombia's Pacific coast. It begins by identifying the intersecting economic, ecological, and political forces contributing to the precarity of life in Buenaventura's intertidal zone. Focusing on conflicts over land in the waterfront settlements of Bajamar (meaning “low‐tide”), it then describes the efforts of Afro‐Colombian settlers and activists to defend their territories against threats of violence and displacement. In doing so, they must navigate historical legacies of ethno‐racial politics as well as formations of liberal governance and their multicultural and biopolitical logics of vulnerability and protection. The socio‐material conditions of the intertidal zone, and in particular the figure of submergence, are used to illuminate forms of political life in Colombia's future port‐city. The struggles of Afro‐Colombians to contest violent dispossession in Buenaventura reflect the racialized politics of precarity under late liberalism.     

Ephemeral geopolitics: Tracing the role of refugees in Syria's transnational opposition

It has become common to read that Syria's conflict has become a “globalized civil war,” with the understanding that states have become the key actors shaping its dynamics. While in great part true, such an understanding overlooks the significance of transnational networks in shaping the conflict and, more importantly, how these networks and states have been intimately connected from its early stages. This paper explores how a network of Syrian refugees that I dub the “coordinating class” performed the work of binding together the heterogeneous assemblage that was Syria's opposition movement. Drawing on assemblage theory and two years of multi-sited fieldwork, the paper explores three practices through which this emergent network linked the spaces of exile to the warzone of Syria's opposition-held “Liberated Territories.” In doing so, the paper argues that in Syria's conflict, refugees' geopolitical agency was highly layered, provisional, and ephemeral, yet still shaped the wider geopolitics of the war.     

White Settler Society as Monster: Rural Southeast Kansas,Ancestral Osage (Wah‐Zha‐Zhi) Territories,and the Violence of Forgetting

This article provides a critical analysis of the practices and discourses of white settler “men” in Southeast Kansas (Ancestral Osage Territories) by examining the inextricable links rural masculinity has with settler colonialism. I begin by underscoring how efforts in erasing Indigenous histories have been sanctioned through processes of dispossession, bordering, and nation‐state building. I then explore how hetero‐patriarchal rural hierarchies are assembled via capitalistic desires for private property; conservative Christianity's rhetoric of altruism and good intentions; white supremacist conceptions of race; and masculinist perspectives regarding work and gender. Next, I highlight how the spatial assertion of white settler masculinity reproduces colonial oppressions based upon interlocking subject positions and notions of difference. I continue by suggesting denial and disaffiliation are banal exercises of disavowal employed by white settler societies as attempts to forget colonial violence. I then finish by illustrating how a masculinist status quo might be disrupted, resisted, and transformed.     

Class,Citizenship and Regeneration: Glasgow and the Commonwealth Games 2014

Abstract: Through a focus on “consumer‐citizenship” this paper foregrounds the class practices inherent in urban regeneration. Using Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games (CWGs) as an illustrative example of regeneration, it seeks to highlight the market‐led processes that underpin state interventions. The paper demonstrates how these processes are implemented to transform “problem people, and problem places” ( Damer 1989 , From Moorepark to “Wine Alley”) into sites of “active” consumption and “responsible” citizenship. Yet, access to this “consumer citizenship” is stratified. In doing so, we synthesise conceptual insights from the Marxist‐influenced gentrification literature and the Foucauldian‐inspired housing renewal literature. We forward this to initiate further academic debate and empirical enquiry on the specific issue of mega sporting events.     

Crisis,Continuity and Change: Neoliberalism,the Left and the Future of Capitalism

Abstract: This essay's point of departure is the coincident economic and environmental “crises” of our time. I locate both in the dynamics of capital accumulation on a world‐scale, drawing on the ideas of Marx, Karl Polanyi and James O’Connor. I ask whether the recent profusion of “crisis talk” in the public domain presents an opportunity for progressive new ideas to take hold now that “neoliberalism” has seemingly been de‐legitimated. My answer is that a “post‐neoliberal” future is probably a long way off. I make my case in two stages and at two geographical scales. First, I examine the British social formation as currently constituted and explain why even a leading neoliberal state is failing to reform its ways. Second, I then scale‐up from the domestic level to international affairs. I examine cross‐border emissions trading—arguably the policy tool for mitigating the very real prospects of significant climate change this century. The overall conclusion is this: even though the “first” and “second” contradictions of capital have manifested themselves together and at a global level, there are currently few prospects for systemic reform (never mind revolution) led by a new, twenty‐first century “red‐green” Left.     

