| Abstract | This essay was adapted from a conference presentation given at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association meeting in 2018. In it I consider the entanglements of antiblackness and settler colonialism through the incommensurabilities of Blackness and Indigeneity at the center of U.S. empire. I ask how theorizations of race and colonialism have lived consequences for how we enact solidarities across disparate histories and geographies, embody resistances at the intersections of identities, and imagine futures outside the colonial registers of possession and dispossession. Returning to the concept of arrivants, I consider further what “ground” and “normativity” actually mean in the context of antiblackness and empire, and toward that end, I hold ground as Indigenous and as relational to push against anything that might be deemed normative in gestures that highlight the processes of removal and arrival to center the refusals of subjectivity as it has been defined through enlightenment and imperialism. Finally, I argue for a reading of power that apprehends the conflicting, oppositional, and contradictory vectors of antiblackness within ongoing settler colonialism to reveal how the investments of racial capitalism pit oppressions against each other while requiring different forms of oppression to vie for ascendancy as the one truth of history. |
