The Grounds of Encounter: Racial and Colonial Discourses of Place

Sarah E.K. Fong (bio)

Abstract

Bridging Black and Native Studies, this essay juxtaposes the speeches of late-nineteenth century social reformers with Black and Indigenous place-making practices to show that white settler spatial imaginaries depict both Black and Indigenous peoples as placeless within the lands currently called the United States. Moving beyond an analytical separation of Black and Native Studies, it employs a relational approach that reveals how racial and colonial discourses of place are co-constitutive in historical practice. The association of past and present in this essay is an invitation to consider the recursive and repetitive production of white settler spatial practices and imaginaries as ongoing sites of struggle.

My first introduction to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust came in August 2017 when I attended a panel discussion titled “Living on Ohlone Land.” I had recently been wondering how I, as a non-Native person, could support the work of Indigenous communities in the Bay Area where I live. Sogorea Te’ Land Trust is “an urban Indigenous women-led land trust … that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people” (Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, “Purpose and Vision”). In order to “reclaim parcels [of land] in the midst of an urban setting,” Sogorea Te’ encourages residents and businesses to pay a land tax to the Ohlone people. The organization describes this voluntary financial contribution to the rematriation of Ohlone land as “a small step towards acknowledging the history of genocide on this land and contributing to its healing” (Sogorea Te’). Sogorea Te’ defines rematriation as the restoration of “a people ot their rightful place in sacred relationship with their ancestral land” (Sogorea Te’). Beyond purchasing and placing parcels of land in a trust, Sogorea Te’ engages in a range of place-making practices such as building ceremonial arbors, re-interring ancestral remains in sacred funerary Shellmounds, and growing food and traditional medicines in urban community farms. Through various projects, this intertribal collective aims to “restore reciprocal relationships with the sacred land we live on, and with the plants, animals and other human beings who we share this land with” (“Purpose and Vision”).

In the summer of 2019, after paying my Shuumi land tax for two years, I began to support Sogorea Te’s work by volunteering at one of their community farms.¹ I met Loa on the farm located at the intersection of two major urban thoroughfares. Walking through the lush, green grounds, I could hear the hum of cars, busses, and bikers passing on the street just beyond the fence. As Loa pointed out the tomatoes, kale, lettuce, and marigolds they were raising, she gestured to the neighboring beds. Those, she explained, were tended by Black Earth Farms, an agroecology collective that works to “train community members to build collectivized, autonomous, and chemical free food systems in urban and peri-urban environments” (Black Earth Farms). Black Earth Farms supports food sovereignty through the distribution of community-supported agroecology (CSA) food boxes to communities that face food insecurity. The long and narrow vegetable beds that make up this community farm, separated by a walking path no more than a foot wide, are stewarded by two different organizations – one identified with Ohlone women and another with African-diasporic and Indigenous people. And yet, Loa told me, members of the two communities will, at times, weed and water one another’s beds as seems necessary or prudent.

Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Black Earth Farms engage in place-based practices meant to sustain the physical bodies, community relations, and epistemological frameworks of Black and Indigenous peoples in the twenty first century. These embodied place-making practices push against dominant geographies that seek to limit and obscure Black and Indigenous peoples’ relationships to the lands currently called the United States, and to one another. This site of encounter between Black and Indigenous communities raises questions about the significance of the land- and place-based practices that emerge in the wake of slavery and amidst the ongoing conditions of colonization that shape contemporary social and political life in the United States. What does it mean for African-descended and Indigenous communities to farm alongside one another in the urban Bay Area? In what ways do their relationships to land align and diverge? How have dominant settler spatial imaginaries positioned Indigenous peoples and African-descended people in relationship to land and to one another in the Americas? How do Indigenous and African-descended people engage one another and remake these relationships today? I am new to this farm and to the communities that tend to it. I do not presume to grasp fully the philosophies or political imaginaries that animate Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Black Earth Farms. This essay will not, therefore, undertake an analysis of the relationships between these particular organizations or their respective relationships to the land they farm. Instead, I use the parallel and shared beds of these two communities to open a window into the dynamics of place that preoccupy settler spatial imaginaries as well as the fields of Black Studies and Native Studies.

US scholars of race and colonization commonly describe the relationship between Black Studies and Native Studies, or between histories of enslavement and colonization, as incommensurable. Frequently, the two fields are positioned at an impasse whereby the body and the land appear as the two poles around which race and colonization orbit. Within Black Studies, the racialized body is often approached as the crux of racialization, marking the limits of citizenship and Western conceptions of the human. Within Native Studies, land is frequently positioned as a primary site of conflict between colonial powers and Indigenous peoples. Native Studies scholar Mark Rifkin summarizes these constructions: “we might quite roughly schematize the distinction between Black and Indigenous political imaginaries as that of flesh and of land, a contrast between a focus on the violence of dehumanization through fungibility and occupation through domestication” (4). Yet as scholars such as Mishuana Goeman and Katherine McKittrick demonstrate, the study of racialized and gendered bodies cannot be so easily separated from considerations of land and place. At the same time, land need not act as an impassable analytical boundary between the intellectual and political projects of Black and Native Studies. Instead, we can approach prevailing discourses of place, which frequently (mis)characterize Black and Indigenous relationships to physical geographies, as the ground upon which to consider overlapping histories of struggle.