The Urban Injustices of New Labour's “New Urban Renewal”: The Case of the Aylesbury Estate in London

This paper discusses the urban injustices of New Labour's “new urban renewal”, that is the state‐led gentrification of British council estates, undertaken through the guise of mixed communities policy, on the Aylesbury estate in Southwark, London, one of the largest council estates in Europe. In this particular case of post‐political planning I show how the tenant support for the regeneration programme was manipulated and misrepresented and how choices were closed down for them, leaving them ultimately with a “false choice” between a regeneration they did not want or the further decline of their estate. I look at what the estate residents thought/think about the whole process and how they have resisted, and are resisting, the gentrification of their estate. I show revanchist and post‐political practices, but ultimately I refuse to succumb to these dystopian narratives, very attractive as they are, for conflict/dissent has not been completely smothered and resistance to gentrification in and around the Aylesbury is alive and well. I argue that we urgently need to re‐establish the city as the driver of democratic politics with an emancipatory agenda, rather than one that ratifies the status quo or gets mired in a dystopic post‐justice city.     

A Response to Fabiano Santos and Fernando Guarnieri*

This article responds to Fabiano Santos and Fernando Guarnieri's dispatch, published under the title “From Protest to Parliamentary Coup: An Overview of Brazil's Recent History” in the December 2016 issue of JLACS. I start by pointing out several errors in the authors' use of terms such as “fascism” and “coup.” I proceed to map out the omissions that allow them to portray Rousseff's impeachment in a moral and Manichean light, as a coup of malignant social actors against innocent victims. I then reconstruct the chronology of Rousseff's long-winded downward spiral of self-inflicted agony, from the electoral larceny of October 2014 through the gigantic popular protests of March 2015 to the final vote in August 2016, showing how the authors chose to omit every fact that revealed Rousseff's and the Workers' Party's own responsibilities in the economic collapse and the political crisis of the country they governed for five and a half and thirteen and a half years, respectively. I conclude by pointing out the contradiction between the authors' claim that there was a parliamentary coup in Brazil and their claim that the country's political system has remained intact.     

China’s urban ideology: new towns,creation cities,and contested landscapes of memory

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that “the urban” has emerged as the most significant ideological realm in contemporary China. In developing this argument, I suggest an alternative approach to how we theorize urbanization in China. Seeking to avoid the dichotomized analyses that often characterize scholarship on China’s urbanization, the paper suggests reading “the urban” as an ideological device. Such a reading calls for an analytical distinction between the city as a technology of socialist party-state planning and government and urbanization as a messy social process over which the state struggles for control. It also calls for a recognition of the ways that ideology itself has shifted dramatically in China, from the Mao-era centrality and coherence of class struggle and its overriding goal of proletarianization to a much less coherent post-reform message of “stability”. The paper begins with a brief discussion of ideology and Gramsci’s notion of “common sense” in a Chinese register. It then considers the film 24 City, directed by Jia Zhangke, as a template for understanding urban spaces as sites of conflict between the city as an ideological device and urbanization as a social process. New urban spaces are then explored in an effort to tease out their complex and contradictory ideological renderings. I conclude with an argument about the openness and contradictions of China’s urban spaces and how an ideological analysis can resist the kind of theoretical closure that much work on urbanization in China seems to aim for.     

2. THE VICTIM'S VOICE AND MELODRAMATIC AESTHETICS IN HISTORY1

Saul Friedländer's recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. He has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the Holocaust, within which he integrates the victims' authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. Excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources.     

‘La doble condición’: landmine victims,forced displacement,and disability in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio

The small body of scholarship that examines the intersection between forced displacement and physical disability draws important attention to the material difficulties simultaneously disabled and displaced people experience. Instead of focusing on disability as a condition lived against the spatial backdrop of forced displacement, this paper approaches disability and displacement as mutually referential spatial conditions. Based on fieldwork with internally displaced landmine victims in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio region, this research highlights how the intersection between physical impairment and forced displacement produces both disabling spatial imaginaries of fear as well as painfully embodied rhythms of daily life. Nonetheless, this paper draws attention to urban agricultural projects’ enabling potential to produce grounding rhythms of labor for landmine victims. Finally, this paper suggests that contexts of forced displacement require close consideration of spatial imaginaries of fear as well as experiences of direct structural violence as key factors underpinning the social production of disability.     

