Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance 9780520976689

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Anticolonial Eruptions

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Praise for Anticolonial Eruptions “An urgent effort to make sense of the senseless, helping readers see the rationality behind the tepid liberal responses to the ideological maximalism of settler-colonial racism and violence.” Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth “Maher stitches together a lyrical text comprised of literary and political themes he has combed out of disparate geographies and times that will have you reading in a contemplative hurry. A welcome addition to a growing literature eager to see humanity overcome the worst of itself.” Noura Erakat, author of Justice for Some “This remarkably rich and diverse book not only offers valuable insights into the composition of our colonial present but also points to the long history of explosive thought and action that will eventually bring it crashing down: that of the colonized themselves.” Glen Coulthard, author of Red Skin, White Masks “Maher distills centuries of anticolonial resistance into this short but necessary primer on decolonial cunning. From Caracas to Minneapolis, Maher theorizes alongside and through the dreams of the oppressed.” Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future “While structural violence is omnipresent and ubiquitous, this book is a necessary reminder that it is not, however, inevitable. Geo Maher’s latest book is a necessary telling of the subversive cunning of global rebellion, deftly illuminating the long history and contemporary path of revolution and resistance unfolding around us.” Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule

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american studies now: critical histories of the present Edited by Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez Much of the most exciting contemporary work in American Studies refuses the distinction between politics and culture, focusing on historical cultures of power and protest on the one hand, or the political meanings and consequences of cultural practices, on the other. American Studies Now offers concise, accessible, authoritative books on significant political debates, personalities, and popular cultural phenomena quickly, while such teachable moments are at the forefront of public consciousness.

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Anticolonial Eruptions Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance Geo Maher

university of california press

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University of California Press Oakland, California © 2022 by Geo Maher Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress. isbn 978-0-520-37935-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-37936-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-97668-9 (ebook) Manufactured in the United States of America 31  30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

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contents

Overview vii Volcanoes 1

1. The Cunning of Decolonization 8



2. The Colonial Blindspot 26



3. The Second Sight of the Colonized 44



4. The Decolonial Ambush 64 Moles 87 Acknowledgments 105 Notes 107 Glossary 139 Selected Bibliography 141

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ov ervi ew

volcanoes Resistance by racialized and colonized people is often described as volcanic because it erupts from the underground of nonbeing George Floyd  •  Racism  •  Haitian Revolution  •  Frantz Fanon  •  Nonbeing

chapter 1. the cunning of decolonization Decolonial cunning takes advantage of the blindspots built into colonial racism and the second sight cultivated there to mount a shocking ambush G. W. F. Hegel  •  Slavery  •  Nat Turner  •  Colonialism  •  Indigenous Resistance  •  Anti-Blackness

chapter 2. the colonial blindspot By invisibilizing and dehumanizing their victims, slavery and colonialism fall prey to a self-imposed blindness Benito Cereno  •  Slave Rebellions  •  Outside Agitators  •  Slavemaster Ideology  •  Deception

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viii  /  Overview

chapter 3. the second sight of the colonized Slaves, colonized people, and women have always taken advantage of the colonizer’s blindness to cultivate a strategic second sight Invisibility  •  W. E. B. Du Bois  •  Tricksters  •  Women’s Resistance  •  Black Spies  •  Harriet Tubman

chapter 4. the decolonial ambush Rebellions against colonialism, slavery, and white supremacy can be understood as an ambush from the underground Riots  •  Police Brutality  •  Underground  •  Mudsill  •  Zapatistas  •  Venezuela

moles The underground has always provided a launching pad for resistance and a space for building alternative worlds Vietnam War  •  Tunnels  •  Walls  •  Drones  •  Migration  •  Decolonization

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Volcanoes

When George Floyd was murdered, Minneapolis erupted. This was the consensus, the lingua franca, of nearly every mainstream media outlet attempting to grapple with the street rebellions that burst forth unexpectedly in May 2020, spreading like wildfire across the US and beyond in the months that followed.1 This sudden mass uprising shocked everyone except those most intimately familiar with the pressure gathering unseen just beneath the surface. As one Minneapolis resident put it at the time, this was “a volcano finally erupting after years of simmering.”2 What is obvious to some is unthinkable to others, however. While those closest can often feel the rumbling, for many others volcanic metaphors bespeak shock and surprise, the sudden bursting forth of previously invisible forces. Something deeper, even subterranean, is at play, surging like so much molten lava, waiting to break the surface and unleash hell. To be clear: we are speaking of people, not nature, though sometimes the difference between the two is not so clear. Think of the proper name “Katrina,” or the perceptible weight of unnamable forces that 1

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2  /  Volcanoes

impose themselves in a way that can only be felt as a force of nature, in part because they seek consciously to naturalize themselves.3 For Ta-Nehisi Coates, this is the case with racism, depicted so often as “the innocent daughter of Mother Nature” that “one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.” 4 For Coates, there is some truth here: growing up Black means experiencing race as so totalizing and immutable a force that it may as well have been a brute fact of nature. “The galaxy itself could kill me,” he writes, “and no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but . . . the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment.”5 But if racism seeks to portray itself as a force of nature, and indeed accomplishes its most brutal work through this naturalization, do we err dangerously by granting it what it wants, even in disastrous form? For some critics, to compare racism to a natural disaster, as Coates does, runs the risk of accepting the truth of its categories, succumbing in the process to pessimism, fatalism, and despair.6 But what if both positions are wrong? What if metaphors of natural disaster portend not the permanence of white supremacy but explosive resistance against it? What if the question is not only of racism as a natural disaster but also of the racialized and colonized people it produces as themselves “disastrous beings” who, in their very unmoored nature, might offer an unexpected path out of our “age of ruin”?7 What happens, in other words, if we refuse to foreclose on the potency of natural disasters, calling white supremacy’s bluff? If racism is a force of nature, then those

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Volcanoes  /  3

who resist it do so with the power of an irrepressibly seismic reaction beyond all possible moral condemnation. Such disastrous beings can throw even the permanence of nature into chaos. Slaves planning an 1810 uprising in Virginia “referred to the planned revolt as an earthquake,” and one conspirator was overheard to remark “that he was entitled to his freedom, and he would be damned, if he did not have it in a fortnight.”8 Frederick Douglass famously argued that rational argument meant little in the face of the structural irrationality of slavery. Confronting such a system therefore demanded not cool reason but zealous action, for which Douglass turned to seismic and more broadly meteorological metaphors: “For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”9 These questions resonate deafeningly today. If you could hardly blame those slaves who crept through the night to set plantation houses ablaze, striking terror into the heart of the American South, the same is true today as fire is again applied as a mechanical, indeed a natural response to police violence: to the Minneapolis Third Precinct building after George Floyd’s murder, to police vehicles nationwide in the weeks that followed, and to the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was shot dead by Atlanta police less than a month later. So natural a response, in fact, that some 54 percent of Americans agreed that protesters were justified in burning down the Third Precinct. If it is a central pretension of Western modernity that nature is a vast prison that stands opposed to human liberation and freedom, then here we find something far different, turning such notions on their head. From Native Hawaiians defending the literal volcano at Mauna Kea to those water defenders congregating to resist the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock under the banner

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4  /  Volcanoes

“Water Is Life” (Mni Wiconi), to speak of nature in this way evokes, not inert matter, but dynamic relation.10 As the revolutionary Indigenous collective known as the Red Nation recently put it in their long-awaited manifesto The Red Deal, “There is something about the weather,” and we don’t need a weatherman to tell us that this points toward both climate crisis and the winds of political resistance blowing in the present.11 This is far from fatalism or despair, and even with the judgment of the gods reversed, Coates’s terms still apply: you can’t subpoena this earthquake either, there’s no slowing this whirlwind, and you certainly can’t blame a volcano for erupting.

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Resistance is everywhere, but everywhere a surprise. Why? What explains the downright shock among the powerful when confronted by the most human of demands—for life, freedom, and equality? Any system of domination relies, to some degree at least, on the pretension that those in power deserve to be there, that their rule is by definition legitimate and good. And more often than not, those in power are persuaded by the comforting stories they tell themselves. This book is about the kind of hubris that such comforts produce among the powerful, and that blinds them to those who would oppose their rule. If power is everywhere naturalized, however, this is doubly true where it depends on, and is upheld by, naturalized divisions within the human itself. Slavery depended on the idea, no matter how absurd, that slaves were happy in their chains, just as generations later, advocates of Jim Crow insisted that Black Americans were content as second-class citizens. More broadly still, colonial domination was justified by the post hoc rationalization that colonized people benefited from, and in fact needed,

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European tutelage on the path to civilization. But when people are disqualified from humanity, we expect very little of them, much less something so human as to fight for freedom. The hubris involved is thus both more specific and far more profound as a result, and resistance all the more unexpected, shocking, and explosive. The Haitian Revolution was an eruption like no other, and for those in power it was more shocking than any natural disaster. As C. L. R. James put it, “The colonists slept on the edge of Vesuvius, but for centuries the same thing had been said and the slaves had never done anything.”12 His description was no aberration. The history of panicked reactions to anticolonial and slave resistance is rife with volcanic and other seismic metaphors. More than a decade before Douglass famously insisted that “the slaveholders are sleeping on slumbering volcanoes, if they did but know it,” the nineteen-year-old Black abolitionist James Forten Jr. had given a rousing speech in Philadelphia urging his audience to “continue to warn the South of the awful volcano they are recklessly sleeping over” and the “terrible tempest” to come.13 When the French painter Jean-Baptiste Chapuy sought to capture the essence of a burning Cap Français in what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue, he drew directly upon his own prior renderings of eruptions at Mount Etna and Mount Vesuvius in style as in message. The same colors, the same brushstrokes once used to capture the sublime force of nature now depicted “the eruption of slave violence as a volcanic natural force.”14 So natural, in fact, that the slaves do not even appear but instead melt into the erupting landscape, at the threshold of the superhuman and the subhuman that has always marked the sublime. Or consider Wilhelm Jordan’s later description: “On August 22, 1791, the first outburst of the terrible volcano took

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6  /  Volcanoes

place. . . . At midnight the wild crowd leaves for the nearest plantations and grows, attracting all the slaves, with the rapidity of an avalanche. . . . Now all the fury that has toiled away at their chains in vain for generations erupts, terribly increased, like the force of subterranean flaming gases that have to work through rocks for miles before they drive out the crater roaringly.”15 Napoleon himself even went so far as to urge the expulsion of powerful Black leaders from Saint-Domingue, lest this “immense and beautiful colony . . . always remain a volcano.”16 But this was a global Age of Revolutions, in which many chroniclers explicitly compared the overground to the underground in an attempt to simultaneously grasp “upheavals both in the global history of humankind and in natural history.”17 Why was there but one volcano, and why was it Haiti?18 Because this was not just any revolution but a revolution led by Black slaves, and as Frantz Fanon has shown, to be colonized, enslaved, and excluded from humanity is to be banished to an underground realm that is more than mere metaphor, a “zone of nonbeing” not simply outside the white world but below it: a “veritable hell.”19 Colonialism is a gargantuan machine that produces sugar, cotton, and capital, of course, but it also produces nonbeing, and chattel slavery is one of its most powerful mechanisms for doing so. Colonization is, as Fanon would later put it, “the decision, literally, to occupy nothing else but a territory,” and the colonized—as in Chapuy’s paintings—blend into the “landscape, the natural backdrop” for the colonizer’s presence.20 But what happens when this landscape gives way, as in an avalanche, or unexpectedly erupts from below, proving in the process that it is not the natural substrate to which it has been so forcibly reduced? When Haitian slaves broke out of that hell in an unprecedented attempt to storm heaven, they could appear

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Volcanoes  /  7

to white eyes only as a volcanic eruption and a torrent of surging lava. As it turns out, this was not a question of nature at all but a peculiar form of blindness built right into the racial architecture of colonial domination—one self-imposed, like that of Oedipus, by an equally hubristic colonizer. Paraphrasing Fredric Jameson, we could say that it was easier to imagine the apocalyptic end of the world than the agency of the enslaved and colonized nonbeings that uphold it. It’s an odd way to preserve one’s illusions: rather than understand why they are angry, the ground simply explodes.

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cha pter on e

The Cunning of Decolonization

When the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel coined the term “the cunning of reason,” he knew he was trying to square a circle. Awash in the chaotic unreason of his world—“the superficial din and clamor of history”—Hegel sought out a deeper logic, or what he described as “a silent and mysterious inner process at work” in human affairs.1 Of all the attempts to harmonize two conflicting elements of the human—the passions and the intellect—Hegel’s was at once the most satisfying and the most maddening. Where many a philosopher had denounced the passions, Hegel found in them a million indispensable motors, without which “nothing great has been accomplished in the world.”2 Individual passions don’t undermine human progress—they secretly do its bidding. Or, as he puts it, in characteristically dense Hegelese: “The particular interests of passion cannot therefore be separated from the realization of the universal. . . . Particular interests contend with one another, and some are destroyed in the process. But it is from this very conflict and destruction of particular things that the universal emerges.” In 8

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The Cunning of Decolonization  /  9

other words, while the passions are sent into battle, the universal itself remains safely in the rear, emerging “unscathed” only after the smoke has cleared. It is this peculiar battleground configuration—and indeed chain of command—that Hegel calls “the cunning of reason,” and that conscripts the passions, individual and irrational, into the service of history’s broader plan.3 Hegel even describes the movement of history as a great tapestry in which reason provides the warp—those threads held straight and true—while the weft of the passions winds erratically back and forth, apparently against the grain but in reality pulling the entire fabric imperceptibly together.4 When I speak of the cunning of decolonization, this is not what I mean. For one, Hegel famously stumbles when it comes to the slave revolution that he doesn’t name, but which provides the unacknowledged background for his master/slave dialectic: Haiti.5 While Hegelian dialectics inspired many anticolonial revolutionaries and thinkers, the master/slave dialectic narrates the establishment of the slave relation, not its destruction. Hegel himself says precious little about abolition, and anticolonial and antiracist thinkers have had to fill in the gaps to do so. Fanon was among many who turned to Hegel for an account of struggle as a precondition for self-consciousness, but as he himself recognized, Hegel’s dialectic is ill-suited to grasping the contours of colonial domination, much less the explosivity of the decolonial reply.6 In its allencompassing singularity, its presumed reciprocity between master and slave, the determinism of its forward motion, and the centrality of mutual recognition, Hegel’s approach exhibits precisely the kinds of systematic exclusion, dehumanization, and nonrecognition that are hallmarks of colonial racism.7 Hegel’s notion of cunning stumbles for the same sorts of reasons. It would be difficult to convince the colonized and enslaved,

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10  /  The Cunning of Decolonization

for example, that their subjugation is all part of a grander plan wrought by human reason, that the insatiable passions of Europe were but the errant weft spreading murder and torture across the globe in the name of a higher progress. Indeed, the idea that history moves inexorably forward has never had much traction among the darker nations, and the belated crisis of the idea of progress in European thought was provoked in large part by something the colonized and racialized already knew. Fascism and Nazism represented, as Aimé Césaire argued, a “terrific boomerang effect” whereby colonial brutality returned to the Old World.8 The idea of progress remained pervasive, however, linking the “civilizing” aspirations of colonialism so venomously mocked by Césaire to twentieth-century theories of modernization and development. Even the young Marx invoked something like Hegel’s cunning when he provided a backhanded justification for the “sickening” behavior of British colonizers in India. While the British pursued only “the vilest interests,” Marx wrote five full years after the Communist Manifesto, they were nevertheless acting as “the unconscious tool of history,” breaking down traditional structures to make way for the communism of the future.9 But Marx revised this view some decades letter, opening up the possibility of divergent forms of cunning as he contemplated different paths toward communism. While the lure of colonial cunning remained strong for some later Marxists who claimed privileged access to warp strings of history, a more decolonial cunning would emerge from global struggles against white supremacy and colonialism that often drew from the Marxist wellspring. Like those Latin American communists who resisted the purportedly universal imperative to build capitalism before agitating for communism, my most powerful

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interlocutors in what follows infuse their Marxism with something radically different.10

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My starting point is therefore not Hegel’s cunning of reason but a cunning of a different sort that is grounded in resistance to slavery and colonialism. Ironically, this approach is one marked out by the slavemaster and colonizer himself, according to whom the enslaved and colonized were cunning if nothing else.11 In the recently launched Freedom on the Move database, for example, cunning appears in hundreds of advertisements describing fugitive slaves, and as early as 1676, Barbadian slaves were described as “cunningly and clandestinely” conspiring against the English.12 It might seem strange that a word so directly associated, indeed originally synonymous, with knowledge (cunning shares a root with everything from cognition to connoisseur) would be turned so firmly toward pejorative ends. But within a century of emerging, the word was split down the knife’s edge separating wisdom and prudence from shrewdness and deceit due to what Don Herzog describes as “repeated experiences of what the knowing do with their knowledge.”13 Different kinds of knowledge are used toward vastly different ends, however. The powerful have always deployed knowledge and deceit to maintain their power and make it insurmountable. The oppressed, on the other hand, have resorted to cunning as a specific kind of knowledge developed of and through their subjection. The trope of the slave as cunning trickster can be traced to ancient Greece and Africa alike and predates race as we know it.14 But the slave cunning acquired a qualitatively different meaning when that slavery was recast in racial

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12  /  The Cunning of Decolonization

terms—when bondage became hereditary, so too was cunning cemented as pejorative.15 Thus, while James C. Scott is correct to identify the cunning of the oppressed as a product of systems of domination, this is not exactly what I mean either.16 As Fanon reminds us, “A colonized people is not just a dominated people.”17 Colonialism and slavery are not merely systems of domination but systems of nonbeing, and they produce a qualitatively different sort of cunning as a result. Further, while Scott is correct that covert and creative resistance to slavery and domination “is not adequately captured by the loaded English term cunning,” there is a reason the word was used so often, especially once we move beyond mere domination.18 To call a slave or colonized person cunning under a system premised on their nonexistence means something different and says as much about the speaker as about the person they are describing. It is to wear a deeper and more revealing suspicion on one’s sleeve: that behind the happy smile and feigned contentedness there lies a subterranean discontent and yearning. To denounce the cunning of slaves was to allow just the slightest glint of one’s own guilty conscience to shine through—to recognize, in other words, that behind the thing there might actually be a person. My goal in what follows is not to establish an objectively correct meaning for the term cunning, but to track and map the anxieties that the word’s usage reveals, why it is so systematically applied to Black and colonized people, and what this can teach us about the contradictory reality colonialism seeks to impose as natural. As W. E. B. Du Bois would later put it: “Wherever a black head rises to historic view, it is promptly slain by an adjective—‘shrewd,’ ‘notorious,’ ‘cunning’—or pilloried by a sneer. . . . The clearest evidence of Negro ability . . . became distorted into cunning.”19 Like slaves, other racialized, colonized, or otherwise

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dehumanized groups—Jews in particular—have been historically associated with cunning, as have women more broadly.20 And with continued colonial-imperial expansion, the charge of cunning constitutes part of a perverse victim blaming that continues to justify violence to the present. As Manifest Destiny pushed the frontier westward in Canada and the US alike, for example, the “cunning Indian” was born.21 In her Custer, the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox references cunning four times, describing how on the “withered” face of “Mahwissa, sister of the slaughtered chief . . . There flits the stealthy cunning of her race.”22 Further south, those Indigenous “Mexicans” who dared use their intellect for resistance as the US border devoured and divided their communities were similarly labeled. In the run-up to that monument of white victimhood that was the Battle of the Alamo, white settlers invading Texas came under attack from “cunning Mexicans” who, “unbeknownst to the Texans [sic], surrounded and commenced firing at them.”23 This bizarre inversion of perpetrator and victim would be almost comical were it not so dangerous, but the guilty suspicion that resistance might be justi­ fied has a way of boomeranging violently back onto the colonized in the guise of self-defense. The 2019 mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart, which the shooter understood as resisting a “Hispanic invasion,” is but the most recent example. Just as Black slaves used cunning to resist and escape the plantation, at the outer fringes of colonial power cunning was also about mobility, the stealthy crossing of an imaginary frontier made real. As a result, cunning—or astucia in Spanish—often becomes synonymous with banditry. White opinion remained divided to the end as to whether Pancho Villa—“more a force of nature than of politics”—was “a consummate Napoleonic strategist” or possessed “merely the inborn cunning of any Indian on the warpath.”24

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14  /  The Cunning of Decolonization

Moreover, fears of slaves and Indians often coincided and fed into one another, as with a similarly maligned bandit of a prior generation, Juan Nepomuceno “Cheno” Cortina, who for decades terrorized the “flocks of vampires” busily dispossessing Mexican Texans. Many white Texans, “already alarmed by the news of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, appeared certain that Cortina was coming north from the border to liberate the slaves in Texas and murder the Anglos in their beds.”25 Indeed, Cortina would attack the Confederate Army two years later. More recently, Argentina witnessed a resurgence in fears of el malón, those “indigenous cavalries that for centuries launched stealthy, high-speed attacks on frontier settlements,” and whose invocation in the present suggests the “return of this gendered, feared barbarism from the past.”26 And wherever colonial and imperial domination arrives, those resisting its power through subterfuge and the weapons of the mind are painted with the same pejorative brush, from the “Yellow Peril” rhetoric of the nineteenth century to outcries against Japanese deviousness during the US-Japan trade war of the 1980s. And when the US invaded Vietnam from half a world away, the Vietnamese suddenly found cunning imposed on them as a strategy and a condemnation alike, heroically leveraging the former to their advantage as they previously had done against the French. Things have scarcely changed today: a recent New York Times article about an international soccer match pitted “American physicality against Mexican cunning,” and Donald Trump repeatedly referred to both Mexicans and Chinese as cunning.27 But if slaves and other colonized peoples were routinely portrayed as fiendishly tricky, crafty, and shrewd in their cunning, then why paint them with the same brush used by their oppressors? Because accusations of cunning have much to tell us about

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racial and colonial domination and, more importantly, about its built-in weaknesses. To accuse slaves and colonized people of cunning was never a pure projection of power. It was also a tacit concession that slavery and colonization share a potentially debilitating Achilles’ heel: the humanity and resistance of their victims. And in this sense cunning is about far more than either intelligence or resistance: it is a peculiarly deceptive and explosive fusion of the two that takes advantage of the delusions built into the system. As a result, it is precisely in the breathless denunciation of cunning that we can find unspoken proof of the power of the oppressed. Harriet Jacobs, formerly a slave herself, put it best when she asked, “Who can blame slaves for being cunning? . . . It is the only weapon of the weak and oppressed against the strength of their tyrants.”28 The point, for Jacobs, was therefore not to reject the master’s portrayal of the cunning slave but instead to bind this cunning to the system that produced it, and more importantly to embrace it as a revolutionary weapon. Struggling against her own master, Jacobs thus “resolved to match my cunning against his cunning.”29 In this and so many other cases, “What their masters and mistresses described as cunning, slaves saw as the psychological mechanism needed to develop and maintain autonomy within the harsh regime of bondage.”30 Viewed from this angle, decolonial cunning intersects with Hegel’s cunning of reason in several ways. It helps us grasp how individual acts of resistance zigzag across and through the tapestry of Black freedom struggles, here falling short, there doubling back, but drawing the fabric together in even unseen ways. Take the case of “the terrible Nat Turner” himself, whose life is shot through with Hegelian resonances.31 There is an intense cunning, for example, in the fact that Turner’s masters—devout Methodists—did

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16  /  The Cunning of Decolonization

not feel guilty enough to free him but did feel guilty enough to inculcate in him a faith that would be their undoing, even proudly touting his fervent religious zeal.32 Or that his African-born mother reputedly tried to kill him rather than see him enslaved, only to have her son survive long enough to enact a bloody vengeance that helped to doom the entire system.33 Or that once, after escaping for a month, Turner claimed to have received a vision instructing him to return to his master. Or most importantly of all, that by striking for partial freedom—and doing so irrationally, at least according to his enemies—Turner’s individual zeal unleashed far greater universal chain reactions. But there is much that Hegel cannot account for as well, specifically how Turner turned his dehumanization against the dehumanizers—the essence of a decolonial cunning. He “used his spotless reputation among whites” and “practiced polite and subservient behavior to gain a reputation never to be associated with trouble.” He was thus able to “manipulate white masters,” taking full advantage of “the misconception that slaves were too ignorant to know or want freedom” in order to strike a blow at it.34 Hegel’s description of Julius Caesar as a world-historic individual sacrificed on the altar of freedom—who “had to do what was necessary,” who “himself met his end in the struggle, but necessity triumphed”—certainly resonates with figures like Toussaint Louverture and John Brown. But it says far less of Turner and so many others who rebelled not for “the Idea” of freedom but for its concrete reality, throwing colonialism and racial capitalism into world-historical chaos in the process.35 Were Turner’s rebellion and so many others like it proof of the inevitable forward march of history, or simply the product of the constant tectonic grinding of subterranean freedom struggles? Decolonial cunning does not look down on society with a

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God’s-eye view from above or seek to survey history as a whole from a position outside of it, reproducing what Santiago CastroGómez has called the “zero-point hubris” characteristic of colonial thought.36 Instead, it finds its footing within conditions of racial-colonial oppression and the struggle against those conditions, leveraging the colonizer’s own hubris through a perspectival cunning that is tied to the weft of resistance but claims to grasp little more than the roughest direction of the warp. Decolonial cunning, in other words, sets out from a radical doubt toward any reason aside from the reasons that we fight. While weaving together, as Hegel did, the sometimes-selfish motivations of individuals, decolonial cunning does not presume a higher rationality, much less arrogantly claim to know its contents beforehand. If anything, it recognizes that the line between individual acts of revolt and universal freedom is a fine one indeed and that even the most mundane acts of cunning can help generate self-consciousness and prepare the grounds for liberation. To steal a pig from the master, for example, was about far more than the value of the pig: what mattered was “the actual act of stealing [it],” through which slaves “outsmarted their physically powerful owners with their wits alone.”37 Decolonial cunning is consequently not itself a universal concept but one that approaches the universal in a specific way: as a shared constellation of particular needs, desires, and struggles. This was something that an exuberant Aimé Césaire once believed he had discovered in Hegel’s Phenomenology, exclaiming to Senghor: “Listen to what Hegel says, Léopold: to arrive at the Universal, one must immerse oneself in the Particular!”38 But a decade later, Césaire would still be looking for what he thought he had found. In 1956, he resigned from a French Communist Party that insisted on sacrificing Black particularity to a future

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18  /  The Cunning of Decolonization

universal and continued his search for “a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars.”39 If decolonial cunning privileges particulars, however, it must be said that these are not just any particulars but those specific to the oppressed, those condemned to the nonbeing of colonization and racial slavery and those absorbing their aftershocks today. It is the cunning of Harriet Jacobs, not of her master, the cunning of those on the underside of history, those truly universal revolutionary subjects who cannot join humanity without tearing down the walls of ontological apartheid separating true Being from its opposite. Decolonial cunning is more an orientation than a framework, and much less a road map. With no omniscient God or philosopher-king to hold tight the warp, the weft careens wildly, and the tapestry of freedom it leaves in its wake is frayed and uneven. But it is freedom nonetheless.

