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Introduction
The essays in this volume address interlinked themes of colonialism, abolitionism, racial capitalism, and settlement. Violence appears here in many forms: in state forms of punishment, transgression, colonization or resistance; in the violence of imposed identities, and in the violence of confining racialized groups to positions of subordination or exploitation. Some of these essays draw our attention to intimate forms of violence—or the violence inserted into the most intimate links—while others emphasize forms of violence emerging from radical divides and differences almost impossible to bridge. But alongside their analyses of slavery, dispossession, racial punitive systems, and other structures of injustice resulting from long imperial and colonial histories, these essays also offer us paths for overcoming these structures and engage in practices of freedom. They offer hope alongside their critiques, calling us to continue the work of truer and fuller emancipation and liberation.
Chad Shomura's essay crafts the idea of "Decolonial Mood Work," which addresses both how settler colonialism regulates moods and how colonized people undo those regulations to live in different affective registers. Shomura focuses on feelings of belonging and home in Hawai'i, arguing that if settler colonialism is about establishing home on occupied lands and making settlers "feel at home," houselessness troubles that relationship and their affective forms. Decolonial mood work makes sensible the work of settlement, and thus can be undertaken by settlers and Natives, separately or collectively, toward feeling a route to decolonization. It entails an openness to felt experiences that undo attachments to settlement and stir up desires for decolonial worlds, finding new ways to feel at home and connected to land.
Also examining settler colonialism and resistance to it, Margaux Kristjansson's essay focuses on Canadian Residential Schools that aimed to assimilate Indigenous children into colonizing ways of life. In her essay "Refusing Child-Stealing States," she argues that the schools reveal how the Canadian state secured whiteness and capital through the reproductive policing of Indigenous women and kidnapping of Indigenous children from their lands, kin, and nations into foster care. Yet Kristjansson also identifies a form of abolitionist care that stems from Indigenous relational orders to unmake the carceral grounds of [End Page 325] the colonial polity and repudiate its brutal treatment of Indigenous women and children.
Questions of land, (settler) colonialism, and forms of what we may call policed abolitionism are key also to Ricardo Vega León's "Tocqueville on the Abolition of Slavery in the French Caribbean." León shows how Tocqueville's emancipation project was in fact one of curtailed freedom and "preemptive dispossession." By calling to limit property rights and emancipated people's purchasing power, Tocqueville sought to separate the previously-enslaved from the land and confine them to the sugar plantations. While he was committed to ending slavery, for Tocqueville abolitionism was an economic project aimed at increasing productivity. As such, he believed it would be jeopardized by emancipated people's full economic freedom. His vision of "emancipation" thus relied on the state's coercive power to transform ex-slaves into proletarians.
The interpretation of colonialism as a form of policing is also central to Paul Gorby's essay, "The Policing Animal," which examines the racialized logic at the foundation of punishment. Gorby tracks down a deep thread of "punitive humanism" in the history of political thought: the belief that human beings are "naturally" punitive. More fundamental than any concrete system of incarceration, it is this tendency to see the human as a "punishing animal"—and simultaneously, this impulse to punish—that we need to overcome on the way to abolition, he argues. Abolitionist theory and practice, in other words, must be understood in relation to this more foundational understanding of the human. The essay proposes to overcome this framework through a leftist reading of Nietzsche's critique of punishment that opens the possibility of alternative ways of imagining both subjectivity and society.
Addressing abolition through aesthetics, Daniel Loick's "The Aesthetics of Counter-Communities: Toward an Abolitionist Concept of Beauty" redefines the aesthetics of beauty from the perspective of marginalized counter-communities. They may not fit into dominant categories of the beautiful, but they refigure beauty as conflict and struggle, rather than as symmetry and harmony. Loick draws on work by Saidiya Hartman and Peter Weiss, and challenges the politics of ugliness, to argue for beauty as an aesthetic form of community-building that targets the abolition of all forms of domination.
In "Stripping Aways the Masks of Identity," Sid Simpson and Ryan Curnow put Fanon and Adorno into conversation around questions of negative dialectic, (non)identity, and the violence inherent in identity thinking. Despite the asymmetries of power across colonial and racial lines they identify, Simpson and Curnow find surprising links between Adorno's turn to art and Fanon's turn to violence, specifically in relation [End Page 326] to these theorists' efforts to "confront the violence inherent in the modern world and think through ways that it might be overcome." As they show, at stake for both is revealing false universality "that keeps people in subjection." By exploring the tangential lines in Adorno's and Fanon's thought, Simpson and Curnow emphasize the shared work of freedom woven into their writings.
Finally, Jonas Heller's piece, "Facing the Systemic Crisis: The Divide in Criticism in the Pandemic State of Emergency," brings us back to the COVID-19 pandemic to examine two critiques of the emergency responses that circulated widely in the US and Europe: first, that government responses trampled on individual rights; and second, that they ignored democratic decision-making. Focusing on Germany, the essay argues that these lines of criticism point to a moment of real disjuncture in between rights and democratic practice, suggesting that it is rooted in the rise of authoritarian versions of freedom across western societies. [End Page 327]