Following this exercise- I decided to play with documents against archive that may have not inherently matched together. I leaned on Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, Tina Campt’s listening to the images, and an article by Philip Norton entitled “Tony’s Oldies: Visualising Vincentian Diasporic Memory” to insert image against narration.

I started with the vernacular photography on this website for the county – http://negenweb.net/NESaline/ A community based and curated online database. Similar to Tony’s Oldies, the website serves the purpose to support “genealogy questions”- but what is curated are letters, pictures from ceremonies, gravesites, maps, and other odd digitized entries that the folks of Saline believe to define Saline for themselves.

The only nonwhite photo I could find on this archive was the photo and house of Henry Burden. Burden as per this particular narrative was to have escaped the confederacy, joined the union and made his way west to settle. He was the “first” Black person to settle the area according to this archive. Similarly to Norton’s observation, archives can reify colonial and in this case settler colonial histories and note the resistance to it. As I worked to triangulate Burden’s photo with other Black specific archives by the state of Nebraska- Burden’s home was part of the underground railroad, something not mentioned on the NE Saline county site.

I decided to read two items of this online archive within each other- bolding the words that stood out to me to see if it would help me ask additional questions about what it meant for this family to be a new and integral part of the landscape of Saline County.

Progressive social movements do not simply produce statistics and narratives of oppression; rather, the best ones do what great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society[…] In the poetics of struggle and lived experience, in the utterances of ordinary folk, in the cultural products of social movements, in the reflections of activists, we discover many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born

Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, pp. 9-10

“Poetry from the future” is an oft-cited phrase used by Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire: “the social revolution of the nineteenth century can only draw its poetry from the future, not from the past.” Kara Keeling writes about Marx’s formulation of “poetry from the future” as “a formal (‘poetry,’ with its associated lyricism, fragmentation, and logics) and temporal (‘from the future’) disruption, which functions primarily on the level of affect to resist narration and qualitative description. It is a felt presence of the unknowable, the content of which exceeds its expression and therefore points toward a different epistemological, if not ontological and empirical, regime” (p. 83). I’m drawn to the idea of poetry from the future as a means to resist making sense through narration or defining some concrete alternative from within the logic of the violence. I want to disrupt it, not to name its claims as false but to start to uncover new truths. Our group project is rooted in iterative definition, and that’s because we understand a relationship between the ontological and epistemological. How do I engage with the still-living archives of racial capitalism to not only shake off their ways of knowing the world, but also their claims on what is? How do I disrupt this artifact from the future?

I think of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, gathered from the text of Gregson v. Gilbert, the only public document related to the 1781 massacre of approximately 150 African people by a slave-ship captain intending to collect insurance on them as lost property instead of selling them into slavery. Philip cuts up the decision and and assembles its words into fragments that shout, whisper, moan, sing, chant in an anti-narrative poetic form, breathing life and pain and death back into an otherwise horrifyingly reductive narrative.

Gregson v. Gilbert and HOLC’s residential security maps both demonstrate evidence and reification of a speculative economy. “The Zong massacre reveals that the economy of the transatlantic slave trade was a speculative one, predicated on the belief that the future would confirm the present values of slaves and other commodities of trade” (Keeling, 28). The transatlantic slave trade ran on credit, European boats boarded and sailed, people kidnapped and transported on the promise of profitable exchange to come. Lively futures disposed of for profitable futures. The language of HOLC area descriptions is rife with speculative predictions and life-altering decisions made on those speculated futures in attempts to maximize profit: “Future development will be heavier foreign,” and “In future desirability will undoubtedly decline due to gradual enlargement of blighted territory on the south and west borders,” both claims followed by the same directive, “Property, if acquired, should be sold rather than held.” The phrase “no future” repeats itself. The entire intent of the residential securities maps and accompanying area descriptions was to secure profit. This is not about individual and community human security in the places we reside; this is about identifying “a fungible, negotiable financial instrument” in the form of real estate. It is about securing a future for capital.

