Economies, life and otherwise: Elizabeth Povinelli in conversation with Amit Baishya
In this conversation, Amit Baishya engages Elizabeth Povinelli on her oeuvre spanning politics of recognition and endurance to that of the nonhuman and the Anthropocene.
Rishav Thakur: Good afternoon everyone, I am Rishav Thakur, a Contributing Editor for Borderlines, an online platform run by graduate students that aims to rethink the academic practice of region and area studies, by questioning theoretical and disciplinary approaches towards these academic formations.
Today, we are very excited to hold a virtual space for a conversation between Elizabeth Povinelli and Amit Baishya on topics spanning the Anthropocene, ordinary modes of endurance and late liberalism. Before we begin proper, let me introduce these two scholars:
Elizabeth Povinelli is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies in Columbia University in the City of New York. Her research has focused on developing a critical theory of late settler liberalism, that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. This thinking has unfolded across many books, numerous essays, and a thirty-five year long collaboration with her Indigenous colleagues in north Australia including, most recently, six films they have created as members of the Karrabing Film Collective.[1]
Amit Baishya is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma. He writes about political terror, survival and the Anthropocene drawing on film and literature from South Asia. He also translates short stories and novels from Assamese to English and his translation of Debendranath Acharya’s Jangam on the “forgotten long march” of Indians from Burma during World War II was released in 2018.
As such, both Elizabeth Povinelli and Amit Baishya not only transgress disciplinary boundaries and engage seamlessly across anthropology, comparative literature, critical theory and philosophy in their academic endeavors; but they also work with film-making and literary translation in their broad intellectual engagements with the worlds that they care about.
Today, Professor Baishya will be posing questions to Elizabeth Povinelli — whose works have influenced his own writing — to draw out and think through some of these themes of mutual interest. Let us begin then without further ado— the floor is all yours, Professor Baishya.
Amit Baishya: Thank you very much, Rishav. Thanks for inviting me and thanks, of course, to Borderlines for facilitating this. And good to see you Beth, after so many years. As Rishav mentioned, your work has helped me a lot in terms of thinking about questions of endurance and survival, political terror and also in my recent forays into Anthropocene discourse.
So I'll begin by asking you the sort of broad question, and then we'll go to more specific ones dealing with each of your published works. The broad question would be: at the end of your book Geontologies, you talk about how this book allows you to take stock of your writing as a whole. It allowed you to look back at your career. There are certain themes that have intensified over the five published books that you've written. Can I ask you to take both a forward-looking and linear direction in terms of your work, and also about how certain themes have developed over time?
Let me give an example. In Labor's Lot you talk about sweat. Sweat ties people to place, so to speak, in some ways. And then this motif comes back again in Economies of Abandonment. Similarly, in Geontologies, you start thinking more about questions about the Anthropocene, about endurance, survival...but you also take a look back at your oeuvre in some ways. You talk about how Geontologies is a sort of a rewriting of Labor's Lot, but in a very different way. So maybe taking both the look forward and the look backward in terms of your career and your ideas will be useful for our audience.
Elizabeth Povinelli: Yeah. I often say that I'm writing one book but it just has very long chapters. And so each book takes up a problem that the last one ended with, or I think ended with. I usually drive into a wreck and say, this is the wreck we're in. And it takes me a little while to figure out, okay, how did that wreck [happen, and] what is the next movement?
And the second very broad way of thinking about all of the six books, five books, is that although, you know, I write them —they definitely come out of this particular mind-body thing. They come out of an ever longer, ever longer conversation with an older generation from Belyuen, which is a small Indigenous community in the north [of Australia], and then, of course, with my Karrabing colleagues.[2] And the Karrabing come from Belyuen, and so we have really literally grown up together since we've been doing things since I was 22, since 1984. So my thought is always thinking with them, alongside them.
And more importantly, my thought was really initialized by the generation above me there, of the older men and women who kind of literally recruited me into my position, and they recruited me to my position...They recruited me into the position of an anthropologist because of the position they were in as Indigenous subjects within a settler-colonial state. And very specifically they were laboring under a law, the Land Rights Act that was passed in 1976, that the settler state considered a landmark act that recognized that Indigenous people own their land. And, so, the state set up mechanisms by which what the state called "traditional Aboriginal owners" could make the claim —and the language is so screwed up, “make a claim”— to the state for the return of what was already theirs. So, it's just, you know, it's the usual circle. We'll come back to that.
When I first went to Australia in 1984, I was a philosopher. But under this Land Rights Act, Indigenous subjects in Australia have to have all their claims mediated by an anthropologist and a lawyer. So it's that older generation that said, you know what? Come back and be our lawyer. They're involved in the claim. And I didn't want to be a lawyer. I've never wanted to be a lawyer. And so they said anthropologist. So it's a bit of a long story, but I'm trying to suggest how deeply my thought has been initialized, and how deeply my life has been initialized, by this long conversation with folks at Belyuen.
There was also this very pretty funny conversation, because people were very savvy and funny, and still are. I said I didn't know what an anthropologist was, in 1985 when they asked me to come back— And they said it's white people studying us. I couldn't believe it! I said seriously? They said yes. They study our culture. I was like, oh, wow, that's wild. What's that? So because I was a philosopher, you know, I didn't know what that was. And I said, that's what you want me to do? And they said, no, we want you to help us understand what this — they didn't use the word mechanism, but they said, what means white or settler law works, what they're doing, what is this? And you know, I would say — what is this apparatus of recognition that's descending on us? Let's try and understand this together. We'll help you. You help us.
So it's deep —my work is not studying them, it's studying alongside everybody, with each other. What are the mechanisms? What's the shape of late liberalism and late settler liberalism if you're standing alongside my colleagues and staring at it from their lives?[3] So, yes, a lot of the concepts that have been developed from Labor's Lot through to the present come out of that conversation. Certainly the broader understanding of the sensory interdependencies and semiotics of the human and more-than-human world is one. So, sweat, and other things.
AB: Let me just pick up on something that you said. You said that when you first met your colleagues in Australia in Belyuen, you didn't know what an anthropologist was, and they responded that it's white people studying “us,” right?
EP: So spot on, right?
AB: Which is, yes, historically correct to a large extent, I think. But you mention at the beginning of Geontologies is that it was never about explaining them to others. Your object of study really is late liberalism when you look at it from their perspective. I'd like to ask you a little bit about this object of study, late liberalism. How exactly can we understand late liberalism? Of course, you make these distinctions at the beginning of Economies of Abandonment, but for our audience here today, what exactly is this object called late liberalism, and why not use a term like, say, neoliberalism?