In the twenty-first century United States, Black and Indigenous communities engage in ongoing struggles against the violent enforcement of racial and colonial spatial orders. For instance, federal and state officials have mounted new challenges to the sovereignty and territorial jurisdiction of Native nations. In addition to executive branch challenges to the Mashpee Wampanoag reservation, three recent Supreme Court cases – Herrera v. Wyoming, Carpenter v. Murphy, and McGirt v. Oklahoma – have questioned whether or not reservation lands and treaty rights remain valid from the vantage point of state and federal governments. In Herrera v. Wyoming, the State of Wyoming sought to constrain the Crow Mountain tribe’s treaty-protected hunting rights by arguing that the Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) was invalidated when Wyoming became a state in 1890.² The state’s argument positioned the Crow Mountain peoples’ movement and its relationships to land as criminal. In both Carpenter v. Murphy and McGirt v. Oklahoma, the State of Oklahoma argued that the Muscogee Creek reservation had been disestablished not through an act of Congress but through allotment, legal precedent, and decades of state administration.³ Although the case specifically addressed whether or not the state of Oklahoma had jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed on Indian land, its ramifications extend far beyond the prosecution of crimes to ask whether or not the Muscogee Creek Reservation retains any legal validity in the present day. In the case of the Mashpee Wampanoag, the Secretary of the Interior unilaterally moved to take the tribe’s 321 acres of land out of federal trust, thereby dispossessing the Mashpee Wampanoag of their homelands. By taking the land out of trust, the Secretary of the Interior put at risk the tribe’s ability to sustain its own governing and cultural institutions, such as a police force, a language academy, a low-income housing development, and a resource management program.⁴ These examples demonstrate that state and federal governments continue their assault on Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and land-based relationships through administrative and judicial maneuvers premised on the enduring notion that Native nations and their citizens, as such, have no rightful or recognizable claims to the lands occupied by the United States.

At the same time, the police-related deaths of Black citizens of the United States – such as Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, to name but a few – point to persistent conceptions of Black people as out of place within the social and physical geographies of the nation. Oscar Grant was returning home from a New Year’s Eve Party when a public transportation police officer killed him on a train platform in Oakland, California. Michael Brown was killed by a police officer as he walked home from the store in Ferguson, Missouri. Sandra Bland died in police custody in Waller County, Texas after a minor traffic stop resulted in her arrest. Breonna Taylor was killed by Louisville Metro Police officers when they entered her home on a no-knock warrant in the middle of the night. George Floyd was killed by a police officer who kneeled on his neck, holding him down on the pavement outside of a Minneapolis grocery store. These killings, and the countless others not listed here, remind us that the mundane geographies of cities and towns across the US can become sites of racialized state violence. That Black citizens can be killed with impunity in locations of everyday life repeats and enforces the idea that there is no place within the nation that guarantees the integrity, dignity, and futurity of Black lives. Police killings mark train stations, public roads, and private homes as sites that divide lives that are valued from those that are not. They remind all residents of the United States that Black people are disallowed from moving through space without risk of fatal harm.

The narratives of place and belonging that shape and undergird these flashpoints are not, however, uniquely characteristic of the present moment. Instead, the contested spatial imaginaries that shape these events have persisted over centuries of struggle following the colonization of the Americas and the enslavement of African-descended people. The geographic discourses that explain and authorize these contemporary sites of struggle are part of a recursive spatial imaginary and a set of material geographies premised on the notion that Black and Indigenous people have no place in the lands currently called the United States. In this essay, I argue that white settler spatial imaginaries depict both Black and Indigenous peoples as placeless, making questions of land, place, and space relevant to the study of both race and settler colonization. Moving beyond an analytical separation of Black and Native Studies, a relational approach reveals that racial and colonial discourses of place are co-constitutive in historical practice. Drawing on speeches made by late-nineteenth century social reformers, I examine the narrative and rhetorical moves that position Black and Native people in relation to one another through the language of placelessness. I show how discourse couples placelessness with normative modes of emplacement that work to uphold white settler control over peoples and lands. I gesture to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Black Earth Farms as well as to historical examples of Black and Native place-making to point out the lines of flight that necessarily rupture and exceed white settler spatial imaginaries. By juxtaposing archival materials with present-day place-making practices, I do not aim to produce a teleological account of nineteenth- and twenty-first century struggles over place, nor do I mean to suggest that the impact of nineteenth-century discourses on twenty-first century spatial struggles can be clearly or easily discerned. Instead, I aim to illuminate enduring patterns of spatial thought. The association of past and present in this essay is an invitation to consider the recursive and repetitive production of white settler spatial practices and imaginaries as ongoing sites of struggle.

While I argue that spatial imaginaries and geographic stories are relevant to the study of racialization and colonization alike, I also want to make clear that I do not aim to question or diminish the fact of Indigenous sovereignty over the lands currently called the United States. Indigenous peoples have long stewarded the lands of North America and maintain meaningful relationships to their ancestral homelands in the face of genocide, removal, and war. These relationships must be taken seriously as the basis for ethical relationships between all non-Indigenous peoples and Indigenous peoples living in North America. My point is not that place and space function identically for Indigenous peoples, African-descended people, and other racialized subjects, but rather that examining discourses of place as a site of encounter between racial formations and settler colonialism can produce new insights about how these different processes have unfolded alongside and through one another.

The Spatial Imaginaries of Mohonk Conferences

Like the present day, the nineteenth century was characterized by violent conflict over the material and conceptual boundaries of the nation. Legal and extra-legal forms of violence such as lynching and segregation policed the social and geographic boundaries of Black life in the United States. Alongside wars of removal and containment, the US government sought to open Indigenous lands to settlement and commercial use through land policy, boarding schools, and other forms of government administration. These racial and colonial conflicts reveal how the language and practice of displacement are mobilized to assert territorial and political control over peoples and lands.

Black and Native feminist geographers argue that spatial analysis is critical to understanding the construction and experience of racial-sexual hierarchy and colonial relationships. Rather than analytically separating body, land, and place, feminist approaches to space illuminate how racialized and colonized bodies move through physical spaces that are themselves organized through registers of racial-sexual and colonial difference. Black feminist geographies expand prevailing conceptions and critiques of racial difference as a corporeal phenomenon by considering how racism and sexism are constituted by “spatial acts” (McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xviii). Since the Enlightenment, the discipline of geography has contributed to the elaboration of racial difference by crafting “racial essentialisms based on place” (Hawthorne 3). Such racialized geographic imaginaries “bound individuals and groups in place, classify them according to their geographical locations, and arrange them in spatio-temporal hierarchy” (3). By designating the where and who of humanity’s apex, as Alexander Weheliye observes, Enlightenment thinking arranges the world through racial, sexual, and economic hierarchy such that some peoples and places are marked as less-than-human and non-human. Thus, the racial and sexual ordering of physical and imaginative geographies shape how racial-sexual bodies move through space. Those bodies marked as racial others are frequently denied access to, segregated from, and policed within the spaces designated as the domain of proper citizens and human subjects.