Poetry from the future, for me, offers an opportunity to speak back from the “no future” (more precisely, I write from a place described as “threatened with negro encroachment” so perhaps I write from the position of future encroacher). From this position, I can take these archival documents and scrap their claims, cut them up, make them say something different. I move between then and now and throw off the historical inevitability. These same words, these same documents, these same artifacts– they can say something different, they can do something different. It’s a yes to worldbuilding and also a yes to continuity, engaging in the practice of continuity. I can get to know these documents intimately without being seduced by them; I can learn them with care and, through poetry, transform them with care. The hope is that their underlying logics fracture and split, giving way to a different epistemology and, possibly, different ontologies.  

A draft of a poem, its words gathered from area descriptions:

No loans
No odors
No green vegetation to be seen
No prospects
No Negro families
And probably never will
Japs are being pushed out
Nothing at all moving here
Obsolete area
No future
 
Little future
Laid out
Dead-end
The future hopeless
Cinder Brick Stone and Frame
Will remain weak
 
Due to concentrated effort
To keep up the barrier
A natural barrier
A natural protective barrier
Protected by fence
Picturesque fences
And walls
A high wall separates
A high wall prevents
Protected by mountains
Protected by railroad
Protected by deed restrictions
Keeping out infiltration
Preventing their spread
Keep out anyone who might be considered undesirable for various and sundry reasons
 
Low grade population
High grade negro
The poor and trashy type
The Onondaga
Half breeds
Undesirable white population
Inferior white D grade property
Communistic reputation
And Italians
And Russians
And Jews
And Slavs
And Greeks
And Syrians
And Puerto Ricans
Confined to only members of their own race
Undesirable to others
Values would be confined
If acquired, should be sold
 
Development takes place
Construction takes place
Promotion takes place
A distinct threat of infiltration
Bank failures caused untold hardship
 
Speculative buying
Speculative builders
Speculative development
Caused untold hardship
Future growth
Future outlook
Future desirability
Future development
Wrong side of the railroad
Wrong side of the tracks
Wrong side of the river
Located on the wrong side of town
The future of the area as a whole will be down
The few negroes are confined
Threatened
Expired
Restricted
Neglected
Abandoned
 
No future
If acquired
Should be sold
Should be sold
Should be sold promptly
Should be sold
No future
Should be
Sacrificed
No future
Should be sold rather than held
Little future
Should be held
Should be held
Should be held rather than sold
Should be held
Should be held
I am told
I am informed
A better feeling exists
 
We have felt a better feeling
We have felt a better future
It is here
It is in Our homes
It is in Our families
It is in Our strikes
We are a distinct threat to the banks
Undoubtedly, a growth
Odors, railroads, colored people, etc.
Smoke and dirt
Everywhere evident
Everywhere mobile
Everywhere encroaching
We are the limits
We are the center
Anyone who might be considered undesirable for various and sundry reasons
We are likely to develop through demolishment
Demolition of capitalists
Demolition of business men
Demolition of politicians
Demolition of banks
No more mortgages
There is a shifting foundation
Home for the aged
Home for children
Home for the blind
Home for poor
But policemen were killed here
Get out
Give up
We are scattered throughout
We have lost interest
We have lost homes
We have lost property
We have not lost each other
The land has not lost US
We will not live anywhere else
Little future should be held not sold
Little future will continue to hold

During the course of our project, I plan on continuing to do close, slow readings of area descriptions and explore alt. presentations of the maps and descriptions. I will also develop an outline for a research design responding to some of the relationships arising out of the process. More to come, but wanted to share some visual experimentation from the past week.

