Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Through the perspective of affect theory, this paper explores how the recent backlash against decolonial theory in the Global North was anticipated by divisions within the decolonial movement in Southern California that were already becoming visible in 2020.

Paper long abstract

This paper deals with a highly sensitive, ethically, and politically contentious subject matter. Based on my previous research experience as a critical anthropologist of security and migration, and of vigilance cultures in particular (Whittaker et al. 2023), I will be talking about my current ethnographic research, which focuses on decolonial community defense groups in the Californian borderlands. Drawing on affect theory (Massumi 2002; Stewart 2007), I explore the moral economy of threat and promise that emerged at the time of the Black Lives Matter and #FreeThemAll protests of 2020. I argue that the recent backlash against decolonial theory (both within and outside the academy) in the Global North was anticipated by divisions within the decolonial movement in Southern California that were already becoming visible at that time. I will focus on three particularly divisive and racialized issues that are tied to what can be intense feelings of threat and promise: gun ownership, education, and gender/sexuality. Tensions over these and/or other issues, which are largely inevitable within any given group or movement, gave rise to remarkable racial reckonings. These may be interpreted as predictive of the transnational anti-decolonization Stimmung (Borneman and Ghassem-Fachandi 2017) we can observe today.