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What I want to argue might seem obvious: that the parameters of racial and colonial domination contain a secret weakness, and that they conceal and indeed nurture a cunning in their victims that surfaces in the shocking eruption of explosive rebellion. This cunning originates in what I call the “colonial blindspot” among the powerful, whereby the very same dehumanization used to justify racial-colonial domination blinds those at the top to the inevitability of resistance from below. Wrapped in colonial nonbeing like an invisibility cloak, the colonized cultivate what, following Du Bois, I describe as a “second sight.” These are certainly “weapons of the weak,” but they are more than that as well.40 They are secret weapons honed in the

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The Cunning of Decolonization  /  19

obscurity of nonbeing that take full advantage of the blindspot of its purveyors: an arsenal of the invisible, of the many specters, zombies, spooks, and spies infiltrating the white power structure from within its own clandestine shadows. Colonial and racial oppression produces its own gravediggers, sharpening them into sentient weapons of its undoing, gravediggers that duck into their own trenches to carry out a subterranean war of position that is always ready to explode into an open war of maneuver. This explosion, what I call the “decolonial ambush,” emerges at the intersection—indeed, the collision—of the colonial blindspot and the second sight of the colonized that the colonial order contains. Or rather, that like so many tinderboxes it fails to contain. The decolonial ambush is the element of surprise peculiar to the invisibilized, the moment when what was concealed is revealed, when the excluded appears with a defiance that debunks its own impossibility. It is the slave revolt, the Indian raid, the riot—it is Ferguson, Missouri; it is Baltimore, Maryland; and it is Minneapolis, Minnesota. From the perspective of those cataracted and willfully opaque regions of self-imposed colonial blindness, this ambush appears above all as a shock, and one that varies in direct proportion to the dehumanization of those involved. No, this is not the despair of standing helpless in the face of natural disaster. It is a righteous fury against the present and the knowledge that the earth must first be torn in two if it is to ever be brought back together again. Decolonial cunning, in other words, is the plastic explosive built right into the foundation of colonial white supremacy, waiting to tear it asunder. This is not optimism, strictly speaking—we know too little of the future, and we certainly know better than to expect easy victories. At the same time and for the same reason, however, decolonial

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cunning cuts against all pessimisms of the intellect that are not outmatched by an optimism of the will for liberation. This includes that form of pessimism with which it would seem to share the most: Afro-pessimism. Afro-pessimism, particularly in the works of Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton, views the world as wholly and inescapably antiBlack because of the reduction of Blackness to pure negativity and the ongoing libidinal investment in Black death, producing a situation not of conflict but of absolute antagonism to which Afropessimists explicitly refuse to provide an alternative.41 Decolonial cunning responds to this diagnosis by insisting that it is precisely from the shadows of negation that resistance so often erupts. In fact, one of Afro-pessimism’s most potent sources, Fanon himself, describes the zone of nonbeing as “an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential[,] from which a genuine new departure can emerge.” 42 But while the apparently minor absence of a single comma in the new English translation of Black Skin, White Masks might seem to imply that this region is so sterile and so arid as to render any “new departure” impossible, Fanon’s meaning is exactly the opposite. It is precisely from the sterility and aridity of nonbeing—from all that survives, subsists, and persists within that zone—that something truly and radically new might indeed emerge. In this and so many other ways, Fanon was no pessimist. More troubling, however, are the strategic implications of the Afro-pessimist approach, or rather, the explicit refusal of strategy—and particularly of what might once have been understood as Third World solidarity. Here, Afro-pessimism traffics in an ahistorical neglect of both the concrete construction of antiBlackness and its deep imbrications with other colonized communities. Let’s not forget that Haiti was a colony and a slave

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The Cunning of Decolonization  /  21

society at the same time, the two so powerfully intertwined that even so forceful a will as Toussaint Louverture’s couldn’t resolve the contradiction of being, as the 1801 Haitian Constitution put it, both “free and French.” Fanon, himself both Black and a Frenchcolonial subject, inhabited a similarly fraught couplet and consequently never fully separated colonialism from slavery, both in their own ways machines for the production of nonbeing.43 When colonialism swept across the globe, it imposed more than mere domination, more than political or economic control. Whether in the discursive weight of Christopher Columbus’s suggestion that the Indigenous “Americans” he encountered in 1492 lacked souls, and thereby lacked access to the fullness of humanity, or the later transfer and indeed radicalization of this dehumanization through hereditary chattel slavery, colonization as a system of dispossession, exploitation, and extraction inevitably relies on divisions that cut across even the ontological level, the level of human Being.44 For Columbus and so many others, Indigenous Americans were “merely another interesting element among the flora and fauna ‘discovered’ in the New World,” and captured slaves suffered the same condemnation: “The slave whose skin suggests the savage deformity of his nature becomes identical with the Carib Indian who feeds on human flesh . . . both seen as the wild fruits of nature.” 45 Colonialism birthed racial slavery, and while the two would spin off along separate orbits, they share underlying logics of dehumanization and dispossession, excluding both Indigenous and Black people from humanity to extract (mostly) land from the former and (mostly) labor from the latter.46 While the Spanish formally promoted Indigenous people to the ranks of the human in 1551 at the expense of Black slaves, this was a false promotion that provided cover for continued dispossession and

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22  /  The Cunning of Decolonization

genocide. All the while, slavery was increasingly bound to Blackness, especially in the US after Bacon’s Rebellion, which pointed in the opposite direction of 1551: reinscribing an even more thoroughgoing erasure of Black humanity as Indigenous people were systematically displaced westward. While the settler-colonial “logic of elimination” targets Indigenous communities most directly, it’s hard to interpret early US government plans to deport the entire Black population through “colonization” schemes as anything but the same. And today, as Kelly Lytle Hernández reminds us, “Mass incarceration is mass elimination.” 47 Between colonialism and the anti-Black legacies of chattel slavery the distance is not so great. Even someone with as immense a colonial blindspot as Alexis de Tocqueville recognized that America’s “two unlucky races”—the Black slave and the Indian, the one on “the ultimate limits of slavery” and the other “on the extreme edge of freedom”—nevertheless suffered the same “misfortunes” and “tyranny” at the same white hands.48 Indigenous people have been enslaved, uprooted, and displaced, with an entire educational apparatus dedicated to their elimination—pure negativity. And as the postwar exclusion, ghettoization, and mass incarceration of surplus Black labor make perfectly clear, anti-Black racism is about far more than labor. By centering the decolonial cunning shared by Black and Indigenous struggles, I hope to contribute to a broader project of building—rather than burning—bridges between movements struggling today against settler colonialism and anti-Black racism. From Seminoles to Standing Rock, those relegated to nonbeing across our still-colonial world have always resisted in the most cunning of ways, and more often than not, they have done so together. To do so, this project builds on an alternative canon

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The Cunning of Decolonization  /  23

that, if it needs a name, we might grasp under the heading of Fred Moten’s “black optimism,” even if not strictly Black or wholly optimistic.49 It is in the name of this unnamed project that Sylvia Wynter has sought a “third perspective” on the events of 1492, that Glen Coulthard deploys Fanon against Canadian settler colonialism, and that Shona Jackson plumbs a transnational “creole indigeneity.”50 And it is in the name of this shared project that Tiffany Lethabo King speaks of the shifting and unpredictable offshore geological formulation known as the shoal—itself often volcanic in origin—that disrupts metaphorical associations of Blackness with water and Indigeneity with land, thereby providing an ideal space for Afro-Indigenous encounter.51 Where Afro-pessimism views our world as irredeemably anti-Black, Lewis Gordon has insisted that the project for an anti-Black world is just that: a project. And it is a project that— like the settler horizon of eliminating the Native—remains incomplete, because “Black people and other opponents of such a project fought, and continue to fight.”52 Alexander Weheliye similarly cautions against taking our enemies’ projects for a fait accompli by erasing those alternatives built by communities in resistance, insisting that white supremacist institutions “can never annihilate the lines of flight, freedom dreams, practices of liberation, and possibilities of other worlds” nurtured even under the direst of circumstances.53 And for Cedric Robinson, even under transatlantic slavery the African was never fully reduced to pure negativity or caricature but instead bore (and indeed cultivated) a wealth of valuable contraband—culture, history, experience.54 Just as there remains a gap between the project of antiBlackness and its victorious consummation, so too does colonial nonbeing leave—and indeed, generate—a powerful remainder

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24  /  The Cunning of Decolonization

and cunning excess. Against Hegel, however, decolonial cunning doesn’t respond to the denial of recognition by demanding to be recognized. In fact, as Coulthard and Audra Simpson have shown, recognition can even serve as colonialism’s most powerful weapon.55 Decolonial cunning doesn’t respond to invisibility with a demand to be more visible but instead takes advantage of the strategic virtues of nonrecognition and invisibility to mount an unexpected ontological ambush. The slave did not only appeal to his master for rights: “He fled. He sabotaged. He delayed. He deceived. He stole. He murdered. He revolted.”56 And as we will see, so did she do that and more. She poisoned, she burned, she held it down, she paved the way. But the persistent humanity that slaves secretly carried with them across the Middle Passage, that dispossessed and displaced Indigenous peoples still transmit from generation to generation, also means that decolonial cunning is not reducible to the pure negativity of struggle against—it is always also the struggle for something radically different. It is the work of the tunneling moles of my final chapter, who take refuge underground to build a new, subterranean world even as they tirelessly prepare to break the surface once again. The gap between what the colonial world imagines itself to be and the reality we inhabit is precisely the space of resistance, and it provides powerful leverage for the present: for imagining revolutionary change beyond mere reaction by drawing upon alternative traditions of life, struggle, and relations to the land; for the slow and thankless work of crafting political solidarities that overcome—however imperfectly—anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous racism in our movements; and for the cunning creation of the new world from within the blindspots and obscurity of the old.

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“To destroy the colonial world,” Fanon tells us, “means nothing less than demolishing the colonist’s sector, burying it deep within the earth.”57 But only after, like so much subterranean lava from “deep within the earth,” struggles against colonialism and slavery break the surface and surge forth.

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c h a p t e r t wo

The Colonial Blindspot

Amasa Delano cannot see, though his eyes work fine, even from a distance. The protagonist of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, Delano spies a ship drifting off the Chilean coast and boards it, only to be subjected to an elaborate ventriloquist act. Cereno, the ship’s captain, is constantly and unnervingly shadowed by his assistant, the slave Babo. Nothing seems quite right—the slaves are acting strangely, and Cereno himself is withdrawn. To express Delano’s creeping suspicion, Melville borrows the phrase Frederick Douglass had famously spoken only a few years before: “Might not the San Dominick, like a slumbering volcano, suddenly let loose energies now hid?” Even the ship’s name—the San Dominick—is a thinly veiled reference to Saint-Domingue, bearing the same volatile cargo that had exploded there in terrestrial mutiny six decades prior. As Delano disembarks, Cereno hurls himself suddenly overboard and all is revealed: the slaves have taken over, and Babo has been in charge the whole time. Slave has become master, an

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The Colonial Blindspot  /  27

inversion so inconceivable that Delano cannot see it until it is forced upon him: “Captain Delano, now with scales dropped from his eyes, saw the negroes, not in misrule, not in tumult . . . but with mask torn away, flourishing hatchets and knives, in ferocious piratical revolt.”1 Fuck it, mask off. Greg Grandin has recently assembled the true history behind Melville’s narrative, arguing that “whatever Melville meant Benito Cereno to say about slavery, the story is fundamentally about blindness, an inability to see.” This blindness, moreover, “exposes a larger falsehood, on which the whole ideological edifice of slavery rested. . . . The West Africans used talents their masters said they didn’t have (cunning, reason, and discipline) to give the lie to the stereotypes of what they were said to be (dimwitted and faithful).”2 There are so many clues that something has gone awry. Why is Delano, “locked in the soft cell of his own blindness,” unable to see something so obvious?3 What sort of myopia allows him to walk through the viscous tension aboard the San Dominick and be none the wiser? The answer would be obvious were it not obscured by the very same forces it seeks to name. It is above all “Delano’s profound racism” that blinds him. He “cannot imagine Africans with power, especially not power over whites,” and he simply cannot grasp the “wit, guile, and cunning” of Babo, the stage director choreographing a complex scene while himself playing the role of loyal servant.4 For his part, Melville was acutely aware of Babo’s cunning and the way that it threatened the very foundations of racial slavery. It was Babo’s “brain, not body” that “had schemed and led the revolt,” he wrote, and so while his “body was burned to ashes” in punishment, his “head, that hive of subtlety,” was hung on display. The effect was the opposite of

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what was intended, however: Babo remained unbowed even in death, his face meeting “unabashed, the gaze of the whites,” and his deception tormented Cereno until the very end.5 As we will see, Delano’s obliviousness was no aberration, but is instead endemic to the institutional twins of colonialism and chattel slavery. In Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner diagnoses much the same sort of blindness in the overseer of a Haitian plantation: “not knowing that what he rode upon was a volcano, hearing the air tremble and throb at night with the drums and the chanting and not knowing that it was the heart of the earth itself he heard.” To which Faulkner adds, playfully, “overseeing what he oversaw and not knowing that he was overseeing it.” 6 Overseeing, in other words, is a form of underseeing, and to speak in volcanic terms is thus to confess one’s own blindness: to tacitly admit that one is afflicted by what I call the colonial blindspot. Far from a thing of the past, this blindspot persists today in the ways that Black and colonized people are simultaneously overseen and underseen, recognized without any semblance of recognition, invisible and hypervisible at the same time.7 Or, as Amiri Baraka put it in 1965, somewhere between Dante and Fanon: “Hell is actual, and people with hell in their heads. . . . The torture of being the unseen object, and, the constantly observed subject.”8 In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois diagnosed what he called the “American Blindspot,” which, while far from limited to the United States, had nevertheless assumed a peculiar form there. For Du Bois, “The color problem became the Blindspot of American political and social development” and thereby—pressing Du Bois’s own Hegelianism to its limits—“made logical development almost impossible.”9 Because people were taught “to look upon the Negro as a thing apart . . . different from other human beings,” Black workers were seen not as workers but as

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natural slaves, setting the stage for their tragic, if not entirely unexpected, betrayal by poor whites.10 Denied a place in the labor movement, however, the Black struggle was forced underground and assumed cunningly unforeseen forms. At the outbreak of the Civil War, former slaves abandoned plantations en masse, in what Du Bois audaciously labeled a “general strike.” This self-activity by slaves transformed first the meaning and then the outcome of the war, and with these, the broad arc of US history itself. But this blindspot persisted among subsequent generations. The inspirational experience of Radical Reconstruction and what Du Bois called AbolitionDemocracy—Black socialist rule in several southern states— was attacked by white terror and denigrated by subsequent generations of historians: “It is only the Blindspot in the eyes of America,” he wrote, acidly, “that can overlook and misread so clean and encouraging a chapter of human struggle and human uplift.”11 Unable or unwilling to grasp the possibility of Black self-rule, America disavowed Reconstruction just as brazenly as France had disavowed the events in Haiti. Three decades later, Ted Allen and Noel Ignatiev would reformulate Du Bois’s concept as what they called the “white blindspot.” This blindspot, they argued, prevented even some on the Marxist Left from grasping the importance of a Black movement that was demanding not simply recognition but revolutionary change. “What we are talking about,” they insisted, “is NOT the Negro question” but “the ‘white question,’ the white question of questions—the centrality of the problem of white supremacy and the white-skin privilege which have historically frustrated the struggle for democracy, progress and socialism in the US.” Again, here was a failure of sight: “Are you going to let the fact that these workers are Black blind you to the fact that

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30  /  The Colonial Blindspot

they are, first of all workers,” and moreover “the foremost representatives, not merely of the Negro liberation movement, but of the American working class?”12 In a moment in which some sectors of the Left dismiss militant struggles against racist policing and denigrate the hardwon (and astonishing) victories of the past five years as neoliberal window-dressing, it is clear that this blindspot remains a fatal barrier to revolutionary change today.13

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Haiti was a volcano, in other words, because those in power, like so many afflicted by the white blindspot born of colonial domination, simply could not grasp so “unthinkable” an event or the vastness of its implications.14 History is unrelenting, however, and Haiti—this inconceivable event of events—would change things irreversibly, simultaneously filling the sails and fanning the flames of hemispheric resistance with what Julius Scott has called a “common wind.”15 Even before Haiti, as Vincent Brown has documented, a broader slave war sporadically emerged, surfacing here and there in the form of a “martial archipelago” testifying to the “great volcanic forces of world history operating below.”16 And after the events in Saint-Domingue, the volcano would persist—in metaphor as in fact—in an escalating cycle of rebellion and fear that was no longer limited to Haiti but in fact corresponded to broader explosions among the colonized and racialized: “The volcano . . . seemed to be spreading throughout the Caribbean.”17 After Haiti, the racial obliviousness of the colonial blindspot could not hold, and yet on some level, it had to hold more than ever. The invisibility that produces and is produced by the colonial blindspot is rarely absolute, however, and this obliviousness

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ranged from complete ignorance to willful denial, repressed anxieties, or simply bad faith. But most often it coexists tensely with the mortal fear born of the guilty colonial conscience: I deserve to die for what I have done and continue to do, so they must be dreaming murderous dreams. The basis for this bifurcation lay precisely in the liminally human position of the colonized themselves: the slaves are happy, and in any case are not sufficiently human to fight for freedom; they are dangerous because they are, in their biological essence, murderous savages.18 So as resistance to slavery and colonial rule spread, this did not lead automatically to a recognition that slaves were unhappy in their bondage—much less that they were actually humans demanding the rights enjoyed by their masters and more. The disavowal of Haiti thus corresponded to an equally “manic defense” of slavery and colonial rule, an increasingly desperate attempt to manage cognitive dissonance that took the form of a wild oscillation between the insistence that slaves were happy and the haunting dread that another Haiti was right around the corner.19 With every turn of the spiral, as resistance— and with it, humanity—became more self-evident, it became all the more necessary for slaveholders to double down on their denials, resorting all the more to delusional self-confidence. And so, as time went on, the ideology upholding the slave system grew paradoxically sturdier and more widespread, but also more brittle in the blind desperation of its proponents. Fear of slave rebellion spiked in moments of foreign and Indian wars, economic downturn, and heroic inspiration from Haiti and elsewhere. Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 provoked a fear of unified class struggle that led to the hardening of the Black/ white racial binary, but did so against the background of

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32  /  The Colonial Blindspot

anti-Indigenous violence and dispossession. In other moments, however, it was the threat of Black unity with Indigenous struggles, not least in the Seminole wars, that marked slaves as a fifth column of dangerous enemies within. During the American Revolutionary War, for example, South Carolina refused to deploy its militia because it was needed to guard the slaves, and southern delegates to the Continental Congress worried that the British might rally slaves to the cause of abolition. This fear proved well founded: thousands of slaves flocked to Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment and other royalist units on promises of freedom, many leaving with the defeated British. After the American Revolution, the slaveholder conscience was all the more torn and manic, denouncing the metaphorical slavery of British colonial rule while upholding the very real slavery underpinning what Gerald Horne has called the “counter-revolution of 1776.” Haiti threw a match into the tinderbox, provoking an escalating cycle of struggle and fear by fueling in equal measure distrust among whites and freedom dreams among slaves. “American slaveholders trembled” at news from Haiti, “and their always precarious sense of ease” was undermined by tales from fearful refugees.20 And then there was the wave of domestic rebellions that Du Bois describes as well as anyone: “The slaves in the South, aroused undoubtedly by vague rumors of the Haytian revolt, made three fierce attempts at insurrection,—in 1800 under Gabriel in Virginia, in 1822 under Vesey in Carolina, and in 1831 again in Virginia under the terrible Nat Turner.”21 Gabriel’s conspiracy in particular “shook Virginians with volcanic fury, because it seemed incontestable proof that a Santo Domingo had been boiling right underneath them.”22 One pamphleteer

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hyperventilated on the page amid the aftershocks of the Vesey conspiracy: “Let it never be forgotten that ‘our NEGROES are truely the Jacobins of the country; that they are the anarchists and the domestic enemy; the common enemy of civilized society, and the barbarians who would, IF THEY COULD, become the DESTROYERS of our race.”23 The War of 1812 saw both a repeat of decades prior and a foreshadowing of the Black cunning of the Civil War. Again, an estimated “3,400 slaves fled from Maryland and Virginia to British ships,” but this time many offered the British the same tactical knowledge and “keen understanding of local waterways and paths” that later “contrabands” would provide to the Union Army. While the defections only stoked the racial fears of local whites, these fears made such troops even more valuable to the British: “Armed blacks and Indians haunted the overactive imaginations of Americans, who dreaded darker-skinned peoples as ruthless savages,” and in the words of one British officer, Virginians “expect Blacky will have no mercy on them, and they know that he understands bush fighting and the locality of the woods as well as themselves and can perhaps play at hide and seek in them even better.”24 The years leading up to Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion “had been marked by a great rumbling of discontent and protest. Turner’s act, itself carrying that rumbling to a high point, caused an eruption throughout the length and breadth of the slave South—which always rested on a volcano of outraged humanity.” Just a month earlier, Reverend Samuel May had written, “The slaves are men. They have within them that inextinguishable thirst for freedom, which is born in man. They are already writhing in their shackles. They will, one day, throw them off with vindictive violence, if we

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34  /  The Colonial Blindspot

do not unloose them.” To which Benjamin Lundy added, in an article written before but only published as the rebellion was already under way, “Vengeance is accumulating in the land of despotism; and it will assuredly burst forth with tremendous fury.” And shortly after Turner’s rebellion, a niece of George Washington spoke fearfully of this “smothered volcano—we do not know when, or where, the flame will burst forth but we know that death in the most horrid form threatens us.”25 On the cusp of the Civil War, John Brown was himself described as possessing of “a fiery nature, and a cold temper, and a cool head,—a volcano beneath a covering of snow”—his own whiteness (the snow) symbolically suspended by his zealous dedication to the enslaved (volcano).26 Brown was known to recite the history of the Haitian Revolution by heart, and according to his enemies the 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry “was nothing more and nothing less than an attempt to do on a vast scale what was done in St. Domingo in 1791.”27 The feeling was mutual: flags across Haiti flew at half-mast on the day he was hanged, and a “reverential funeral [was] held in Port-au-Prince for the heroic Brown.”28 By the eve of the Civil War, tensions had reached an undeniable pitch, and in the words of the escaped slave Austin Steward, “The slaveholder [was] well aware that he stands over a volcano.”29 The Turner revolt had “illuminated the shadows of slavery,” Lerone Bennett would later write: “It was no longer possible for men to pretend.”30 But those shadows persisted and the pretending continued regardless. Despite undeniable rumbling from subterranean depths, slavemasters doubled down on their selfinflicted blindness—the overseer’s underseeing—giving rise to a perverse alternation between denial and panic. Harriet Jacobs described this ironic tension best when she quipped that it was

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“strange that they should be alarmed, when their slaves were so ‘contented and happy’!”31 The more there was to see, the less the slavemaster saw.