By considering physical and imaginative landscapes, Black geographies offer a site of overlap with those elements of Native studies that focus on land and place. Native feminist geographies too explore how land, space, and place are ordered through colonial categories and practices. Mapping and cartography emerge in these approaches as critical practices in the colonial project of accumulating and controlling territory. According to Goeman, cartography is a technology from which conquest flows, allowing colonial powers to rename and reorganize Indigenous lands according to colonial conceptions of gender, nation, and indigeneity. By renaming and reconfiguring Native spaces, imaginative and material settler geographies demarcate between Native and non-Native (or national and non-national) spaces. Importantly, such mapping practices do more than reorder the physical spaces of North America. They also establish “gendered colonial structures” that organize, categorize, and surveil Native bodies such that they are “readable to the state” and appointed to “appropriate” spaces (Goeman 36). When Native people move outside of the spaces designated to them by settler spatial imaginaries, they are criminalized and made vulnerable to violence. In this way, Goeman observes, “colonialism is not just about conquering Native lands … it is also about the conquest of bodies” (33). Considered together, Black and Native feminist geographies reveal the overlapping ways that racial-sexual difference and colonial relations structure white settler spatial imaginaries and geographic practices.

Black and Native feminist geographies reveal space and place to be simultaneously material (manifested in physical landscapes and infrastructures) and imaginary (rendered through discourse and language). Rather than a static background upon which human social life occurs, geography is a contested site of meaning and a field of encounter between different histories and worldviews. When we take “the language and physicality of geography seriously,” as McKittrick does, we are better able to see place as a site of struggle over racial and colonial power relations (Demonic xiii). Goeman too, in her study of Native women’s literatures and geographies, shows that the geographic structures of colonial governance “rely on tales to lend meaning to nature and ordered space” (35). For example, colonial cartographies seek to overwrite Native peoples’ understandings of and relationships to place through narratives of property law, environment, and nature. I take up Goeman and McKittrick’s focus on spatial imaginaries and geographic stories to explore how discourses of place and placelessness contribute to relational racial formations and settler colonial practices. Below, I explore how the spatial imaginaries of the Mohonk Conferences crafted racial and colonial categories as well as policies that aimed to resolve the so-called Negro and Indian Problems. The records of the Mohonk Conferences provide an opportunity to approach discourses of place as a site of encounter where histories of racialization and colonization meet. This article does not aim to offer a definitive theory of place in relationship to racialization and settler colonization, but rather to point to new avenues of relational analysis that neither collapse colonization into racialization nor hold these sociohistorical processes apart as discrete and separable.

The Lake Mohonk Conferences—founded in the years preceding the passage of allotment legislation and amidst the solidification of Jim Crow segregation—provide a rich archive from which to discern the spatial imaginaries that narrate and justify Black and Indigenous displacement. Taking place during the post-Civil War era as the nation expanded westward, the Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian (1883–1916) and the Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question (1890–1891) brought together policy-makers, philanthropists, educators, and business leaders who hoped to resolve the so-called Negro Problem and Indian Problem through humanitarian social reforms. Hotelier and social reformer Albert K. Smiley established the Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian in 1883 to call national attention to the policy reforms needed “before a solution of the [Indian] problem [would] be possible” (Lake Mohonk Conference, “Address” 14). By debating the causes of and solutions to the so-called Indian Problem, conference participants hoped to sway public opinion and federal law towards policies such as residential schooling and allotment. Energized by the first conference, in 1890 Smiley founded a second forum to address the conditions of African-descended people. The Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question drew attention to the conditions of Black life in the post-Reconstruction era, focusing on questions of poverty, schooling, and citizenship. Although most conference attendees stopped short of openly advocating for legal segregation, many were careful to explain that they did not support immediate and complete equality for Africa-descended people while making apologies for deepening physical and social segregation. Similarly, many argued that Native people could eventually be woven into mainstream US society, but only after they adopted normative models of domesticity, gender, and property. Thus, although Mohonk delegates largely agreed that Black and Native people would inevitably remain or become part of the US body politic, their imagined and material place within the nation remained open to debate. In line with these material forms of sociospatial control, Mohonk reformers gave voice to spatial imaginaries that denied Black and Native peoples any valid or recognizable place in the lands claimed by the United States. The remarks and speeches made by attendees of both Mohonk Conferences reveal an underlying spatial imaginary that sought to determine where Black and Indigenous people fit into the emerging geographic and social landscapes of the post-Civil War United States. To what physical locations and social positions could or should Black and Indigenous people be assigned? How were these two populations positioned in relation to one another? And to what spaces could white settlers rightfully lay claim? Rather than explore the material impact of the Mohonk Conferences on legislative and juridical realities, I am interested here in the discursive patterns revealed by the records of these conferences.

In the eyes of many Mohonk Conference speakers, Black and Native people appear to lack any legible or meaningful relationships to the spaces of the United States. Speakers draw on dominant spatial imaginaries that envision African-descended people as ungeographic—a perception that, according to McKittrick, connotes an inability to establish geographic relationships or valid geographic knowledge. By describing African-descended people as out-of-place within the social and material geographies of the nation, Mohonk speakers draw on and extend dominant geographic narratives that “require black displacement, black placelessness, black labor, and a black population that submissively stays ‘in place’” (Demonic 9). According to McKittrick, such depictions are rooted in the spatial imaginaries and practices of chattel slavery and are thus key to the dehumanization of African-descended people in the Americas. Goeman demonstrates how settler spatial imaginaries similarly disavow Native peoples’ geographic knowledges and practices. By attempting to overwrite Native geographies, settler spatial practices and imaginaries contribute to “the violent erasure of alternative modes of mapping and geographic understandings” (Goeman 2). The mischaracterization of Native nations’ relationships to place as non-relationships contributes to dominant spatial imaginaries perception of white settlers as the rightful owners and occupants of the land.