EP: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's great. And again, I can kind of do that in terms of how these books set the stage for rethinking things one after the other. So I go over [to Australia] in 1984 and 1985. Well by 1984 and 1985 in Australia—but also in the broader Anglo diaspora let's say, the Anglo-colonial world, the Americas, et cetera—there had been a shift from, and especially in Australia since the mid/late '70s, a shift from an explicit white nationalism, and an explicit xenophobia relative to Asia, to what they call multiculturalism. That is, to a liberal form of the recognition of the worth of difference.
Right. So and again, I just was really like a classical —like, I went to St. John's in Santa Fe [New Mexico], where there was tension between Native Americans and the history of Latinx/Spanish and then American White colonialism. But so I go there and, you know, and I'm fully a subject of that emergence in some ways, of this liberal form of recognition. But I'm just like, what is going on here? Right. I'm more like, what is this? And we're working to try and think through the apparatus of a land rights act that takes shape within the politics of recognition. So that was what I was doing first, and then I start thinking, wait, what is this thing, recognition liberalism? And Cunning of Recognition starts trying to think about liberalism in its different periodizations and in its geographical dispersions. So I start thinking, okay, first Labor's Lot is like, what is the settler state demanding people, Indigenous people, be in order for settlers to see Indigenous claimants as authentically Indigenous? Then, Cunning of Recognition expands it out a bit. The first book is more about Belyuen, the second more of a national perspective. And I start thinking, with everybody, what is the state recognizing? And in the process of trying to understand the mechanism by which recognition is a strategy by which liberalism re-entrenches its authority rather than gives it up. So this is 2002, I'm thinking about this in Cunning. Then I just start thinking, wait a minute, how is this part of a bigger global periodization of liberalism? And how would I understand how Australia fits in the bigger global picture?
And that's where I start in Empire of Love. Now I can say, why "late liberalism" as a phrase. But we can put that aside. But by, I would say, The Empire of Love, but definitely by Economies of Abandonment, I really dig in and start thinking, okay, so what is happening between the '50s, '60s and '70s? So globally, but in a dispersed geography and in a dispersed governmental form. And what I see happening — again, it's not like it happens. It happens, like — I always wave my hands, because it's happening like this and then it comes back, and it comes back and so on...
What happens is that the anticolonial new social movements, the radical new social movements, the Third World movements, post-colonial theory have effectively by, definitely by the '60s, I describe it as having ripped the mask off of civilizational liberalism. That is, the very old — well, in some ways still there now — but the older liberal form that says, “oh, we're smashing the social forms and excavating and extracting all your wealth and redistributing, gorging ourselves with it, because that's good for you, because we give you Civilization” is no longer working. And, you know, by the '50s and '60s after, that series of false promises, World War after World War, it's like...Can I swear on this thing? “It's like, fuck you! You're just stealing!”
The Inheritance (p. 4-5)
You know, and it's not like that was the first time people said that. But really, it was working. Liberalism could no longer claim that it was ravaging and destroying worlds based on any good. So what happens? And that's what we start looking at — late liberalism. Liberalism says, in terms of its cultural logics, does this amazing thing. What a great trick! And it's what I and my colleagues at Belyuen were in the middle of in 1984. They say, “Oh, my God, you're right! We're wrong! We were racists!” You know it's like Charles Taylor.[4] “All cultures should be assumed to have some worth if they've been going on for long enough. So you tell us how you fit into the worth of the human difference. And then maybe we'll give you back a little bit of what was yours anyways.”
So we see a transformation of civilizational liberalism to recognition liberalism. But both are simply ways in which liberalism is able to re-entrench its authority to rule, to judge, and to decide the differences that matter and don't matter. Originally, in Economies of Abandonment, I distinguish late liberalism in its recognition function. You know, in its broad anthropological function of, oh, humans are human in their difference, but not too different, or we will continue to criminalize you, right?
So there's always a limit. And I distinguish that from the transformations of liberal governments relative to the economy. And that's what I call neoliberalism. And in Economies of Abandonment, I said, look, the '50s and '60s are where both of these forms start changing, right. So you get Keynesian, and then you start, in the '50s and '60s, anywhere you are in the global movement of this, the shift in in the way that liberalism justifies the extraction of work from others from Civilization to Recognition. And then you get the economic transformation from a kind of Keynesian to a more conservative Keynesian, it was never really Hayekian — nobody can govern on an actual "just let everyone die." So I start looking at that. And I, initially, I'm saying that I call these new styles of the governance of difference “late liberalism” and I call these new styles of the governance of markets “neoliberalism.” You know, but right after I published Economies of Abandonment, I say, you know, look, this shift in the economy and in the politics of governance of difference, they're all what I'm going to call late liberalism. And how they're related to each other, I don't think they determine each other. But I don't think they're separate from each other. It's more of a, maybe a kind of Althusserian kind of looseness to them. That doesn't mean they're detached.
Is that too long? Well, yes. So now late liberalism refers to a broad periodization of the transformation of the governance of markets and the governance of difference that begins, I would say, in the late '50s, and may have been starting to shake in 2008. Now we really see a shake. Whatever is going on now, the governance of difference and the governance of markets are morphing in ways we don't quite understand yet.
AB : If I could just briefly interject and ask you before we go into some of the other concepts...when you're saying that late liberalism is morphing and mutating now, how would you probably describe some of the shifts that are happening? You talk about classical liberalism as a civilizational discourse. Late liberalism, on the other hand, is a strategy of governance, which basically tries to govern the energies released by anticolonial movements and the like. In this current conjuncture, when liberalism is in crisis, how would you say it's mutating? What kind of critical toolkit do we need for that?
EP: Yeah, that's one of the things that, again, how I work, it's like I drive in there and I think that's as far as I can get. Now I have to sit down and think what exactly is this, how is it working? And I've been trying to — I mean, I've been watching, and I both watch where I sit with my oldest relations and colleagues in Australia, and I watch as any social theorist would watch what's going on globally.
And, you know, I'm not sure. I have nothing better to say than what any halfway intelligent person would say, which is how... put it this way: So, Trump is elected, right? And, you know, there was a conference that a Performance Studies professor organized like a thinkshop, he organized it down at NYU [New York University]. And everyone's just trying to figure out, like, what the? Because by that time, we knew it wasn't just — it was a lot of suburban white people, it was educated people, you know, it was a broader span of middle-class and upper-middle-class white people who had voted [for Donald Trump]. So you couldn't just say it's this small racist group. It was like, no. It was not that.
And my, my thoughts at the time, and they're still my thoughts because everyone's really angry and I'm angry, you know, but my thoughts, at the time were that there was this this re-alignment of the Far Right and the Far Left that was all happening around a certain kind of populism. Not an old kind of populism, but a certain new kind of populism, that is defined as anti-global. A kind of populism that in some ways was correct. Whether it's the Far Left or the Far Right, I mean, in some ways they were absolutely correct.