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The fundamental conceit of chattel slavery and colonialism alike—the myth of myths common to both—was that the enslaved and colonized were happiest in chains, that subjection was their natural state, and that they were unsuited to, and did not desire, freedom. As it became increasingly indisputable that at least the latter was untrue, that for whatever irrational reason slaves would and did resist, their masters managed their cognitive dissonance through several strategies. The first was ambiguous silence, the largely unspoken rule that slave resistance was not to be discussed. As an influential Quaker wrote in 1773, “it is the general opinion, that nothing ought to be published whereby the Negroes may be made acquainted with their own strength,” though he conceded that it was “more dangerous to withhold from the generality of people the knowledge of danger they will be in.”32 “It is a subject not to be mentioned,” one woman wrote to a friend of a planned insurrection in South Carolina, before cautioning the friend “to say nothing about it.”33 Despite widespread interest, the Vesey trial was hardly publicized, since “Charleston officials did not want to spread the news that slaves were capable of planning revolts.”34 Even a foreign visitor like Alexis de Tocqueville, touring the South in the 1830s, couldn’t help but notice this overbearing silence and the fears it sought desperately to contain. “Each man, so to say, hides it from himself,” he wrote. “There is something more frightening about the silence of the South than about the North’s noisy fears.”35

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36  /  The Colonial Blindspot

Where silence failed, two divergent strategies entered into play: one internal to the slave and one external. The first rested on slaves’ biological inferiority: if they were unhappy in their natural state—subjection to their racial superiors—this could grow only from a deeper nature even less human than the first. Such desperation for a biological explanation, however absurd, reached its apex as the slave system entered into terminal crisis, epitomized by Samuel Cartwright’s 1851 diagnosis of what he called drapetomania—“the disease causing slaves to run away.” In an argument more scriptural than experimental, Cartwright deemed drapetomania “a disease of the mind . . . and much more curable”: since the Black slave is by nature a “submissive kneebender,” the cure was to keep slaves in that natural state, “treated like children, with care, kindness, attention, and humanity.”36 Cartwright was a hack, of course, disguising his reactionary politics under the thinnest veneer of science. But so too is Charles Murray, and as debates around The Bell Curve make clear, racial science will be with us for as long as it speaks the language of white desire. Where endogenous explanations for slave resistance would not suffice, there was always the exogenous factor, in the age-old trope of the “outside agitator.” Colonizers and masters desperate to believe that their subjects were incapable of organized resistance looked for anyone to blame: northern abolitionists, Indians, foreign enemies like the British, and—apparently impervious to their own contradictions—even the revolutionary ex-slaves of Haiti. These claims have proven remarkably resilient throughout history, later becoming a staple argument for the Ku Klux Klan, which viewed all Black resistance in the South as the fault of communists and other northern agitators.37 As Herbert

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Aptheker noted in his 1969 preface to the republication of American Negro Slave Revolts in the era of Black Power: In the days of slavery, the masters and their scribes insisted that the source of plots and insurrections lay in “outside agitators.” Abolitionists replied that this was quite untrue; they added that they had a fool-proof proposal which if implemented would guarantee the end of slave unrest and uprisings. To end slave rebellion, they said, end slavery! . . . Similarly, today . . . the present “outside agitator” offers a fool-proof proposal. To terminate the unrest in the United States manifested by black men and women it is necessary only to terminate racism; end one, the other ceases.

Claims of outside influence have not lost their tenacity today either, and are regularly rehashed by police departments and media talking heads alike to explain away the obvious: why Black people rebel against police murder.38 Throughout this historical waxing and waning, the master class responded to the unstable situation it had built for itself with a sort of bizarre schizophrenia. While “it may seem paradoxical . . . the ruling race did not live in constant dread of revolt from below,” even amid periods of heightened tension, but instead “boasted of their freedom from such intolerable nightmares.”39 Northerners thought they were crazy, and perhaps they were: considering their slaves to be insufficiently “enterprizing” to resist, “Southern plantation dwellers did not live in fear of robbery, rape, or massacre. They left doors unlatched, windows open, gates ajar. Slaves freely roamed in and out of the ‘Big House’ day and night, much to the wonderment of visiting Yankees and foreigners.” 40 And they stubbornly maintained this divided consciousness until the very end. Even “during the Civil War, white Southerners persisted in characterizing blacks as a

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38  /  The Colonial Blindspot

loyal and obedient race,” in a “strange blend of candor and propaganda” that sought to “allay pangs of guilt” by substituting desire for reality.41 But such blithe denialism was as unsustainable as the myths on which their livelihoods rested, and those same masters would often fly, suddenly and apparently unprovoked, into a panic. The slave-owning classes of the South thus swung wildly between “two alternating states of mind—apathy and horror— each provided the context for the other . . . lapsing back into somnolence as the fears faded.” 42 Their panic “at the slightest hint of slave insurrection revealed what lay beneath their endless self-congratulations over the supposed docility, contentment, and loyalty of their slaves.” 43 What lay beneath—sometimes deep underground, sometimes roiling just below the surface—was a people resolved to be either human or, failing that, a volcano.

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The unstable psychic oscillation of master and colonizer alike was a direct reflection, a boomerang effect, of the dualism that colonial racism and slavery imposed on their victims. At its heart, this was a question of the very status of Black and colonized people to begin with: Were they fully human or something less? Slavery in particular was never able to resolve the fundamental contradictions of slave “subhumanity” or to fully exorcise the humanity of the slave. In the words of C. L. R. James, French colonizers “enslaved the Negro, they said, because he was not a man, and when he behaved like a man they called him a monster.” 44 These vertiginous swings from human to monster, like the rebellions themselves, came in waves, escalating hope and audacity on the one side, panic on the other.

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The Colonial Blindspot  /  39

Revolts “were firebells in the night; cries from the heart; expressions of human need and aspiration in the face of the deepest testing. They manifest that victimization does not simply make victims; it also produces heroes,” weakening the foundational claim of slave subhumanity with every turn of the dialectic.45 Even a ritual as important to late slave society as the insurrection trial, a sort of religious sacrifice ceremony meant to reinforce a cross-class alliance among whites, ran the perpetual risk of putting the system’s contradictions on display.46 On the one hand, trials conceded what hush campaigns sought to deny: that slaves were willing to resist. But more importantly, they held slaves accountable as moral subjects for that resistance. If slaves were not capable of rational or moral judgment, as white supremacy insisted, how could they be responsible for their actions? You can’t subpoena a volcano, but on many occasions the southern legal system certainly tried to. William Styron’s fictionalized account of a speech by Nat Turner’s judge underlines this tension starkly: “The point is that you are animate chattel and animate chattel is capable of craft and connivery and wily stealth. You ain’t a wagon, Reverend, but chattel that possesses moral choice and spiritual volition. Remember that well. Because that’s how come the law provides that animate chattel like you can be tried for a felony.” 47 This “perilous balance between property and volition” was ultimately untenable.48 And as Douglass would contend, the entire legal apparatus of the South was but an elaborate confession of the same untenable contradiction. Why attempt to prove that slaves are human, he asked, when “that point is conceded already” by the “the enactment of laws for their government”? By holding slaves morally accountable, he argued, the slavemasters tacitly admitted that “the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being”: “When

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40  /  The Colonial Blindspot

you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave.” 49 Trouillot describes the same white supremacist double-bind in the context of Saint-Domingue, where “next to a discourse that claimed the contentment of slaves, a plethora of laws, advice, and measures, both legal and illegal, were set up to curb the very resistance denied in theory.”50 Every prohibition was a confession, and even (or especially) the southern doctrine of paternalism insisted on “mutual obligations—duties, responsibilities, and ultimately even rights” that “implicitly recognized the slaves’ humanity.”51 The most fatal manifestation of this contradiction emerged, however, within the subjectivity of the enslaved and colonized themselves, driving a wedge that would open a space for cunning deception and the widespread suspicion it provoked. In perpetuating this irresoluble tension, in inventing and upholding the binary between docility and savagery, the slave system stamped the same binary onto and into the slaves themselves, in what George Rawick among others dubbed the Uncle Tom/Nat Turner dialectic. These two positions—the one invented to justify slavery, the other a dreaded specter haunting a guilty conscience—are not opposites, Rawick argues, but rather dynamically connected as reflections of and reactions to social reality, the suffering and smiling of the first fueling the legitimately unbridled rage of the second.52 But arguably more important than the internal psychological struggle between these competing selves was the cunning of those who strategically embraced their alleged docility, bending it toward resistance. In the words of the former slave Henry Bibb, “The only weapon of self-defense that I could use successfully . . . was that of deception.”53 For Genovese, this was no

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The Colonial Blindspot  /  41

accident either: “The first line of defense for any vanquished or occupied nation, as for any camp of war-prisoners, is calculated cunning and deceit. It was thus that the Negro slaves in the European colonies made lying their second nature.”54 In Haiti, too, slaves often displayed what James described as a “a wooden stupidity before their masters.” But this was merely a mask: in reality, they bore a more complex “dual personality.”55 In a perverse circle, the same white slavemasters who had projected the blueprint of inhumanity onto their slaves, insisting on their innate docility, became immediately suspicious when those same slaves played their assigned roles too well. To square the circle, the deception enforced upon them was folded into their inborn nature as an aspect of cunning. As one white preacher put it, “They are one thing before the whites, and another before their own color. Deception toward the former is characteristic of them,” while an agriculturalist emphasized “their superior cunning, or sagacity in roguery,” grasping to his credit that this adversarial relationship was a necessary outgrowth of the system: “It is their business to deceive us, and ours to detect the deceit.” “They soon ascertain the character of those in authority over them, and their peculiarities of temperament and disposition,” another wrote, “and frequently, under the cloak of great stupidity, make dupes of the master and overseer.”56 “Power,” as James Scott has famously insisted, “means not having to act,” and the inverse—the need to act to survive and resist—“has been imposed throughout history on the vast majority of people.”57 For racialized and colonized peoples, this is even more true, with the imperative to act retroactively folded into their very (non)being. Slaves and other colonized people were forced at gunpoint onto a brutal stage, only for their overseers to then worry that they might be acting too well.

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42  /  The Colonial Blindspot

Indigenous people, for whom the antipodes of gentleness and barbarism were even more diametrically opposed in the colonizer’s mind, were similarly objects of suspicion. In the Spanish Americas, the original sin of deceit was committed as soon as native Taínos were unable to disclose to Columbus the secret location of nonexistent gold mines, their hands cut off as a result, and Indigenous Quechuas, Aymaras, and other inhabitants of the Incan Empire were similarly labeled as innately dishonest. Here again Melville, who writes in The Confidence-Man of the many “histories of Indian lying, Indian theft, Indian doubledealing, Indian fraud and perfidy, Indian want of conscience . . . Indian diabolism.”58 In the words of even a sympathetic observer of the Mexican Revolution like John Reed, “Indians have masklike faces.”59 Saddled with an unmanageable dualism, colonized people become objects of distrust as soon as they swing slightly toward either extreme. In the words of the northerner A. M. French, writing in 1862, “The owners never understood their slaves. They were accomplished tragedians, the dullest of them.” Even Denmark Vesey, he observed, “was for twenty years a most faithful slave” without showing “a symptom of the volcano raging.” But French, unlike many of his southern counterparts, was able to grasp the fundamental point: Vesey was a human person desirous of freedom, but “the more he was plotting for it, the more loving and contented would he appear.” Blindness was built into the system, shrouded by the very umbrae of its ideology: “The only light in which [the slave] could be seen, was that cast by slavery, for no other power had access, real access, to them.”60 The shadows cast by slavery were as dark as they were deep, but here is the key point: they were most impenetrable for its beneficiaries, those who most wanted to believe, blinding them

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The Colonial Blindspot  /  43

to a dangerous reality they had themselves created while making them permanently suspicious that something might be percolating just below the surface. One Georgia planter admitted as much: “So deceitful is a Negro,” he wrote, “that as far as my own experience extends I could never in a single instance decipher his character. . . . We planters could never get at the truth.” 61 Here were four million cunning Babos, faithfully playing the roles expected of them—but what lay behind this murky veil? And what would happen when suddenly, as French feared was inevitable, “the mask is thrown off”?

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chapter three

The Second Sight of the Colonized

“A Black man with a mop, tray, or broom in his hand can go damn near anywhere in this country. And a smiling Black man is invisible.” The voice belongs to Dan Freeman, protagonist of Sam Greenlee’s cult classic The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Cunning is at the very heart of Greenlee’s film, its pivot marked by the duality of the term spook, both a racial epithet—code for Black docility— and shorthand for a spy.1 Freeman is both: the first Black agent hired by the CIA, he smiles and nods his way deferentially through counterinsurgency training before deploying this knowledge to build a guerrilla insurgency to fight the US government from within. If his given name were not revealing enough (free man), his code name—Uncle Tom—is even more so. The lesson of Spook is crystal clear: that the strategic use of invisibility and the enemy’s own blindspots are among the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of the oppressed. Little surprise that this underground classic would itself be invisibilized, forcibly relegated to subterranean production and clandestine distribution. “I had to live the book to get the film done,” Green44

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lee later recalled, and this was true in more ways than one.2 Freeman’s character was based on Greenlee himself: one of the first Black officers in the US Information Service, he was trained as a propagandist abroad only to become one at home. The original book manuscript was rejected more than forty times, and Chicago mayor Richard Daly even refused permits to film in the city. Richard Nixon was allegedly incensed by the film, and the FBI bullied theaters into dropping it.3 Only one copy survived, and only by—again, revealingly—masquerading in the vaults under a different name.4 Knowing full well that, in the age of Black Power, mainstream distributors would shy away from the film’s subversive message, Greenlee and director Ivan Dixon managed to secure a dis­ tribution deal only by sending United Artists an action montage stripped of all political content. The official movie poster reflected this strategically sanitized view, depicting a battle scene with masked guerrillas, none of whom are identifiably Black at all. But a poster created by artist Jay Shaw for the film’s 2004 rerelease is a more fitting testament to the subversion, indeed the inversion, that the film embodies and hopes to incite. A sheep stands in the foreground, but as its shadow stretches into the background, it takes the form of a black panther, all under the words: “He turned the American dream . . . into a nightmare.”5 Tropes of invisibility have a long pedigree in Black literature, but few have embraced that invisibility as unambiguously as Greenlee. Ralph Ellison, for example, begins Invisible Man with his narrator’s explicit refusal to be a “spook”: “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand,

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46  /  The Second Sight of the Colonized

simply because people refuse to see me.” 6 For Greenlee, this formulation was no accident, “except Ellison thought of it as a curse. He wanted to be visible.”7 This is unfair to Ellison, albeit not entirely so. While certainly concerned with recognition, Ellison nevertheless recognizes that “it is sometimes advantageous to be unseen,” that “hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action,” and that invisibility generates “a certain ingenuity” that we would call cunning.8 Ellison even described his text as one in which “our hero . . . attempts to take advantage of the white man’s psychological blind spot”—and begins his book with an epigraph from Benito Cereno.9 And then there is the enigma of the narrator’s grandfather’s deathbed confession, in which this “meekest of men” declares that “our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction.” To be this kind of spook most effectively, moreover, meant adopting the deferential veneer of the happy slave: “I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.”10 This confession—that, in Greg Grandin’s words, “he wasn’t an obliging Tom but a stealth Babo”—becomes a curse for the narrator to bear, “a constant puzzle which lay unanswered in the back of my mind” as haunter becomes haunted.11 Regardless of Ellison’s intentions, even in his narrator’s tortured conscience we can begin to triangulate what Greenlee sought to do with Spook: to embrace invisibility and to cultivate a treasonous cunning that, beyond mere survival, weaponizes the figure of the Uncle Tom or “spook,” as a strategy for revolution.12 Invisible Man, in Greenlee’s view, was ultimately a protest novel “designed to have a moral appeal to white people”—which he

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The Second Sight of the Colonized  /  47

explicitly compares to the politics of representation and visibility so prevalent today. But moral appeals, as Kwame Ture famously said of nonviolence, only work if your oppressor has a conscience. Or as Greenlee puts it: “You can’t protest a tiger for attacking you, ’cause that’s what tigers do. . . . It’s as natural for them as breathing!”13 You can’t subpoena a tiger, either. Instead of an appeal for white recognition, he sees Spook as “a slave rebellion” and Freeman as “a modern Nat Turner”—although he immediately corrects himself—“He was probably closer to Toussaint L’Ouverture or Denmark Vesey, who were far more sophisticated” in their level of organization.14 Freeman’s character is not like Ellison’s narrator or even Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas from Native Son, but more akin to a younger sibling standing on their shoulders who has learned from their struggles and transcended their ambivalences. If Freeman’s time at the CIA seems Sisyphean—“He’s rolling that rock up the hill”—the overall structure of Spook is Promethean: “He’s stolen fire from the gods and he teaches ’em how to use it. And I think that’s a metaphor not necessarily for armed struggle, but for the resistance that we have traditionally made, going back to slavery. We weren’t just a passive people.” And as far as metaphors go, Promethean fire has in this context a searing literalness as well: “if you don’t treat us right, your barn is gonna go up in flames. Your children are gonna die mysteriously. Your crops are gonna be burned.”15 In this sense, Freeman is a younger sibling of Du Bois and Fanon as well, at least in their earlier works: where “DuBois decried duality,” Greenlee sees it as “a survival tool . . . not a disease.” The question is therefore not to denounce those with “black skin” who wear “white masks” but instead to take full advantage of the facade that the mask of docility provides.16

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48  /  The Second Sight of the Colonized

Freeman “speaks in a way that doesn’t threaten white folks. He is not the man he pretends to be. And he welcomes the bigotry, which becomes his shield. The whites are never able to penetrate his mask because he gives them what they want.”17 This white mask becomes literal in the character of Pretty Willie, who struggles with his identity as a white-passing Black man before Freeman convinces him to weaponize his skin as a disguise to rob banks. Greenlee’s view therefore shares more with the late Du Bois of Black Reconstruction or the Fanon of Wretched of the Earth, for whom invisibility could be a virtue and the Black revolution was an explicitly anticolonial one: “The South Side of Chicago was a Third World country,” as Greenlee puts it, “almost identical in every way.”18 A spook is a specter haunting the guilty conscience of white America past and present, provoking fever dreams and walking nightmares: “And for damn good reason—they know what they’ve done; they know what they continue to do; and they wonder when the shit is going to drop and bring the house down like Samson and the temple.”19 For whites to disparage Black people as “spooks” is thus a failed attempt to exorcise the everpresent threat of rebellion. The knowledge that slaves are never truly happy in their chains and may at any moment erupt into violent resistance has been systematically repressed for hundreds of years and manically defended with soothing bromides, but persists nevertheless in a powerfully spectral form. Small wonder, then, that one reviewer deemed The Spook Who Sat by the Door “one of the most terrifying movies ever made” or that the horror genre—from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead to the white body-snatchers of Jordan Peele’s Get Out— remains powerfully racial in its resonances.20 Comparing Chris, the protagonist of Get Out, to Ben from Night of the Living Dead—

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The Second Sight of the Colonized  /  49

both Black men—Peele underlines the specific “skill” gleaned in the process of living while Black: “Theoretically, their racial perspective is the very skill that helps them. . . . The lead in ‘Night of the Living Dead’ is a man living in fear every day, so this is a challenge he is more equipped to take on than the white women living in the house. Chris, in his racial paranoia, is onto something that he wouldn’t be if he was a white guy.”21 For Peele, to live the horror of Blackness is to be a tool in the process of sharpening, and this skill, this sharpening, is what I call the second sight of the colonized.

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The fundamental gesture of decolonial cunning is to embrace, perform, and weaponize the dehumanization and invisibility built into systems of racial and colonial oppression, to take advantage of the oppressors’ self-imposed blindspot, to play the docile slave until the last possible moment, to invert the historical situation through its own parameters—in short, to press the duality of the “spook” from bowing and scraping to haunting and avenging. This cunning inversion is not the only advantage the colonized can claim but is accompanied by an entire arsenal of weapons, skills, and knowledges peculiar to those condemned to the hell of colonization and slavery—their sharpening by subjection into the perfect weapons to destroy those systems from within. These skills, honed in the protective obscurity of colonial blindness, go by many names. Du Bois, for example, did not simply diagnose double-consciousness, that “peculiar sensation . . . of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” Rather, he bound this idea to what he called “second-sight”: “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the

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50  /  The Second Sight of the Colonized

Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world.”22 For Du Bois, in other words, the curse of white supremacy brought a paradoxical gift—the ability to look upon the world through the racist veil, an ability that, while certainly disfiguring Black self-consciousness, also and at the same time functions as a sort of one-way mirror: those apparently concealed behind the veil can see better as a result. Second sight has been reworked in various ways, not least by standpoint theory and Black feminists in particular, who expanded the concept to accommodate the multiple intersecting, overlapping, and historically entangled oppressions they endured and the specifically powerful viewpoint these engendered. To live on the margins, in the words of bell hooks, produced “a particular way of seeing reality” that “provided us an oppositional worldview,” the “special vantage point our marginality gives us” granting Black women a privileged position for “criticiz[ing] the dominant racist, classist, sexist hegemony as well as to envision and create a counter-hegemony.”23 The idea that the most oppressed possess special insight into the broader functioning of our world is one that far exceeds the anti-Black legacies of slavery. The poor, and particularly what Du Bois himself would later call a vast “dark proletariat,” are positioned to grasp the whole in ways that the rich are not. They know both sides of the tracks, they circulate as labor between sharply divided spheres, and they uphold with their labor an entire system that negates their existence. Little surprise then that Third World elites dismiss these darker sectors as “marginals,” or that the marginalized often develop the same sort of “oppositional worldview” that hooks describes. As should be

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clear, the second sight of the colonized is not simply a return to the ocular-centric approaches so predominant in Western modernity, and much less does it demand mere inclusion in the order of the visual.24 It is a specific kind of sight that exceeds vision and furnishes the oppressed with an entire arsenal of strategic advantages and practical weapons. In his ambitious attempt to decolonize Western political thought, for example, Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel provides a similarly interwoven view of resistance that sets out from the various overlapping social groups that are exploited by and excluded from the political status quo. Political victims, Dussel insists, should be seen as living symptoms that point toward the inhumanity of the existing order and toward an alternative world beyond it. When the poor and exploited, those most excluded culturally and racially, women and all those subjected to gendered and sexual oppression and invisibility—when this broad majority comes together in struggle, it enjoys a peculiar power, an “effectiveness of the weak” that Dussel calls “hyperpotentia.”25 To these we could add James Scott’s analysis of the “hidden transcript,” not only as a refuge where the oppressed, without fear of punishment, “can speak the words of anger, revenge, self-assertion that they must normally choke back when in the presence of the masters and mistresses,” but also as a space of conspiracy, deception, and resistance. Between this hidden space and the public transcript that upholds power, we find a powerfully cunning zone of coded language, of “rumor, gossip, folktales, jokes, songs, rituals, codes, and euphemisms.” For Scott, the Br’er Rabbit stories, and trickster tales more broadly speaking, are emblematic: “At one level these are nothing but innocent stories about animals; at another level they appear to

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52  /  The Second Sight of the Colonized

celebrate the cunning wiles and vengeful spirit of the weak as they triumph over the strong.”26 This hidden transcript is not simply a “safety valve” or “harmless catharsis,” however.27 Rather, with something like the weaving motion of Hegelian cunning, history is punctuated by moments of “political electricity” when individual fantasies become the boldness of collective vision, when the veil separating hidden and public falls away, and when “utopias of justice and revenge” become real.28 Moments when the volcano erupts. Consider, furthermore, what Tendayi Sithole calls “the Black register,” those specific “ways of thinking, knowing, and doing that are enunciated from existential struggle.”29 Or what Paget Henry has resignified, against the tradition of Caribbean dehumanization, as “Caliban’s reason.”30 Or what Alexander Weheliye lyrically describes as “the sweetness that reclines in the hunger for survival.”31 Or finally, consider the atravesado subjectivity cultivated in that particularly inhospitable terrain that Gloria Anzaldúa calls the borderlands, among those who cross—and are crossed by—borders both internal and external. As for Fanon, this zone of nonbeing is paradoxically generative, sharpening through its very conditions of oppression the skills required for navigating the perils of everyday life. This skill, what Anzaldúa calls la facultad, builds an additional corporeal attunement to gendered violence into decolonial second sight as well. “Those who are pounced upon the most,” she writes, “have it the strongest—the females, the homosexuals of all races, the darkskinned, the outcast, the persecuted, the marginalized, the foreign. . . . Pain makes us acutely anxious to avoid more of it, so we hone the radar. It’s a kind of survival tactic that people, caught between the worlds, unknowingly cultivate.” This facultad can only be understood, Anzaldúa concludes, as “a

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sixth sense that’s lain dormant from long-ago times,” sharpening the senses, honing the radar, and shaping subjectivity in resistance.32 This is a second sight and a strategic skill that develops not only among those on the bottom but among those subterranean nonbeings condemned to a lower level still. And as we will see, it is the peculiar advantage of those who by simply entering into motion are able to shake the entire edifice built on their bent and bloodied backs. “Pressure busts pipes,” so the saying goes— a cryptic testament to the overwhelming trauma and destruction wrought by colonialism and white supremacy—“but it can also make a diamond.” Or if it is the pressure of subterranean currents surging stubbornly toward the light, a volcano.