The remarks of Mohonk Conference attendees link Black and Native people to one another through their mutual dislocation in ways that suit the needs of the racial settler-state, depicting African-descended people as doubly-displaced and Indigenous peoples as improperly in place. In the eyes of late-nineteenth century social reformers, African-descended people in the Americas appear to have no lasting ties to the lands of Africa and no valid claims to the territories of the United States. They craft a category of placelessness that imagines enslaved and, later, freed people as lacking any rightful or recognizable relationships to the physical and social geographies on either side of the Atlantic. By contrast, conference attendees cast Indigenous peoples as improperly in place. Having encountered Native nations on their traditional homelands, settler spatial imaginaries cannot so easily craft a totalizing narrative of rootlessness. Instead, Mohonk Conference attendees suggest that Native peoples exist improperly in place as they do not appear to cultivate or improve land according to the capitalist logics of production and extraction. Narrating multiple forms and histories of displacement, Mohonk Conference attendees contribute to the geographic stories that seek to locate and contain Black and Indigenous bodies and relationships to land. Such spatial imaginaries endure today, as evidenced by ongoing patterns of residential segregation, racialized policing, and the continued erasure of Indigenous peoples’ presence on and relationships to land.

African-Descended People as Doubly-Displaced

By arguing that the Middle Passage and generations of enslavement catalyzed a fundamental subjective transformation, Mohonk Conference delegates represent enslaved people and their descendants as placeless in relation to both Africa and the Americas. Their discursive construction of double-displacement relies on a pair of rhetorical moves. First, they sever enslaved peoples’ ties to the places and people of Africa. Second, they describe the captivity of chattel slavery as a benevolent form of emplacement that locates African-descended people in proximity to, yet always apart from, civilized modernity. To men like former US President Rutherford B. Hayes and Reverend A.D. Mayo, the geographies of slavery appear benevolent and humanizing. Narrating what he perceives as racial progress, Hayes describes the ancestors of freed people as “African barbarians and pagans of the lowest type” (Lake Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question, “First Mohonk Conference” 10). They had, he claims, “no moral code,” “no skills of any kind,” and “knew nothing of any printed or written language” (10). Hayes suggests, however, that when these “heathen people” were “brought from the Dark Continent” and subjected to “several generations of bondage,” they began to adopt the habits of civilized people (10). Reverend Mayo adds to this conception of enslavement as a civilizing experience, describing generations of chattel slavery as a “brief period of tutelage” through which African-descended people were “brought into contact with the upper strata of the most powerful and civilized peoples” (38). He celebrates the “prodigious change” resulting from bondage, arguing that as a result of slavery, the Black subject was at the time of emancipation “further ‘out of the woods’ of barbarism than any other people after a thousand years” (38, 39). Hayes and Mayo share a perception of the geographies of slavery as transformative and humanizing. From their perspective, traversing slavery’s geographies produces an irreversible separation between African-descended people in the Americas and their ancestral homelands.

Hayes’s and Mayo’s remarks articulate a spatial imaginary that designates the “where” of civilized modernity, differentiating “the woods of barbarism” and the “Dark Continent” from the civilizing spaces of bondage. The slave ship and the plantation appear as geographies of transit that move African-descended people across space and time to arrive in physical proximity to the civilized spaces and people of the Americas. Hayes and Mayo emphasize the same material geographies identified by McKittrick as dehumanizing “locations of captivity”: the slave ship, the Middle Passage, and the plantation (Demonic xvi). McKittrick understands these as the sites that underwrite the violences of chattel slavery by claiming to transform people into property. Hayes and Mayo invert the dehumanizing effects of slavery’s geographies to envision them as sites rich with transformative and human-making potential, proposing that slavery’s geographies are essential to the production of modern, civilized human subjects. From another perspective, however, the logics of slavery and the space of the plantation mark African-descended people as existing apart from the peoples and places of the United States. Plantations serve as spatial reminders of the supposed distance between African-descended people and white Americans (construed as the apex of modern human subjectivity). As a material geography, the plantation contributes to dominant racial imaginaries that construe black working bodies as “without land or home” and “without ownership of self” (McKittrick, “On Plantations” 948). According to McKittrick, the plantation not only “legalized black servitude” but also sanctioned “black placelessness and constraint” (948). The spaces, practices, and imaginaries of the plantation underwrite the representation of African-descended people as enslaveable and thus homeless within a nation of ostensibly free-willed and autonomous white subjects. Even after the abolition of slavery, the plantation “provided the blueprint for future sites of racial entanglement” (949), continuing to mark African-descended people as apart from and placeless within the material and social geographies of the United States.

Reverend A.W. Pitzer articulates this racial placelessness when he insists that, despite their contact with European and American cultures, freed people remain apart from the white societies in which they live and labor. Even as he describes himself as a man who “did not like slavery,” Pitzer perpetuates these racializing and dehumanization logics, remarking “how great the gulf between the Anglo-Saxon and the Negro” (Lake Mohonk Conference on the Negro Questions, “First Mohonk Conference” 70). He calls on the gathered audience to recall that “the wild, naked, man eating savages of equatorial Africa are of the same blood and race as the Negro of this republic” (70). “We must remember,” he continues, “the darkness out of which he comes” and “the fact that he does not belong to our historic race” (70). Through his rearticulation of inherited racial difference, Pitzer casts African-descended people out of the networks of social relations under negotiation at the end of the Civil War. He stages a narrative of racial non-belonging that moves between conceptions of placelessness and efforts to emplace restrictively. The supposedly irreconcilable racial difference Pitzer describes authorized lynching and segregation in the years following Reconstruction. These forms of corporeal violence and geographic constraint send the message that the place of Black citizens is restricted by white Americans. For example, lynching and Jim Crow restrictions sought to emplace Black people in narrowly defined and violently policed spaces. And yet, according to Reverend Mayo, the forms of segregation authorized by these narratives of placelessness have had a beneficial effect on African-descended people. He argues that “the temporary isolation of the Negro in the Southern church, school, and society” is not “an evil” but rather a “providential aid in gaining the self-respect and habit of self-help absolutely essential to good citizenship” (44). He thus holds that the spatial dynamics of slavery (removal) and segregation (confinement) contribute to the progress of the race. Again, the placelessness of African-descended people appears as a path to developmental and evolutionary progress, this time in relation to the dominant geographies of the Americas.

