Coda

ARCHIPELAGOES OF LIFE

This is about rejecting everything people say we have to be in order to be recognized, to be citizens, to be humans.

—Alexis Templeton

What we’re doing is creating something different. For me, it’s a different way of viewing myself, a different way of living, a different way of loving my blackness.

—Kristina (pseudonym)

A cultural politics of race and space relies on the logics of antiblackness as described in disturbing detail throughout the preceding chapters of this book. As a fundamental technique of biopower, power over life, this politics deploys culture to produce and police disposable yet profitable bodies in North St. Louis County. But to theorize the experience of living under the “racial state of municipal governance” as solely a form of social death denies how relations of power are dependent upon possibilities for resistance. Michel Foucault makes this point when he states that “if there were no possibility of resistance, there would be no power relations at all.”1 The paradoxically liberating capacity of lived flesh to resist and the ability of embodied knowledge of suffering to move beyond discursive enclosures of rights and personhood lie at the core of Alexander Weheliye’s powerful critique of the limits of biopolitics, bare life, and related theories of modern political violence. Lived flesh and embodied knowledge are especially important with regard to theorizing modern racial projects. As Weheliye argues, “the existence of alternative modes of life [occurs] alongside the violence, subjection, exploitation, and racialization that define the modern human.”2 This argument asserts the possibility of fully inhabited flesh, including its capacity to experience such things as pleasure, desire, pain, and even death, to redefine living as human in ways that transcend the limits of both biopolitical and liberal humanism critiques, especially the conceptualization of bare life, which leaves the body suspended in a condition of utter abjection. When people who are designated as those who “could die” appear within spaces imagined as protected (the spaces of life and flourishing), suffering is made visible and spatial dissonance results.

Haunting, at its most basic level, occurs when something that is supposed to be invisible, or is said to not exist, can suddenly be seen. Seeing people who should not be seen, especially when their personhood is said to be in question in the first place, is an uncanny experience, and a choice must be made to either see or to deny those who haunt. Through haunting, time and space are collapsed such that past, present, and future are not a continuum but must be sorted out. Avery Gordon explains,

Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in linear time, alters the way we normally separate and sequence the past, the present and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view. . . . The whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and demands its due, demands your attention. Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way, I tried to suggest, we’re notified that what’s been suppressed or concealed is very much alive and present, messing or interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed towards us.3

This statement provides a productive and provocative way to think about the queering of protest presented in part II of this book. Ferguson protesters demanded their due, revealed that they are not only alive but living their blackness fully, and strategically messed with the forms of containment and repression that are ceaselessly directed toward them. Women and queer individuals leading Ferguson resistance also illustrated how the performance of visibility leverages the power that embodied blackness holds—revealing the inhuman and reconfiguring the metrics of what it means to live as fully human. This living as fully human is similar to what Fred Moten has described as a social poetics that is “enthralled by generativity.”4 The choreopolitics of bodies in space employed by nonconforming protesters joined with the uncanny experience of bodies that show up in places where they are not supposed to be seen, and demanded that the terms of visibility and generativity be set by people practicing a sociality that exists outside, and beyond, the normative social world.5

Disrupting the static Look!—the gaze that attempts to inscribe a fixed identity onto Black bodies—a sensate praxis of blackness, now as flesh, supersedes and exceeds the human and thus resituates blackness outside abjection, outside enduring distinctions regarding degrees of the human that construct and constrain bodies, indeed outside an ontological ordering of the world.6 In so doing, the degrees of the inhuman practiced against inscribed flesh also becomes visible. This reconfiguration (of the body) and resituation (in space) is the ethics of lived blackness. The ethics of lived blackness reveals itself as an always-already-present site of freedom with “poetic access to what it is of the other world that remains unheard, unnoted, unrecognized in this one.”7

The ephemeral space of violence evidenced through the inscribed flesh of Michael Brown and the space of resistance that was opened up by differently inscribed Black flesh in Ferguson became a worldwide symbol of how profane and sacred spaces can exist within the same place. In this way, the haunting of a space connected diaspora subjects in both beautiful and horrific terms, linking Black experience and Black flesh across time and space—what Nadia Ellis has described as a “territory of the soul.”8 Haunting, however, is more than just a connection to the past. Haunting is very much about the future. As Gordon has argued, haunting reveals the something-to-be-done; it is “one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life.”9 Until 2014, the abusive systems of power that had been operating in North St. Louis County for decades at extreme scales were invisible to some and conveniently ignored by others, except those who experienced them daily. Although these defuturing systems have not been dismantled in any permanent way, they continue to emerge as visible and call for something to be done, which does not necessarily lead to futuring practices.