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This cunning second sight, this special sort of knowledge gleaned from the brutal depths of colonization and slavery, is more than just seeing and knowing, however. It is doing as well, and the practical skills honed in the shadows of colonial blindness take many forms. From Indigenous resistance, to slave rebellions, to Third World revolutions in Cuba and anti-imperial resistance in Vietnam, guerrilla warfare has been the strategy of choice and, as we will see, the ambush its defining modality. Second sight becomes guerrilla strategy when those condemned to invisibility chart clandestine pathways and unseen geographies for survival. When survival tips toward resistance, these subterranean maps are repurposed for struggle, providing the basis for unifying and organizing struggles in the shadows of colonial violence. Simply put, the oppressed, the colonized, and the enslaved know the terrain better, are familiar with its geographical contours

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54  /  The Second Sight of the Colonized

in a different and more strategic way.33 This is a knowledge of the terrain that develops among those whose feet actually touch it: “By traveling at night, the enslaved gained an intimate knowledge of their landscape, particularly the forests and swamps and the paths and waterways that avoided the main roads watched by slave patrols. The same wild landscape that alarmed whites, especially at night, seemed more welcoming and secure to blacks.”34 Enslaved people learned through perilous experience how to move unseen and where to hide; it was only a matter of time before they then transformed these hiding places into launching pads for ambushes. We have a name for the weaponization of this clandestine cartography in the US South: the Underground Railroad. But invisible communication cables were stretched across the landscape as well, imperceptible to white eyes and borne forth along unseen currents and movements and conversations and languages and faiths. This was the “uncanny underground telegraph” that constituted the hidden nerve center of the Underground Railroad, a “slave grapevine—an elaborate oral communications system that spread news throughout the slave community” and “hummed with accounts of war and resistance in the New World.”35 During the Civil War, white southerners were so unnerved by this subterranean intelligence apparatus that some spoke French in the presence of their slaves. “We are using French against Africa,” one wrote. “We know the black waiters are all ears now, and we want to keep what we have to say dark.”36 Religion and spirituality were essential parts of this communication infrastructure and something more as well. They were a coded language to speak and to plan, and a faith to exhort and unify a community in resistance. Islam in particular played a

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central role in early slave resistance, providing the organizational backbone for many slave rebellions and maroon communities like the massive Quilombo dos Palmares in colonial Brazil.37 The revolutionary role of Vodou in Haiti and elsewhere is well established—from François Mackandal to Dutty Boukman, both of whom were reputedly Vodou priests (houngans) and, according to some reports, Muslims as well.38 Trickster tales of Legba, Anansi, and Br’er Rabbit find their origins in African cult faiths later tied to slave rebellions.39 And Nick Estes has shown how North American Ghost Dances, reduced to messianic religious faith by anthropologists, instead functioned as “Indigenous revolutionary theory”—and were duly criminalized for the cunning they channeled.40 As was the case across Latin America, moreover, the imposition of Christianity was itself turned inside-out by the oppressed, repurposed as a source of religious fervor that was one step away from revolutionary confidence: Vesey, Turner, and Gullah Jack Pritchard were the names of just some who crossed this crucial threshold with the wind of faith at their backs. “The church was both opiate and inspiration,” and here Marx’s oft-misunderstood phrase found a powerful grounding: “For the slave church was not only a center for underground slave plottings against the master class, but the focal point for an entire subterranean culture the blacks sought to construct beyond the white man’s control.” 41 While masters hired preachers to sermonize on the virtues of submissiveness, laws were passed requiring white oversight of religious meetings, and clandestine places of collective worship known as hush arbors (or hush harbors) were criminalized. Increased surveillance only made the visible invisibility of the coded language in slave spirituals like “Wade in the Water” and “Swing Low” all the more crucial.

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In the words of Frederick Douglass, “Every tone was a testimony against slavery.” 42

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Women have long been privileged targets of colonial and racial violence—a powerful spinal column that needs to be fractured as part of a broader attack on the community-in-resistance. But just as often, women have also taken advantage of their peculiar double invisibility to fight back in ways devastating to the colonial and racial orders. There is no doubt that in the annals of Indigenous, anticolonial, and slave resistance, women played an active but unrecognized role on all fronts. In the words of one recent effort to correct the historical record: “Women warriors planned and led slave revolts on slave ships during the Middle Passage. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history.” 43 From the earliest days of settler colonialism, women “posed an obstacle to US annexation of Indigenous lands,” often owing to the matriarchal authority they enjoyed in many communities, so even “more so than Indigenous men, the subordination of Indigenous women was about realizing profits in the fur trade.” 44 As Audra Simpson has argued, the “Indian woman’s body in settler regimes” is the symbolic equivalent to “land itself, the dangerous possibility of reproducing Indian life, and most dangerously, other political orders.” 45 If rape can thus be understood, in Sarah Deer’s words, as “a metaphor for the entire concept of colonialism,” settlement and expansion have always gone hand in hand with concrete sexual violence as well, from the spread of “man camps” and the genocidal targeting of Indigenous families through “involuntary sterilization, forced abortion, prohibition of marriage, and long-term separation of men and women”—not

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to mention the overt theft of children.46 When French Canadian trader Toussaint Charbonneau, best known for kidnapping Sacagawea as his “wife,” was caught raping an Ojibwe woman’s daughter, “The woman stabbed Charbonneau with a canoe awl, ‘a fate highly deserved for his brutality.’ ” 47 In slave communities, too, sexual violence was essential to what Angela Davis describes as the “counter-insurgency” of the master class. To attack “the black female as potential insurgent” was to target “the slave community as a whole,” in no small part because of the powerful role women played in the work of social reproduction—from “sundown to sunup,” in Rawick’s phrase—that gave stability to that community.48 Davis, herself a prisoner of US counterinsurgency at the time, concludes: “The sexual contest was one of many arenas in which the black woman had to prove herself as a warrior against oppression.” 49 And like the Ojibwe woman who stabbed Charbonneau, prove herself she did, despite the consequences: “Harriet Jacobs secreted herself in a small attic for years to avoid her master’s sexual demands. Sukie Abbott slapped her master and pushed his naked buttocks into a pot of boiling soap. The famous (or infamous) Celias—Celia Bryan of Florida and Celia Newsome of Missouri—never reconciled themselves to being sex slaves and resisted mightily. Both killed their masters and were tried and hanged for it.” After multiple attempts to stop her master’s assaults, Newsome “killed him, crushing his skull with a heavy stick. She then burned his body to hide evidence of the crime.” Bryan’s assailant was her own biological father, by whom she bore four children, until one day when “Celia and her owner-father got into a fight while working a field together. Celia picked up a hoe and bludgeoned Jacob Bryan to death.”50

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Women’s resistance to slavery and colonization, however, did not always take the same overt forms as that of the men. Women were rarely insurrectionists and runaways, so tracking women’s resistance requires an attentiveness to what Stephanie Camp described as “subtler forms” of resistance, and specifically those “hidden and informal aspects” doubly obscured by gender and race that were key to building communal alternatives.51 Enslaved women were essential to underground resistance, helping to establish a “rival geography” of “clandestine trails to secret meeting places,” an “unstable underground” that helped others escape and thereby provided a broad reservoir of resistance.52 And we should not forget that Jacobs’s famous “loophole of retreat,” which has come to signify for many the limits of Black women’s freedom, was not only a refuge but also a hidden observation point from which to survey and map her world in accordance with her second sight.53 Regardless, the cunning with which women turned the parameters of their subjection into a weapon was unparalleled. As far back as slave ships, “Women, who were allowed more run of the deck than men, sometimes managed to snatch up unattended arms and ammunition and thus precipitate an armed struggle.”54 In colonial Saint-Domingue, enslaved women poisoned Black and white children alike, and “Negro midwives” were blamed for unleashing an epidemic of “jaw-sickness” that killed “nearly one-third of the children born on plantations.”55 In the US, “From 1785 to 1859, twenty slave women were either banished or executed for infanticide,” and some—like Margaret Garner, the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s Beloved—even killed their own children rather than see them live as slaves.56 Enslaved women took full advantage of the intimacy of the roles imposed upon them: as domestic workers, they were often arsonists; as what we would today call care workers, they would

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often turn to poison. The “hellish practice of poisoning” became so widespread and provoked such panic that several states instituted the death penalty for poisoning attempts, with many women implicated.57 “Into the master’s food or drink house servants covertly slipped such poisons as laudanum, ratsbane, and the seed of the jimson weed. It was a form of revenge peculiarly suited to women.”58 As Davis describes it, “Black women often poisoned the food and set fire to the houses of their masters. For those who were also employed as domestics these particular overt forms of resistance were especially available.”59 In the mideighteenth century, moreover, “Suspicious blazes had become Manhattan’s frequent companion, as alleged acts of arson were thought to be lit by discontented Africans, with women playing a leading role,” and “so widespread was arson that for a time the American Fire Insurance Company refused to insure any property in the South,” leading to both an increase in brick construction and the invention of the fire escape.60 Throughout the long Haitian Revolution, moreover, women also played a direct role in armed combat, sometimes openly in accordance with egalitarian gender norms in Africa, sometimes disguised as men.61 But just as often, they took advantage of the subterfuge afforded by their gender, working as coquines (prostitutes) or domestic workers for the French while engaging in poisoning, arson, smuggling, and gun-running in the name of the Revolution. “Some women prostituted themselves to French soldiers in the towns, asked for cartridges as payment, then passed the ammunition to mountain rebels.” 62 So effective were women in facilitating rebel communications that the French eventually cracked down, executing many as spies, and targeting in particular the Vodou priestesses known as mambos who “had underpinned conspiracies to revolt against or poison planters.” 63

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Fanon famously showed how the gendered dynamics of the Muslim veil shifted in accordance with the strategic requirements of the Algerian Revolution, although he is far from the only one to have done so.64 Where the veil helped Algerian women to transport weapons through checkpoints undetected, it was worn. When the French became suspicious of the practice, however, the veil was strategically abandoned, and like so many tiny volcanoes, bombs were instead transported in fashionable handbags carried by unveiled women in European-style clothing—a tactic vividly portrayed in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. This strategic deployment of what we might describe as a sort of multifaceted, gendered cunning would long outlive formal slavery and colonial domination, moreover. In a study of late nineteenth-century violence and criminality among Black women, for example, Kali Gross documents how “badgers” posing as sex workers took advantage of the racial and gendered stereotypes imposed upon them to manipulate, entrap, and rob white men—“tricking the tricks—and often to avoid punishment by a criminal justice system more concerned with the immorality of the men.” 65 Their “cunning and ingenuity” were skills honed from their own “experiences of social alienation and violence,” and “they took up the slurs” used against them “as armament and transformed the themes contributing to black female victimization into offensive tactical maneuvers.” 66 This was far from an isolated practice: a 1968 article in Maclean’s describes the “sexual warfare” of Vietnamese sex workers in similarly anxious terms as a sort of sexual fifth column preying on the innate weaknesses of occupying American soldiers. Engaging in “a sort of erotic guerrilla warfare which, in its methods and results, can be compared with the tactics of the Viet Cong,” theirs was “a masterpiece of Vietnamese cunning.” 67

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If a spook is a spy is a specter haunting white supremacy, Harriet Tubman was all three at once. From the elusively gendered “Moses” who tirelessly haunted the South and spirited slaves away on the Underground Railroad to the Union spy and commander during the Civil War, Tubman epitomized subterranean resistance in “her spycraft, her cunning mind, her secret ways.” 68 After her skull was cracked by an overseer at age thirteen, many assumed she was “half-witted” but this was “an assumption the wily Harriet encouraged” and turned to her advantage thanks to “a natural talent for acting.” She was, in Lerone Bennett’s words, a “guerrilla in the cottonfields” with “a personal radar that never failed” and “tactical ability approaching genius.” 69 And like all good guerrillas, Tubman’s astonishing effectiveness as an Underground Railroad conductor was due precisely to her intimate knowledge of the terrain. In her native Maryland, she knew every secret pathway and could identify valuable curative roots, but even elsewhere she had a knack for tapping into the local network of Black cunning. In the South Carolina Lowcountry, for example, where many slaves spoke an impenetrable dialect known as Gullah, Tubman built relationships with local guides who knew the language and territory, leading to the Combahee River raid during the Civil War in which she personally oversaw the liberation of nearly eight hundred “contrabands.” Tubman was far from alone. Robert Smalls learned navigation as a slave before stealing a confederate ship and steering it to the Union side. He and other contrabands became a crucial resource for the North because of their intimate knowledge of the complex terrain of the southern coastline and barrier islands, alerting captains to the nuances of the tides, sandbars, and the

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location of mines. After a raid against the former plantation of one of his own Black troops, Union colonel Thomas Higginson insisted that the superiority of Black soldiers—the subject of acrimonious debate at the time—“lies simply in the fact that they know the country, while white troops do not.”70 There were other reasons, of course, but this was certainly one. Black spies formed part of a broader intelligence apparatus known as the “Black dispatches,” which depended on the double invisibility of domestic labor and the gendered hubris of the white blindspot. Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy white socialite, used her privileged position as a cover for a spy ring known as the Richmond Underground, disguising spies as domestic workers in her home while sending others to work for Confederate officials. Mary Elizabeth Bowser, a former slave with a photographic memory, is considered by many the “boldest spy of the war” for having infiltrated the mansion of Confederate president Jefferson Davis: “No one would notice her. After all, she was a young female slave who could not read or write. . . . Everything she saw on the Rebel president’s desk she could repeat word for word.”71 Mary Touvestre was also a housekeeper whose owner—a Norfolk Naval Yard engineer—“talked when she was around because they considered her too ignorant to be able to understand what they were saying to each other.”72 Touvestre stole the plans for a new ironclad ship and ran. And Union troops entrenched at Fredricksburg began to receive curiously accurate intelligence from a runaway named Dabney, who soon explained a communication system that his wife had devised. A domestic laborer behind Confederate lines, she would hang the laundry out to dry in such a way as to send coded messages across the river to aid the cause of the Union. Such was the depth of racial

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and gendered invisibility, moreover, that one white spy, Sarah Emma Edmonds, even enlisted in the Union Army as a man before then using blackface to cross enemy lines: “Confederate soldiers ignored her, seeing her as just another slave.”73 To invisibilize the slave as “spook” thus became a powerfully self-fulfilling prophecy, making them the most effective spies against the institution of slavery. “They had lived their lives as invisible people,” and “since most people in the South did not believe a slave was clever enough to be a spy,” enslaved people “uncovered information that only they could get.”74 These “Black spies worked in the darkness of secrecy and prejudice,” and it was in the second sight afforded by that darkness that they sharpened their weapons.75

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c h a p t e r f ou r

The Decolonial Ambush

“This is like a volcano,” one Ferguson resident put it. “Once the chemicals start reacting, it takes off.” Much the same could be said for riots in Baltimore and Minneapolis, and so many other explosive moments in US history.1 But if riots are routinely described as erupting, the opposite is equally striking. Google the generic phrase “riots erupted” and you will see that nearly every result refers to Black rebellions: Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Detroit, Rochester, and Chicago; Watts in 1965; the nationwide riots triggered by Martin Luther King’s assassination and by the knockout blow Jack Johnson had delivered to the “great white hope” Jim Jeffries half a century earlier. Black riots erupt and erupting riots are Black, even when they aren’t. The 1992 Rodney King rebellion in Los Angeles, for example, was a fully multiracial affair: Latinx people made up a far higher proportion of those arrested than Black people, but such is the symbolic power of anti-Blackness in the United States. In reality, however, it’s just as common for riots to mark the emergence of anticolonial revolutions across the Third 64

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World. More galling than this erasure is the history of the phrase “race riot,” which not only strips away the agency of the oppressed but even conflates rebellions against racial oppression with what are effectively white pogroms. Little surprise that this sleight of hand gained force after Emancipation. The 1873 massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, for example, was nothing less than an armed assault on Black freedom, in no small part because it took as its target the sole force—Black militia members— capable of making Reconstruction a durable reality. Black riots are nothing new but always a shock. And yet the conditions that create them are well known, the inaccessibility of channels for addressing them more than evident. The invisibility imposed by the colonial blindspot, in other words, is radically material, obscuring the dramatic inequalities and suffering among poor communities of color while blocking even a minimal recognition among those in power that there is even a problem in need of solving. The conditions that sparked the Ferguson rebellion, for example, are “not that complicated,” according to Sam Fulwood of the Center for American Progress: “Unless we’re prepared to attack poverty in our local communities and urban areas we’re going to have these things bubbling up to the surface, sometimes erupting in a volcanic way, and we will continue to scratch our head and try to understand why this happened.”2 For James Baldwin, the apparently faux shock of many white Americans toward the explosivity of Black (and Brown) rebellion is in fact a very real shock triggered when the thick blinders of whiteness fall away. One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. Before the dust has settled or the blood congeals, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions

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66  /  The Decolonial Ambush are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men. Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straightforward statement, containing only seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable.3

As Fanon adds, however, this explosiveness is no accident and indeed a subjective necessity for those trapped in nonbeing. By condemning the racialized to subterranean nonexistence, by trapping them forcibly underground, colonialism blocks all access to reciprocity and thus demands an eruption as the only possible path toward liberation. “In order to break the vicious circle,” Fanon writes, “he explodes,” thereby laying the basis for a struggle among equals.4 In other words, the shock of appearance varies in direct proportion to the depth of nonbeing, and this shock is a testament to the veracity of the struggle. Accordingly, the point is not to decry this shock, much less the colonial blindspot that creates it, but instead to embrace the element of surprise that the decolonial ambush exemplifies. The provocation is always-already there and waiting, and the foot soldiers of the color line and colonialism alike—the police—are always eager to drop the match. “What ignited the riots was almost always an incident of police brutality,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes.5 In Watts it was the 1965 traffic stop of Marquette Frye and the ensuing scuffle that “served as the catalyst for a volcanic reaction that had long been simmering beneath the surface.” 6 As Taylor describes it, “For six days, an estimated ten thousand African Americans battled with police in an unprecedented rebellion against the effects of racial discrimination.”7 But she insists that, while sparked by police brutality, Black (and Brown) rebellions are always about much

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more as well: housing was and remains a persistent underlying cause, and as the opening scene of Richard Wright’s Native Son makes painfully clear, rats were “the most visceral example of the unequal living conditions forced onto Black people.”8 Despite all the studies, reports, statistics, and federal commissions, much of white America has remained blind to otherwise obvious motivations of Black resistance, and that blindspot extends to the impact of the rebellions as well. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of an entire academic-mediatic cottage industry dedicated to condemning rioting through dubious statistical analyses that miss the social forest for the electoral trees. Omar Wasow, for example, has argued that the riots of the 1960s were the primary cause of the conservative backlash of the following decade, and with every new rebellion his work is gleefully embraced by media talking heads who would feel the same regardless of what the data shows. When Wasow released an early version of his findings amid the 2015 Baltimore riots, for example, Jonathan Chait was quick to cite him.9 And when Wasow’s more extensive research was finally published on the eve of the Minneapolis rebellions, Ross Douthat immediately seized upon it to make “The Case against Riots.”10 Media opportunism aside, Wasow’s conclusions rely on an incredibly narrow analytic frame that surgically excises electoral politics from its broader social and historic context: measuring so-called backlash in terms of voting patterns and little else. But radical change has rarely been measured in such terms or explained by control variables in regression analyses. Taking a broader view, Taylor tells a far different story in which the Black struggle of the 1960s, and the multiracial coalition it helped spark across society, “pushed mainstream politics to the left.” It was only through militant struggle that movements were able to

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pierce the veil of invisibility, revealing the conditions of Black life and “knitting together a common Black view of Black oppression while simultaneously providing an alternative understanding for white people.” This broader shift was visible in opinion polls: a 1967 Harris poll taken in the aftermath of the rebellions showed that a full 40 percent of whites had come to recognize that riots were a response to structural problems. “There was a nuanced public response to the riots in the late 1960s,” Taylor concludes, “not just a backlash.”11 In societies governed by the colonial blindspot, segregation, and the painful couplet of invisibility-hypervisibility, this should be no surprise at all, since barriers to visibility and humanity needed to be exploded for any conversation to begin. In societies marked by the denial of humanity, in which channels for concrete change were systematically blocked, it took a truly shocking display to make clear that things couldn’t go on as they were. And if the rebellions of the 1960s provided just such a shock, the same can be said of our recent cycle of struggle, from Oscar Grant to Trayvon Martin and from Ferguson to Baltimore and Minneapolis. Here, too, the impact has been undeniable: the period stretching from Ferguson to Baltimore saw a 7 percent increase in those who believed race was still an issue and an astonishing decline in the number of white Americans who saw police killings as “isolated incidents”—from 58 percent to 36 percent in less than a year.12 The rebellions unleashed in Minneapolis and across the nation after the murder of George Floyd have only reinforced these fundamental lessons. Despite an entire chorus of political leaders, academics, and media talking heads once again insisting that rioting is counterproductive and produces no results, Minneapolis has set off a chain reaction of material and symbolic victories with

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no sign of backlash in sight. Police departments nationwide are suddenly on the defensive and fighting off pressure to defund and reform. Amid the broad wave of resistance sparked not only by Floyd’s death but also by that of Breonna Taylor in Louisville in March and the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia in February, the television show Cops was quickly canceled, NASCAR banned the Confederate flag, and monuments to slavery and colonization were torn down or quietly removed across the country and the globe. In short, the symbolic trappings of white power are in full retreat, driven by a feedback loop of militant rebellion and public opinion. Immediate polls showed that an astounding 74 percent saw Floyd’s death as the result of racial injustice—an increase of 30 percentage points since the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner—and the number of respondents seeing such incidents as isolated continued to drop, this time to 26 percent.13 Some 54 percent of Americans felt that protesters were justified in burning down the Minneapolis Third Police Precinct building, and according to the New York Times, support for Black Lives Matter increased almost as much in two short weeks as in the previous two years; those considering racism a “big problem” increased 26 percent since 2015; 57 percent of respondents felt the anger of the rebellions was completely justified and 21 percent somewhat justified—78 percent in total. In sum, “Since the death of George Floyd . . . public opinion on race, criminal justice and the Black Lives Matter movement has leaped leftward.”14 While these numbers may be ephemeral they are also unprecedented, pointing toward a more fundamental shift just below the surface of which the “backlash” thesis tells us precious little. Indeed, statisticians have been left scratching their heads as to why these indicators have shifted so dramatically while

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American public opinion on other matters moves notoriously slowly. Black rebellions past and present have shown their ability to shake white Americans’ existing beliefs while “providing an alternative understanding” of the world—a bridge to understanding Black realities. Statistical arguments will never grasp the undeniable power of Black movements and struggles in the US—a quality that forever outstrips quantity— or explain their undeniable ability, in Taylor’s words, to throw “the entire mythology of the United States—freedom, democracy, and endless opportunity—into chaos.”15 This chaos is a reflection of the shock provoked by Black struggles, and this shock in turn varies in direct relation to the invisibility and exclusion that Black and colonized people are subjected to every day. Preaching that rioting is counterproductive from a comfortable perch in academia means falling into the most powerful form of condescension: tut-tutting at the unruly masses while offering no alternative and refusing to confront the undeniable reality that nothing else has worked. It tells us little about the powerful movement, the flowing lava just beneath the surface of voting data, waiting to rend the earth asunder. And regardless, you can’t blame a volcano for erupting. It has erupted, and needed to do so; what next?

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, the very metaphor of the underground as a space of political and cultural resistance finds its origins in nothing less than the clandestine cunning and concealed obscurity of the Underground Railroad, which was “popularized as a metaphor by viral newspaper coverage” in the 1840s, much of which portrayed it “as an actual subterranean train.”16 The emer-

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gence of this metaphor coincided, moreover, with the popularity of Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, a tourist destination in which the racial and physical undergrounds coincided. As Lara Langer Cohen argues, central to Mammoth’s mythos was the fact that “its guides were all enslaved men” whom many visitors reported to have been “nearly as captivating as the cave itself.” White writers “persistently identified the racialized bodies of the guides with the space of the cave.”17 This racist conflation was as unsurprising as it was self-defeating, however, an inadvertent testament to the Black cunning that the racialization of the underground sought pyrrhically to contain. The underground is Black because to be Black is to be subterranean to Being, and from this potent intersection of ontology and geology, a chorus of echoes resound off the cavernous walls. Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground both predated and anticipated Ellison’s Invisible Man—in Wright’s description of his protagonist in those same terms, but more importantly in his descent into the underworld of the sewers. In Wright’s case, however, the underground provided not just shelter but an omniscient position much like Harriet Jacobs’s loophole of retreat, a strategic position from which to act.18 After Wright’s publisher rejected the text, it was condemned—much like The Spook Who Sat By the Door—to its own subterranean existence, unpublished in its full form until recently. To this we could add an entire litany of theoretical concepts from the “abyss” (Édouard Glissant), to the “underlife” (Sylvia Wynter) and the “undercommons” (Stefano Harney and Fred Moten).19 If these concepts all bear something of the desolation of Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing,” they reflect its spring-loaded tension as well, the cunning ambush that emerges ex nihilo like a mutiny from the floating underground of the slave ship’s hold.