And I am implicated in this, so that those folks who are able to treat their national passport as merely a form of supranational movement... I thought of it as a pneumatic tube. One little end of a pneumatic tube. So you go whoop! And you go whoop! And you go whoop! You know. And you just shoot through all these pneumatic tubes that crisscross the globe. Right, and are completely unaffected by your nationalism as long as you have the money and, you know, other kinds of social privileges. And increasingly, then, there's this whole other population whose trajectories are going down. Just in terms of class for a moment. And they're stuck. You're not able to enter the pneumatic tube to anywhere and everywhere. So the rise of a kind of populism in the left and the right as anti-global were correct. It's like those people who've been pneumatic tubed were the ones that are increasingly winning class-wise and everyone else is not.
So from a class perspective, I'm a pneumatic tube person. So this implicates me, right. And I think, well, you know, I don't feel American. I am not nationalist. A lot of it comes from my grandfather, from the Alps. So we have a longer history. But on top of that, melded into that, and I don't think it's just American, but James Baldwin would say that [there is a] deep grammar...Well, certainly, James Baldwin, there is a deep American grammar to all this. Which is if the class analysis had been the only thing, okay. But it wasn't just class, it was like, wait a minute, we're White. Right. And for a long time, Whiteness could absorb a lot. Like my family was absorbed into Whiteness. And that's what we'll come to here. But we were absorbed. And now Whites, we're feeling like they're being chucked out of this "well, if you have the right skin color [the] world just dumps into your lap!" So there was a racial, racist component to this.
The Inheritance (p. 288-289)
And so what we're seeing is a new kind of anti-global, which means a new form of nationalism. That is not the old form. It's like it can't be fascist — because we didn't have globalization. I mean, it can be fascist — but it's not old fascism because there wasn't globalization.
AB: Sure.
EP: And when we return. But now it's like they're running into forms of the economy that, so we're seeing the same kind of problem of governance of difference. And the governance of markets, neither one is quite working right. Or they're working fine, but they're not going to create the kind of things it had earlier for the kinds of people it was supposed to produce values for. So instead of an answer, those are the kind of things I think we need to be looking at.
AB: Well, if we have time we'll come back to this question, about fascism, which I find very fascinating in terms of its mutations now. But just to go back to your work, one of the key distinctions that comes up in Cunning of Recognition is that between the autological subject and the genealogical society. It took me a long time to figure it out myself...the distinction between the autological subject and the genealogical society.[5] On the one hand, you talk about it as a strategy of discipline. But what I found very useful in that concept especially is this idea of “the tense of the other”— the fact that the autological subject is more about the future perfect, whereas the genealogical society is more about the past perfect. And this distinction comes back in many of the legal cases that you discuss in Cunning of Recognition and elsewhere. And along with that, you've developed a vocabulary which I found very useful, like “governance of the prior”, “quasi-event” (which is a key term for the Anthropocene as well). We'll come back to that later on. But I'd like you to talk a little bit about the distinction between the autological subject and the genealogical society. It's coming from Cunning of Recognition. But then it's mutating and developing in other works as well. How would you account for that?
EP: Yeah, I forgot I had actually started thinking about the autological subject and genealogical society in Cunning, because I really develop it in Empire of Love. But yeah, but I began, kind of, like, what the heck was this? And again, it comes from where I was taught, which is at the heart of the settler state’s governance of Indigenous people. And what became very clear in these land-claim cases, but in just the ordinary way in which Indigenous subjects—but I would say Black subjects, subjects of color more generally—are apprehended, both visually seen and captured. Like grabbed and held. It is that people are always looking in and through them, to try and see something that was.
And in Australia, it's very clear what they're trying to see is what it was like before settlers came. Like I'm looking to try and see what you were before I came. And thus, you—actual existing Indigenous person—are in the way. So there's a kind of Fanonian phenomenology.
Like talking to late liberal subjects, saying: "That's what you're doing! You understand that, that is what you're doing to someone? What if you were in the way of what someone wanted to see in you, from the moment you're born to the moment you die? That is that constant measuring and failing. So that the Indigenous subject who was, in that past perfect sense, became in social theory, a mass subject. So it was never you in particular, it was your kind. Your kind of people—and your kind in the past perfect tense. That's why I say autological subject, because the liberal subject is always singularity. Because genealogical society is always the mass objects, it's always you all were the same. You are just one big sameness, whose truth happened right before we arrived into your thing [world].
That's the basic distinction. One is future-oriented. And one is past perfect and frozen, is rock-like and, and it's important because that distinction survives in the permutations of liberal form. So in civilizational liberalism, that distinction between the future, liberal, progressive, unfolding, horizontal subject was there. And the genealogical society, you know the frozen, you're in the way of what I want to see, which is what you were before... But it was governed in a genocidal way. It was like you, Indigenous subject, have to be destroyed so the Modern can come. It was like, you're out-of-time, right? You just need to either be allowed to die or you have to be wiped out so [our] time can get back into alignment.
In recognition and late liberalism, the distinctions still hold, it's just governed differently. Now we want to celebrate that thing that you, Indigenous subject, were, even though you actual Indigenous person is a bit of a messed-up version of [that]. You see, so for me, the autological subject and genealogical society is super interesting for liberalism, in general, because it subtends the permutations of how liberalism governs difference. Yeah. And so it just flips: you either kill the genealogical society, celebrate it, but then say it's an actual person, you know, you're just a version of what we celebrate.
AB: To follow up on what you said...my reading of your project overall is that it has two dimensions, right? One is the kind of description and analysis of a mode of power, of the notion of governance. It's a description of a certain modality of rules and grammar of governance, if you may put it that way. But there is another way in which you think about how people survive in the interstices. I go back here to the title of the class that I took with you in 2008 [School of Criticism and Theory], which was ‘Recognition, Espionage, and Camouflage’. So tell us a little bit more about espionage and camouflages as modes of being, or strategies through which people who are abandoned within these pockets of late liberalism survive. And then if you could go on to address your refusal of discourses of redemption, the concept of endurance...
EP: No, I think that's really, the second aspect of the work that you mentioned is super important, and it's not simply super important to the work, but it's super important to the ongoing nature of really what sits behind all this work, which is, you know, how together do we, you know, as a funny group, refuse to give way. How does Karrabing refuse to give way? Stubbornly say, "No! We're not! Whatever this is, we're not giving way!" So in part, we have to analyze what it is, what's the trick? Like what's the trick? And we, like, we're still hunters. So we understand that everything is being baited, like, you know. And then we look for the hook. Oh, that's a tasty worm. But where's the hook? Oh, no, there's no hook here...oh, there’s the hook, right. So it's not simply, it’s the work is part and parcel also of the second aspect, which is part of the work, but it's also the purpose of the work, which is life. And, you know, you're very sweet to bring up that class, it's like, oh yeah, I forgot I taught that class.