Despite such narratives of double-displacement, however, Black people have and continue to enact and narrate a “different sense of place” that moves against and across dominant geographic imaginaries. McKittrick offers the story of Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman, as an example of the geographies crafted by Black women within and against the dominant geographies that aim to constrain and dehumanize. Jacobs crafted a complex and fraught plan to free her children from slavery and shield herself from ongoing physical and sexual assault, hiding in a narrow attic above her grandmother’s home for seven years. Although this space was too small for Jacobs to stand or even sit comfortably, McKittrick nonetheless characterizes the crawlspace as a “loophole of retreat” (Demonic 41) that allows Jacobs to remake the violent geographies of slavery. McKittrick interprets Jacobs’s spatial imaginaries as evidence of her ability to shape a “different sense of place,” allowing her to “explore the possibilities in the existing landscape.” Although she could not escape or operate entirely outside of slavery’s geographies, Jacobs was able to create a geography that “makes available a place for [her] to articulate her lived experiences and emancipatory desires” (41). Jacobs’s geographic strategies provide an example of Black place-making practices that subvert dominant geographies and create more room for liberation.

Today, in contrast to the dominant geographic imaginaries that narrate and seek to produce Black placelessness, Black Earth Farms centers Black and Indigenous peoples’ relationships to land as an essential element of Black liberation and decolonization. Growing, harvesting, and delivering “nutrient dense and chemical free food to low-income communities experiencing food apartheid,” this collective works to regenerate Black and Indigenous communities’ “connection to and reverence for land and agriculture” (Black Earth Farms). Arguing that “relationships with soil, plants, food, and medicine are direct lines of communication and connection with our ancestors,” Black Earth Farms engages in a place-making practice not bound by commercial food systems, urban segregation, or racialized violence (Black Earth Farms). By building and sustaining communities of care through sustainable farming practices, Black Earth Farms emphasizes the centrality of place-based practices to liberated futures.

Indigenous Peoples and Improper Relationships to Land

The assertion that Indigenous peoples in North America failed to establish valid or recognizable relationships to land was central to social reformers’ discursive construction of Indigenous placelessness. Rather than as doubly-displaced, Mohonk delegates depict Indigenous peoples as improperly in place based on the perception that they do not relate to land through the capitalist logics of acquisition, extraction, and production. Lyman Abbott, a theologian and author, stages this narrative at the 1885 Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian when he argues that “a people do not occupy a country simply because they roam over it.” Abbott holds that Native peoples do not “occupy the coal mines, nor the gold mines, into which they never struck a pick; nor the rivers which flow to the sea, and on which the music of a mill was never heard.” Given their apparent non-use of the land and its resources, he insists that “the Indians can scarcely be said to have occupied this country more than the bisons and buffalo they hunted” (Lake Mohonk Conference on the Friends of the Indian, “Proceedings” 51). Although Abbott tacitly acknowledges the prior relationships of Native people to the lands of North America, he moves immediately to deny their validity. He imposes a colonial geographic imaginary that erases Native peoples’ complex, enduring, and evolving relationships to place. Given their apparent failure or refusal to approach land through capitalist logics, Abbott reduces the status of Native people to that of the buffalo and bison. As Goeman argues, this type of “unjust spatial imaginary” distorts Native peoples’ social worlds such that they “become part of the flora and fauna open to settlement” (18). By re-writing Native peoples’ relationships to place as non-relationships, Abbott depicts the land as open to settlement by those who would use it for production and extraction.

Such narratives of placelessness have long authorized genocide, forced removal, and other forms of dispossession at the hands of colonial and national governments. In the late 1880s, social reformers used this enduring colonial imaginary to argue for allotment in the 1887 Dawes General Allotment Act. The Act legislated the allotment of tribal lands by individual title rather than as collective holdings, and reformers hoped the policy would facilitate the dissolution of tribal governments and the incorporation of Indigenous lands into US markets. Abbot and his contemporaries perceived the reservation system as a spatial order that allowed Native people to continue living on the land improperly and, by extension, to continue living according to traditional lifeways that were not easily assimilable into settler state politics or capitalist economies. Viewing reservations as vast areas of land “set apart to barbarism,” Abbott argues that the reservation system cannot be reformed (Lake Mohonk, “Proceedings” 52), and must instead be “uprooted, root, truck, branch, and leaf, and a new system put in its place” (53). For Abbott and his fellow reformers, the “new system” would transform Native peoples’ supposedly improper relationships to land into proper and recognizable forms of individual land ownership, and protect Native peoples from being further removed and dispossessed. Abbott maintains that allotment would secure every Indian “in his right to his home, and in his right to free intercourse and free trade, whether the rest of the tribe wish him so protected or not” (53). Individual land ownership and independent economic activity are, he suggests, rights “which no tribe has the right to take from him, and no nation the right to sanction the robbery of” (53). In Abbott’s view, then, properly emplacing Native people on the land through private property ownership would produce them as differentiated and independent individuals, transforming their improper relationships to land, protecting them from further dispossession by settlers, and preventing what he perceived as the violation of individual economic and ownership rights by tribal governments.

The rhetorical underpinnings and material results of the Dawes Act produced a contradictory cluster of spatial discourses and dynamics. On the one hand, reformers claimed that allotment would protect Native peoples’ connections to land by formally and properly placing them on the land; their supposedly improper placement on the land would become legible through individual land title as a mode of civilizing emplacement. Yet in historical fact, allotment facilitated a new era of dislocation through land sales, land speculation, and tax forfeiture (108). Despite reformers’ claims that the Dawes Act would secure Native people on their land, Native landholdings decreased from 138 million to 53 million acres between 1887 and 1934 (Chang, “Encolsures” 108). By narrating shifting conditions of displacement and emplacement, reformers worked to incorporate Native peoples and lands into US political and economic structures. In the minds of social reformers, the incorporation of Indigenous peoples and lands into the nation state required the dissolution of tribal governments and the disappearance of Indigenous subjects and socialities as Indigenous. These settler spatial imaginaries seek to “incorporate Native people through their disappearance or social death” (Goeman 4). The contradictory discourses and shifting practices of displacement and emplacement surrounding allotment are essential to explaining and justifying this mode of incorporation and/as disappearance.