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The failure of the Black underground as an ontological containment strategy is visible even in that most potent metaphor for Black (and more broadly, working-class) subjection in the US: the mudsill. Put forth in its strongest form by James Henry Hammond in 1858 as a last-ditch, manic defense of the imperiled slave system, the concept of the mudsill denotes not a structure’s foundation per se but the very lowest level upholding that foundation. Every society, Hammond contended, needs a class characterized by “vigor, docility, fidelity” whose task it is “to perform the drudgery of life,” and which “constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill.”20 The mudsill theory contained two fatal weaknesses, however. First, in his zeal to underline northern hypocrisy, Hammond enacted the very class unity that the slave system sought to dispel: workers in the North, he argued, also constituted a mudsill class and were “essentially slaves.” While Hammond sought to plug the leak thus opened by insisting that Black slaves were more naturally suited to this role, it was too little and too late. “Workers appropriated the mudsill label, transforming an insulting epithet into a badge of pride,” and many a Union recruit marched into battle reciting songs and poems like “March of the Mud-Sills.”21 The “sneering and insulting epithet burned the quick sensibilities of the mechanics, the artisans, the farmers and the laborers of the nation, as molten lava [!] might burn their physical frames, and they never forgot nor forgave the atrocious and cowardly insult, until they lit their pathway through South Carolina by the light of blazing homes and burning palaces.”22 While some workers no doubt found it galling to be compared to Black slaves, the bridge of mudsill unity “inspired some soldiers

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to assist fugitive slaves, not least because they savored opportunities to humiliate lordly masters.”23 Second, mudsill theory grants a counterintuitive power to the lowest of the low, that foundation-beneath-a-foundation without which no society could exist, thus begging the question: What would happen if this mudsill were to give way or rise up, revealing as it betrayed its own role in upholding the material and symbolic foundations of white supremacist society? Materially, as labor, source of dispossession, exploitation, and extraction, a strategic position revealed in the withdrawal of slave labor in the Civil War—Du Bois’s “general strike,” which doomed the southern war effort. Symbolically, as both the ideological linchpin and consequently the Achilles’ heel revealed by the human-all-toohuman valor of slaves themselves as soldiers and the ability of Black movements to throw the foundations of American society into disarray.24 In Moten’s words, Blackness is “ontology’s anti- and antefoundation, ontology’s underground,” and what a thing it is when this subfoundation cracks, buckles, and bursts forth.25

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Resistance has long surfaced from the underground—literally, figuratively, but often both at the same time. Think of C. L. R. James’s description of revolutions—those moments “when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption”— not simply as the product of a Marxian base-superstructure relationship but as something more deeply grounded: “projections of the sub-soil from which they came.”26 Think of the tragic myth of John Henry, whose showdown with a steam drill has come to abstractly represent the struggle of man versus machine and the contradictions of modernity. But

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as it turns out, the real John Henry was a Black man convicted under dubious circumstances in the scarcely postabolition South and leased to the C&O Railroad for forced labor. While his image was literally whitewashed by Klan-affiliated folksingers, communists turned John Henry into a Black proletarian folk hero before the Red Scare, after which “the ballad of John Henry gradually became emptied of its racial and political significance.”27 Just as convict leasing was the overlooked link between slavery and mass incarceration, fueling capital’s own reconstruction, the legend of John Henry would never fully lose its underground cunning. In white supremacist society, even “language goes underground” in dialect, song, and myth, and John Henry’s subterranean heroism continues to infiltrate children’s textbooks and permeate American folk culture.28 Or think of the centrality of underground resistance in two recent films: Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Jordan Peele’s Us, both premised on radical inversions whereby the last become the first, the upending of the underground and the aboveground in the struggle against racial capitalism and colonialism. For Parasite, which commentators have rightly interpreted as grappling simultaneously with “Japanese settler colonialism, US military rule, [and] the demands of globalized capitalism,” Bong’s constant foregrounding of colonial symbols is undergirded by a spatial geography of colonial nonexistence.29 The poor live not only in basements but further down still, where in an opening scene they are fumigated just like the other parasitic bugs—part of the “landscape,” in Fanon’s words, the flora and the fauna. But after a poor family surreptitiously infiltrates a superwealthy household in the guise of a variety of domestic roles, it becomes clear that the true parasites are the rich themselves.

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When the poor flee amid a downpour, down, down, down, only to find their apartment flooded, the complicity of coloniality and climate disaster is evident in the difference between high ground and low, where falling water flows, pools, and drowns. In a fit of anger, the father of the poor family fatally stabs his boss before, like Ellison’s narrator, taking up an underground existence in a basement hidden beneath the luxurious home, from which he emerges only occasionally as a ghostly apparition. But despite this explosive clash of retributive violence, Parasite is an arguably pessimistic film in which the poor squabble for crumbs and the situation seems inescapable. The viewer is led along to believe that the poor son, by playing by the rules of capitalism, eventually becomes rich enough to buy the home and free his father from his underground prison. But in a final gut punch, it turns out that this was simply a daydream, and Parasite seems to foreclose on the possibility of subterranean resistance against those true parasites preying on the life of the people. If Get Out was Jordan Peele’s Black Skin, White Masks, then Us is his Wretched of the Earth, a shift from the “sunken place” of nonbeing to the volcanic appearance of collective resistance. Here the dramatic inversion is even more shocking than in Parasite because it traffics in our own deeply ingrained distrust of the monstrous underground, beginning from the very first words in a movie with few words: “There are thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the continental United States. . . . Many have no known purpose at all.”30 In a flashback to a night on the Santa Cruz boardwalk, we overhear that the young protagonist Adelaide had been scared by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video: “You hid your eyes when the people came out the ground,” her mother remarks. Her father is supposed to be watching her but is

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instead playing Whac-a-Mole—a testament if ever there was to the futility of resisting subterranean forces. Adelaide wanders into a hall of mirrors, a portal to the underground, and is forever transformed. Fast-forward to Adelaide as an adult, anxiously returning to Santa Cruz for vacation, where her family is attacked by uncanny, scissor-wielding doppelgängers whose identities are a mystery until Red—Adelaide’s counterpart—delivers a long soliloquy. They are the “Tethered,” Red explains, the result of an experiment gone wrong, an attempt to clone people and use their Tethered others to control them like puppets. But the experiment failed, and these living shadows—Red’s daughter is even named Umbrae—were abandoned to nonbeing and condemned to conditions that echo the Manichaeism of Fanon’s phenomenology of colonialism: “When the girl ate, her food was given to her, warm and tasty, but when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbits, raw and bloody. On Christmas the girl received wonderful toys, soft and cushy, but the shadow’s toys were so sharp and cold they’d slice through her fingers when she played with them.”31 And echoing Ellison’s Invisible Man, Red muses: “We’re human too, you know. Eyes. Teeth. Hands. Blood. Exactly like you.”32 “The only way for a soul to truly be free,” Red declares, “is to sever the tie”—what she calls “The Untethering,” and which evokes the anticolonial strategy of “de-linking” from the colonial metropole.33 And so she has planned a collective rebellion that will turn the world upside-down, in which the last will truly become the first: “I didn’t just need to kill you. I needed to make a statement that the whole world would see. . . . It’s our time now. Our time up there.” But in a final inversion we discover that years before, Red and Adelaide had switched places in the hall of mirrors. Adelaide was in fact Red—a

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smiling spy who spent decades playing nice to escape her condemnation—and Red was Adelaide, whose knowledge of both the above and the below would make her the redeemer of the Tethered. For Fanon, “The last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists”—and Us tests the limits of this claim, both in the subterranean depths of the inversion and the monstrously murderous stakes.34 The cunning of Us lies in the powerful shock of realizing that the monsters are not monsters at all. “Is it the end of the world?” Adelaide’s daughter asks as the rebellion of the Tethered becomes unstoppable, to which her brother responds: “Nah. The world isn’t gonna end. It’s just gonna be different.” And for Fanon as for his teacher Césaire, the end of the world—the abolition of the underground as a space of nonbeing and the building of something radically different—was and remains “the only thing in the world worth starting.”35

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Neither the condemnation to subterranean nonbeing nor the volcanic potential of what lies beneath is exclusive to Black America; rather, both are embedded within broader colonial histories. Think, for example, of Mariano Azuela’s classic account of the Mexican Revolution Los de abajo, translated as The Underdogs but meaning more literally “those from below,” those who continue to suffer regardless of who takes power or by what means. One character, Valderrama—a mad poet, a vagrant, and a drunk—paradoxically evokes while disavowing the subterranean nature of a revolution that breaks the surface only to forget its own source: “Villa? Obregon? Carranza? What’s the difference? I love the revolution like a volcano in eruption; I love the

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volcano because it’s a volcano, the revolution because it’s the revolution! What do I care about the stones left above or below after the cataclysm? What are they to me?”36 Or think of those Bolivian miners often seen hurling dynamite during militant labor protests today. In 1985, the state-run mining company was privatized and neoliberal reformers saw their chance to break the miners’ union—some twenty thousand were laid off. By a stroke of historical cunning, however, those banished from the mines carried with them a history of union organizing that would provide the organizational backbone for the coca farmers’ movement and the Indigenous neighborhood assemblies that eventually propelled Evo Morales to the presidency.37 From dynamite to the coca leaves that miners chewed for stamina while deep within the earth, those condemned to life underground always reach for the weapons at hand. And as Bolivia also reminds us, sometimes the underground sits high aboveground—as in the militant Indigenous stronghold of El Alto perched above La Paz, nearly three miles above sea level, from which ambush has often rained down. So too the figure of the morne, Martinique’s volcanic mountains, in Aimé Césaire’s Notebook on a Return to the Native Land, which like so many “shackled volcanoes” eventually “will explode.”38 Or consider Mexico’s largely Indigenous Zapatista rebels in southern Chiapas state, who speak of a similarly subfoundational position they call “Basement Mexico.” The enigmatic Subcomandante Marcos narrates the class structure of Mexican society through a metaphorical descent much like Dante’s nine circles of hell—from Penthouse Mexico down to Middle Mexico, and on into Lower Mexico (Azuela’s Mexico de abajo). This is the poor and working-class Mexico that, according to traditional Marxist accounts, marks the lowest of the low, nothing to lose but its

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chains. Marcos would appear to agree: “Lower Mexico has absolutely nothing,” he writes. But he doesn’t stop there: “Lower Mexico is really far down, so far down that it seems that there is no way to go farther down, so far down that one can hardly see that little door that leads to . . . Basement Mexico.”39 Basement Mexico is Indigenous Mexico and thus represents, in Moten’s terms, both “anti- and antefoundation.” It “came first. When Mexico was not yet,” but “for the rest of the country, it does not count—it does not produce, sell, or buy—that is, it does not exist.” 40 Thus what first appeared to be a loose architectural metaphor is instead a precise parsing of the difference between those exploited within the (capitalist) system and those subject to (colonial-racial) exclusion, invisibility, and nonexistence. “In Basement Mexico one lives and dies between mud and blood,” mud here marking—as with the mudsill—the very limit of Being, but also the secret power of its subterranean location. “Hidden, but in its foundation, the contempt that this Mexico suffers will permit it to organize itself and shake up [sacudir] the entire system. Its burden will be the possibility of freeing itself. . . . It will explode.” 41 And, with Marx but beyond him, it is Basement Mexico that truly “has nothing to lose and everything to win.” 42 In this appeal to subterranean forces, the Zapatistas echo Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s description of the submerged precolonial undercommons that he calls “deep Mexico” or México profundo, which persists and resists the elite nationalist project of an “imaginary Mexico.” 43 Or the veritable obsession with all things volcanic of the self-styled Dr. Atl, a key participant in the Mexican Revolution and later mentor to Mexican Modernists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, who like others associated the resilience of subjugated Indigenous peoples with their semivolcanic source. Little surprise, then,

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that the preferred metaphors of the Zapatistas are consistently seismic in nature: when they rose up on the first day of 1994, “the entire country remembered that there was a basement” and they “shook the country awake.” 44 In the words of filmmaker Salvador Carrasco, “Between the Zapatistas and the Popocatepetl volcano, it seems that Mexico can’t wait to erupt.” 45 Scarcely five years before the Zapatistas and not two thousand miles to the southeast, Venezuela too had been shaken awake. The Caribbean, heated crucible of modernity itself, had long tossed glowing embers in all directions. In 1795, news from Haiti and France had helped to ignite a rebellion in Venezuela led by José Leonardo Chirino, which rallied slaves, Indigenous people, and poor whites against Spanish rule. And not weeks after Toussaint’s ascent to power in 1801, Black Venezuelans reportedly celebrated with a pun on his name: “Look to the firebrand,” in which tisón means “something both black and incendiary.” 46 And as the Zapatistas were sowing the underground in Chiapas, Venezuela was detonating in a powerfully decolonial ambush against neoliberalism and nonbeing alike, its invisibilized and subterranean constituents thrown into motion by a sudden rise in gasoline prices—and the perception that the petroleum found in the country’s literal, natural subsoil belonged to all of them. This was the mass rebellion known as the Caracazo, in which the heretofore invisible poor and racialized Venezuelan masses flowed down from their homes in the hilltop shantytowns of the cerros to flood the valley floor like so much molten lava. Dismissed as “marginals” and relegated by segregation to the margins of being, many nevertheless knew their enemies as intimately as the house slaves and Black spies of the past: as domestic workers, delivery people, and security guards, they entered and exited the homes of the wealthy and powerful unnoticed. The

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second sight they possessed and the cunning it reflected were on full display in this momentary ambush, the dramatic shock it provoked, and the decades of sustained grassroots organizing that followed. Today, the Caracazo is described alternatively—and revealingly—as the Sacudón, the same term frequently invoked by the Zapatistas, which evokes nothing so much as the violent and unforeseen shaking of an earthquake, tremor, or even a rumbling Vesuvius. It was this explosive moment that unleashed the chain reaction that catapulted Hugo Chávez into power, that set in motion the Bolivarian Revolution and continues to underwrite its decolonial and antiracist dynamics. Looking back, Chávez himself described the Caracazo as “the eruption of a volcano that had been accumulating for many years,” and it was not the only time he would appeal to this decolonial ur-metaphor.47 One photojournalist on the scene described the rioting as having “the naturalness of a volcano,” and in the words of an Argentine anarchist present at the time, “That day a hidden majority appeared, spilling the lava of a volcano that had for decades threatened the valley with its devastating eruption.” 48 Other descriptions point similarly to the colonial nonbeing of the Caracazo’s constituents, as in the starkly desubjectified description of “when the hills came down”—a phrase that erases the already invisible, as Chapuy’s paintings had done of SaintDomingue.49 What this meant of course was that those people dismissed as “marginals” came down from their homes in the precarious hilltops ringing the capital city, breaking down the apartheid walls of segregation and exclusion that had until then cut them right to the ontological bone. As is so often the case, the impact of this weeklong riot was best gauged by the panicked reactions of those who feared it most, with some academic commentators

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mourning the “death” of a social harmony that even many elites admitted was purely mythical, premised as it was on the invisibility of the majority.50 What better testament to the power of the decolonial ambush than to shatter the illusory myths of harmony by simply appearing? The folksinger Alí Primera described this radically marginalized condition well in a song aptly entitled “I Come from Where You’ve Never Gone,” in which he insists that the “truth” of Venezuela lies in these same hills, in the “other Venezuela” so invisibilized by exclusion as to require the statement and restatement of its existence. “Without any reason to exist,” Primera tells us, “it exists” nonetheless, and the “muddy” or “earthy children” (the niños terrosos) who live there are so liminally human that he must similarly insist that they “are Venezuelan children” (niños venezolanos).51 Needless to say, those positioned on the other side of the ontological veil of marginality—those looking down on the city from above and unifying it in their daily labor, circulating down and across the valley floor as workers, housecleaners, cooks, security guards, street vendors—enjoyed a shrewd second sight. And the cunning of their vision would be fully revealed when those same niños terrosos ambushed and took over the city, shook it to its foundations and deeper still, and broke open a breach in history through which people and events have since rushed forth at breakneck speed. The consequences of their cunning have been no less than earth-shattering for Venezuela and the world, helping to set into motion a broader wave of global revolt against the neoliberal onslaught with which Venezuela’s own Bolivarian experiment would be interwoven. The neoliberal experiment first tested in blood and fire in the Chilean coup of 1973 and the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that it installed soon went global, but the age

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of austerity it promised was quickly transformed into an age of rebellions and riots—the weapon of choice among those most excluded—both across the Third World proper and in the global core itself, the return of the colonial repressed to London, Paris, Ferguson, Baltimore, and Minneapolis.52

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The decolonial ambush is a shock, and spiraling dialectically back toward where we started, Haiti was and remains the most shocking of shocks, an ambush of unmatched proportions. As Laurent Dubois puts it, “Despite all the talk of revolution, it was a shock when the slaves actually launched one.” Misled by their own most cherished myths and “the relations of kindness and charity they imagined they had with certain privileged slaves, many planters were shocked by the sudden transformation of these men and women into dangerous enemies.”53 This shock is even more pronounced when provoked by the docile and trusted “house slave.” The Big House, in Genovese’s words, “often resembled a battlefield,” and house slaves were often more troublesome rather than less. There exist many accounts of favorite family servants suddenly becoming murderous rebels armed with poison and fire, not least because they possessed a special knowledge of their masters’ vulnerable humanity. “The house servants,” Genovese writes, “knew their white folks too well to see them as ten feet tall.”54 As Césaire vividly describes in his 1941 “And the Dogs Were Silent,” a poem originally about none other than Toussaint himself, but that may as well have been about Nat Turner and so many other trusted slaves as well: “The master’s room was wide open. . . . I went in. It’s you, he said to me very calmly. . . . It was I, it was indeed me, I said to him, the good slave, the faithful slave, the

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slavish slave, and suddenly his eyes were two cockroaches frightened on a rainy day. . . . I struck, the blood spurted: that’s the only baptism I remember today.”55 But while the image of decolonial resistance by the lowest of the low might formally parallel Marx’s description of the proletariat as a universal class, we should not neglect the substantive supplement that it adds—the specificity that comes when “nothing to lose but their chains” is taken up as a banner by those held in literal bondage and subject to its afterlives. As a result, to Marx’s famous dictum on revolution as the midwife of history that releases a new world gestating within the old, we might respond that the shock of the decolonial ambush can bring something even more radically new into the world through a pregnancy unknown and a violent birth unanticipated—at least for one of the parties involved. Even the most militant of labor strikes are in some sense expected, no matter how systematically the bosses underestimate the workers. When the colonized subject springs forth from the zone of nonbeing, by contrast, it is not as a known adversary on a well-staked-out field of battle. The battlefield must itself first be prepared, “drawn up” in Fanon’s terms, by way of an explosive ambush that “identified the enemy and created a scandal” in a single stroke.56 It is no accident that the most unexpected of labor strikes are described as “wildcats,” or that an offensive by an imperceptible enemy, invisible because you have invisibilized them, is a different and wilder cat altogether. “If they want to kill us,” a South Carolinian slaveowner wrote from the precipice of history in 1861, “they can do it when they please, they are noiseless as panthers.”57 This point is as metaphorically potent as it is concrete: speaking of the wartime integration of auto factories, Rawick recalls that “when black workers acted . . . they did for the most part through the wildcat strike,” partly because of their own marginal

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position on the fringes of the labor force and unions alike.58 And class hatred predates capitalism, historically entwined with premodern notions of race that blend ideas of nobility, birth, blood, and stock, where the poor figure as bestial and shock at their resistance is all the more pronounced. Of such ideas, we find more than echoes in the inadvertently unifying figure of the mudsill, or in the many pejoratives deployed in Latin America today, where notions of blood purity have never lost their force, to describe the uppity poor, which make no attempt to distinguish the hatred of inborn class from that of biological race. At the intersection of the colonial blindspot and the decolonial ambush in which it is inadvertently complicit, we therefore find a peculiarly powerful kind of shock. The colonized and racialized emerge as an unseen enemy so disqualified, so scorned, and so invisibilized that, like a beast leaping from the dark, they appear only in outline and only when it’s too late. While it may seem jarring and ill-advised to describe people of color in the “zoological terms” through which they are, in Fanon’s words, “reduced to the state of an animal,” this is in fact precisely the point: to see from within the colonial mindset.59 When inanimate objects open their eyes, turn to us, and begin to speak, we cannot but be shocked and shaken by such an uncanny display. When they reach for our throats we cannot scream quickly enough to rescue our illusions. Slavery was long considered legitimate by the mere fact of its existence. In the words of Hegel: “If someone is a slave, his own will is responsible.” 60 When this circularity is exploded by slaves fighting (and killing) for freedom, the shock is severe indeed, as it was for those French troops confronting the valor of the rebellious soon-to-be-ex-slaves in what would soon become the independent Black nation of Haiti. “The French,” James writes, “who had

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fought on so many fields, had never seen fighting like this.” Their bravery moved even a French officer and supporter of slavery to remark: “But what men these blacks are! How they fight and how they die! One has to make war against them to know their reckless courage.” 61 In the words of the French commander Leclerc, “We have there a false idea of the Negro . . . a false idea of the country in which we fight and the men whom we fight against.” 62 For Du Bois, the seismic impact of the Black soldier of the Civil War was as undeniable as it was tragic: “Only murder makes men. The slave pleaded . . . and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he was a man!” 63 “If slaves will make good soldiers,” one Confederate politician unintentionally conceded, “our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” 64 And so it was. At the outset of decolonization, Fanon writes, “The guns go off by themselves” because violence has become “atmospheric,” saturating the very air that the colonized strain to breathe.65 Colonization and white supremacy are a form of asphyxiation, and we can say the same for Eric Garner, strangled by New York police, or George Floyd in Minneapolis, whose dying words were the same: “I can’t breathe.” But the guns also go off by themselves because by definition there is no fully human subject capable of pulling the trigger prior to it being pulled, and because the causes for the discharge are apparent only after the powder explodes but before the smoke clears. It is no accident, in other words, that breaking out of nonbeing so often takes the form of an explosion, a riot; that those in power are always astonished by resistance from an enemy unseen even as they are overseen; that the curse of condemnation to nonbeing might also contain a paradoxically cunning gift.

