As I begin reading Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, I stop after reading the Lamba proverb from Zambia he uses to begin the essay:
“Wa syo’ lukasa pebwe
Umwime wa pita”
I make an anatomical link with the essay by Aníbal Quijano’s essay, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentricism, and Latin America and I remember the two most powerful words to me within the essay: “constitution” and “domination” (Quijano, 181). The former which he introduces in the first sentence of his essay, and the latter, introduced in the second sentence of the essay, bear a strong dualism in Quijano’s multilayered explanation of how “Eurocentricism” reconstructed historical perspectives of modernity and subjective power in the global world, primarily because of genocide and colonialism in trans-Atlantic and global relations. Quijano in no way predates, or dates, anything in his essay strictly to the creation of Europe, which is evident in his patient writing of the multi-layered historical continuations of violence and power in our world. Mbembe’s writing echoes this sentiment immediately in his introductory sentence stating that this essay Presently “assumes” that sovereignty “resides” in the power of dictating who “may” live and who “may” die (Mbembe 12). The proverb stops me once I read the powerful English translation because I immediately ask myself in relation to Quijano and Mbembe’s texts: The free “hand” of capitalism that Quijano thoroughly describes is what “Eurocentricism” identity releases into our world and the hands, so to speak, that “wrote” the Constitution are actually much better if seen as footprints: “[He left the footprint on the stone He himself passed on]” (Mbembe 12). Why? Because then the historical processes can clearly be analyzed in the Decolonial discussion of how the performances of Domination and what Mbembe states as “to kill” or to “allow to live” not only determines power but also can “constitute the limits of sovereignty.” Here again, the word “constitutes” stands out. I argue, that the performances of nation-making and the constitutions of the Americas, and the global word, “constitutes” who has the power to kill and also dominate life. Mbembe’s use of the word “allow” to live, clearly reveals his essay’s argument: that even if sovereignty grants you life, you still May not have power to be allowed to live in freedom. Mbembe’s reading is also betrayed simply yet in a complex wording structure: “politics as the work of death” and sovereignty expressed as the “right to kill” (16). An image that comes to mind in Mbembe’s discussion of “death-worlds” is, a GUN in Harlem that wasn’t made there (Mbembe). The lyrics of another form of resistance and martyrdom through global fame comes to mind from a song released in anger on Facebook by a global voice in outrage to current colonial crisis, one being the “death-world” of the American hood: “No guns made in Harlem but crime is a problem” (“We are Here,” Alicia Keys) (I use Mbembe’s term in italics to caution that all “death-worlds” in their human capacity, are also worlds of life). In her essay, “The Potosí Principle: Another View of Totality” in conjunction as a text to the Principio Potosí exhibition at the museum in Calle Madrid, Spain en Calle de Santa Isabel (Postal Code: 52, 28012), en the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 2010, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui resonates with the prior texts discussed in her exclusion from the writing of “decolonial” trajectories, and instead focuses on the dominating spheres of Money, Church, and the Museum. In her discussion of paintings of the Principio Potosí exhibition in the colonizing European mainland of Spain, Cusicanqui removes us from the text lens on to the paintings, and from the Artistic mode of abstracting these paintings from their origins and rituals and journeys, and situates us into the longitude and latitude of the “communities who worship them and dance in their honor” (Cusicanqui). Cusicanqui shares Ancient Andean wisdom graciously in her description of the earthly connection that these “paintings” of ritual and space have to the Land: “We observe their east, their north, their west, and their south” and the Cosmos in her explanations of this ritual and how it both honors ancestral Knowledge and incorporates the lines of power that Mbembe and Quijano also graciously explain in their texts as functioning powers of colonialism and genocide (Cusicanqui). Cusicanqui’s text and exhibition now insists on textual focus on the unequal and violent crisis of Land and labor and the hybrid resistance in autochthonous community circles of worship created through and out of living under these domination structures in the colonial and neocolonial force of “de-territorialization and loss of meaning” (Cusicanqui). The community dance as sacred space is something evident even in Urbanized communities of labor diaspora, where dance halls and sonic streets are Daily celebrations of Joy within the power of inequality. Which brings me back to Mbembe’s questioning introduction on the “footprint” that “He himself passed on” (Mbembe 11). To “pass” on Any transgression in community, is powerful, and so I bring these readings in to my own community and I ask, as indigenous Diasporic community, How do our footprints pass on colonial violences, and how can they instead “dance,” so to speak in forceful indetermination of these powerful orders?
Works Cited:
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15. no. 1: 2003. Accessed 29 Sep 2018.
Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. 181-222. Durham & London: Duke University Press. 2008.Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia.
“The Potosí Principle: Another View of Totality.” Decolonial Gesture, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, 11. no. 1: 2014. Accessed 29 Sep 2018.