Vunja

Much has been written about the troubles of our days, about climate change and ocean acidification, about the failing promises of modernity, about the hollowness of jobs, about the failures of our political systems, about migration and the controversial rise of weaponized walls, about the colonial legacies of schooling, about poverty, property and human rights. To these connected crises, modern nation-states and institutions offer temporary relief: the spectacle of a “better future” via citizenship.

Hope in this future – a future of sustainable development, of justice, of prosperity, and of technological ease – rises and falls on the presumption that this future is universally desirable, and that the present socio-political arrangement merely needs minute adjustments or reform in order to be radically inclusive. Even the most transformative proposals along the political spectrum rest on the same assumptions that power the modern nation-state and its processes of creating subjects. As such, most activist work is framed in terms of increasing inclusion and reducing exclusion – about letting more people into the halls of power.

But should we strive to get a larger piece of a carcinogenic pie? Aren’t there other places of power and other gestures towards emancipation beyond being included in troubling definitions of ‘humanity’? What is often not noticed is the contingency of business-as-usual and the violence embedded in the everyday. What is often not said loudly enough is that this hope in a “better future” hides stunning costs: the bodies and lives of the marginalized, racialized, not-quite-human ‘others’ at the margins, the New World plantations, the refugee camps, the favelas and slums. The broken bodies of the marginalized subsidize our global political order, and the state – by its very dynamics of upholding a particular notion of what it means to be properly human – continues to generate the conditions of exception it ‘pretends’ to seek resolutions to. It is towards these bodies and their carnal accounts that we now turn.

With Vunja, we are asking:

What does it mean to be ‘human’?
And to whom is the glorious future of modern logic promised?
Whose time are we in?

Drawing from black feminist scholarship and indigenous ontologies, Vunja is premised on the ethics of appreciating that there are other genres of “human”, other genres of hope, other temporalities, and other futures. Vunja turns its attention to the underground cultural practices of New World slaves in their response to enslavement and colonization. We are motivated by the idea that within the conditions of exception that statehood and white normativity generates, there is vitality. There is life of a different order even in the bare lands. In a time when the highway no longer leads to interesting places, perhaps we must pay attention to the cracks instead. To the ruptures in the middle, not solely the promise of rapture at the end of the road. Perhaps there are potentialities for living that we are being invited to consider. Perhaps to dwell in the margins, in the states of exception and ‘bare life,’ is to occupy other places of power.