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Moles

In 1966, occupying US military forces built a base in the Cu� Chi District of what was then called Saigon, in what was then called South Vietnam. The Cu� Chi base came under immediate attack, but it wasn’t at all clear from where. “Black-clad guerrillas soon began organizing attacks on the base, popping out at night to blow up planes and steal weapons and equipment, including a tank, before disappearing into the darkness. The US military responded by declaring the area around Cu� Chi a ‘free fire’ zone and pounded it with artillery, bombs, and even napalm in hopes of destroying the Vietcong. Yet the raids continued: from their tunnels, the Vietnamese guerrillas could wait out US bombing raids and then prepare to strike again.” The tunnels, one National Liberation Front (NLF) officer later recalled, “were like a thorn stabbing the enemy in the eye” that the US military was unable to extricate. Between the literal and figurative undergrounds, the relationship was direct: thanks to the tunnels, communist forces were able to infiltrate the US base so thoroughly that, at one point, “all thirteen of the base’s 87

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barbers were members of the Vietcong.”1 In the words of one brigadier general, US troops “didn’t realize that they had bivouac’d on a volcano.”2 Tunnel warfare is as old as walls themselves, with specially trained sappers quite literally under-mining otherwise impenetrable fortifications, leading to their collapse, or—with the invention of gunpowder—their demolition from below. But tunnels have just as often been weapons of the weak. The Great Jewish Revolt of 66 CE was launched against the Romans from tunnels and caves, and survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising later fled through the Muranowski Tunnel to escape certain death at the hands of a later generation of would-be Romans. The undergrounding of the underground became even more urgent during and after the Korean War, as North Korean and Chinese forces dug in to evade US air supremacy, building “underground fortifications so extensive that for every mile of military front on the surface, there were two miles of underground tunnels—more than 300 miles in total.”3 The tunnels at Cu� Chi were first developed by the Viet Minh in the 1950s to fight the French occupation—with more than a bit of help from the Koreans. Legendary Vietnamese general Võ Nguyên Giáp recalled the importance of trenches and tunnels for defeating the superior French forces ensconced at Dien Bien Phu: “The fortified entrenched camp had quite powerful artillery fire, tank and air forces,” he wrote. “We overcame this difficulty by digging a whole network of trenches that encircled and strangled the entrenched camp. . . . These wonderful trenches enabled our forces to deploy and move in open country under the rain of enemy napalm bombs and artillery shells.” Giáp noted how these trenches, more than simply providing

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protection, gradually formed a vast “mobile” camp of their own, ensnaring the enemy as if in a spiderweb.4 The Vietnamese defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu shattered myths of French—and more broadly, colonial and imperial—military superiority, and detonated a global chain reaction against colonial rule that began with rebellion in Algeria only months later. “The great victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bien Phu,” Fanon would write, “is no longer strictly speaking a Vietnamese victory. From July 1954 onward the colonial peoples have been asking themselves: ‘What must we do to achieve a Dien Bien Phu? How should we go about it?’ Dien Bien Phu was now within reach of every colonized subject.”5 But the hubris of American imperialism was such that it did not learn, and still hasn’t learned, the lesson of the underground. Giáp reputedly quipped that if “the enemy was to occupy the face of his earth, then his people would occupy its bowels,” and a NLF officer would later say much the same: “The more the Americans tried to drive us away from our land, the more we burrowed into it.” 6 A document later captured by occupying forces clearly laid out the strategic objective of the tunnels: “If the tunnels are dug so as to exploit their effectiveness fully, the villages and hamlets will become extremely strong fortresses. The enemy may be several times superior to us in strength and modern weapons, but he will not chase us from the battlefield, because we will launch surprise attacks from within the underground tunnels. . . . Tunnels are very favorable for armed forces as limited as ours.”7 On one occasion, the NLF even stole an American M-48 tank in Lai Khê, buried it in a tunnel, and turned it into a command center. In Vi.nh Mô´c, an entire town was moved underground. And by all accounts, Cu� Chi itself constituted what has been

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described as a “dark, subterranean metropolis.”8 The tunnels comprised “residential facilities such as hospitals, storage spaces, cinemas, and living compounds, as well as bunkers, ammunition caches, imaginative traps, tunnel mines, and military headquarters. Some military commanders spent more than five years in the tunnels,” and “Dr. Vo Hoang Le, the chief of the medical section of the Cu� Chi tunnels, performed ‘hundreds of operations inside the Cu� Chi tunnels,’ among them countless amputations and even brain surgery.”9 With the B-52 Stratofortress bomber, occupying forces sought to establish a God’s-eye view, surveying the surface from above with what, in the history of philosophy, Santiago Castro-Gómez has called “zero-point hubris.”10 Arrogating to themselves the unique ability to see all without being seen in turn, US commanders sought to banish depth entirely and reduce Cu� Chi to mere surface—what was conspicuously called a “white area”— by pummeling it with air strikes and defoliants like Agent Orange. But while “the earth cracked, groaned, and in places gave way . . . the physical integrity of the tunnels was to survive long enough.”11 Cu� Chi would function as an advance post for the NLF throughout the war, most spectacularly as the launching pad for the 1968 Tet Offensive, when troops and weapons traveled through the tunnels toward Saigon. According to US general William Westmoreland, the Vietnamese defeated the US “by becoming an army of moles pitched against armies winged into battle by helicopter.”12

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According to one glorified counterinsurgency manual written by Israeli academic Daphné Richemond-Barak, “The underground enabled [the NLF] to establish a more level playing field

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with US forces, and momentarily overcome the discrepancy in the belligerents’ respective military capabilities,” and their success “changed the nature of underground warfare forever.” The widening of “the gap between tech-savvy belligerents and those with lesser capabilities”—which, it almost goes without saying, is also a gap between rich and poor, colonizer and colonized— has made the subterranean theater more important, not less. In this context of heightened surveillance and visibility, the underground provides a “virtually impenetrable refuge” from which “the weaker party forces the stronger, more conventional party to enter its terrain (a terrain often unfamiliar to them), thereby decreasing the relative advantage that comes with sophisticated modern armor, surveillance, intelligence, and training.”13 Moreover, the underground is not a theater of battle like any other, she argues, but instead qualitatively transforms warfare by amplifying the role of the unknown, adding what many American “tunnel rats” learned the hard way in Vietnam: “Once inside a tunnel, a soldier is very much alone.”14 In short, Richemond-Barak concludes, underground warfare is only likely to intensify in the coming years. In the words of retired army major John Spencer, chairman of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, “They’ve gone underground to match our overmatch,” and the resilience of underground resistance led to a 2017 revision of the army training circular (TC 3-21.50): “Small Unit Training in Subterranean Environments.”15 But from drones to walls, the colonial hubris of total visibility and impenetrability is on full display today. When it comes to such questions, however, the anxieties of our enemies on the right are often more insightful than the dystopian fears of allies on the left. For Grégoire Chamayou, an example of the latter,

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the drone is “an eye turned into a weapon” that has today broken the historic link between deploying force and deploying vulnerability. While there was never any fixed equilibrium between the two—the entire objective of ballistic technology is to raise the ratio of force to vulnerability—drones, for Chamayou, have changed the game entirely. By increasing striking distance to thousands of miles and reducing risk to essentially zero, drones “allow you to project power without projecting vulnerability.”16 Or rather, they stack all vulnerability onto the other side—the insurgent enemy, reduced to a nameless, faceless target. If traditional warfare is premised on a notion of reciprocity, however imbalanced, drone warfare catapults us beyond the merely asymmetrical warfare of recent decades and into the realm of the unilateral.17 While there is much to fear in the advent of unrestrained drone warfare, however, and while it’s important to limit the scope and impunity with which drones are deployed, Chamayou’s dystopianism runs the risk of neglecting both the built-in hubris of the drone and the potential to resist its all-seeing eye, and more importantly still, the relationship between the two. As military strategists struggle to catch up to the still-unlearned lessons of subterranean warfare, the drone’s God’s-eye view, its pretension to omniscience taken to the extreme, flattens the depth of that underground and creates a blindness that can be fatal to the powerful. This is the vulnerability that the drone cannot eliminate.18 Even more than drones, walls today confess—in their unconvincing confidence—their own secret weaknesses. Again, walls respond not to the parameters of conventional warfare, but as Wendy Brown puts it, to the “often informal or subterranean powers” that herald “a post-Westphalian world.”19 For Brown, the contemporary proliferation of walls reveals a paradoxical “weak-

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ening of state sovereignty” and its detachment from the nationstate: “Rather than resurgent expressions of nation-state sovereignty, the new walls,” she argues, “are icons of its erosion.”20 The reactionary fantasy of impermeable barriers and surfaces has been propelled into hyperdrive by Trump’s nativist paranoia. But rather than disarming these contradictions, the Trump quadrennium only amplified them, revealing an even more profound “tremulousness, vulnerability, dubiousness, or instability at the core of what they aim to express.”21 In seeking to perform sovereign power, in other words, Trump’s wall—and the detention and deportation machinery that, like the wall, long predated him—wears its anxiety on its sleeve. But what happens if we instead recognize that the global proliferation of physical walls has as much to do with dividing Being from nonbeing(s) as with safeguarding a waning sovereign order? What if the apartheid walls slashing across the terrain of the present bespeak a parallel crisis of systems of racial apartheid that have always relied on containment—from plantations to ghettos to mass incarceration and the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip? What if we decenter the white anxieties that animate the walling campaigns of the present, to instead recenter the cunning of resistance from the ontological and literal underground? To do so means lauding the sappers, diggers, and moles of our world who work incessantly to undermine and explode the physical, ideological, and ontological divisions racking humanity. And it means praising what Émile Zola described in Germinal as the soot-covered “black army of vengeance slowly germinating in the furrows, growing for the harvests of the century to come,” a new, subterranean humanity whose “germination would tear the earth apart.”22 After all, it is no surprise that the greatest concrete and material threat to the fantasy of the southern US border takes the

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form of the tunnel, from El Chapo Guzmán’s escape tunnel to the scarcely detectable passageways running under the border itself, provoking a panic not unlike Pancho Villa’s cross-border raids a century ago. (Indeed, as far as failed performances of sovereignty go, Chapo’s trial was a tour de force.) We are talking not only about literal tunnels, however, but about other subterranean pathways as well and the cunning they channel. Pushed away from the cities by Bill Clinton’s murderous 1994 Operation Gatekeeper, hundreds of thousands today tunnel perilously over land, just as drug shipments—coated in tar, charcoal, and chile paste and stowed deep in the bowels of car bumpers—pass through tunnels that they carry with them and carve out by their movement. As Shahram Khosravi has said of the European context, cross-border smuggling can be understood as a “decolonial practice.”23 When it comes to the migrant route running from the Northern Triangle—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador— through Mexico and into the US, cunning is both pervasive and essential. Where nineteenth-century Tejanos were rumored to have been “assisting slaves in their flight to Mexico by way of an underground railroad,” many Central Americans today travel in reverse on a perilous underground railroad that consists largely of the overground freight train known as La Bestia.24 In his book The Beast, Óscar Martínez insists that on this treacherous journey, “the difference between knowing and not knowing” is often the difference between life and death.25 While far too many don’t know, and while even knowing is no guarantee of survival, Viktoria Zerda has described how even many unaccompanied minors transmit nuanced subterranean knowledge up and down the entire migrant route just as the underground telegraph did during slavery:

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Moles  /  95 They are told by family members not to talk to or trust anyone on their journey north, not even their coyotes, or guides. Most kids travel in small groups, or larger caravans, formed by word of mouth. They hear from cousins or neighbors that if enough people show up at the border, they will be let in and reunited with family. They are told to surrender to the Border Patrol, to avoid violent encounters or getting lost alone in the desert. They carry small pieces of paper that list various human-rights or faith-based organizations, as well as shelters. As they travel together, they compare notes, relaying information and forming a collective common sense, necessary for navigating the perilous route.26

This knowledge, and the vast collective movement it undergirds, help to lay the mobile and shifting subfoundation for what Zerda calls the “coyote commune.” When it comes to racialized and colonized people resisting border apartheid, every across is also an under, every migrant a mole. And as walls are thrown up worldwide, the subversive ranks of these moles only multiply, relentlessly under-mining the border like hundreds of thousands of sappers whose own individual work is also the cunning work of decolonization. As Israeli settler colonialism comes to rely increasingly on the division of space—a strategy symbolized but not exhausted by the massive Apartheid Wall—tunnels have proven increasingly central to Palestinian resistance as well. In what one retired Israeli officer calls an “underground arms race,” both Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south have developed significant tunnel systems—the latter gaining notoriety in the 2006 cross-border capture of Gilad Shalit, later traded for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.27 Lest we match colonial hubris with a hubris of our own, however, we should remember that Israel has every intention of remaining on the cutting edge of global

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counterinsurgency, pioneering drone warfare even before the US and responding to tunnel warfare by training its own mole hunters—called “weasels”—akin to the “tunnel rats” of Vietnam.28 More daunting still is the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF’s) own demonstrated ability to tunnel, not strictly underground, but rather horizontally through Palestinian homes. Inspired in part by radical theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s distinction between “smooth” and “striated” spaces, the IDF embraced a conscious strategy of forcible smoothing that Eyal Weizman has described as “walking through walls” and that has proven far more effective than ham-fisted US attempts to flatten Vietnam from the sky.29 Weizman’s caveat is an important one: threedimensionality, depth, and the “politics of verticality” do not always favor the forces of liberation.30 But this doesn’t change the fact that in decolonial struggles, two realms of verticality— the above and the below—are persistently and insistently set against one another, that against drones and walls there is always the option of digging in deeper, of sheltering in the earth and wearing one’s subterranean condemnation like a shield. In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Los Angeles rappers YG and Nipsey Hussle teamed up on an incendiary track entitled “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump).” Hussle’s verse in particular stands out as a testament to Black-Brown unity—“It wouldn’t be the USA without Mexicans, and if it’s time to team up, shit, let’s begin”—but also to the underground cunning of cross-border struggles: It’s pressure built up and it’s prolly gon’ blow and if we say go then they’re prolly gon’ go . . . You build walls, we gon’ prolly dig holes and if your ass do win, you gon’ prolly get smoked.

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Under direct pressure from the Secret Service, the last five words were redacted from the song’s final album version, and Nipsey Hussle would be shot dead less than three years later.31

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If Hegel’s cunning can be summed up in a single image, it is that of the mole: apparently blind, rooting around in the recesses of the earth, but by some curious miracle moving in the right direction nonetheless. The mole, in other words, is no less than Spirit itself, the hidden progress of historical motion, which “often seems to have forgotten and lost itself . . . until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away.”32 Moving inexorably and slowly toward the light, there is nothing quite so cunning as a mole. Hegel’s cunning mole would be taken up and reshaped by Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire as a metaphor for the underground progress of the revolution itself, which moves slowly and methodically “through purgatory,” seeing enemies set before it only to be knocked down in the moment of overthrow: “But the revolution is thoroughgoing,” Marx writes, and when it has finished this work, “Europe will leap from its seat and exult: Well burrowed, old mole!”33 But a mole is a specter is a spirit tunneling its way slowly and assiduously toward the light of day, and it is no surprise that Hegel (philosopher of Absolute Spirit) and Marx (militant intellectual of the communist specter) would draw upon a shared source: Shakespeare, whose “old mole” is the ghost of Hamlet’s father, voice drifting up from under the stage, stubbornly pursuing the tormented Hamlet wherever he goes. For some, the figure of the mole thus represents the literally “groundbreaking hero” of teleological accounts of history as

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moving inevitably forward—as representing, in other words, the worst aspects of Hegelian cunning.34 For Jacques Derrida, for example, grappling with the specters haunting Shakespeare and Marx alike meant embracing not the mole’s innate radar but instead the indecisiveness of the “fretfull Porpentine” (porcupine).35 Abandoning teleology does not inevitably mire us in such fretful undecidability, however, and the theoretical horizon of deconstruction is rapidly receding today as we grapple with the urgent tasks and concrete alternatives thrown forth by the present. If it is true, as Peter Stallybrass argues, that “Marx’s mole, unlike Hegel’s, is not working toward the light; it is working in the earth,” or as Lara Cohen adds, “For Marx, the underground itself animates history,” then a different picture of the mole begins to emerge.36 This is even more true of those decolonial moles rooting about in the subontological soil of nonbeing, occasionally breaking the surface but also taking up residence in the other/under world.37 Here again, we see the relationship between the underground and the spectral, a communist specter for sure, but one deeply imbued with the spirituality common to many anticolonial communisms. The mole would seem to resonate even more directly with a decolonial cunning that draws its strength from subterranean quarters, from literally and figuratively underground resistance, a gathering reservoir of forces invisible to the God’s-eye view from above. What of those struggles where victory—and progress—are far from guaranteed, but refusing to decide is simply not an option? Those struggles that work and prepare the earth not because victory is inevitable but because there is simply no other choice? Between decolonial second sight and molean blindness, the distance is not so great.

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Nick Estes offers a decolonial, Marxist detournement of the figure of the mole that takes refuge not in undecidability but in the concrete burrowing of the decolonial subsoil. If Marx saw the mole’s digging as preparation for the moment of revolutionary groundbreaking, Estes insists that this moment shouldn’t obscure the long-term work of underground preparation. “The mole is easily defeated,” he writes, “if she hasn’t adequately prepared her subterranean spaces, which provide shelter and safety; even when pushed back underground, the mole doesn’t stop her work.” This work includes collecting medicinal roots revered by the Lakota, and Estes recounts how Crazy Horse washed his body in the soil of mole mounds, knowing them to contain medicinal properties. The root, moreover, the mole’s faithful companion in the underground, is a metaphor for how freedom dreams and traditional practices have survived despite being “forced underground.”38 This sort of underground mole work, Estes insists, was essential to maintaining the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Oceti Sakowin camp in Standing Rock, North Dakota. “Hidden from view to outsiders, this constant tunneling, plotting, planning, harvesting, remembering, and conspiring for freedom,” he writes, “is the most important aspect of revolutionary work.”39 While Estes echoes Antonio Gramsci, who described the “war of position” of trench warfare as subterranean preparation for a frontal “war of maneuver,” his description transcends Gramsci as well: this is not mere strategy but also the historical reality of those condemned to nonbeing, and their cunning response. Unlike Hegel, the decolonial mole evokes, not the broad and inexorable movement of a singular Spirit, but the incessant

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burrowing of a million sappers and diggers, specters and ghostly apparitions, zombies, tricksters, spooks, and spies, tirelessly undermining white supremacist barriers, boundaries, and borders from below. It is the difference between the teleology of knowing where history is inevitably headed and the stubborn resolve to always fight for liberation no matter what. Not, in short, Universal Spirit as the inevitable end of history, but the Ghost Dance as “Indigenous revolutionary theory” that cares less for predicting the overarching movement of world history than for “imagining and enacting an anticolonial Indigenous future free from the death world brought on by settler invasion.” 40

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When Hegel spoke of historical cunning, he sought to read into the ensemble of humanity’s apparently irrational and passionate self-interest a broader movement of capital-r Reason in history. There is no question that global histories of resistance to slavery and colonization resonate powerfully with this vision, and it is no surprise that many anticolonial thinkers have found exhilaration in Hegel’s account. For the late Cedric Robinson, this cunning was apparent in the many ways that slavemasters inadvertently dug their own graves: for example, when, in the tempestuous wake of the Haitian Revolution, “slaveowners fled to Louisiana, Virginia, and the Carolinas with as many slaves as they could transport, thereby also transporting the Haitian Revolution” as surreptitious and subversive cargo.41 Or in the way that everyday acts of individual racial hatred are woven together into a broader fabric. Here Robinson quotes from Richard Wright’s The Outsider: “Every day in this land some white man is cussing out some defenseless Negro. But that white bastard is too stupid to realize that his actions are

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being duplicated a million times in a million other spots by other whites who feel hatred for Negroes just like he does. He’s too blind to see that this daily wave of a million tiny assaults builds up a vast reservoir of resentment in Negroes.” 42 This was a historical process so cunning, moreover, that it blinded the would-be defenders of the slaves and even the enslaved themselves. In a sense, this was the entire point of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction: to show how everyone was overtaken by the unfolding dynamics of the struggle. As Frederick Douglass had made clear from the beginning, “The South was fighting to take slavery out of the Union, and the North fighting to keep it in the Union . . . both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro.” 43 In Robinson’s reading, all of the actors in the “drama of emancipation,” from Lincoln down to the poor whites, were just as much overtaken by the unintended consequences of their actions. . . . The northern field officers who put the fugitive slaves to work did not intend to free them . . . but they did. The Confederacy moved to preserve slavery . . . it helped to end it. Groups moved to the logic of immediate self-interest and to historical paradox. Consciousness, when it did develop, had come later in the process of the events. The revolution had caused the formation of revolutionary consciousness and had not been caused by it.44

“Freedom for the slave,” in Du Bois’s words, emerged from this fraught paradox as “the logical result of a crazy attempt to wage war in the midst of four million black slaves, and trying the while sublimely to ignore the interests of those slaves in the outcome of the fighting.” 45 This swirling tempest that alchemically transformed a war for slavery’s profits into a war against slavery’s existence was unleashed by the slaves themselves in the shadows of this

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sublime colonial ignorance. But they too were overtaken, developing consciousness not prior to but through struggle, and even then not always in a strictly rational form. “The mass of slaves, even the more intelligent ones,” Du Bois insists, “were in religious and hysterical fervor. This was the coming of the Lord. . . . It was all foolish, bizarre, and tawdry. Gangs of dirty Negroes howling and dancing; poverty-stricken-ignorant laborers mistaking war, destruction and revolution for the mystery of the free human soul; and yet to these black folk it was the Apocalypse.” 46 Spiritual fervor succeeded where Spirit could not, both because they were so unlikely to succeed and because small acts of self-interest couldn’t sustain a broader movement. In Haiti too, Black slaves had transformed an Age of Revolution into an age of abolition—and ultimately one of independence as well, through a historical process that constantly outstripped even the most ambitious aspirations of its leaders. Trouillot struggled with the same paradox as had Du Bois: not only was slave revolution “unthinkable” in Europe, but it was also largely “unspoken among the slaves themselves.” Why? Because its demands were “too radical to be formulated in advance of its deeds” and thus needed to be worked out in the process of the struggle itself. “The Haitian Revolution,” Trouillot concluded, “expressed itself mainly through its deeds.” 47 The short-sightedness of even those with their hands on the wheel of history was an unexpected stumbling block for C. L. R. James. James had set out to write The Black Jacobins as a celebratory account of Toussaint’s leadership, only to discover that for all the great general’s vision, his own colonial blindspot—he was deeply enamored of European principles of Enlightenment and human equality—ultimately sealed his doom. “Toussaint’s failure was the failure of enlightenment, not of darkness”—he lost

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the pulse of his people, thereby neglecting the secret ingredient of the revolution itself.48 It was instead the “shrewd, cunning” Jean-Jacques Dessalines who best grasped what the Haitian masses innately understood: that the whites were not destined to be partners in an egalitarian future and would stop at nothing to reinstitute slavery.49 Toussaint would lose his life while Dessalines saw the revolution through to the end, because his own apparent blindness was in fact a different kind of seeing: “If Dessalines could see so clearly and simply, it was because the ties that bound this uneducated soldier to French civilization were of the slenderest.” His was a sort of historical nearsightedness in which what is closest appears most clearly: Dessalines “saw what was under his nose so well because he saw no further.”50 Today, scientists tell us that, far from being blind, moles have the peculiar ability to see time, and this indeed is the sort of mole that Dessalines was: finger on the pulse of the people and keenly aware that the ground of the future is prepared in the present. When James noted that the retreat of racism in the early stages of the Haitian Revolution resulted, not from high-minded moral persuasion or ethical conviction, but instead from the sheer strategic contingencies and amoral calculations of battle, his remarks pointed both toward Hegel’s cunning and beyond it: “Sad though it may be,” James wrote, “that is the way that humanity progresses. The anniversary orators and the historians supply the prosepoetry and the flowers.”51 Hegel was himself far more cunning than an anniversary orator, but here he was, laying a flowered wreath over the ardor of battle and calling it historical cunning in the hope that the aroma might cover the stench of death. In the end, his dialectic could not accommodate the reversals, the defeats, and the retreats that have marked colonization, slavery,

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and struggles against both, in part because it could not grasp their point of departure in the condemnation to subterranean nonbeing. What can we expect when the lava surging forth from today’s rebellions cools and hardens into a newly unrecognizable ground? What formerly human figures will be locked into place like statues, and, more importantly, which formerly frozen or concealed figures will walk free? What specters and spooks will wander the surface, and what moles will remain buried, rooting around and sowing the seeds of groundbreaking liberations to come? This future remains indistinct by necessity, as seen through the blurry lens of those in the present that will soon make it a reality. But what is clear is that we will be freer and more equal—not because this is predetermined, but because anything less will only demand its own abolition in turn. Struggles against coloniality and white supremacy, past and present, struggles grounded in the below-ground of ontological nonexistence, can claim no easy victories, no historical guarantees, no preordained progress, no comfort of Reason in history. Their cunning instead lies shrouded in the invisibility of nonbeing, swathed in the folds of the colonizer’s own blindness; not in gravediggers breaking ground from above but in moles tunneling up from the obscurity below; in the explosivity of the ontological ambush, Nat Turner’s hatchet slicing through the night air, the seismic churning of a human Vesuvius that wakes the sleeping oppressors only when it’s far too late.

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ack nowledg m ents

This work began with an invitation from John Drabinski to participate in the symposium “Decolonization in Comparative Context” at Amherst College and has since been presented in different forms at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the College of William and Mary. My thanks to all the interlocutors who have made an indelible contribution to this book. Lisa Duggan embraced this project immediately, and she and her coeditor of the American Studies Now series, Curtis Marez, offered useful thoughts on reframing it. I am profoundly thankful to them, and to Niels Hooper and Naja Pulliam Collins for helping to make it a concrete reality. My deepest appreciation goes to those who took the time to read the full manuscript and offer indispensable feedback, insights, and challenges: Ziyana Lategan, Robyn Marasco, Christina Heatherton, Jordan Camp, Claire Sagan, and Manu Karuka, as well as several anonymous reviewers. Along the way, conversations with Lara Cohen, John Drabinski, Lara Sheehi, Stephen Sheehi, and Nicki Kattoura helped me sharpen my 105

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106  /  Acknowledgments

formulations and generously lent me concepts and reference points that I didn’t even know I needed. We live in a time of comrades and cowards, the dividing line between the two becoming starker by the day. All love to the comrades, nothing but scorn for the legions of cowards in academia and beyond, for whom only the inimitable words of Otto René Castillo will suffice: One day the apolitical intellectuals of our land will be interrogated by the poorest of people . . . you will have nothing to say. A vulture of silence will eat at your guts.