Despite reformers’ persistent efforts to narrate and make placelessness a reality, Indigenous peoples continued to enact place-making relationships to land that exceeded the terms set by policy-makers. For example, in the face of forced removal from the regions now known as Georgia and Alabama, town leaders of the Creek Nation strove to establish continuities between their ancestral homelands and Indian Territory. According to David Chang, Hotulke Emarthla, micco of Okichye, “planted the ashes of his town fire in the earth” 600 miles from the Creek homelands (The Color of the Land 26). Rekindling the town fire on the other end of removal, Hotulke Emarthla insisted that this new place, too, was Okichye. In the allotment era, Creek people continued to craft and enact their own relationships to place despite the expectations of US authorities. Although allotment policy re-envisioned land as private property, Chang argues that “Creek people continued to use their land to work toward their own goals” (112). Rather than approaching allotment as the foundation of a new subjecthood as yeoman farmers (as policy-makers had anticipated), Creek people used the new land system to sustain kinship and community ties by selecting plots alongside members of their kin group (144).

The ceremonial arbors, funerary sites, and urban farms built and stewarded by Sogorea Te’ Land Trust remind us that today, as in the past, Indigenous peoples sustain relationships to place that operate within, but not always in alignment with, the terms set by white settler spatial imaginaries, political systems, and economies. The Ohlone people are not a federally recognized tribe, and so remain landless within settler imaginaries and material arrangements of space: “the lack of access to traditional ceremonial grounds and to land appropriate for multi-day ceremonies is a serious challenge faced by Lisjan people today” (Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, “Lisjan”). However, through the rematriation and stewardship of urban land, the women-led intertribal collective creates pathways for Native and non-Native people alike to affirm Indigenous geographies and establish relationships to land not grounded in settler spatial arrangements. Sogorea Te’ Land Trust has built a traditional Lisjan roundhouse on rematriated land where ceremonies can be held; formed a Himmetka, “a culturally based emergency response hub” (“Himmetka”); and established three urban farms where community members grow traditional plants, medicines, as well as fruits and vegetables.¹ In these ways, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust has facilitated Indigenous peoples’ ability to affirm their enduring and evolving relationships to unceded and occupied Ohlone lands. Sogorea Te’ Land Trust invites non-Native peoples too to see and relate to the land outside of settler spatial orders. Paying the Shuumi land tax and volunteering to support the organization’s daily operations rupture settler spatial imaginaries by affirming that before these lands were known as Berkeley, Oakland, or Richmond, they were Lisjan Ohlone land, and remain so to this day.

Relational Discourses of Place

Reading the records of the two Mohonk Conferences alongside one another reveals that narratives of Black and Native placelessness are not simply parallel or similar discourses but are relational and co-constitutive. Beyond comparing the perceived placelessness of Black and Native people, conference attendees mobilized the narrative of humanizing Black dis/emplacement as a conceptual resource to justify allotment as a civilizing mode of dis/emplacement for Native people. This relational exchange is evident in both the founding of the two conferences and in the published statements of attendees. The formation of two conferences registers the construction of Blackness and Indigeneity as separate yet related problems in the minds of late-nineteenth century social reformers. As they sought to describe and respond to the problems of racial and colonial difference, the attendees of the conferences presumed that African-descended and Indigenous people are separate groups of people that can be managed and incorporated into the nation by similar means. Buoyed by the apparent success of the Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian in swaying public opinion in favor of allotment and a federal boarding school system, Mohonk delegates mobilized to form a corollary conference to address matters related to Black citizens. The conferences’ founder and host Albert K. Smiley recalled that years prior, President Hayes indicated that he was “so gratified” with the methods and spirit of the Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian that he could not help but hope that someday “that other weaker race” would “have some annual assembly such as this to consider its condition and to aid it to rise to the stature of true American citizenship” (Lake Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question, “First Mohonk Conference” 7). This hope, according to Smiley, was the impetus for the formation of the Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question. Crafting an origin story for the new conference, Smiley recounts the duplication of an institutional model first devised to address the problems associated with settler expansion (the Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian) to craft a corollary institution to address the problems arising from enslavement and its afterlives (the Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question). In this narrative, Smiley alludes to a relational form of thinking that borrowed institutional forms and civic practices oriented towards settler expansion to envision a response to the problem of racial difference.

Smiley’s duplication of institutional forms – and the exchange of ideas about Blackness and Indigeneity that it facilitates – positions Black and Native communities as comparable problems that might be resolved through similar means. This viewpoint was made explicit in speeches at the Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question, as delegates drew on discourses of Black placelessness to express their support for allotment policy. After the Dawes Act passed, the actual allotment of land proceeded unevenly across various reservations; some – including the Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek nations – were exempted from the terms of the act entirely. But whether subject to the Dawes Act or not, Native nations persistently resisted the division of tribal lands and thus, reformers and policy-makers had to fight continually for the implementation of the policy. So strong was the resistance to allotment amongst the Five Civilized tribes, for example, that the federal government had to appoint the Dawes Commission in 1893 and pass the Curtis Act in 1897 before their lands were divided (Carlson 15).⁵ Thus, it is not surprising that in 1890, Mohonk Conference attendees continued to argue for the effectiveness of and need for allotment.

The ideological underpinnings and material effects of allotment policy have been studied within the frameworks of Native American studies as an extension of earlier practices of removal and dislocation.⁶ However, examining the arguments made in favor of allotment at the Mohonk Conferences produces new insights into the discursive relationship between Indian removal and chattel slavery. Reformers’ discourse of placelessness and efforts to emplace Indigenous peoples properly on the lands desired and/or claimed by the United States depend on a metaphorical relationship to discourses of Black placelessness. Casting enslavement as a “brief period of tutelage,” this group of reformers argued that increased proximity to white, western society catalyzed racial advancement for African-descended people. In turn, Mohonk attendees suggested that allotment will bring Native peoples into intimate contact with white Americans and thus drive their progress towards modernity.

