Original speech in Portuguese: “Como eu vou fazer poesia quando eu escuto um governo interino dizer que os povos indígenas não merecem uma ponte para o futuro? O que é que vamos dizer? Vou dizer isso para ele: Nós não precisamos dessa ponte; nós não queremos essa ponte. Nós queremos passar por dentro da água. Nós queremos passar por dentro dos rios.” Translated by the author.
See A World of Many Worlds, eds. Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (Duke University Press, 2018).
I am indebted to, among others, artist and activist Zahy Guajajara, who has acted in my films; indigenous leaders Ailton Krenak and Sonia Guajajara, to whom I have strived to listen closely; and anthropologists Tânia Stolze Lima and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in Brazil. In a US context, the films of Adam and Zack Khalil, to whom I dedicate this essay, and the writings of Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, and Kim Tallbear have taught me many lessons.
Of course, one can also look to Europe for such erasure, pointing to the transition from medieval to early modern thought in Europe and the history of witch hunting, land grabs, and enclosures. For two seminal references on early modern Europe, see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (Harper One, 1980); and Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004).
Marisol de la Cadena, “Uncommoning Nature,” in “Supercommunity,” special issue, e-flux journal no. 65 (2015) →. Italics are mine.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future (AK Press, 2011). To be clear, Berardi’s “century” refers to the period of the twentieth century from the rise of the Russian and Italian futurist vanguards to the emergence of neoliberalism in the late 1970s. This would make it, in historian Eric Hobsbawm’s words, a “short twentieth century.” A wider view of this “trust in the future” would have to begin, at least, with the “long nineteenth century” and its devotion to naturalist science, objectivity, and engineering.
This was made clear to me in conversations I had with environmental and climate specialists while in residency at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), the top-rated climate center in the world. For a glimpse of such frustration over climate gradualism, see the discussion between Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, former director of PIK, and Bruno Latour at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2018 →.
This is a transcript from the film’s narration. According to the Khalils, this part of the film script was adapted from the version of the Seven Fires Prophecy found in The Mishomis Book, originally published in 1988, by Ojibwe writer Edward Benton-Banai.
My use of the word “situated” is inspired by Donna Haraway’s poignant term “situated knowledges.” I want to imply that the particular story told by the Khalil brothers could only be told from this particular place, or at least imbued with the spirit of this particular place (which is also where the brothers grew up).
Conversation between Suzy Halajian and Adam and Zack Khalil, Vdrome, 2019 →. Italics are mine. In the interview the brothers say that they use jokes and playfulness as strategies for subverting both their own traditions and settler mentalities. They cite the essay “Indian Humor” by Native American author and activist Vine Deloria, Jr. as an important influence in this regard. See Vine Deloria, Jr., “Indian Humor,” in Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Macmillan, 1969), 146–67.
The erasure of the past is, of course, canonical to the making of modernity, even if modernity, too, is a fiction. The radical novelty of modernity, with its universal figure of humanity and its elevation of science as the standard of truth, went hand and in hand with the fetishization of othered cultures and natures. This is why the “orientalism” of the Romantics, the “primitivism” of the surrealist art-vanguards, the “spiritualism” of Russian abstraction, and the “Buddhism” of the counterculture could nonetheless be included in modernity’s narrative of progress. As Bruno Latour stated long ago, modernity has never been pure: it is full of “factishes,” sublimations, and transferences. In other words: for each culture a different nature. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press, 1993).
I explore this topic in greater detail in my article “If Futurity Is the Philosophy of Science Fiction, Alterity Is its Anthropology: On Colonial Power and Science Fiction.” Here I examine the plantation as a science-fictional space, with coloniality, capital, and the control of futurity at its center. See Futurity Report, eds. Sven Lütticken and Eric de Bruyn (Sternberg Press, forthcoming 2019).
Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 292.
Michael A. Fortun, “The Human Genome Project: Past, Present, and Future Anterior,” in Science, History, and Social Activism: A Tribute to Everett Mendelsohn, eds. Garland E. Allen and Roy M. MacLeod (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 332–69.
Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” 293.
Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives in Postindian Survivance (University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
Adam and Zack Khalil, “The Violence Inherent: Native Videographers Shoot Back,” The Offing no. 20, September 2016 →.
Grace L. Dillon, Introduction to Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (University of Arizona Press, 2012), 1–12.
See Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World (Polity Press, 2017); Gerald Vizenor, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (Truck Press, 1978); Andrea Hairston, Mindscape (Aqueduct, 2006) and Redwood and Wildfire (Aqueduct, 2011).
Two of the actors who play band members in the film are people of color, but this is left largely unmentioned and unexplored in the film, leaving them to be defined by their youthful, creative, and precarious Bushwick milieu. Thus when I say “whiteness,” I understand it here as a sociological category, which supersedes the real diversity found within it.
See Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Penguin Classics, 2010); Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology (Zone Books, 1987); and Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Aldine Atherton, 1972).