Some Personal Reminiscences and What They Meant for Me

There are those who have said I should write a book, and there are those—about the same in number—who have said I should not write a book. Those in the negative assert that my “book” already is written in the several hundred opinions (majorities, concurrences, dissents) I have filed over the years, and in my public utterances. There are valid arguments, I suppose, on both sides. I certainly do not wish to write anything that merely seeks to explain further my vote in decided cases, or to comment—supportively or adversely—on colleagues' votes, or to express little more than after‐the‐fact criticism. In that context, what might be said belonged in the decisional process itself. But there are other things in Supreme Court experience. Law students are inclined to ask questions. Example: “Tell me, how does one come to be a federal judge?” Justice Tom Clark had a direct response: “One has to be on the corner when the bus comes by.” One federal appellate judge plaintively said to me: “The only reason I am on the federal bench is because I was a close friend of a United States Senator.” (He had served for a time as the Senator's administrative assistant.) It may perhaps be said that every federal judge comes by his status in his own way. Of course, there are things one must not do, but I doubt that there is a specific path one must follow to be eligible and seriously regarded as a candidate for federal judicial service.     

HISTORIA MAGISTRA VITAE,INTERRUPTING: THUCYDIDES AND THE AGONISTIC TEMPORALITY OF ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY

In this essay I discuss Koselleck's thesis on the dissolution of historia magistra vitae in modernity with a view to exploring how the modern historiographical engagement with Thucydides entails qualifications of this argument. Focusing on Barthold Georg Niebuhr's contextualization of Thucydides in a new temporality of “ancient and modern history,” I examine how modernity is caught between conflicting notions of its own prehistory, and that this conflict suggests that the forward‐leaping qualities of Neuzeit were co‐articulated with other temporal notions, and particularly an idea of historical exemplarity associated with historia magistra vitae. This plurality of times highlights an agonistic temporality linking antiquity and modernity: a model of conflicting times inscribed in a dialogue through which modern historiography interrupted the “useful” history of antiquity, while simultaneously being itself interrupted by it. By following this dialogue, I seek to test two interrelated hypotheses: a) that modernity produced a multitemporal scheme in which the ideas of differential time and the future were intertwined with a notion of historia magistra vitae as meaningful and sense‐bearing time; and b) that contradictions in this scheme arising from the modern confrontation with Thucydides's poetics challenges the opposition between historia magistra vitae and modern historical sense and configures a temporality that is self‐agonistic in the sense that it confronts historical actors before and beyond the terms through which they may be able to give it meaning. Formulated as a poetics of the possible, this notion is approached as a corrective alternative to the modern consideration of the future as distanced from the space of experience, but nonetheless as grounded in actuality and therefore largely mastered by human knowledge and action.     

Draper,the “Conflict Thesis” and Secularising Politics in Late Nineteenth‐Century Argentina

Despite appearances to the contrary, late nineteenth‐century Buenos Aires (Argentina) seems to be a suitable scale model to explore the relationships between the “conflict thesis” and secularisation. John W. Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) arrived in the country in the midst of political battles over the shape of the future relationships between the state and the majoritarian Catholic Church. In the decade between 1875 and 1885 variants of the “conflict thesis” were expounded, discussed, and used as rhetorical weapons in the battles over the issue of religious teaching in elementary schools. This article analyses the discussions over the “conflict thesis” between liberal secularists and Catholics in newspaper articles, public speeches, parliamentary debates, and other forms of public discourse during that period. Against the backdrop of a weak institutional church, a vigorous growth of nascent scientific institutions, and a cultural atmosphere permeated by positivism, the opposing parties argued about the “conflict thesis” while each reclaimed for itself the legitimacy of science. The episode permits a close look at how the intellectual leaders who conceived the project of a secularised state utilised science‐based philosophies for purposes of political argument and ideological legitimation.     

