Hi Everyone,

I lost a part of myself this semester working through these ideas with my partner Zaca, but I wanted to share a methodology that we came up with and extend it to how I am looking at my project.

Funk is a way out, and a way in- George Clinton, Parliament, and founder of P-Funk

Santi bon, Koute Che (If it smells good, it costs alot) – Haitian Proverb.

Funk? Rematriation? Whose mama are we talking about? Katherine Mckittrick’s uplift of Sylvia Wynter’s prolific manuscript Black Metamorphosis locates Black cultural production as a space to consider the limits of western liberal humanism. Through Wynter, Mckittrick reads Black music- grooving- as a practice of collaborative rebellion. Funk music, birthed from discontent of liberal social reform, also known as the civil rights movement, attempted to build a universal resistance[1]. Funk, disrupted commercial rock and jazz as path out, measured by the virtuosity of the bass instead of the lead guitar. Funk(y) works to repeat to us the resonance, harshness, depth of a tone, and asks us to build on that tone as a foundation. That tone works as bare life, and we as listeners are led to follow its witnessing of continuous dispossession as that tone does not initially mark its “home” within a major scale. If I can make the comparison here, in Funk, there is no “home” as a destination, for there is no melody, but there are distorted harmonies that are relational yet opaque. Funk represents the residual essence of the body engulfed in arduous labor. The smell of hard work, the funkiness, of someone- especially in the tradition of the African Diaspora, works to make us catch the afterlives of slavery, plantation economies, and resistance to displacement

through autonomous struggle[1]. In African cosmology, as per the Kikongo, funk represents to the will to work hard to achieve resolution[2]. Where the west has found the duress from resistance to be a catalyst toward depression or nihilism, Funk asserts that this dissonance is necessary to reach the end, the undoing[3]. Indigenous epistemology reminds us that sovereignty is not relational to capitalist production[4]. Thus, when we refer to rematriation[5]– we activate it as methodology that resists a patriarchal demand for the land to work for us, or work for the land. Embracing Eve Tuck’s use of rematriation in conversation with educational curriculum, we understand rematriation to force an ethical relationality that “understands mutual implications, puts indigenous epistemologies at the forefront, and requires a public form of memory”. The Funk of Rematriation speaks to how relationality (where for our work we place in land), and the arduous work that this calls for, between human and non-human entities, is where we must pivot from to arch toward liberation in co-habitation with our ruins.

Form

            Our methodology or practice is influenced by the wakework defined and necessitated by Christina Sharpe, the call of analytical reinvention by Katherine McKittrick in that “reinvention is the process through which enslaved and post slavery black communities in the New World came to live and construct black humanity within the context of racial violence—a range of rebellious acts that affirmed black humanity and black life were and are imperative to reinvention”.  Mckittrick for this practice sets the metronome for how we walk on these demonic grounds. Blues epistemology as constructed by Clyde Woods reminds us that witnessing happens outside the spectacle. In Funk, the space for critical observation is between the uprisings, the lead silence between the grooves. Tiffany Lethabo King’s intervention of Black Shoals demonstrates where to put our lighthouse on this land.  As we tread between different cosmologies that define our existence, we lean on Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, who reminds us that the linearity of time is not our own- it is a colonial project stemmed to anti (ourselves). Therefore, when we plan, labor and dream- it spans generation before and after us. We also hold as Cuiscanqui would also ask us to hold, that these forms or ways we represent ourselves to perform relationality are fictive, they have been created, contested, and will continue to do so. We hold these elements as imperative because it speaks toward the work of doing and undoing fragmented histories in relationship to the land.

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Nebraska- from wild west to Desakota*, funkyness of the ‘rural’

I began my project wanting to undo what I perceived to be a silencing of the cultural landscape of Nebraska. I naively remembered the film, Nebraska, as limited but a critique on the temporal understanding of this region- dry, deindustrialized, ruins. Initially, I determined to describe the digital landscape of Saline County, as the counter-narrative. This work was too easy.

In class, Ruthie proposed the intervention that shifted this project from sketch to frame, she asked, “what happens if you see the railroad and the internet as the same”. So, I had to ask, what exactly did the railroad mean for this region (meatpacking development). And what role does the internet play for this ‘rural’ in a de industralized sentiment, (promotion of these counties by immigrant economic development). And what if I questioned this ‘rural’ detached perception- what can come of that?