AB: Well, I remember it, it helped me a lot!
EP: No, I do too! I do too! It was a great class. You guys were amazing! So, it was a class in which I was trying to take recognition and pull it out a little bit. How to say? To give it more dimensions. That's often what I do. The function of a concept is to bring things together so that you can see and feel that which is immanent, but not yet quite formed or actualized. But then sometimes the concept gets in the way of seeing the field so you have to pull it apart again and look at it. Okay, so I was trying to think of three dynamics in late liberalism. One was a dominant one from a late liberal governance perspective. One was the dominant one, and that's recognition, right. And this trick of the recognition of the law, getting you to turn toward it, as if it was there for you. When it's actually there, I shouldn't say there for itself, that's abstract, but the mechanisms are there for the state to re-entrench itself. So recognition is a mode of turning refusal towards itself. And once you turn toward it, that's it. It's got you. Then you're fighting as Rex Edmunds [EP’s colleague from Karrabing] said, you're fighting each other with the settler as the adjudicator. And late liberalism wants that.
Espionage was a way of, as the term implies, it was a way of hiding within this model in order to secret out its strategy.[6] So you just, it's like, "Oh! yeah, I really, really am here to be recognized." But what you're doing is to like [mimics looking around]. It's more the mimicry — we get to Homi Bhabha. It's more like the either strategic essentialism, like Gayatri [Spivak] talks about, or a form of mimicry such as Homi Bhabha talks about. But the intentionality is to get the plans, right? Camouflage is a...so all these are forms of survival. But not recognition, recognition we — it's like at least from Karrabing, it's like don't go there. Don't actually bite that worm because it is a hook. Don't swallow it, spit it out. If you taste that metal, spit it out.
Espionage is a form of survival. And Camouflage is definitely also a form of survival and survivance. Camouflage is more, though; namely, how do you make your way in this governance of difference and markets long enough to thicken up what you see as the actual otherwise within the system.[7] And so I'll just kind of pull this out a little bit. One of the problems is that with a kind of otherwise—is that immanence, and I'll give a concrete example—a kind of immanence that's there, but not thickened enough to withstand a frontal assault from late liberalism. And I know this sounds like war, but it feels like war. It's this constant assault. It might not be at the level of an actual bomb, but it's a constant straining of people’s lives. So you have to thicken up and extend enough before someone comes in and tries to co-opt you. How do you do that? And that's what Camouflage is. Camouflage is like, “Nothing's happening here!” As you're deepening and thickening. Because it's hard to figure out what it is you actually are doing at the beginning of a thought or a movement. Right? Sometimes it's so immanent, you don't quite know yet. Because these are in a dynamic of movement. So say when this all started and we're trying to figure out what is this, what is this Land Rights Act, which is operating under this thing, we now call recognition? Well, we don't quite know yet. Right? So we have to go spy. Then in spying, we see what it is differently, then we hide. Then we spy and see what it is and then we hide. And each kind of movement, people's own understanding and voicing and counter-voicing is enriched and thickened, right? Until you're good and strong enough that when someone comes ,you're like, "No! That’s not what I want, imagine, am trying to build." Right? So I was trying to get more of the dynamics of the flow in this. I don't know if that's what I actually said in class. But I think it's close enough.
AB: When we did Battle of Algiers, I think the whole discussion definitely came up there. It was useful, in terms of talking about agency, of survival, and questions on those lines.
EP: But it really is. I mean, I think what's hard for those who have never had to do this is, and it's something that interests Karrabing a lot, especially in the beginning, it's like ideas, my ideas, I think, you know, counter-immanent ideas in general, they don't come fully formed. It's like, it's like an irritation, it's like, no! Something is wrong here! But what is it? Right? What is it? And if someone comes in, and is like, it's this, this, this, this, this, it's like, you know, it's... it's hard not to just give weight to that. So you need to have some kind of separate space to go to kind of explore what it is. Right? And that's what we've tried to be doing together quite a long time in all our differences.
AB: Before I ask you the next question, since we are in the realm of time discipline, I wanted to ask if we have an hour left or if you’d prefer something else? I was trying to be a little E.P. Thompson-ish, but yeah...Okay, great!
I'll move on to something which I found very productive in your work about the refusal of narratives of redemption. You end the introduction of Empire of Love with this. And I'll just read out one section for people who may not be very familiar with this: “[t]he options presented to people to choose, or must, live at the end of liberalism's tolerance and capitalism's trickle, are often not great options. To pretend that they are is to ignore the actual harms of liberal forms of social tolerance and capital forms of life- and wealth-extraction produce...To wish for a redemptive narrative, to seek it, is to wish that social experiments fulfill rather than upset given conditions, that they emerge in a form that given conditions recognize as good and that they comply to a hegemony of love rather than truly challenge its hold over social life.” So this is what you wrote, of course, in Empire of Love [p. 25]. Could you elaborate on that please?
EP: It defines my work. That is I mean, I don't reread my work, but that is, I must say, that angry sentence or paragraph, that defines it all.
AB: And of course, this is related also to concepts like quasi-event, to concepts like endurance.[8] The fact that you live in a durative time without necessarily any clear beginning or end.
EP: Hope. Hope is another one. And how some people are supposed to give other people hope. And it's like, well, what is that about? You know, it's a story I tell all the time, the hope one. I was at, oh it was a wonderful event. I was discussing sections of Economies, or something. Really, really lovely people, and it was great. But, you know, someone asked me something like, “so well you go after hope in Economies as a liberal strategy of maintenance. But your colleagues, your Karrabing colleagues, they must have hope because they get on the boat. They keep getting on the boat.” And part of Economies was about this difficult boat ride across a huge bay on the way to Karrabing country. And, you know, I said, I think that's a great question, although I would put it differently, I would say, if not hope, why do they get on the boat? If not redemption, why do people engage in alternative social projects? And if I rephrase the question that way, then I have an answer that there is a kind of common affect across Karrabing, including me, for different reasons. And I'm going to say the answer and then I'm going to — you know, I'm always going back and forth— and so I'm going to ask the question, because now I'm really curious, it's a good question, and see what other people say. And I said the reason we all keep getting on that boat is because we're stubborn. My white grandfather in the Alps, in this little village, he would say to us, he would say to me, "Elizabeth, you tell them you can kill me, but I'm not going anywhere!" And we're like, what!? But it was just stubborn refusal to give ground. And to be obdurate, to be like a rock! Because, in fact, liberalism is obdurate and a rock. Why doesn't liberalism give some ground up? They don't want to. So, it's not like, oh, then let's be say that being a rock is redemptive. It's not, it's got its own problems.