THE TIME OF THE SELF AND THE TIME OF THE OTHER

What is time? This essay offers an attempt to think again about this oldest of philosophical questions by engaging David Hoy's recent book, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, which proposes a “history of time‐consciousness” in twentieth‐century European philosophy. Hoy's book traces the turn‐of‐the‐century debate between Husserl and Bergson about the different senses of time across the various configurations of hermeneutics, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. For him, what is at stake in such a project is to distinguish between the scientific‐objective “time of the universe” and the phenomenology of human temporality, “the time of our lives.” Hoy's approach is to organize his book around the three tenses of time—past/present/future—and to view objective‐scientific time as derived from the more primordial forms of temporalizing lived experience that occur in our interpretation of time. In my reading of Hoy's work, I attempt to explore how “time” (lived, experiential, phenomenological) can be read not in terms of “consciousness” (Hoy's thematic), but in terms of the self's relationship with an Other. That is, my aim is less to establish a continental tradition about time‐consciousness, understood through the methods of genealogy, phenomenology, or critical theory, than it is to situate the problem of time in terms of an ethics of the Other. In simple terms, I read Hoy's project as too bound up with an egological interpretation of consciousness. By reflecting on time through the relationship to the Other rather than as a mode of the self's own “time‐consciousness,” I attempt to think through the ethical consequences for understanding temporality and its connection to justice.     

Adaptation Machines and the Parasitic Politics of Life in Jamaican Disaster Resilience

This paper unpacks a politics of life at the heart of community‐based disaster management to advance a new understanding of resilience politics. Through an institutional ethnography of participatory resilience programming in Kingston, Jamaica, I explore how staff in Jamaica's national disaster management agency engaged with a qualitatively distinct form of collective life in Kingston's garrison districts. Garrison life has been shaped by the confluence of political economic, cultural, geopolitical force relations, which creates a hyper‐adaptive life that exceeds the techniques and rationalities of neoliberal disaster resilience. I draw on autonomist Marxist and Deleuzian readings of biopolitics to identify a new subject of disaster politics that I call, after Deleuze and Guattari, “adaptation machines”, decentralized apparatuses of capture that are parasitically reliant on the population's immanent adaptive capacities. The concept of adaptation machines enables us to envision resilience politics as a struggle over how to appropriate vulnerable peoples’ world‐forming constituent power.     

Sri Lankan Muslims: between ethno‐nationalism and the global ummah

ABSTRACT. Sri Lanka's Sunni Muslims or “Moors”, who make up eight percent of the population, are the country's third largest ethnic group, after the Buddhist Sinhalese (seventy‐four per cent) and the Hindu Tamils (eighteen per cent). Although the armed LTTE (Tamil Tiger) rebel movement was defeated militarily by government forces in May 2009, the island's Muslims still face the long‐standing external threats of ethno‐linguistic Tamil nationalism and pro‐Sinhala Buddhist government land and resettlement policies. In addition, during the past decade a sharp internal conflict has arisen within the Sri Lankan Muslim community between locally popular Sufi sheiks and the followers of hostile Islamic reformist movements energised by ideas and resources from the global ummah, or world community of Muslims. This simultaneous combination of “external” ethno‐nationalist rivalries and “internal” Islamic doctrinal conflict has placed Sri Lanka's Muslims in a double bind: how to defend against Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic hegemonies while not appearing to embrace an Islamist or jihadist agenda. This article first traces the historical development of Sri Lankan Muslim identity in the context of twentieth‐century Sri Lankan nationalism and the south Indian Dravidian movement, then examines the recent anti‐Sufi violence that threatens to divide the Sri Lankan Muslim community today.     

‘Signs of the still recent war’: Medbh McGuckian and conflict

In a review of Medbh McGuckian's poetry, Christopher Benfey maintained that ‘[t]o scan her poems for allusions to sectarian violence would be as fruitless and naïve as to sift Emily Dickinson's poems for references to the Civil War’. McGuckian's work is not often read for its commentary on or critique of violence in Northern Ireland. Indeed, in an interview with John Brown, the poet revealed that ‘I never thought of myself as a “Troubles” poet; it was not part of my oeuvre and I couldn't do it simply as an exercise, so I didn't take it on’. This article tests the validity of her self-assessment by examining poems which borrow from sources focused on conflict, particularly the two world wars. The intertexts allow the poet to explore moments of crisis (due to violence, imprisonment and enforced deprivation) without having to deal explicitly with the more immediate conflict in Northern Ireland.