Unpayable Debt: Migration, Development, and Reparations

Hosted by Duke's Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Lab along with NYU's Critical Racial Anti Colonial Study Co Lab

This closed workshop is part of an ongoing set of conversations meant to foster critical and interdisciplinary reflection on how colonial practices of expropriation, extraction, and violence have shaped contemporary political, economic, social, and ecological conditions, and therefore also the terms of possible reparative praxes and sociocultural reorientations. Our workshop speaks to the extraordinary current geopolitical moment when the prevailing Western global order has encountered an unavoidable rupture in its absolute hold over political communities throughout the world. We come together to think, study, and discuss interdisciplinarily and cross-institutionally in the throes of changing world order and its attendant crises. Our contention is that the social, cultural, and intellectual conditions that have structured colonial practices since the 16th century persist in the logics of state politics playing out in the Global North today-particularly the insidious fundamental constitution of modern Western subjects via a negative relation to the lifeways of the world's 'Others'. The responses of wealthy states in the Global North to increasing environmental and social precarity throughout the Global South has consolidated the corporate-security state along with the return of racial identity politics deployed across borders, in service of the work the state performs for the advance of capital and the exercise of sovereignty. Indeed, since 2015, state responses to rapidly growing precarity throughout the ex-colonies of the world have served to re-enforce labor expropriation and erode civil rights and human rights frameworks with exceptions for the privileged few.

This workshop centers anti-colonial feminist scholarship, in the interdisciplinary areas of Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, and critical studies of migration in all its forms, to consider how we might rethink migration through the conceptual lens of "unpayable debt." How might we rethink the theoretical constructs of both citizenship and the nation state toward a generative reconsideration of the migrant, as a gesture towards some modicum of reparations for such unpayable debt?

Public keynote: What Is a Migrant? What Is a National Border?, by Prof. E. Tendayi Achiume