Drawing a comparison between the history of enslavement and of the reservation system, Mohonk attendees mobilize the material and discursive construction of Black placelessness as a model for how to incorporate Native peoples and lands into the structures of racial-settler capitalism. Where enslavement appears as a civilizing force, attendees of the Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question perceive the reservation system – which enabled Native peoples to maintain collective land holdings, even if limited in scope – as a hindrance to progress. For instance, Reverend A.D. Mayo perceives the reservation system as a spatial arrangement that allows Native people to live in “proud isolation” from civilized society, thus making it possible to repel all the “beneficent changes” experienced by enslaved people living in close proximity to white society (39). He argues that as a result of the ongoing spatial separation facilitated by reservations, “the entire philanthropy, religion, and statesmanship of the republic are now wrestling with the problem of saving [Native peoples] from the fate of the buffalo” (38). Unlike the supposedly humanizing emplacement wrought by enslavement, Mayo construes the reservation system as a mode of spatial organization that renders Native people akin to the buffalo and similarly threatened with extinction. From Mayo’s perspective, the preservation of Native life requires a form a dis/emplacement modeled on that which animated enslavement and its afterlives. Samuel J. Barrows, too, stages this relational spatial imaginary when he contrasts enslavement as a mode of incorporation that draws African-descended people into the sphere of civilized modernity with the reservation system as a spatial order that holds Native peoples apart from the civilizing spaces of the United States. He explains in 1891 that, whereas slavery and its afterlives have “drawn [the Negro] away from his traditions, and absorbed him into the body of our civilization,” federal Indian policy pushed the Indian “outside of our civilization, forcing him back upon his tribal traditions, leaving him free to speak his own language” (Lake Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question, “Second Mohonk Conference” 8). Laying claim to the role of benevolent humanitarian, Mayo and Barrows applaud reformers and policy-makers for working to ensure the continuation of Native life by properly emplacing them on the land via allotment. In this comparative discourse, enslavement is first recast as a civilizing force and subsequently converted into a model for reshaping Indigenous relationships to land and making land available for settler use.

The remarks of Hayes, Pitzer, Mayo, Abbott, and Barrows illuminate the shifting narratives of placelessness that animate late-nineteenth century social reform. In addition to leveraging displacement to seat themselves at the top of a racial/colonial spatial and social order, late-nineteenth century social reformers sought to delineate the relationship between Black and Indigenous peoples by using slavery as a metaphor for allotment. In actuality, the geographies of slavery attempted to convert Black life into a labor resource and to demarcate the limits of humanity. Similarly, the material effect of allotment was not the “civilization” of Native peoples but rather the capturing of Indigenous lands within the mechanisms of racial-settler capitalism.⁷ Analyzing the spatial narratives of Mohonk Conference speakers reveals the centrality of Black and Native placelessness to a white settler imaginary that envisions “modern” and “civilized” white subjects as the rightful owners, occupants, and masters of Black and Native peoples and lands. Their discursive acts recall how the conquistador-settler, to borrow Tiffany Lethabo King’s terminology, seeks to determine “the violent terms of … social relations” in order to ascend to whiteness and mastery over peoples and lands (xi). Mohonk delegates exemplify how the self-actualization of the conquistador-settler requires the mediation of Black and Indigenous relationships as well as the death and displacement of racial and colonial others (xi). Through the language of double-displacement and improper placement, social reformers justify the dehumanization of Black and Native people as well as the dispossession of Native nations. Their remarks register an anxiety about the place of Euro-American settlers in the Americas. Asserting their right to live on and govern in the lands called the United States requires the disavowal of longstanding and newly emerging Black and Indigenous geographies.

Today, the geographic, social, and political dominance of those people racially coded as white continues to rely upon similar representations of Black and Native peoples as placeless. However, the embodied and place-based practices of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Black Earth Farms point to fissures in this white settler spatial imaginary. They challenge or operate outside of this framework by asserting ongoing relationships to land despite centuries of thought and action meant to transform or dissolve these relations, and by opening up possibilities for mutual relations between Black and Native people grounded in land and place rather than displacement and dispossession. By enacting and nurturing relationships to land on terms set by their own communities, and by building relationships with one another, these organizations produce other ways of knowing and experiencing place.

Black and Native Studies: Beyond the Impasse

Emphasizing the distinctions between processes of racial dehumanization and settler colonial violence is a critical intervention into the tendency to collapse histories of genocide, removal, and territorial dispossession into frameworks of racial difference. However, too neat a division between the signs of “body” and “land” frequently results in positioning Black and Native Studies, or the experiences of Black and Indigenous peoples, as oppositions where entanglements, overlaps, and sites of mutual constitution are obscured. Such occlusion raises questions about methodology and how best to account for the complex interchanges between racialization and colonization in the US. Can we approach Black and Indigenous place-making practices without placing them in opposition to one another? Can we explore how land-oriented practices fit into divergent and overlapping liberatory and decolonizing political imaginaries without establishing hierarchies between them? Can we construct methodological or theoretical approaches that allow for Black and Indigenous relationships to land to emerge as a site of encounter rather than impasse? Can we account for simultaneity and difference? Can we account for vegetable beds tended by Black and Indigenous communities, driven by different political imaginaries, and yet at times tended and watered together?

In addition to studying the unique histories of African-descended and Indigenous peoples, scholars have increasingly taken up relational analyses that consider enslavement, colonization, and other dehumanizing forms of power alongside one another.⁸ Building on these methods, I approach land and place as a site of encounter between Black and Native Studies, rather than as concepts that sever these fields. Enslavement and genocide cannot be collapsed as equivalent historical processes, yet both are foundational to the formation of the United States (and Western modernity more generally); Lethabo King describes them as “distinct yet edgeless forms of violence.” Black fungibility and Native genocide proceed along divergent trajectories and yet “the violence moves as one” (x). Ethical analysis of the violences experienced by Black and Native peoples in the Americas thus requires a form of relational analysis capacious enough to account for simultaneity and difference. Troubling the analytical separation of Black and Native Studies via land and body, the proceedings of the Mohonk Conferences demonstrate that, historically, discourses of place structure both racial and colonial imaginaries by producing narratives about how Black and Indigenous people do (or do not) relate to material geographies and the social landscapes of modernity.