Sending a militarized police force to Ferguson and deciding not to indict Darren Wilson were two responses to the something-to-be-done. Passing legislation limiting predatory policing practices in North St. Louis County that was subsequently fought and overturned by Black municipal leadership or forcing largely unenforced consent decrees on the cities of Ferguson and Pagedale that do not address the other twenty-nine municipalities in this geography were other responses. Ousting Bob McCulloch, the white St. Louis County prosecutor who handled the investigation of Brown’s death and held the office for twenty-seven years, and electing Wesley Bell, the Black challenger (and a municipal judge and prosecutor in North St. Louis County who was part of the predatory system) were additional reactions to protests. The momentum to initiate yet another effort to reunite the city and county of St. Louis after 143 years of separation and to restructure redundant and abusive municipal jurisdictions (which failed due to corruption and questionable motives) was also attributed to awareness raised by Ferguson resistance.

The one step forward, one step back pattern of redressing state-sanctioned racialized violence through policy reforms is not what emergent leaders in Ferguson were and are fighting for. Rather, the legacy of “Ferguson” in response to what amounts to a public lynching and which continues a long history of the Black radical imagination, is a call to confront blackness itself as a way that affords different calculations and imaginations of what it means to live and practice freedom. Just as Black political autonomy has been shown to be a hollow prize within prevailing systems of power, remediating inequality predicated on the violent and historical differentiation of people and space through mechanisms of the liberal state simply perpetuates this cycle. But “what if blackness is the name that has been given to the social field and social life of an illicit alternative capacity to desire?”10 While blackness cannot be separated from Black people without violence resulting, what I believe Moten is suggesting by posing this question is that blackness holds the possibility to usher in a world with a future—something none of us currently can claim.

What this book has tried to convey in part is that the stakes surrounding how we respond to the something-to-be-done do not just apply to people who live in places like North St. Louis County. The modalities and uses of antiblackness that produce invisible, precarious and profitable people and populations across the globe through the denial of personhood and attachments of blackness to risk, in fact deny the possibility for anyone to experience the full potential of living as human. These modalities are also unsustainable, as they undergird the gradual destruction of life-sustaining resources, which will ultimately deny a future for all life. For these reasons, we all live in a precarious state of existence, which is not to deny the fact that precarity is experienced in vastly different degrees or that privilege renders precariousness illegible.11

Bodies continue to show up and haunt St. Louis and elsewhere in ways that rework “the human” as a powerful act of protest against defuturing systems and actions. Although no longer at the top of national news feeds (at least as I write this), the work of those who were ignited in the days after Michael Brown’s death continues, in various ways, to show how “in this very violence something rotten in the law is revealed.”12 “Justice for Mike Brown” brought people to the street, but young emergent leaders pushed people in the region and beyond to confront the afterlife of slavery in the everyday lives of people all around them, even if they subsequently chose to look away. While most people outside the protest family consider the Ferguson Protest Movement to be over, those whose lives were transformed across space and time are committed to fight in registers that go beyond those recognized by the liberal state. This resistance and the capacity to imagine other worlds crop up across the globe and are connected through a radical relationality that not only multiplies “the reals” but maps that which is currently unimaginable.13 Together these outcroppings create, as Arturo Escobar beautifully describes, archipelagoes of life that sit within the sea of unsustainable ways of being and doing.14

“Until everyone can answer the question, ‘What is the value of a life born in 1996?’. . . . we don’t stop” (Ashley Yates).