In 2010, the Dominican constitution was modified, eradicating birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented parents. So, if someone was to give birth in the Dominican Republic but their migratory status was considered irregular, the legal ambiguity of the parents is automatically transferred to the child, effectively creating a new category of under-citizenry for people born in the country. This constitutional change is preceded by unofficial state practices that arbitrarily denied state documents to Dominicans of Hatian descent. The case of Juliana Deguis Pierre is an often cited case for what would be a very consequential outcome: as she headed to a local state office to request an identification card in 2008, state officials confiscated her birth certificate, informing Juliana that an I.D. card could not be issued due to her French surnames—a marker of Haitian origins indicating to state officials that she was irregularly enrolled in the civil registry. Juliana filed a suit with a local court in 2012, but because she could only produce a photocopy of her birth certificate, her claim was declared inadmissible. She appealed the court’s decision and the Dominican Constitutional Court—also a byproduct of the 2010 Constitution—picked up her case a year later. Upon reviewing Juliana’s case, the Court stated that the Dominican Constitution denied birthright to individuals born to foreign diplomats and people “in transit” since 1929. While the language of “in transit” first appeared then, it was not until 2005 that a definition for this term was provided and legally codified through migration law No. 285-04. Before then, the term was loosely defined and inconsistently applied. But despite the ambiguity behind the term “in transit,” that was the excuse that allowed the Court to delegitimize Juliana’s claim to citizenship, and as it turned out, that of so many others. As a result of Juliana’s case, the Court ruled the controversial legislation TC 168-13, which retroactively stripped away the citizenship of Dominicans born to undocumented immigrants going back as far as 1929.

What crises are folded into this crisis? This is a question I have been pondering about as I think about a scenario in which denationalization is possible, and whether it represents a moment within a larger conjuncture. What cumulative tensions, spaces, and temporalities are condensed into this moment? I would like to spend time during what is left of this semester doing some of the preliminary thinking and assembling necessary to decide whether conjunctural analysis is a useful lens to analyze this case.

The ruling and constitutional change has often been perceived as a solution to a problem, a necessary evil of sorts to begin to manage undocumented Haitian migration. The new citizenship policies could surely have the effect of discouraging immigrants to settle in the country, and its discriminatory nature and retroactive application has already proven to have catastrophic effects in the lives of the denationalized population. However, the ruling itself does nothing to regulate border flows or put an end to the circular migration that furnishes cheap labor to the agricultural industry, construction sector, and domestic work, primarily. It reaffirms, through exclusion, the power of the state to decide who belongs or does not belong to the nation as a legitimate legal authority guaranteed by sovereignty in a framework of national v. international law.

The language of sovereignty and constitutionality—despite its legal violations—are useful mechanisms to legitimize and position the ruling in the service of law, order and non-intervention. It taps into what I recognize to be two central anxieties present throughout the history of the Dominican nation-state: Sovereignty or lack thereof as the nation carved space for itself in the racialized climate of 19^th century geopolitics as postcolonial independence seriously threatened the colonial power structure; and the political instability that would follow, often in the form of undemocratic rule,carrying the nation into the twentieth century at the mercy of coups, foreign interventions and dictatorships. These anxieties have often manifested in tandem, or rather in an entangled manner in which undemocratic rule—associated with a weak institutional state—could justify an assault against sovereignty that generally concealed and served foreign (though not exclusively) socio-political and economic interests at the expense of popular wellbeing. Given this history, the affective register around questions of sovereignty and procedural protocol are generally regarded as something to be defended and respected at all cost. It also interweaves, in my view, questions of sovereignty as an abstract political principle of external recognition with a grounded analysis of internal territorialization encapsulating the process and obstacles to state modernization and centralization, and the discourses of security attached to both of these concerns. As I reflect, I find myself thinking about different moments in which this discursive architecture might be at play, resulting—as with denationalization—in the erasure of the political recognition of racialized subjects, through the dual motion of state expansion and nation shrinkage. In subsequent blog posts, I will seek to elaborate on these different moments to test the explanatory power of this line of thought, and benefit, whether it proves to be an appropriate analytical lens or not, of the generative stimulus it has provided thus far.

I have been struggling to articulate a project that feels compelling and relevant and doable. Mostly I’ve just felt overwhelmed and tired and sad, and maybe over-focused on the big picture, in ways that have encumbered my progress. I just had to decide a place to start – so I think this will be it:

Context: Québec has acknowledged the existence of “Guardian Angels”. The Premier, François Legault, used this name to speak of the asylum seekers who worked in healthcare during the first wave of the pandemic. His party, the Coalition Avenir Québec (yes, the CAQ) campaigned on a limited immigration, assimilationist platform that is neither separatist, nor federalist per ce. The pandemic, however, created an opportunity to shine a light on the crucial role of migrant labor in the province, particularly in care and agriculture work.