But I went back and I didn't say what I said, and I asked one of my daughters G.G., and she was so funny, she said “Stubborn, ain't it?” And I said “That’s what I said!” And then we talked about how it can also be a problem, you get back up too quick, you know, and then you don't have enough flexibility. But empathy, redemption, and hope. We have to look at the genealogies of these affects and their deployment in liberalism. Why does liberalism continually desire these aspects of returns? And from whom?
AB: This would be a good segue into your intervention into Anthropocene discourse and the concept of geontology, I think. Let’s consider the differences between someone like you and, say, Dipesh Chakrabarty.[9] Obviously for him, the Anthropocene is about inventing a new form of politics, even inventing a new form of the human. That's what he's been calling for...a new planetary politics. He calls for a break from what has gone on before. Whereas when I read someone like you or someone like Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, I identify a different position. Where I see some of the commonalities between your discourse and Yusoff’s discourse is that many of these strategies of governance and forms of alternative politics have already existed at these edges, let's say in settler colonies and so on. It's only now becoming more visible on a global scale. In fact, geontopower, the whole framework of geontopower is precisely that it's already been there immanently.[10]
EP: It’s been operating in the open for a very long time.
AB: That’s right, absolutely. And Yusoff in A Billion Black Anthropocene or None is also talking about settler colonialism, the aftereffects of the plantation system and so on. You also talk about that from the standpoint of Australia, for instance. So it seems to me that there is a trajectory in the discourse of the Anthropocene that says we need to break with everything that was going on before... we have to reinvent the wheel all together again. On the other hand, scholars like you and Yusoff are saying that in some ways it's something which is already immanent. Maybe even the question of survival might be something that we can actually consider otherwise—as you say not from the standpoint of other of the self, but the other of the other.
In this vein, I quote one small sentence from the end of Geontologies before I pass it on to you: “We hear all around us the coming Event, the catastrophic imaginary orienting and demanding action—the last wave, the sixth extinction. And yet pulsing through various terrains is a very different temporality—the river becomes a polluted dump; the fog becomes smog; rock formations become computer components.” [p. 176-177]. I find that very useful in terms of thinking that the Anthropocene has already been there with us, but has never been conceptualized quite in that way. So I’ll pass it onto you to think through this question of the Anthropocene and how you approach it in your work.
EP: Just a little question for me, you know I talked about—I could speak about Dipesh’s work a little more, and then the new book. I mean, Geontologies, part of what I’m trying to suggest is that there is a scaling up that mimics a very old liberal civilizational form of governance and this scaling up transforms, ‘Oh this is now happening to us, when it was never supposed to happen to us, it was only kind of supposed to be happening to you without any consequence to us — It's now happening to us.’ And when that happens, it suddenly becomes about all humans. So in just a kind of simple way, we could say that particular spaces in the whole planet, or the earth, have been radically transformed. Species annihilations. Human annihilations. Geographical annihilations. Since the discovery of the New World—sorry, look at me, flies out of my mouth!—since the invasion of Native American lands on this side of the Atlantic. And the forceful extraction resources and enslavement of people. You could say, well, that just happened to certain parts of the world. It’s like, no it didn’t! No it didn’t happen in certain parts of the world! It happened to all parts of the world! And there were more radical collapses everywhere. It just wasn't your, white, Western, collapse. It was your expansion. So it wasn't a ‘human’ problem. The Anthropocene becomes a human problem when it starts happening to specific types of humans, again, white, Western. So those humans are being taken down too now, okay? I mean, I'm not liking any of this, but we have to radically rethink the modes by which certain forms of human become the Human. And of course, you know, there's also the question of “a” or “the” human? Is it a social relation, i.e. capitalist relation? And Dipesh, you know, I feel like he got really enamored with these forms of time and disciplinarity, especially if you look at his Tanner Lectures. In the Tanner Lectures, he says— okay, we had a geological time frame, a species time frame, and a historical time frame. And each one of these time frames, for a very long time, you could hold them in very separate spaces—like geological time didn’t touch us, species time was after that but it didn’t touch us, and then it’s historical time that touches us. And now they're collapsing. And because they're collapsing, we have this new historical consciousness. And again, I just think, who are we talking about? And I think he would say—and I haven’t spoken to him lately—but I think he would say, well, I'm talking about the West…and I’m thinking, this is part of it. It's this refusal—and this is Dipesh, who has done Provincializing Europe—so, the immanent otherwise is that which never—no, which refused that abstraction, which was always looking and saying, `look, you, western subject-society, are being gored by the radical extinction of worlds that you initiated in our lands and our bodies.’ And yet, it’s only when the extinction they began starts to have noticeable effects on them that the liberal western subject of accumulation says it is a global, a human problem, rather than local and specific problem.
This is what I talk about in Geontologies. You see a specific social space, the western space of accumulation—suddenly shocked because what they do to others is happening to them now— is turning from the very people whose worlds they destroyed, both the human and more than human world, back to its source. And now the subjects of accumulation ask those they ripped their worlds from, ‘Could you give us your secrets for how you've been able to endure us?’ I mean, literally, Karrabing has been asked that. Audiences have asked, like Rex or Gavin, [EP’s Indigenous colleagues from Northern Australia] like, what in your traditions can help us save the world? I was like, you’re joking me! At some point I was just not in the mood, and I said you know what, if I was Rex or Gavin and I did have a secret, I wouldn't tell you. But, you know, people are much nicer than me. But we don't —there is no secret. What’s the “secret”? So those are the general ways in which—and I think Katherine’s [Yusoff] work is spot on, Sylvia Wynter’s work is spot on this—you cannot begin this question without irreducibly placing it in that history of colonialism and the enslavement of worlds, that is, the dispossession and displacement and destruction of worlds that initialized the European subject.[11] This is the “secret.” You cannot start in a new moment, you cannot start as if everything is new. No, no. This is not new. And we will get no answer, no strategy, if we act as if we are in a new moment.
AB: That's what I would call it the temporality of post-colonial science fiction—because, from the dominant standpoint, there is the future, but it is still in the realm of fiction.[12] But, for the colonized, it always starts from the moment where the dispossession has already happened. It’s never in the future, about to happen; it’s already happened. A lot of the people like N.K. Jemisin are precisely writing from that framework, that particular temporality.
EP: Yeah, it’s already happened.
AB: It's already happened, and the rest of the world is catching up a little too late.