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notes

volcanoes 1.  As of writing, combined Google searches for “Minneapolis erupts” and “Minneapolis erupted” return an absolutely astonishing combined tally of more than sixty-five thousand results, ranging from the New York Times to Fox News, CBS, ABC, the Daily Mail, the L.A. Times, Democracy Now!, and others, as well as thousands more for cities that erupted similarly in solidarity with Minneapolis. The same searches for Ferguson yield more than five thousand combined results and nine thousand for Baltimore. 2.  Ted Anthony, “In George Floyd Protests, Echoes of 1968 Social Unrest,” Christian Science Monitor, May 31, 2020, www.csmonitor.com /USA/Society/2020/0531/In-George-Floyd-protests-echoes-of-1968social-unrest. 3.  For Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón, the aftermath of Hurricane María’s devastation of Puerto Rico in 2017 shows how the “seismological lexicon” exceeds the movements of the earth. Rather, such catastrophic events speak to a broader “coloniality of disaster”— the long-term context for so-called natural disasters and their impacts—and that nevertheless offers the possibility of crafting

107

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108  /  Notes to Pages 2–3 “decolonial futures” from the wreckage. Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico before and after the Storm (Chicago: Haymarket, 2019). 4.  Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 7. 5.  Coates, Between the World and Me, 83. 6.  For Melvin Rogers, to appeal to disaster metaphors brings us dangerously close to despair, and Black Americans “can’t afford despair.” Melvin L. Rogers, “Between Pain and Despair: What Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Missing,” Dissent magazine, July 31, 2015, www.dissentmagazine.org /online_articles/between-world-me-ta-nehisi-coates-review-despairhope. But Coates insists that his target is instead those “fairy tales” of “redemptive history” and says bluntly: “This is not despair. . . . Struggle is all we have” (70–71). Responding to Rogers, Lester Spence has argued that “Coates is a realist, not a pessimist,” and that he shows how the purportedly natural force of white supremacy was methodically constructed. Lester Spence, “ ‘Coates Is a Realist, Not a Pessimist’: Lester Spence Responds to Melvin Rogers,” Dissent magazine, August 13, 2015, www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/ta-nehisi-coates-is-a-realist-nota-pessimist-lester-spence-melvin-rogers. Readings and misreadings of Coates aside, we might wonder, with Robyn Marasco, if it isn’t possible to retrieve a more potently dialectical form of despair. See Robyn Marasco, The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 7.  Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 2016), 2. 8.  Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1993), 246–47. It is a painful reality that Aptheker, one of the most important American historians of slave resistance and an unavoidable reference point for this book, sexually abused his daughter Bettina, who has described the abuse in her memoir Intimate Politics (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006). Her own struggles led her to walk a path of neither lionizing nor demonizing her late father, and in one account she notably describes her repressed memories of the abuse as “erupt[ing] with astonishing, volcanic force.” Bettina Aptheker, “Did I Ever Hurt You When You Were a Child?,” L.A. Times,

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Notes to Pages 3–6  /  109 October 15, 2006, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-oct-15-opaptheker15-story.html. 9.  Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” in The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 118. 10.  See Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future (London: Verso, 2019), 15. 11.  The Red Nation, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2021), 1. 12.  C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989), 55. James is paraphrasing the Comte de Mirabeau. In his preface, James describes revolutions more generally as those moments “when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption” (x). 13.  Quoted in Leslie H. Fishel and Benjamin Quarles, The Negro American: A Documentary History (New York: Morrow, 1967), 192. Alfred N. Hunt notes that in the early nineteenth century many Americans turned to “images of natural catastrophe—particularly hurricanes, volcanoes, and violent storms—to characterize the times.” Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 1–2. 14.  Laurence Brown, “Visions of Violence in the Haitian Revolution,” Atlantic Studies 13, no. 1 (2016): 148. 15.  Translated and cited in Florian Kappeler, “The Chronotope of Revolution: ‘Volcanic’ Narrations of the Haitian Revolution,” Karib— Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 6. 16.  Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 255. In Germany, the volcanic eruption was “one of the most common metaphors” used to discuss Haiti. Prussian lieutenant Johann Valentin Hecke described burning plantations as volcanoes, having adopted the metaphor from Mirabeau and other French observers, and Theodor Mügge described Toussaint as the only man “able to close this volcano.” Kappeler, “Chronotope of Revolution,” 1–2, 9. Today, the metaphor remains as potent as ever: for example, in a 1950s Nation article about social pressure (Bernard D. Nossiter, “Haitian Volcano,” Nation,

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110  /  Notes to Pages 6–8 March 26, 1955, 255–57) and a June 23, 1986, Time magazine article entitled “Haiti at the Edge of the Volcano,” among many others. 17.  Kappeler, “Chronotope of Revolution,” 3. 18.  For Kappeler, Haiti’s peculiarly volcanic nature grows out of geological confusion and political conflation. The modern concept of revolution was infused with seismic metaphors bridging the natural and agential, but Haiti was also misunderstood as a naturally volcanic place. Thus, for Kappeler—following Marlene Daut—the French Revolution could be detached from its particular location and universalized, whereas the Haitian Revolution remained place-bound. This misses the deeper question, however: Why were the events in Haiti prone to a naturalistic explanation? Which is another way of asking: Could the Haitian Revolution ever have been conceivably understood as universal? The answer is no, because a revolution carried out by Black slaves was the most unthinkable of events and therefore required a misapprehension and even an active process of disavowal. Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). The implications are seismic in their own right: the modern concept of revolution diverges from the classical, cyclical concept at the same time that it is overdetermined by colonial racism and is thus racialized ab origine, upholding modern sovereign human agency as it naturalizes the nonagency of nonwhite nonhumans. 19.  Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), xii. Not only is Fanon the preeminent theorist of the racial underground, but, according to Gavin Arnall, there exists another, subterranean Fanon who tracks powerful forces simmering “beneath the dialectical surface.” Gavin Arnall, Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). 20.  Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 182.

chapter one. the cunning of decolonization 1.  G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. Hugh Barr Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 33.

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Notes to Pages 8–11  /  111 2.  Hegel, Lectures, 73. 3.  Hegel, Lectures, 89. 4.  Hegel, Lectures, 71. This is not to say that Hegel’s resort to cunning was the cynical ruse that Theodor Adorno would later suspect, because Hegel was a true believer if ever there was one: “Great philosophy was accompanied by a paranoid zeal to tolerate nothing else, and to pursue everything else with all the cunning of reason, while the other kept retreating farther and farther from the pursuit. The slightest remnant of nonidentity sufficed to deny an identity conceived as total.” Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1973), 22. A similar cunning can be found in Marx, for whom intracapitalist competition drives capitalism’s inexorable development of the forces of production and for whom proletarians’ resistance to their own conditions of labor plays a broader world-historical role. See G. H. R. Parkinson, “Hegel, Marx and the Cunning of Reason,” Philosophy 64, no. 249 (1989): 287–302. 5.  See Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), building on the lessrecognized Pierre Franklin Tavares, “Hegel, critique de l’Afrique: Introduction aux études critiques de Hegel sur l’Afrique” (PhD diss., Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, 1989). 6.  Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 191–95, esp. 195n10. 7.  For my account of Fanon’s diagnosis of Hegel’s limitations, and his attempt to reformulate a decolonized alternative, see George Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 8.  Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 36. 9.  Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India,” New York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm. 10.  Marx revised his view above all in a series of letters to Vera Zasulich in the 1880s. On these debates, see Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). For the most influential of Latin America’s heterodox Marxists, see José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven

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112  /  Notes to Page 11 Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971). 11.  Elizabeth A. Povinelli has sought to unmask a pernicious cunning built into liberal-colonial recognition politics in The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Decolonial cunning is a far different thing, however, that refuses to be enclosed within recognition and indeed draws strategically upon nonrecognition. More recently, Glen Coulthard has extended the critique of the politics of recognition in Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2014). 12.  Freedom on the Move database, https://freedomonthemove. org/; Great Newes From the Barbados. Or, a True and Faithful Account of the Grand Conspiracy of the Negroes Against the English (London, 1676). 13.  Don Herzog, Cunning (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 71. Cunning, for Herzog, suffers a split “between ‘low cunning’ and genuine wisdom” that reflects a bifurcation in our own fraught relationship between morality and instrumental rationality (8). Descriptions of slave cunning reflect this bifurcation, as in the “lowcunning” of eighteenth-century Jamaican slaves. Gerald Horne, The Counter-revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 151. 14.  See, e.g., Francesca Schironi, “The Trickster Onstage: The Cunning Slave from Plautus to Commedia dell’Arte,” in Ancient Comedy and Reception, ed. S. D. Olson (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 447–78. See also J. P. Rodriguez, ed., Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 1:xxvi: “Cunning slaves and socially accepted transgressions of wickedness received moral sanction within many slave societies. Those who could find clever ways to resist were considered heroic and were lionized in popular memory.” In ancient Greece, cunning (mêtis) was celebrated more unambivalently at the intersection of “flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills, and experience,” but even then it was maligned, “thrust into the shadows, erased from the realm of true knowledge” by philosophers.

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Notes to Pages 12–13  /  113 Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 3–4. 15.  Herzog makes no mention of Hegel’s concept, and despite opening with a quote from Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus on Br’er Rabbit, makes scant mention of slavery either—these apparently don’t figure among the “canonical moments of cunning” (9). Even Hegel himself fell prey to a racialized and pejorative notion of cunning, which he associated—albeit not exclusively—with Egyptians and “Mahometanism,” and which he argued represented one of the “fundamental characteristics of the Hindoo.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1956), 205, 158. But while Hegel was a racist, he was not stupid, and we might even be tempted to read such references subversively, as granting non-Western peoples a privileged access to an essential dialectical moment. See Robert Bernasconi, “With What Must the Philosophy of World History Begin? On the Racial Basis of Hegel’s Eurocentrism,” Nineteenth Century Contexts, no. 22 (2000): 171–202; Teshale Tibebu, Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011); or more recently, Rei Terada, “Hegel’s Racism for Radicals,” Radical Philosophy 2, no. 5 (2019): 11–22. 16.  James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 136. 17.  Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 182. 18.  Scott, Domination, 164. 19.  W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998), 721, 726. 20.  Scott, Domination, 36, citing Schopenhauer: “As the weaker, [women] are driven by nature to have recourse not to force but to cunning.” 21.  Despite being an abolitionist, Peter Percival Elder, in an 1862 report to the Department of the Interior, spoke of the “cunning Indians” in such a way as to suggest the phrase was commonplace, and indeed it was (“Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs,” 37th Cong., 3rd Sess., 288). In Canada too, the Cree were singled out for their

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114  /  Notes to Pages 13–15 cunning. See Harvey A. Feit, “Colonialism’s Northern Cultures: Canadian Institutions and the James Bay Cree,” in On the Land: Confronting the Challenges to Aboriginal Self Determination in Northern Quebec and Labrador, ed. B. Hodgins and K. Cannon (Toronto: Betelgeuse Books, 1995), 105–27. 22.  Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Custer and Other Poems (Chicago: W. B. Conkey, 1896), 108. 23.  J. M. Morphis, History of Texas (New York: United States Publishing, 1874), 93. See also Everett McNeil, In Texas with Davy Crockett (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1908), 104. 24.  See Luis Gonzaga Inclán’s 1865 novel Astucia, whose protagonist is literally nicknamed Cunning and whose gang operates under the slogan “With cunning and wisdom one can take advantage of any situation.” According to Juan Pablo Dabove, such banditry prefigures an “insurgent utopia.” Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin America, 1816–1929 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 129–45. On Pancho Villa, see John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1968), 192; Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 303. 25.  Cortina was duly indigenized for the effort and nicknamed the “Christian Comanche.” Jerry Thompson, “ ‘The Sacred Right of SelfPreservation’: Juan Nepomuceno Cortina and the Struggle for Justice in Texas,” in Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity, ed. B. Baum and D. Harris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 89–90; Acuña, Occupied America, 67–68. 26.  Gastón Gordillo, “The Savage outside of White Argentina,” in Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina, ed. E. Elena and P. Alberto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 243–44. 27.  Rob Hughes, “Bigger Is Not Better in Battle of Neighbors,” New York Times, June 27, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/sports/soccer /27iht-soccer27.html. 28.  Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston: L. Maria Child, 1861), 154. Abolitionists like Richard Hildreth agreed, writing that for a slave, “cunning is almost the sole quality of mind

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Notes to Pages 15–17  /  115 which he has any occasion to exercise; and by long practice it is sometimes carried to an astonishing perfection.” Despotism in America (Boston: Whipple and Damrell, 1840), 55. Grandin similarly cites the seventeenth-century Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval, who understood “that the brutality inherent to slavery forced slaves to use cunning to survive.” Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 194. 29.  Jacobs, Incidents, 193. 30.  Josephine Pacheco, The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 15–16. 31.  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1996), 41. 32.  Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 140. In the words of Lerone Bennett, “Nat Turner turned the book against the people who had given it to him.” Pioneers in Protest (New York: Pelican, 1969), 89. 33.  Bennett, Pioneers in Protest, 85. 34.  Heather E. Lacey, “Nat Turner and the Bloodiest Slave Rebellion in American History,” Inquiries Journal 2, no. 1 (2010), www .inquiriesjournal.com/articles/147/nat-turner-and-the-bloodiest-slaverebellion-in-american-history. 35.  Hegel, Lectures, 89. 36.  Santiago Castro-Gómez, Zero-Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment in 18th Century Latin America (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). 37.  “In one folktale, slaves were cooking a stolen chicken when their owner suddenly appeared and inquired about the pleasant aroma. . . . The slaves had to think quickly. The menu item was possum, the slaves explained to their owner, and the secret of their preparation method was to spit in the pot in order to enhance its tenderness. The slaves then quickly offered their owner a sample of the dish, whereupon he departed in disgust.” The point of the story is not the chicken but the cunning. John J. Zaborney, “Theft,” in Rodríguez, Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance, 2:510. Such stories are far from limited to slaves or the US, but speak to a broader decolonial cunning. Compare,

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116  /  Notes to Pages 17–21 for example, a story once recounted by Hugo Chávez about a visit from a Catholic priest to an Indigenous community in Venezuela: “It was Holy Week, and the priest—seeing a fattened pig nearby— reminded the community that they were not allowed to eat pork that week, only fish or the large amphibious rodent known as chigüire, or capybara. The priest then took several community members to the river to be baptized with Christian names. When the priest returned later that day to find the community dancing and roasting the recently slaughtered pig, he was appalled.” The response from the community? “No, we solved the problem. We baptized this pig and named it chigüire.” Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics, 151. 38.  Nick Nesbitt, Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), xiv. 39.  Aimé Césaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” Social Text 28, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 152, translation modified. 40.  James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). 41.  Afro-pessimists draw upon many sources, from Fanon to Orlando Patterson and more contemporary thinkers like Hortense Spillers, Lewis Gordon, David Marriott, and Saidiya Hartman. I center Wilderson and Sexton, not because they deserve sole credit for the approach, but because they bear responsibility for its limitations. 42.  Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xii. 43.  If anything, Sexton fully recognizes this point when he urges scholars not to forget the “racial logic of colonialism.” Jared Sexton, “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign,” in Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, ed. Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 96. 44.  What Maldonado-Torres calls “the coloniality of being” is thus the central hinge for grasping coloniality as a whole. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 240–70. For Fanon, the treatment required under colonialism in turn requires

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Notes to Pages 21–23  /  117 a process of ontological disqualification to legitimize colonial extraction or at the very least to assuage the guilty conscience/cognitive dissonance of Western narratives of freedom from slavery. And every aspect—racial, gendered, epistemological—turns on ontological disqualification. 45.  Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Religion, Conquest, and Race in the Foundations of the Modern/Colonial World,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 3 (September 2014): 652; George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 13. As Lisa Lowe insists, “Native Caribbeans have been rendered invisible by both the histories that tell of their extermination in the sixteenth century and the subsequent racial classifications in which their survival is occluded.” Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of the Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 1. 46.  See, e.g., Robert Nichols, “Disaggregating Primitive Accumulation,” Radical Philosophy 194 (November/December 2015): 18–28. 47.  Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 132–58; Kelly Lytle Hernández, Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 1. 48.  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 317–18. 49.  Fred Moten, “Black Op,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008): 1743–47. 50.  Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5–57; Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Shona N. Jackson, Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 51.  Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 52.  Lewis R. Gordon, “Thoughts on Afropessimism,” in “Critical Exchange: Afro Pessimism,” Contemporary Political Theory 17, no. 1 (February 2018): 106.

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118  /  Notes to Pages 23–28 53.  Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 1–2. 54.  Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 55.  Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 56.  William F. Cheek, Black Resistance before the Civil War (Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe Press, 1970), 10. 57.  Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 6.

chapter two. the colonial blindspot 1.  Herman Melville, Benito Cereno, in Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 2016), 81, 116. 2.  Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 280, 8. 3.  Grandin, Empire of Necessity, 271. 4.  Isis Leslie, “Benito Cereno,” in Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion, ed. J. P. Rodríguez (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 1:53–54. For Grandin, Babo was comparable to Br’er Rabbit (285), and for C. L. R. James, “He is a man of unbending will, a natural leader, an organizer of large schemes but a master of detail, ruthless against his enemies but without personal weakness.” C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), 112. 5.  Melville, Benito Cereno, 137. In Leslie’s words, Melville “respects Babo’s cunning to the end.” Leslie, “Benito Cereno,” 54. 6.  William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1990), 202–3. 7.  For Lewis Gordon, “Hypervisibility is a form of invisibility. For to be hypervisible is to be seen, but to be seen in a way that crushes the self under the weight of a projected, alien self.” “Fanon’s Decolonial

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Notes to Pages 28–32  /  119 Aesthetic,” in The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, ed. Nikolas Kompridis (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 104. 8.  LeRoi Jones, The System of Dante’s Hell (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 153–54. 9.  W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998), 377. 10.  Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 370. 11.  Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 577. 12.  Ted Allen and Noel Ignatiev, “The White Blindspot,” Sojourner Truth Organization: 1969–1986: Electronic Archive, 1967, www .sojournertruth.net/whiteblindspot.html. 13.  See Kenneth Warren, Adolph Reed Jr., Cedric Johnson, Touré F. Reed., Preston Smith II, and Willie Legette, “On the End(s) of Black Politics,” Nonsite.org, September 26, 2016, https://nonsite.org/editorial /on-the-ends-of-black-politics. 14.  Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 87. 15.  Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London: Verso, 2018). 16.  Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 8. 17.  Gerald Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins: The U.S., the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 62. 18.  These two aspects do not always stand in such direct contradiction, either. As Alan Taylor has shown, it was common to confide in one’s own trusted slaves as individuals while fearing slaves as a collective force. The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: Norton, 2013), 7. 19.  I am grateful to Lara Sheehi for bringing this concept to my attention. 20.  Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1993), 41. 21.  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1996), 41.

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120  /  Notes to Pages 32–36 22.  Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 17. 23.  Edwin C. Holland, A refutation of the calumnies circulated against the southern & western states, respecting the institution and existence of slavery among them (Charleston, SC: A. E. Miller, 1822), 86. 24.  Taylor, The Internal Enemy, 3–6. 25.  Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1993), 49–50, 306–307. 26.  William Phillips, The Conquest of Kansas by Missouri and Her Allies (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1856), 332. 27.  David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist (New York: Vintage, 2005), 107; Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins, 245. 28.  Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins, 245. 29.  Austin Steward, Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 12. 30.  Lerone Bennett, Pioneers in Protest (New York: Pelican, 1969), 83. 31.  Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston: L. Maria Child, 1861), 97. 32.  Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 40–41. 33.  Oates, Fires of Jubilee, 15. 34.  Thomas B. Allen and Carla Bauer, Harriet Tubman, Secret Agent: How Daring Slaves and Free Blacks Spied for the Union during the Civil War (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2006), 38. 35.  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 358. 36.  Samuel Cartwright, “Drapetomania,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 7 (1851): 708–9. In an article from the same year, the esteemed doctor marshals such stunning scientific evidence as the fact that “the white and the red ants make slave of the black ants, and yet they are the very insects to which the Holy Scriptures refer us to learn wisdom.” Samuel Cartwright, “How to Save the Republic, and the Position of the South in the Union,” DeBow’s Journal 11, no. 2 (August 1851): 189. 37.  Similar claims were common across the colonial world, as with the trope of outsiders “riling up the natives.”

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Notes to Pages 37–41  /  121 38.  In the recent context of the Minneapolis rebellions, see George Ciccariello-Maher, “Blaming ‘Outside Agitators’ Is a Centuries-Old Ploy,” Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/blamingoutside-agitators-is-a-centuries-old-ploy-11591560877. 39.  Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 156. 40.  Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence, 157. 41.  Lawrence Friedman, The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 4–6. 42.  Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence, 157–58. 43.  Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 595. 44.  C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989), 362. 45.  Aptheker, 1969 preface to American Negro Slave Revolts. According to Genovese, Aptheker “demolished the legend of the contented slave” and Kenneth Stampp gave it the death blow (Roll, Jordan, Roll, 587). 46.  Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence. 47.  William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Penguin, 1981), 17. 48.  Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 50–51. 49.  Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” in The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 117. 50.  Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 85. 51.  Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 5. 52.  George Rawick, Listening to Revolt: Selected Writings (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2010), 31–32. 53.  William F. Cheek, Black Resistance before the Civil War (Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe Press, 1970), 16–17. 54.  Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 610. 55.  James, Black Jacobins, 15, 18.

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122  /  Notes to Pages 41–46 56.  Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 583. The former, Reverend C. C. Jones, is erroneously identified as Black by James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 33. 57.  Scott, Domination, 29, 2. 58.  Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1857), 204. 59. John Reed, Insurgent Mexico (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1914), 105. 60.  A. M. French, Slavery in South Carolina, in Leslie H. Fishel and Benjamin Quarles, The Negro American: A Documentary History (New York: Morrow, 1967), 117–18. 61.  Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: AfroAmerican Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 122.

chapter three. the second sight of the colonized 1.  See David Marriott, Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 1–2. 2.  Sam Greenlee, video oral history interview, November 1, 2001, HistoryMakers oral history database, thehistorymakers.org. 3.  The dialectic is more complicated, however: Greenlee was later told that, in an attempt to fill in its own blindspot, the FBI had made Spook required reading (a dubious honor shared with the Battle of Algiers). 4.  Richard Brody, “The Troubling Fate of a 1973 Film about the First Black Man in the C.I.A.,” New Yorker, July 20, 2018, www.newyorker .com/culture/the-front-row/the-troubling-fate-of-a-1973-film-aboutthe-first-black-man-in-the-cia; Nina Metz, “New Doc Unearths Story behind Making of ‘The Spook Who Sat by the Door,’ ” Chicago Tribune, August 18, 2011, www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-xpm-201108-18-ct-mov-0819-chicago-closeup-20110819-story.html. 5.  Jay Shaw, movie poster for The Spook Who Sat by the Door, 2004, www.kingdomofnonsense.com/the-spook-who-sat-by-the-door/. 6.  Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995), 3.

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Notes to Pages 46–48  /  123 7.  Michael T. Martin, David C. Wall, and Marilyn Yaquinto, eds., Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 43. 8.  Ellison, Invisible Man, 3, 13, 7. 9.  Ralph Ellison, “Before Publication,” in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Casebook, ed. J. Callahan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 25. 10.  Ellison, Invisible Man, 16. 11.  Greg Grandin, Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 285. 12.  We find echoes of Greenlee’s imperative in the recent Netflix series Lupin about a Black man in Paris who uses racial invisibility to his advantage, becoming a master jewel thief, all in an attempt to clear his late father’s name. In the words of the protagonist, who works nights at the Louvre Museum, flying under the radar with a mop in his hand: “You saw me, but you didn’t really look. Just like they don’t look. . . . The people I work for, everyone who lives on that side of town. Everyone on top while we’re at the bottom. They don’t look.” 13.  Greenlee, video oral history interview. 14.  Martin, Wall, and Yaquinto, Race, 37. 15.  Greenlee, video oral history interview. 16.  Martin, Wall, and Yaquinto, Race, 37. 17.  Martin, Wall, and Yaquinto, Race, 42. 18.  Martin, Wall, and Yaquinto, Race, 31. Greenlee insists that he hadn’t read Wretched of the Earth when he wrote Spook, which is possible but unconvincing. When Freeman explains to Pretty Willie that “you gonna need more than hate to sustain you when this thing begins,” he echoes Fanon’s words in Wretched: “Racism, hatred, resentment, and ‘the legitimate desire for revenge’ alone cannot sustain a war of liberation” (89, translation modified—“sustain” occurs in the Farrington translation that Greenlee would have read). Greenlee is just factually wrong to suggest that Wretched’s audience was mostly “bourgeois intellectuals” (48) or that Fanon wrote the text “on the Left Bank in Paris” (54)—dying of leukemia, he dictated the text in Tunis while participating directly in the Algerian Revolution. 19.  Martin, Wall, and Yaquinto, Race, 43.

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124  /  Notes to Pages 48–52 20.  Kevin Thomas, “Melodrama with Powerful Message,” Los Angeles Times, December 19, 1973, E27; Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 92. See also Zora Neale Hurston’s classic discussion in chapter 13 of Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York: Harper and Row, 1990) and the twin volumes edited by C. M. Moreman and C. J. Rushton, Zombies Are Us: Essays on the Humanity of the Walking Dead (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011) and Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011). On white terror as supernatural, see Gladys-Marie Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). 21.  Jason Zinoman, “Jordan Peele on a Truly Terrifying Monster: Racism,” New York Times, February 16, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017 /02/16/movies/jordan-peele-interview-get-out.html, my emphasis. In one Key and Peele sketch, racist white zombies shy away from attacking Black people, inverting the racist dystopia of zombie apocalypse into an unexpected Black utopia. 22.  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1996), 5. 23.  bell hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984), i, 15. 24.  See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 25.  Enrique Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 81, 78–79. 26.  James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 18–19. 27.  Scott, Domination, 187. 28.  Scott, Domination, xiii, 102. 29.  Tendayi Sithole, The Black Register (London: Polity, 2020), 3. 30.  Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000). 31.  Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 113–14.