In “Forgotten Place and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning” (2008)- Ruthie asks us to look toward the scaling up (internet) “how can people who inhabit forgotten places scale up their activism from intensely localized struggles to something less atomized and therefore possessed of a significant capacity for self-determination”

So, if I play with Saline County as the desakota to Lincoln, and other larger city territories of the area- what kind of claims can be made? Surely, this work has been done by the youth which is what indeed galvanized their organizing from online to the Smithfield factory on behalf of their parents who have precarious status at the worksite.

Pondering on the intermingling of exo and endogenous processes rooted in external recognition and territorialization, respectively, to link historical and contemporary politics in the D.R.

The Dominican nation-state emerges embedded in a wider, racially charged, geopolitical setting where sovereignty is subjected to regional, neocolonial dynamics; and, relatedly, with the urgency of consolidating the state through the territorialization of political power in a place where authority had been decentralized for at least two centuries prior to the emergence of the state.

Out of this political decentralization emerge the conditions of possibility for (1) the establishment of another colony and later state on the island (Saint Domingue/Haiti) with a vastly different socio, political and economic development; (2) fugitive geographies and the emergence of a free, necessarily mobile, self-sufficient peasantry in Santo Domingo outside the purview of the colonial and later state administration; and (3) a climate of political instability and endless coups as the next strongman or caudillo claimed control of the state.

The second point represented a great obstacle for proletarianization, introducing the need of importing foreign labor (particularly Haitian) for the development of the modern sugar industry in the DR, an enclave capitalist formation revitalized through foreign (particularly US) capital. And the third point prevented the protection of these investments. The inability of establishing a strong central state in the DR eventually resulted in the first US occupation, during a time when Haiti was also US-occupied territory, facilitating the establishment of a binational labor system supplying Haitian labor to work in the sugar industry, and doing some of the work of institutionalizing the border.

One of the things that I have failed to consider or emphasized on previous personal reflections is how localized—how gradual and partial—the development of a capitalist mode of production was through the case of the sugar industry. The consolidation of the territorial, centralized state and its role of incorporating a mobile, self-sufficient peasantry into the national project intersects or complements this story in interesting ways.

This population and space [el monte]—rooted in colonial fugitive geographies and “empty,” unoccupied, unproductive, untamed land/nature—were considered a problem before the nation-state. Indeed, the reason why the colony—often compared to neighboring and prosperous Saint Domingue—and later the nation would not progress according to colonial and early state intelligentsia. The need to control this unruly population by anticipating the need for labor and creating the conditions for capitalism to function in the state more broadly, seemed an apparently necessary requirement to safeguard sovereignty (official sovereignty at the very least) in the context of foreign and U.S. capital investment. The process of dispossessing and trying to fix the peasantry in space started during the U.S. occupation by way of a land registration system, but it wasn’t until the Trujillo dictatorship that the process of consolidating the territorial state and incorporating the peasantry into the national project took place. Trujillo built his basis of support during the first years of his regime through the peasantry by reconciling the restructuring of rural life that had been waiting to happen for a long time, with an alternative project of modernity that afforded certain concessions to the peasantry [policies of land distribution, agricultural assistance, and property reform] integrating them—unevenly, and not always successfully, but to the largest extent to date—into the national project as “men of work.” Trujillo is also known for being the most ruthless advocate of anti-Haitian sentiment, a textbook example of which is the 1937 Massacre, when he ordered to kill Haitians at the border.

Given the contrasting realities of Saint Domingue and Santo Domingo, the east’s precarious administration and land availability provided refuge for enslaved peoples and folks escaping the colonial structure on both sides of the island. As such, I see the border as a mechanism that not always reproduced a neocolonial logic in this setting. In fact, one that even facilitated emancipatory politics, opening avenues for the realization of liberated futures. The border, an area of historically fluctuating imperial and postcolonial jurisdictions was a squatter ground as isolated and separate from the nation as el monte had been. Trujillo’s orders are part of an effort to “dominicanize” or nationalize the border and come in the context of localized resistance against the central state’s decision to carry out deportations in the border zone transnational communities. As these ‘unofficial spaces’ were increasingly disrupted by the central state, in the border zone and throughout, bateyes became one of the few legal spaces for Haitians and ethnic Haitians to reside. As economic restructuring and increasing waves of migration would pushed them out of these secluded spaces and the restructuring and colonization (rather than incorporation) of dissident communities, state and elite crafted anti-Haitian discourse becomes hegemonic in the space of an increasingly all-encompassing nation.

The legalistic and constitutional foundation of the ruling represents a novelty, a sophisticated change in the strategy of the ultranationalist right against the political recognition of ethnic Haitians, seeking to institutionalize policies that were previously enacted through violent, extra-legal, and arbitrary means.