EP: Yeah, and that’s part of the stubborn thing. When I was talking to a G.G.—Cecilia Lewis to get her full name in [a member of the Karrabing Film Collective]—and she was just like, “you know, every time, every time they come up with a new thing, they say we’ll give up, but we've been outwitting them for how many years!” But that said, it's pretty hard because, as we're working, say Karrabing, our little group, we redirect all this money that we [the Karrabing Collective] make from making these films and artwork and things… to thicken us up… it’s really actually great, it’s generational, and we're not losing anything. We're actually thickening and extending stuff, and a vision, their vision about, how people should have their own land. The basis of that is to stay with interconnectability. So all that's good! But it's also the case that the land itself is, you know, it's radically changing underneath us. Okay, right? And that's part of the stubbornness like, well, you know, if you treat the land wrong, then it goes underground, it changes itself, so you just have to keep going. You adjust, it adjusts, you adjust. So there you go! But the idea that there's some secret in which the West can erase what it did and come out clean again, it’s like no. No, no, no, no, no. [laughs] No redemption!!
AB: I'd like to briefly end with two questions. The first one is...could you tell us a little bit more about your work with the Karrabing Collective, both in terms of your digital work as well as your documentaries that you've produced, and also the movie you’ve produced? It was very interesting to read what you said…that there were some errors in continuity, but that you did it anyway, you improvised it on the way. It was very interesting to read about that production aspect.
And the second thing...the question that I’d like to end with, is your future work. Can you talk about The Inheritance, the graphic novel that is coming out, and also Routes & Worlds, where you talk about this concept of embagination?[13] So, I’d like to end probably by talking about these two things.
EP: So, the Karrabing Collective, emerged… there is now Karrabing—now you can be born into Karrabing, right, it’s amazing. But Karrabing is an Emmiyengal word, and it functions as a concept. In Emmiyengal it refers to when the tide has gone out and it's about to start coming back in. But as a concept, we all settled on it, it was suggested and everyone was like yeah that's right—it's what connects everyone's country to each other. To be sure, I'm from the Alps. They’re coastal people. And the Karrabing Film Collective or the Karrabing in general, emerged as the otherwise to both the government’s late liberalism, that is the governance that separates Indigenous subjects according to this anthropological imaginary of the clan, that is a sovereign, that has boundary, and the neoliberal state that said, ‘You know, we're done with recognition. We're just in the market. If you want money, open your land for mining.’ So Karrabing emerged when a group of people were at a really precarious position because they had been dispossessed of, really of legitimacy in their own community, by the land claim act.[14] The state, in the guise of the Land Rights Act, ruled that many Indigenous people weren’t the real traditional owners of the lands around the Belyuen Community, even though they were born there, they had their ceremonies there, everything. It's like, no, “you're not real.” Because, again, you're not past perfect. Things have changed, therefore, you're not real, therefore, you don't belong here. And then this neoliberalism moment that was like and if you want any money you need open your lands to mining. So Karrabing emerged to say, we know where each of our lands are, each of our family lands are, but we refuse to be governed as if they were sovereign areas, because we understand they are independent. And the film stuff came because—well, it’s a long story—but the short of it is that in this very terrible moment in the late 2000s, just everybody wanted to push a certain kind of, what they saw as the real problem, into public discourse, about state and public fantasies about Indigeneity. And we all decided to do it, it was like okay let’s just do it.
Screen-grab from Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ (2015) by Karrabing.
And no one knew how to do films. And so we made two with—we’d bring some people over who helped us with craft a little bit… We have like seven films now. The last five we just do it on our own production crew. And they’re great, because the content of them—and the group is like 30 to 50 depending on the day—is decided by someone in the group and everyone just decides what role they want to play in it or how, you know, what they want to do, whether they want to acting in it, and which part they want to act out, or just do some shooting on the iPhones or holding the sound equipment, or whatever. And we usually have a day or two when we do big shooting around the film, and then we just shoot everything else whenever, whenever something happens and we think it'll fit in the basic story. And the films are kind of nuts, but they're really great because there's no script. There’s a story—we grew up together, so we know the drill. So it's someone…like with our second film, some of the young guys, they said, we want this film to be about how we find beer in the bush and we’re chased by police. And then some of the older folks, like a little younger than me, said, we can't just have [it, the film] to be about young guys getting drunk, so we should put in that you guys are drinking by a Dreaming, a sacred site, where there's illegal mining.[15] So the police are called because the miners don't want you guys drinking where they’re illegally mining. And so that happens and the whole thing kind of goes on, and the whole thing ends up being, like who goes to jail for what kind of stealing? And because we all know each other, we know how this works. The films kind of minimal, we don't need a script. Everyone just comes up with their own lines and how they're going to act it out, and we just go forward. And it’s fun and every film has to weave, as is our principle, we have to weave some aspect of an older story into it, so that there’s several layers, historical, bringing all of them into one frame. So that what we're doing. Karrabing thus functions as a kind of school, as a memory extender, as like, “yeah, I know what this is, I acted it out.” And the country can feel you remembering and acting out the ancestral present. So it strengthens the country, in relation to you. It also has a big financial and capital redirection mission. Since we now do the films on iPhones, by this time, we've all kind of learned how to do this. I have definitely learned how to edit. We skim off the money that accumulates around this kind of body [referring to herself], and we use that to make films… And then the money we make from the films, we redirect into land-based stuff: we buy boats, and cars, and plot all kinds of stuff… So it’s also an anticapitalist machine. And it means they can travel, so they've been in MoMA, they’ve been in the Tate, they’ve been to Manila, they’ve been to China. And as they go everywhere, again: espionage, camouflage, recognition. Here is a deepening of everyone’s understanding and everyone's opinion, and then conversation about what's happening in local politics gets thickened up amongst us. And then that leads to more thickening et cetera. So it's this great machinery, that in part is about filmmaking, but really is about this much broader social analytic project that stretches all the way back.
AB: Have you screened the movies elsewhere? I see updates from time to time on your Facebook page. But have you screened the movies elsewhere...outside Australia, like in the US or elsewhere?
EP: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. They're everywhere. I mean, they're not everywhere. We actually keep them behind a [pay]wall, so if you want to see then, you have to ask permission. But yeah. No, no, no. We've been very lucky. We're in galleries, right now, we're in the Melbourne Film Festival, again, with the most recent one. We were doing an interview last night for ABC in Australia, and they asked what genre it was and we say our genre is Karrabing genre. But it’s kind of like a hip-hop ballad. And it just follows different characters as they go around, the kind of ordinary thing, in which nothing quite works because there’s this level of governmental corruption. It’s kind of, look at the obvious abandonment.
Screen-grab from The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland by Karrabing, featured in Melbourne Film Festival (2018).
