A friend sent me this zine: https://dochub.com/rloggans/jo3xELpR3ZjmJLowJBa7nr/land-back-zine
It is supposed to be a zine on how the term “Decolonization” has become (neo)liberalized and run its course, how though there are limits with regards to the “land back” movement, that it is a more appropriate term to think through settler colonialism and ending it. I have no interest in defending decolonization, because its revolutionary black roots have been thoroughly divorced and misunderstood even in this zine which purports to understand that. It is an historical term that served its time, what more needs to be said? I’m more interested in the ways that the terms “Indigenous” and “Anti-blackness” both here and generally are used in an empty manner.
First we have to understand that these terms are not universal, they were not always there, and they do not encompass everyone and everywhere. What do you mean by indigenous? Indigenous to where? Blackness is indigenous too, blackness is indigeneity too, a way of living through the violence that slavery and colonialism enacted on people indigenous to Africa (also an invention). Land back is limiting in this manner because it says land back to the people indigenous to this land, what is known now as the USA, but doesn’t recognize the way that black people’s indigeneity is being lived through, broken apart, coming together, in a way that absolutely interacts with the presumed universal way that people use “indigenous” here in the states to mean native or native american. The zine offers that black people should be gifted land, as if 40 acres and a mule were not a thing that actually happened. If blackness is a construction then, an impasse of the colonial world on the way that we as black people move through and potentially beyond it, then how do we read it in tension with “anti-blackness?” To speak of anti-blackness, you have to speak of blackness, and not in a dialectic way, but, to think with the poet Kamau Brathwaite, using tidalectics. The use of “anti-blackness” within non-black indigenous and communities of color in the US feels so empty because the response is always we have to address anti-blackness in our communities but it is never coupled with we have to learn about the ways that blackness moves through our world constructions, our identity formations. We have to learn how blackness historically and currently orders and disorders our world and THE world. And it seems more and more to me that empty acknowledgement of the one is willful erasure of the other.