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Notes to Pages 53–56  /  125 32.  Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987), 38–39. 33.  For Mao Tse-Tung, “knowledge of local terrain and local customs” was essential to guerrilla operations. On Guerrilla Warfare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 78. Mao, and to a greater degree Che Guevara, are concerned with propagating and spreading guerrilla warfare, but the failure of many Latin American guerrilla movements had everything to do with a lack of connection to the terrain. Guevara makes clear the role of the ambush, however: “Hit and run, wait, lie in ambush, again hit and run, and thus repeatedly without giving any rest to the enemy.” Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 54. 34.  Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: Norton, 2013), 71–72. 35.  Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1993), 306; Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 16. Du Bois speaks of a “mysterious spiritual telegraph.” W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998), 63. 36.  Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 27. 37.  Muhammed Abdullah al-Ahari, “The Caribbean and Latin America,” in Islam outside the Arab World, ed. D. Westerlund and I. Svanberg (London: Routledge, 1999), 456–57; Grandin, Empire of Necessity, 195–96. 38.  Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 39.  “The Br’er Rabbit stories of North America are not as Joel Chandler Harris in his racist wisdom imagined them to be.” George Rawick, Listening to Revolt: Selected Writings (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2010), 37. 40.  Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future (London: Verso, 2019), 16. 41.  Oates, Fires of Jubilee, 25. 42.  William F. Cheek, Black Resistance before the Civil War (Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe Press, 1970), 14. 43.  Rebecca Hall, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021). See also the recently

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126  /  Notes to Pages 56–58 published book by Stella Dadzie, A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery, and Resistance (London: Verso Books, 2021). 44.  Estes, Our History, 83, 81. 45.  Audra Simpson, “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty,” Theory and Event 19, no. 4 (2016), Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/633280. 46.  Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), xvii. 47.  Estes, Our History, 81. Glen Coulthard delineates both the structural and symbolic aspects of violence against Indigenous women in Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2014), 177–78. 48.  Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Black Scholar 12, no. 6 (December 1971): 7, 12. 49.  Davis, “Reflections,” 13. 50.  Brenda E. Stevenson, “What’s Love Got to Do with It? Concubinage and Enslaved Women and Girls in the Antebellum South,” in Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas, ed. D. Ramey Berry and L. Harris (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 176–77. In Invisible Man, Ellison describes the ambivalence of a woman who loved her master because she loved the sons he had given her but hated him as well. Ellison’s narrator finds her moaning in sadness while her sons laugh upstairs—she loved freedom more than she loved her master, eventually poisoning him because if she hadn’t, “Them boys woulda tore him to pieces with they homemade knives” (11). 51.  Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Every Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 3. See also Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 307–8. 52.  Camp, Closer to Freedom, 6–8. 53.  “I heard many conversations not meant for my ears. . . . There was no place, where slavery existed, that could have afforded me so good a place of concealment.” Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston: L. Maria Child, 1861), 177. In Saidiya Hartman’s

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Notes to Pages 58–59  /  127 Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), the loophole prefigures the limits of emancipation in which the space of freedom “is at the same time a space of captivity” (9). Katherine McKittrick, in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), blends agency with captivity, but this allows her to map a different geography. Tiffany Lethabo King in The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019) and C. Riley Snorton in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017) take a similar approach. Jasmine Syedullah notes how, by taking refuge in her loophole, Jacobs “leverage[es . . . ] her relational proximity to racial regimes.” “Becoming More Ourselves,” Palimpsest (forthcoming, 2022). 54.  Cheek, Black Resistance, 3. 55.  C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989), 17. While mal de mâchoire was likely infantile tetanus, the paranoid accusation reflects the very real practice of killing newborns rather than seeing them enslaved and thereby exemplifies the “contradictory image of slaves as both commodities and willful agents capable of resistance.” Paul Brodwin, Medicine and Morality in Haiti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 36, 43. 56.  Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 411. 57.  Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 143. 58.  Cheek, Black Resistance, 20. It was peculiarly suited to house slaves as well: when they killed, “well-bred house servants preferred the more genteel device of poison.” Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 362. 59.  Davis, “Reflections,” 8. 60.  Gerald Horne, The Counter-revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 139; Cheek, Black Resistance, 20. 61.  David Geggus, ed., The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014), 93.

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128  /  Notes to Pages 59–60 62.  Philippe Girard, “Rebelles with a Cause: Women in the Haitian War of Independence, 1802–04,” Gender and History 21, no. 1 (2009): 69. 63.  “In 1802, one mambo was hanged for organising a dance in which practitioners became possessed by lwas (spirits). The French stopped using black nurses when two of them were convicted of purposely administering the wrong medication to soldiers under their care.” Girard, “Rebelles with a Cause,” 71. For the best overall account of the role of women in the Haitian Revolution and the revolutionary grassroots more broadly, see Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990). On the specific role of healers, see Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 64.  Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 35–68. For a positive reevaluation of this controversial essay, see Drucilla Cornell, “The Secret behind the Veil: A Reinterpretation of ‘Algeria Unveiled,’ ” Philosophia Africana 4, no. 2 (2001): 27–35. 65.  Kali Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 78. 66.  Gross, Colored Amazons, 79. Gross similarly documents the case of Hannah Mary Tabbs, implicated in the 1887 murder and dismemberment of her lover. “Switching codes as needed” and “adhering to female domesticity when it suited her,” Tabbs “was apparently as clever as she was deceitful.” Her “shrewd maneuvers” were successful, and she was almost entirely exculpated of her role in the crime—it seemed unlikely that a Black woman could plan and execute such a horrendous and involved crime (99). Gross has written at greater length on the case more recently in Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 71. Gross’s work can be seen as pushing beyond Hartman’s reading of the structural limits of seduction in Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection. 67.  Goffredo Parise, “The Sexual Warfare of Saigon’s Bar Girls,” Maclean’s, February 1968, 24–25, 46–47. See also the exploits of the Dutch antifascist and communist teenagers Hannie Schaft and Truus

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Notes to Pages 61–66  /  129 and Freddie Oversteegen as recounted in Sophie Poldermans, Seducing and Killing Nazis: Hannie, Truus and Freddie: Dutch Resistance Heroines of WWII (Haarlem: SWW Press, 2019). 68.  Thomas B. Allen, Harriet Tubman, Secret Agent: How Daring Slaves and Free Blacks Spied for the Union during the Civil War (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2006), 13. John Brown insisted on addressing Tubman as “General Tubman” and using only masculine pronouns— make of this deeply ambiguous fact what you will. 69.  Lerone Bennett Jr., “Guerrilla in the Cottonfields: Harriet Tubman,” in Pioneers in Protest (New York: Pelican, 1969), 134–38. 70.  Allen, Harriet Tubman, Secret Agent, 144. 71.  Allen, Harriet Tubman, Secret Agent, 106, 109. 72.  Allen, Harriet Tubman, Secret Agent, 115. 73.  Allen, Harriet Tubman, Secret Agent, 96. 74.  Allen, Harriet Tubman, Secret Agent, 95, 97–98. 75.  Allen, Harriet Tubman, Secret Agent, 161.

chapter four. the decolonial ambush 1.  Paul Hampel and Jesse Bogan, “Baltimore Unrest Like ‘Having a Scab Ripped Off’ in Ferguson, Resident Says,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April28,2015,www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/baltimoreunrest-like-having-a-scab-ripped-off-in-ferguson/article_e836ed65-613d5a1e-a459-ddb48350a431.html. 2.  Leon Siciliano, “Ferguson Shooting: American Social Issues ‘Root from Poverty,’ ” The Telegraph, August 19, 2014, www.telegraph .co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11042874/Ferguson-shootingAmericas-social-issues-root-from-poverty.html. 3.  James Baldwin, No One Knows My Name (New York: Vintage, 1993), 67. 4.  Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 119. 5.  Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 116. 6.  Lonnie Brown, “Different Lyrics, Same Song: Watts, Ferguson, and the Stagnating Effect of the Politics of Law and Order,” Digital

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130  /  Notes to Pages 66–70 Commons @ Georgia Law, January 1, 2017, https://digitalcommons .law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2183&context=fac_artchop. 7.  Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter, 39. 8.  Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 26. 9.  Jonathan Chait, “New Study Shows Riots Make America Conservative,” New York Magazine, May 20, 2015, https://nymag.com/intelligencer /2015/05/new-study-shows-riots-make-america-conservative.html. 10.  Omar Wasow, “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting,” American Political Science Review, May 21, 2020; Ross Douthat, “The Case against Riots,” New York Times, May 30, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/opinion/sunday /riots-george-floyd.html. 11.  Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter, 43, 45–46. 12.  Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter, 189. 13.  Kendall Karson, “74% of Americans View George Floyd’s Death as an Underlying Racial Justice Problem: Poll,” ABC News, June5,2020,https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/74-americans-view-georgefloyds-death-underlying-racial/story?id=71074422. 14.  Matthew Impelli, “54 Percent of Americans Think Burning Down Minneapolis Police Precinct Was Justified after George Floyd’s Death,” Newsweek, June 3, 2020, www.newsweek.com/54-americansthink-burning-down-minneapolis-police-precinct-was-justified-aftergeorge-floyds-1508452; Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy, “How Public Opinion Has Moved on Black Lives Matter,” New York Times, June 10, 2020, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-livesmatter-attitudes.html. 15.  Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter, 218. 16.  Lara Langer Cohen, “The Depths of Astonishment: City Mysteries and the Antebellum Underground,” American Literary History 29, no. 1 (2017): 2; Lara Langer Cohen, “Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century US,” American Literary History 33, no. 3 (2021): 510, 514. Prior to his Harper’s Ferry raid, John Brown sought to construct what he called the Subterranean Pass Way alongside the Underground Railroad.

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Notes to Pages 71–74  /  131 17.  Lara Langer Cohen, “ ‘The Blackness of Darkness’: Mammoth Cave and the Racialization of the Underground,” History of the Present 11, no. 1 (2021): 4. 18.  Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground (New York: Harper Perennial, 2021). Imani Perry has argued that Wright’s unpublished novel was in many ways a “direct model for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” “The Bleak Prescience of Richard Wright,” The Atlantic, June 2021, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/06/richard-wright-man-wholived-underground/618705/. 19.  Cohen, “Blackness of Darkness,” 4. 20.  James Henry Hammond, “The ‘Mudsill’ Theory,” speech to the US Senate, March 4, 1858, in The Negro American: A Documentary History, ed. Leslie H. Fishel and Benjamin Quarles (New York: Morrow, 1967), 96. 21.  Michael E. Woods, “Mudsills vs. Chivalry,” Journal of the Civil War Era, December 21, 2018, www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2018/12 /mudsills-vs-chivalry/. 22.  Corydon E. Fuller, Reminiscences of James A. Garfield (Cincinnati, OH: Standard Publishing, 1887), 309. 23.  Woods, “Mudsills vs. Chivalry.” 24.  Little surprise then that majority-poor, Black neighborhoods— from Detroit and Oakland to Philadelphia and Baton Rouge—would a century later still be known as the bottoms, both for their low-lying position and for the denigration of their residents. And little surprise that these same spaces would serve as launching pads for many an ambush as well. See also Walter Johnson, “American Bottom,” Boston Review, January 23, 2020, http://bostonreview.net/class-inequalityrace/walter-johnson-american-bottom. 25.  Fred Moten, The Universal Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 194. 26.  C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989), x. 27.  Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 167. 28.  Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man, 95.

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132  /  Notes to Pages 74–79 29.  Criss Moon and Julie Moon, “Parasite and the Plurality of Empire,” Public Books, June 23, 2020, www.publicbooks.org/parasite-andthe-plurality-of-empire/. 30.  Jordan Peele, Us (screenplay), www.scriptslug.com/assets /uploads/scripts/us-2019.pdf. 31.  Compare Fanon: “The colonist’s sector is a sated, sluggish sector, its belly is permanently full of good things. . . . The colonized’s sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light.” Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 4. 32.  Compare Ralph Ellison: “I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. . . . It is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass”—prefiguring Us’s hall of mirrors as well. Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995), 3. 33.  For a classic account, see Samir Amin, Delinking: Toward a Polycentric World (London: Zed Books, 1990). More recently, see Walter Mignolo, building on Aníbal Quijano: “Delinking,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (March/May 2007): 449–514. 34.  Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 3. 35.  Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 76. 36.  Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2008), 158–59. 37.  Benjamin Dangl, The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007), 39. 38.  Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 43, 58. For Khalfa and Game, Césaire understands poetry to be volcanic in its very essence, emerging all of a sudden and provoking a shock not announced beforehand. Jean Khalfa and Jérôme Game, “Pustules, Spirals, Volcanoes,” Wasafiri 15, no. 31 (2000): 43–51. On the importance of the morne for Suzanne Césaire as well, see Anny Dominique Curtius, “Suzanne Césaire and the Tropiques-Poetics of the Morne: From Tropiques to the Intangible Heritage of Knots of Memory,” Revue de Littérature Comparée 364, no. 4 (2017): 404–21. 39.  Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings (New York: Seven Stories, 2001), 66.

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Notes to Pages 79–81  /  133 40.  Marcos, Our Word, 66. 41.  Marcos, Our Word, 67. 42.  Marcos, Our Word, 68. “With the exception of respect,” this hierarchy is also reproduced and duplicated for women, but “the dual nightmare begins to duplicate an awakening. . . . Their word follows the double-route of a self-propelled rebellion—the double motor of rebel women” (68–69). 43.  Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Mexico Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). See also Rodolfo Kusch’s 1962 study of Aymara communities América Profunda, in Obras completas, vol. 2 (Córdoba: Editorial Fundación Ross, 1998). 44.  Marcos, Our Word, 67. 45.  Salvador Carrasco, “The Invisible Sight,” in The Zapatista Reader, ed. T. Hayden (New York: Nation Books, 2002), 169. Jorge Cuéllar has recently documented how volcanoes in El Salvador, “once-fertile landscapes [that] sustained the lifeways of generations of people, with historical uses ranging from plantation agriculture, subsistence production, and animal grazing to local sightseeing and global ecotourism . . . are being remade into cryptominer farms” under a disastrous harebrained scheme to harness volcanic geothermal energy spearheaded by president Nayib Bukele, a plan that has provoked grassroots resistance in response. “The Value of a Volcano,” NACLA Report, November 1, 2021, https://nacla.org/news/2021/10/29/bitcoin-volcano-el-salvador. 46.  David Geggus, ed. and trans., The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014), 188. 47.  Ludmila Vinogradoff, “Chávez elogia a Fidel Castro en el 20 aniversario del Caracazo,” ABC International, February 27, 2009, www.abc.es/internacional/abci-chavez-elogia-fidel-castro-aniversariocaracazo-200902270300-913431946948_noticia.html. One French account argues that “the Caracazo volcano sprang between two tectonic plates of history: the end of Stalinism and the crisis of social democracy.” Julien Terrié, “Venezuela—27 février 1989: Le Caracazo,” AlterInfos, March 16, 2012, www.dial-infos.org/alterinfos/spip.php? article5435. 48.  Armando Olveira Ramos, “Crónicas del 27-F,” Crónicas Migrantes (blog), December 22, 2008, http://armandolveira.blogspot

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134  /  Notes to Pages 81–86 .com/2008/12/material-inmaterial.html; Ángel Cappelletti, “27F: La epifanía de los cerros o la sinceración democrática,” El Libertario (blog), February 27, 2012, http://periodicoellibertario.blogspot.com/2012/02 /27f-la-epifania-de-los-cerros-o-la.html. 49.  José Ignacio Cabrujas et al., eds., El día que bajaron los cerros (Caracas: El Nacional, 1989). 50.  Ramón Piñango, “Muerte de la armonía,” in En esta Venezuela: Realidades y nuevos caminos, ed. Patricia Márquez and Ramón Piñango (Caracas: Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Administración, 2003). 51.  Alí Primera, Que mi canto no se pierda (Caracas: Fondo Editorial Fundarte, 2006), 18. 52.  Joshua Clover, Riot, Strike, Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (London: Verso, 2016); Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Themes of Riots and Uprisings (London: Verso, 2012). 53.  Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 59, 112. 54.  Aimé Césaire, The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 225. 55.  Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 361, 364. 56.  Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 94. 57.  Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 363. Mary Boykin Chestnut, A Diary from Dixie (New York: D. Appleton, 1905). 58.  George Rawick, Listening to Revolt: Selected Writings (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2010), 77. Rawick represents a political and historical tendency that was acutely interested in both. 59.  Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 7. 60.  G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 88 (§57). 61.  James, Black Jacobins, 367–68. 62.  James, Black Jacobins, 356. 63.  W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998), 110. 64.  Lawrence Friedman, The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 1. 65.  Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 32, translation modified.

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Notes to Pages 88–93  /  135

moles 1.  Arthur Herman, “Notes from the Underground: The Long History of Tunnel Warfare,” in “Clueless in Gaza,” special issue, Foreign Affairs, August 26, 2014, 145–46. 2.  Tom Mangold and John Penycate, The Tunnels of Cu Chi (New York: Random House, 1985), 128. 3.  Herman, “Notes from the Underground.” 4.  Võ Nguyên Giáp, People’s War, People’s Army (Marxists Internet Archive, 2014), 88, www.marxists.org/archive/giap/1961-pwpa.pdf. 5.  Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 30–31. 6.  Mangold and Penycate, Tunnels of Cu Chi, 55, 66. 7.  Mangold and Penycate, Tunnels of Cu Chi, 57. 8.  Mangold and Penycate, Tunnels of Cu Chi, 70. 9.  Daphné Richemond-Barak, Underground Warfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 11. 10.  Santiago Castro-Gómez, Zero-Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment in 18th Century Latin America (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). 11.  Mangold and Penycate, Tunnels of Cu Chi, 67. 12.  Mangold and Penycate, Tunnels of Cu Chi, 258, 17. 13.  Richemond-Barak, Underground Warfare, xvii, xii. 14.  Richemond-Barak, Underground Warfare, xv. 15.  Todd South, “The Subterranean Battlefield: Warfare Is Going Underground, into Dark, Tight Spaces,” Military Times, February 26, 2019, www.militarytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/02/26/the-subterraneanbattlefield-warfare-is-going-underground-into-dark-tight-spaces/. 16.  Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone (New York: New Press, 2015), 1–2. 17.  Chamayou, Theory of the Drone, 13. 18.  In George Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 164–66, I make a similar argument about Chamayou’s Manhunts. 19.  Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 21. 20.  Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 24.

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136  /  Notes to Pages 93–98 21.  Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 24. 22.  Émile Zola, Germinal (New York: Penguin, 2004), 532. 23.  Shahram Khosravi, “Border Smuggling as Decolonial Practice,” episode 25 of A Moment of True Decolonization podcast, April 16, 2020, Funambulist, https://thefunambulist.net/podcast/a-moment-of-truedecolonization/daily-podcast-25-shahram-khosravi-border-smuggling-asdecolonial-practice. 24.  Jerry Thompson, “ ‘The Sacred Right of Self-Preservation’: Juan Nepomuceno Cortina and the Struggle for Justice in Texas,” in Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity, ed. B. Baum and D. Harris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 83. 25.  Oscár Martínez, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (London: Verso Books, 2013), 260. 26.  Viktoria Zerda, “Coyote Commune,” Commune Magazine 4 (Fall 2019): 22. 27.  Yaacov Ayish, “The Underground Arms Race in the Middle East,” Real Clear Politics, June 11, 2019, www.realclearworld.com /articles/2019/06/11/the_underground_arms_race_in_the_middle_east_ 113036.html. 28.  Herman, “Notes from the Underground.” 29.  Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007), 200. 30.  Weizman, Hollow Land, 12. 31.  YG, featuring Nipsey Hussle, “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump),” Still Brazy (2016). Also censored was YG’s suggestion that he was “surprised El Chapo ain’t tried to snipe you,” allegedly on the grounds that it was an incitement to violence. See YG’s own comments on the song’s Genius entry (https://genius.com/8904229). 32.  Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1896), 546–47. 33.  Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), www .marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/. 34.  Margreta de Grazia, “Teleology, Delay, and the ‘Old Mole,’ ” Shakespeare Quarterly 50, no. 3 (1999): 251–67.

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Notes to Pages 98–103  /  137 35.  Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. P. Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 117. 36.  Peter Stallybrass, “ ‘Well Grubbed, Old Mole’: Marx, Hamlet, and the (Un)fixing of Representation,” in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. J. E. Howard and S. C. Shershow (London: Routledge, 2001); Lara Langer Cohen, “The Depths of Astonishment: City Mysteries and the Antebellum Underground,” American Literary History 29, no. 1 (2017): 18. 37.  To this, we could add the specifically gendered cunning that is the shrewdness of the shrew, which while not living underground borrows the mole’s burrow, and which became synonymous with a troublesome woman needing, to maintain the Shakespearean register, to be “tamed.” 38.  Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future (London: Verso, 2019), 18. 39.  Estes, Our History, 18–19. 40.  Estes, Our History, 16. 41.  Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xxxi. 42.  Robinson, Black Marxism, 304. 43.  W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998), 61. 44.  Robinson, Black Marxism, 238. 45.  Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 121. 46.  Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 122, 124. 47.  Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 88–89. 48.  C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989), 288. 49.  Robinson, Black Marxism, 168. 50.  James, Black Jacobins, 288. 51.  James, Black Jacobins, 63.

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glossa ry

anti-blackness  A specific form of racism cemented globally by the African slave trade and worldwide chattel slavery. Defined by a racial binary in which those people racialized as Black are positioned on the lowest level of humanity, or below humanity entirely, with those identified as white generally at the top. chattel slavery  A modern form of hereditary, racially based slavery targeting African people in particular. While centering on the extraction of labor, chattel slavery also entails the total, permanent, and intergenerational reduction of certain human beings to the status of property. colonialism  Domination of one people by another through permanent settlement geared toward the extraction of land, labor, and natural resources. Occasionally facilitated by a small number of colonizers who rely on local surrogates, although more often a larger settler enclave or outpost is established. In some cases— what we call settler colonialism—large-scale settlement seeks to fully displace and even exterminate the Indigenous population through forced assimilation or genocide. coloniality  The long-term legacies that outlive formal colonial power and persist after formal liberation. Coloniality manifests

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140  /  Glossary across all aspects of society: in racial and gender structures, sexual and familial norms, patterns of economic and political power, the geographic arrangement of territory, and epistemological (knowledge) structures, among many others. Originally formulated by Aníbal Quijano. decolonization  On the one hand, the complete removal of a colonial power from a territory and the total eradication of colonial settlements. On the other hand, and more recently, a long-term and unfinished project of rolling back coloniality in all its aspects by uprooting the sedimented legacies of colonialism. guerrilla war  A form of asymmetrical warfare characterized by small groups of often poorly armed combatants engaging in unconventional and highly mobile tactics against what is usually a more well-equipped conventional enemy. The objective of guerrilla warfare is to invert the apparent balance of forces, turning weakness into strength. indigeneity  Those people across the globe residing in their ancestral homelands. While often racialized, indigeneity is not strictly a racial category but is more often defined in terms of relation to land, as well as shared ethnic, cultural, and linguistic characteristics. nonbeing  The exclusion of certain groups of people from the status of fully human, usually on racial grounds, and institutionalized in practice by both chattel slavery and colonialism. Originally formulated by Frantz Fanon. revolution  The total transformation of a political and socioeconomic order in which the masses of people overthrow and replace existing institutional and informal structures, often through violence and often toward greater equality. riot  An explosive moment of resistance generally characterized by disruptive street protest, property destruction, and looting. Often deployed as a pejorative term and painted as unproductive but in reality incredibly effective for setting into motion deeper changes, particularly for the most invisibilized.

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selected bibliogr a phy

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International Publishers, 1993. Bong Joon-Ho, director. Parasite. Barunson E&A, 2019. Davis, Angela. “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.” Black Scholar 12, no. 6 (December 1971): 2–15. Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Free Press, 1998. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1995. Estes, Nick. Our History Is the Future. London: Verso, 2019. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2004. Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage, 1976. 141

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142  /  Selected Bibliography Grandin, Greg. The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014. Greenlee, Sam, producer, and Ivan Dixon, director. The Spook Who Sat by the Door. United Artists, 1973. Gross, Kali. Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Translated by Hugh Barr Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989. Marcos, Subcomandante Insurgente. Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings. New York: Seven Stories, 2001. Melville, Herman. Benito Cereno. In Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories, 55–137. New York: Penguin, 2016. Peele, Jordan, director. Us. Universal Pictures, 2019. Rawick, George. Listening to Revolt: Selected Writings. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2010. Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

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american studies now: critical histories of the present Edited by Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez Much of the most exciting contemporary work in American Studies refuses the distinction between politics and culture, focusing on historical cultures of power and protest on the one hand, or the political meanings and consequences of cultural practices, on the other. American Studies Now offers concise, accessible, authoritative books on significant political debates, personalities, and popular cultural phenomena quickly, while such teachable moments are at the forefront of public consciousness. 1. We Demand: The University and Student Protests, by Roderick A. Ferguson 2. The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit, by Scott Kurashige 3. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, by Jack Halberstam 4 . Boycott! The Academy and Justice for Palestine, by Sunaina Maira 5. Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism, by Shelley Streeby 6. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, by Barbara Ransby 7. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas, by Macarena Gómez-Barris 8. Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, by Lisa Duggan 9. Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question, by Lázaro Lima 10. A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South, by L. H. Stallings 11. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger, by Julie Sze

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12. Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century, by Naomi A. Paik 13. Neverending War on Terror, by Alex Lubin 14. Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist, by Joanne Barker 15. Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance, by Geo Maher

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