The Inheritance is in some ways a very simple little story. It’s about where, when, what we think inheritance is. The punchline is that inheritance is not something that's in the past. And instead, inheritance is the infrastructures by which bodies were separated, differentiated, some elevated and some disenfranchised. But that kind of simple point is told as a story.
And it... it's based on the little Elizabeth, who is between two and seven, who is growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, from 1964, until I'm like nine years, let's say. So whatever that would be, 1973-74. So in her house, there is a framed, kind of the size of this image of these blurred lines [referring to the picture behind her], that all her relatives stand in front of and argue about. And in every one of her relatives' houses, and all her relatives are up north in Buffalo, everyone has the same image, and everyone sits in front of it and argues about it. And the images are of this area in Trentino in which my patrilineal village is Karezol, the argument is, is it Karezol or is it Carisolo? Is it Austro-Hungarian Empire or is it Italy?
The Inheritance (p. 312-313)
And so the story is about the damage that was passed down the line, if you want, the kind of psychic damage that was passed down, and violence that was passed down, as my Povinelli clan—so, they have clans up there, I’m a Simonaz Povinelli—so, as our clan leaves this frontier area during the First World War, when it was a slaughterhouse, goes to Buffalo, and then we end up in Shreveport…
So it starts as this unclosable space. You think, we're so lucky we know where we come from, it’s not even general, it’s specific [laughs]. But the closer you get, the more it breaks apart. No one can agree on what it is, what it means. But then the book turns and says, you know what, let's get real. Let's talk about who mattered, and who didn’t matter in the place where I actually grew up. Not this thing in the past, but in Shreveport in 1964 and 1965, when the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act were being passed, but schools were being resegregated, there was still rampant—there still is [rampant racism]. And we had George Wallace, who was winning. He won like five states, when I grew up. I was in the Bible Belt.
So it’s an analysis of how we think about inheritance as an infrastructure of the present. And it's a kind of prequel to everything that happens in Australia, so that if you know my work in Australia, then you kind of see why when I went there, we really deeply—like me, I was like, ‘We have clans too,’ and they were like, ‘No, you’re white, you can’t have clans,’ and I was like, ‘No, really. I’m a Simonaz Povinelli and there’s another kind of Povinelli, and we only marry, I mean not anymore.’ And up there, people don’t consider themselves—there are frontiers, there was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before that the Roman Empire, then the Italian nation, but there’s this way in which you were colonized but you don’t lose your identity to the country. You are still Carisolo, Carisolian. And that was so much like what they were. They were like, yeah, we are Mabaluk or we’re from Banagula, but the Australians say but there’s still Banagaiya, Banagula, but we’re still Emmi. This imposition of a nation-state can’t obliterate. And yet, with all this—and I grew up in the woods, we grew up hunting, I come from my household that’s very violent, you know, I'm very comfortable with all this—so there is a lot of resonance. So what made my life so different? White supremacy made my life different! Right? So that was also for me what started all these books, what started all these thoughts. And, you know, it's not like I, I should have seen this, but really confronting this in a deep way, when I got to Australia, which means how brain dead, really I was, even though, you know, I see it, I am in it. But the inheritance—you can be so wrapped up in, you know, in your own family tragedy. And it’s like, bullshit! I mean, it's a very sad story. Very compelling. I still cry at times in it [in the book]. There’s a sound piece we’re doing in it. But that kind of self-absorbedness—has to be ripped away. It's just like, fuck that! Absent of all this kind of crazy stuff about the Alps and our heritage, chip that away, and you know what it is? A white girl being elevated by white supremacy. And it didn't matter that I have a clan, that I have a village, that I was on a frontier, that I come from a frontier, too, my family was slaughtered by various Empires too…blah blah blah blah! Nevertheless, the infrastructures of whiteness in America, meant whooo, I go up! As other people are being held down. And that's what the book is about. But told in a story, it’s just a really nice story.
AB: I’m looking forward to reading it, and you’ve given me a clue as to how to read it too. It’s like a prequel to your entire work. So I think I'll read it more like the Star Wars stuff, you know watching the sequels before the prequels...Thank you very much, it was lovely talking to you.
EP: Thank you so much for doing this. You were so generous and brilliant. Like you read stuff like, I was like, wow. I even saw that in me.
AB: Well, hopefully we won't wait till twelve years to get together face to face again.
EP: It was twelve years? Wow. And Rishav, thank you for organizing this.
RT: Thanks a lot, both of you for this great conversation on behalf of Borderlines. And it's really going to give people a lot of food for thought.
Annotations
[1] Karrabing Film Collective is a group of more than thirty artists and filmmakers, most of whom are Indigenous to the Northern Territory of Australia. EP is a member of this collective.
[2] In Karrabing: An Essay in Keywords, Tess Lea and EP explain: “The Collective uses the Emmiyengal language term Karrabing (‘low tide turning’) to disturb the usual anthropological binary between place‐based (‘traditional’) Indigenous polities and displaced, diasporic (‘historical’) Indigenous socialities, seeing both as ‘brittle and outdated ethnographic construct[s]’ (Vincent 2017, 3). While most members are Indigenous and from seas and lands that stretch along the Anson Bay region of the Northern Territory, the Collective places emphasis on a set of friendships and family relationships that stretch inland to freshwater communities and as far afield as the United States. These forms of connectivity knowingly and critically speak to the state’s use of descent lineages and bounded spaces, enshrined in land claim legislation, to artificially fix them in a ‘homeostatic antiquity’ (Neale 2017, 59). The forms of interconnection signaled by the term Karrabing push explicitly against the methods by which state agencies isolate and divide Indigenous people from one another via racialized descent. Ceremony, marriage, laboring together, and linguistic code‐switching are all seen as a means of connect[ing] people and country: they make them one collective without canceling people’s independence and difference from each other.’
[3] EP writes in her essay titled Defining Security in Late Liberalism in Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest and the Future (2013) edited by Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen: “By late liberalism I mean to indicate a formation of power—the twined formations of neoliberalism and liberal cultural recognition—that emerged in the late 1960s as a method of solving the crisis of liberal economic and social legitimacy in the wake of economic stagflation and colonial and social revolutions. Late liberalism solved these legitimacy crises by arguing that the population of the nation-state would be secured against harm if it were opened to the precarious character of life as difference. In other words, late liberalism marks a period in which the population would be secured by a new reading of society and individual, a reading that ignored people and their freedoms as a kind of truth-speaking...and focused instead on the care of economic and cultural aptitudes and attitudes that enhanced the life of the population but only in so far as it maintained the flows of economic and cultural values from subordinate to dominant groups.” (p. 30-31).