Using this historical instance as an example, we can ask how settler spatial imaginaries continue to occlude and disturb Black and Indigenous relations to self, land, and other. As place continues to be a site of struggle, attending to the ways Black and Indigenous people have been simultaneously yet differently rendered placeless is an important element of liberatory intellectual and political pursuits. Rather than allow the notion of incommensurability to produce seductive notions of irreconcilable difference, attending to simultaneity and difference brings into view the mutual constitution of racial dehumanization and settler colonial relations. This suggests that Black liberation and decolonization require attention to the ways that both Black and Indigenous peoples have engaged in struggle with white settler spatial imaginaries. However, if “many histories and ways of seeing and mapping the world can occur at the same time,” as Goeman argues, we cannot presume that dominant geographies overdetermine the nature of Black and Indigenous relations to place nor their relations to one another. In the face of displacement and dispossession, Black and Native peoples have sustained material geographies and spatial imaginaries that exceed the terms of placelessness. Today, the embodied and land-oriented work of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Black Earth Farms point towards “alternate geographic formations” that might “incite new, or different, and perhaps more just, geographic stories” (McKittrick, Demonic xix). These two organizations provide spaces that nurture embodied relations to the land, cultivating a grounds of encounter where Black and Indigenous communities might remake the spatial relations that white settler imaginaries would establish for them. Their subaltern geographies might incite alternative mapping practices that open up “a conceptual arena through which more humanly workable geographies can be and are imagined” (xii). The vegetable beds tended by Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Black Earth Farms offer an existing model of co-constituted, land-oriented care between Black and Native communities. This site of growth and abundance – fed by and illustrative of Black and Indigenous political imaginaries that diverge from the model of nation-making predicated on exploitation, dehumanization, and dispossession – pushes against prevailing white settler geographies that imagine African-descended and Indigenous peoples as placeless. The collective care shown to the soil, the carrots, the bugs, and the other beings that make place on this farm reveal Black and Native placelessness to be a settler fiction. Within the limits set by racial-settler capitalism, the embodied and narrative practices of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Black Earth Farms are a reminder that Black and Native peoples have persistently and powerfully challenged the dehumanization of racialized life and the exhaustive extraction of land.

Sarah E.K. Fong is an Assistant Professor of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. Her research examines the entanglements of schooling, self-making, and racial-settler capitalism in the late-nineteenth century. Dr. Fong has published work in American Indian Culture and Research Journal as well as Amerasia Journal.

I would like to express my thanks to the editors and staff of Postmodern Culture for making this volume possible. I am thankful to the organizers and participants of the “Troubling the Grounds Conference” for creating a space in which to develop these ideas. I am grateful, also, to Dr. Rosanne Sia for thinking with me over many months and reading countless drafts of this article. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Dr. SA Smythe, for their steady encouragement from the earliest iteration of this piece to its final form.

Footnotes

1. See descriptions of all Sogorea Te’ Land Trust’s projects at sogoreate-landtrust.org..

2. Sogorea Te’ Land Trust defines Shuumi as “a gift.” According to their website, it is a way for “non-Indigenous people who live in traditional Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone territory to make a voluntary annual financial contribution to this critical community work. If you live on Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone land, you are inadvertently benefitting from the genocide waged against the Ohlone people and the theft of their land. Whether you know it or not, however you feel about it, this is an inescapable fact. The civic infrastructure, the economic system, the private development and the consumption of natural resources in our society are all connected to and in different ways built upon the colonial occupation of this land and the violent displacement of the Ohlone. Paying the Shuumi Land Tax is a small way to acknowledge this legacy and contribute to its healing.”

3. See “Herrera v. Wyoming,” Harvard Law Review, 8 Nov. 2019, harvardlawreview.org/2019/11/herrera-v-wyoming/. Accessed 24 Aug. 2020; Olivia B. Waxman, “This Supreme Court Case on Hunting Is Really About a 150-Year-Old Treaty and Wyoming’s Existence as a State,” Time, 8 Jan. 2019, time.com/5494458/treaty-wyoming-herrera-history/. Accessed 24 Aug. 2020.

4. See Albert Bender, “Supreme Court’s earthshaking decision: Eastern Oklahoma is still Indian Country,” Indianz.Com, 15 Jul. 2020, www.indianz.com/News/2020/07/15/supreme-courts-earthshaking-decision-eas.asp. Accessed 24 Aug. 2020; David K. TeSelle, “Review of McGirt v. Oklahoma – How the Supreme Court and Justice Gorsuch’s Revolutionary Textualism Brought America’s ‘Trail of Tears’ Promise to the Creek Nation Back From the Dead,” The National Law Review, 5 Aug. 2020, www.natlawreview.com/article/review-mcgirt-v-oklahoma-how-supreme-court-and-justice-gorsuch-s-revolutionary. Accessed August 24, 2020.

5. See Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, “Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Threatened with Land Disestablishment, Tribal Leaders Step in to Address Ongoing Land Issues and Threats to Sovereignty,” 30 Mar. 2020, mashpeewampanoagtribe-nsn.gov/news/2020/3/30/mashpee-wampanoag-tribe-threatened-with-land-disestablishment-tribal-leaders-step-in-to-address-ongoing-land-issues-and-threats-to-sovereignty. Accessed 24 Aug. 2020; Carrie Jung, “What’s At Stake In The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Land Bill.” WBUR, 13 May 2019, www.wbur.org/news/2019/05/13/edited-whats-at-stake-in-the-mashpee-wampanoag-tribal-land-bill. Accessed 24 Aug. 2020.

6. In 1893, the Dawes Commission was appointed to negotiate with these five tribes to get them to accept allotment or, if they would not, to force it upon them. In 1897, Congress passed the Curtis Act which dissolved tribal governments and enforced allotment where voluntary agreements could not be reached.

7. See Emily Greenwald, Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and the Dawes Act, U of New Mexico P, 2002; Frederick Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920, U of Nebraska P, 2001; D.S. Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands, U of Oklahoma P, 1973.

8. See Sarah Fong, “Racial-Settler Capitalism: Character Building and the Accumulation of Land and Labor in the Late Nineteenth Century,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 43, no. 2, 2019, pp. 25–48.

9. See Jodi A. Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, U of Minnesota P, 2011; Quynh Nhu Le, Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Americas, Temple UP, 2019; Nada Elia, David M. Hernández, Jodi Kim, Shana L. Redmond, Dylan Rodriguez, Sarita Echavez See, editors, Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, Duke UP, 2016; J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “Tracing Historical Specificity: Race and the Colonial Politics of (In)Capacity,” American Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 2, 2017; Lisa Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, Duke UP, 2015.

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