A group of activists working under the banner of “Debout pour la dignité” (Standing up for dignity), lobbied the province for regularization for migrant essential workers through the first part of the pandemic. Meanwhile other groups have been calling for Status for All, and the regularization of all migrants, not just a limited swath of ‘essential’ workers. Debout pour la dignité succeeded in getting the media attention necessary, and Legault and Trudeau put together a plan which should regularize some asylum seekers who worked in old folks homes and hospitals during the early days of the crisis. The program is called “The Special Program for Asylum Seekers During COVID-19″.

For my contribution to our collective project, I will do a discourse analysis around this special program, to consider how the pandemic is used to secure/destabilize different visions of the migration regime. First, I will analyze the program itself and any media that has been released about it. I will also attempt to get information from the government about the decision-making process (any tips on how to do this would be welcome!).

Simultaneously, I will look at media coverage of the program inside Québec and Canada, with a keen eye to how ideas of sovereignty(ies), territory, and securitization are mobilized.

I’m still thinking about my redefinitions, but I’ll have them posted in another post real soon!

Collage I compiled in Photoshop; it feels heavy-handed to me (I also just really hate American flag art) and is definitely not a standalone, but I wanted to experiment with pulling text forward from the redlining imagery and really explicitly connecting the local scale with the national. The stars contain different responses to the line “Negro: _____” in A, B, and C-graded neighborhoods; blue and red are both cut outs of different sections of maps from different cities; and the white stripes contain text from area descriptions.

I’ve really struggled with writing lately, but here’s a go at some of what I’m thinking about:

In the context of the “residential security maps,” more commonly called “redlining maps,” security is used in the financial sense, defined by Investopedia as “a fungible, negotiable financial instrument that holds some type of monetary value.” Specifically, it refers to mortgage security, intending to estimate the risk of mortgage loans by area. 

Red indicates a high risk for investment.

How can we use the assessments to document what happens in the “high risk” areas? How people survive, how people resist, how people find other means of security? We see how investments are protected: “high walls” (Camden, NJ, A1), “special police day and night” (Brooklyn, NY, C23), “the Michigan central R.R. tracks” (Kalamazoo, MI, B4), “a private fence” (Staten Island, NY, B15), “lots of sufficient size” (Rochester, NY, B15), “a gate and guard” (Stamford, CT, A6), “deed restrictions protecting against subversive racial elements” (Los Angeles, CA, C29), to name a few. But how are investments threatened? We see “mixture of the races,” “communistic people,” and “rent strikes” in Brownsville (Brooklyn, NY, D10); “a decline in values following the strike at Montgomery Ward’s and other labor troubles of 1937” in Kansas City (MO, D27, D28, and D30), Melrose Park has “a bad reputation for crime and vandalism” (Chicago, IL, D18). 

There is more than the securing, the fixing, the damning in HOLC’s documentation; there is tension. The repeating phrase the area/town/land has no future points to organized abandonment, naturalized to the extent that even terrain descriptions for D-graded neighborhoods read “Negro servants” or “high-grade Negro” while terrain descriptions for A, B, and C-graded neighborhoods read simply “level” or “rolling.” This abandonment naturalized even as the State makes massive interventions into the economy and structure of the housing market. 

These grades produced holes in access to capital, but people still need places to be. Contract sellers and other predatory lenders stepped in: organized violence. 

My goal in this visualization is to surface tensions, abandonments, violences, and survivals that produce the State. The bottom quote, the only in red, quotes from tract D83 in South Chicago: “Something drastic ultimately must be done.”

Further investigations:

Can these documents serve as an archive of resistance, as evidence of financial punishment for care and resistance? 

I came across instructions to sell property in one area “as quickly as possible;” what else are investors and owners encouraged to do? How do these encouragements track in “white flight” and the organized violence enacted by contract sellers?

More about the history of the Contract Buyers’ League in Chicago and similar efforts elsewhere and these groups’ relationships to security/securities.