[4] In Cunning of Recognition, EP argues that Charles Taylor’s works “pivot on the question of whether and how a multitude of modern liberal nation-states should recognize the worth of their interior ethnic and indigenous cultural traditions.” On the other hand, Povinelli is interested in asking: “What is the state and nation recognizing and finding worthy when it embraces the ‘ancient laws’ of indigenous Australia? What is it about the thing of ‘indigenous tradition’ that produces sensations, desires, anxieties, and professional, personal, and national optimisms? What is this thing that is only ever obliquely glimpsed and that resists the bad faith of the liberal nation while at the same time does no violence to good civil values, indeed crystallizes the best form of community ‘we’ could hope for? What is the glimmering object the public support of which can produce, as if by magical charm, the feelings necessary for social harmony in the multicultural nation...?...Why must Aboriginal persons identify with it to gain access to public sympathy and state resources?” (p. 38).
[5] In Empire of Love, EP writes: “By the autological subject, I am referring to discourses, practices, and fantasies about self-making, self sovereignty, and the value of individual freedom associated with the Enlightenment project of contractual constitutional democracy and capitalism. By genealogical society, I am referring to discourses, practices, and fantasies about social constraints placed on the autological subject by various kinds of Inheritances.” (p. 4).
[6] In Economies of Abandonment, EP explains: “By espionage I mean actual practices of spying and being spied on, as well as a much broader and diverse set of assumptions that someone is trying to penetrate a socially sealed space. In espionage, value circulates in such a way that both those circulating it and those trying to impede its circulation avoid the initial confrontation underlying the imaginary of recognition.” (p. 30).
[7] In Economies of Abandonment, EP clarifies: “By “camouflage” I mean the art of hiding within a given environment via embodied disguise. These actual practices of cloaking are part of a much broader and diverse set of discourses about modes of concealment that allow otherwise visible organisms or objects to remain indiscernible from the surrounding environment. Obviously camouflage, as I am using it, has a genealogical relationship to mimicry and colonialism, say the work of Fanon, Bhabha, and Serres, and equally obviously perhaps, they are not merely spectral qualities but involve the entire sensory apparatus.” (p. 30).
[8] EP characterizes Economies of Abandonment as a book “interested in the quasi- events that saturate potential worlds and their social projects. If events are things that we can say happened such that they have a certain objective being, then quasi- events never quite achieve the status of having occurred or taken place. They neither happen nor not happen. I am not interested in these quasi- events in some abstract sense, but in the concrete ways that they are, or are not, aggregated and thus apprehended, evaluated, and grasped as ethical and political demands (...) Crises and catastrophes are kinds of events that seem to demand (...) an ethical response. Not surprisingly then, these kinds of events become what inform the social science of suffering and thriving (...) What techniques, such as statistics, allow nonperceptual quasi-events to be transformed into perceptual events, even catastrophes? What are the temporal and epistemological presuppositions that foreclose an anthropology of ordinary suffering and thus an anthropological understanding of the dynamic by which extraordinary events of violence are folded into everyday routines—and visa versa? How and why do things move from potentiality to
eventfulness to availability for various social projects? How might we turn from an ontology of potentiality to a sociology of potentiality in which potentiality is always embodied in specific social worlds? How can we grasp some of the qualities of a material object that is nevertheless a discursive object?” (p. 13-14).
[9] For Dipesh Chakrabarty’s thoughts on Anthropocene and crisis see his 2015 Tanner Lectures in Human Values at Yale University titled The Human Condition in the Anthropocene.
[10] In Geontologies (2016), EP proposes the concept of geontological power / geontopower to shed light on the operation of power in ways such that concepts like biopower (ala Michel Foucault) do not help see. Thus EP argues: “Have we been so entranced by the image of power working through life that we haven’t noticed the new problems, figures, strategies, and concepts emerging all around us, suggesting another formation of late liberal power (...)? Have we been so focused on exploring each and every wrinkle in the biopolitical fold—biosecurity, biospectrality, thanatopoliticality—that we forgot to notice that the figures of biopower (...) once so central to our understanding of contemporary power, now seem not as decisive, to be inflected by or giving way to new figures: the Desert, the Animist, the Virus? (...)This introduction and the following chapters attempt to elaborate how our allegiance to the concept of biopower is hiding and revealing another problematic—a formation for want of a better term I am calling geontological power, or geontopower. (...) The simplest way of sketching the difference between geontopower and biopower is that the former does not operate through the governance of life and the tactics of death but is rather a set of discourse, affects, and tactics used in late liberalism to maintain or shape the coming relationship of the distinction between Life and Nonlife.” (p. 4-5).
[11] Sylvia Wynter began her Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument (2003), by the following oracular lines: “The argument proposes that the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves.” Continuing she argues, “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources (...) these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle (p. 260-261).
[12] AB, along with Priya Kumar, argues in their introduction to forthcoming special issue of the Postcolonial Studies titled Planetary Solidarities: Postcolonial Theory in the Era of the Anthropocene and the Nonhuman: “The Anthropocene is not only about the (deep) past, but also speculations on what comes after ‘us.’ We posit the Anthropocene as a species of postcolonial science fiction. (...) Postcolonial science fiction, for us, is less a placeholder for a specific genre than a ‘mode of relation’ to the future.”
[13] In her essay Routes/Worlds (2011), EP works through the anthropology of the gift (following Bronislaw Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, and Claude Levi-Strauss), and proposes the woven bag as a metaphor to visualise anthropology of otherwise: “We can think of these reflexive movements [created by reciprocal exchange] as a kind of embagination of space –the creation of a flexible receptacle closed in all places except where it can be tied and untied. But, again, this fold, or embagination, fabricates a world in which individuals, and competing worlds, attempt to dwell – to their advantage or disadvantage.”
[14] Maggie Wander in her essay “It’s Ok, We’re Safe Here”: The Karrabing Film Collective and Colonial Histories in Australia on Karrabing’s film Windjarrameru (The Stealing C*nt$) provides the following background: “Since the 1950s, the tension between mining companies and Indigenous Australians has centered around issues of land rights and the destruction of sites that manifest and maintain ancestral power. In fact, throughout Australia’s mining history, Indigenous communities have resisted the industry’s presence, perhaps most notably through land rights petitions and subsequent legislation. In 1963, for example, the Yolngu community in Yirrkala petitioned for legal rights to their land in the face of mining corporations which were beginning to lease that land from the government. Similar petitions occurred in the following decades, leading to the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act in 1973 as well as the landmark court case Mabo vs. Queensland in 1992, which declared the doctrine of terra nullius to be null and void (Mason et. al.). This, in turn, led to the Native Title Act in 1993, which, among other initiatives, required mining corporations to get permission from Indigenous communities who are now legally referred to as ‘Traditional Owners.’”
[15] This became the film Windjarrameru (The Stealing C*nt$) that EP describes as a piece of improvisational realism.