Countermanifestos and Audibility

By now "Decolonize_____!" is a familiar formulation. "Decolonize" is placed in front of a word to describe it as an object of oppression, and the phrase is then followed by an exclamation point. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang predicted, in the academic move to decolonize everything, specific claims by Indigenous peoples to territories fall out of the political demand. If we are serious about changing the structural relations of colonial power, which the call to decolonize media implies, we must first raise the problem of foundational violence and dispossession, remembering how settler Law protects the privatization of property as a foundational underpinning of the capitalist racial order.

Let's not follow the "commonsense" next move, which would make a universal claim to common lands. As the radio programmer and Kanaka Moli scholar J. Kēhaulani Kauanui reminds us, the concept of the commons dates back to a seventeenth-century English context. It was transferred into North America by British settlers in order to manage Indigenous lands during the founding of early towns. The commons, then, is "a historically and racialized concept as well as one implicated in colonial structures."¹ In other words, in the Americas there is no common media, no common property—except as Indigenous communal territories and Indigenous technologies. To decolonize media, we should first reposition the normative claim on land as the original corporate ownership, mediated by and organized for settlers. We might call this group of ideas countermanifesto point number 1.

Countermanifesto point number 2 invokes Nicholas Mirzoeff's term "countervisuality" as a way to look back on the mediations of colonial power.² I use the term "the extractive view" as a way to see how terrains are mapped as digital colonies.³ Rather than the panopticon, which assumes a disciplinary society, the extractive view names how corporate states use military and surveillance technologies. We might also insist on decentering ocular and Eurocentric representation through decolonial visions. The Mapuche filmmaker Francisco Huichaqueo works with the machi healer Sylvia Kallfüman to slow the speed of accelerated capitalism by visualizing temporal lag in the videos they make together. Embedded in the Bío-Bío River, the machi's body becomes a way to inhabit the sensorial world. We might turn the original demand to decolonize into a question, changing the language slightly to adjust for vibration and frequency: What do decolonial media look like? What do decolonial media feel and sound like?

Countermanifesto point number 3: originally, the genre of the manifesto referred to a verbal declaration of intention, political motives, or viewpoints, be it by an individual, group, or the state. I use the term "countermanifesto" to invoke the antistate and anticolonial historical usages of the manifesto, rather than its mediation as a tool of power. We might think with the decolonial critique of Emma Pérez, who queers the documents of archival research that reproduce colonial and heteronormative ways of seeing and knowing.⁴ Pérez asks, How do we retrain colonial visions? Which modes work beyond, rather than on behalf of, the technologies of racial and extractive capitalism?

For this, the manifesto may be a useful genre, although it, too, is steeped and entangled in a history of power. For masculine revolutionaries in the Americas, the countermanifesto has often been the privileged site of enunciation and a new site of dispossession, excluding Black, trans, queer, female, and Indigenous populations, to instead speak on behalf of the oppression of "the working man" or lo popular. In other words, the manifesto, depending on standpoint, could become another site of mediation on behalf of all, but it often functions to lift the positionality and knowledge locus of only the speaker.

Although the human microphone used by the Occupy movement amplified this idea by echoing the voices of many, it still amplified the voice of a singular speaking subject. Put simply, the manifesto was the original leftist mansplaining technology. I would even go so far as to suggest that the manifesto, with a few exceptions, leaves out the complex trace of queer and decolonial feminist and submerged perspectives. In the vein of...