• • • low end theory

Damn, I thought I was going to enjoy this book, too.

In contrast to the kind of colonial formation that Cabral or Fanon con- fronted, settler colonies were not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labour. Rather, they are premised on displacing indigenes from (or replacing them on) the land; as Deborah Bird Rose points out (1991: 46), to get in the way all the native has to do is stay at home.

Yes! Although when Fanon was talking about Martinique, he was talking about a colony where the primary segment of the “indigenous” population were not indigenous at all but the descendants of slaves who came to the island along with the colonizing population. Though in British colonies like Jamaica, black ex-slave populations were referred to as “natives,” they were technically speaking no more native than many of the British colonial populations, so…

The relationship between Native and African Americans illustrates the distinction particularly well. In the main, Native (North) Americans were cleared from their land rather than exploited for their labour, their place being taken by displaced Africans who provided the labour to be mixed with the expropriated land, their own homelands having yet to become objects of colonial desire. The ramifications of this distinction flow through, particularly in so far as they affect the different constructions of ‘miscegenation’ that have been applied to the two communities. Briefly, whilst the one-drop rule has meant that the category ‘black’ can withstand unlimited admixture, the category ‘red’ has been highly vulnerable to dilution.

Wait, huh? Blackness isn’t just a category, it’s also a relation between a person or another, or, as history would have it, between a person and a less-than-person. The word “withstand” is misleading here, because the blackness sustained in this relation has less to do with a constant supply as labor as a consistently degraded human population. I also got to wonder at the positioning of slaves as colonizers (“their place being taken by displaced Africans”—active voice) here? Serious question: can a slave—legally speaking, an object of property with no will, whose agency is only legally recognizable in the case that she commits a crime—be a colonizer?

This is consistent with a situation in which, whilst black labour was commodified (so that white plantation owners fathered black children), red labour was not even acknowledged (so that white fathers generated so-called ‘half-breeds’ whose indigeneity was compromised). In Australia the structural counterparts to African slaves were white convicts, which has meant that racial coding and questions of emancipation have operated quite differently between the two countries.

No. No. NO. Jesus, NO. For the majority part of this land’s settler colonial history, black labor was not commodified—commodifying labor in the conditions of capitalism means that the laborer enters into a contractual relation whereby her labor becomes abstracted into a commodity that she can sell “consensually.”* Black bodies were made into commodities so that they could be bought and sold—their labor was not abstracted and the relationship did not require their consent at all. Nor did it require that they break the law!

The systematic rape of black women by slaveowners did not simply produce black children—it produced black slaves. Let’s please reserve the language of fathering for a different kind of relation. Rape reproduced the relations on which the system of slavery relied. In fact, calling rape rape becomes difficult because legally speaking, the slave, as property, has no consent to give. Here, the analogy conceals more than it reveals. The children of convicts did not become convicts because convictness, unlike black slavery in the U.S., was not hereditary, as far as I know. Black labor was not acknowledged as labor in the context of slavery. Slave masters were not only legally entitled to the slave’s labor; they were also regularly entitled to any use of the slave’s body that they saw fit. As commodities, slaves, as Saidiya Hartman has put it, became fungible. Fungibility “makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values” (Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 21).

Ugh, ugh, ugh. I’m not supposed to be this angry before noon.

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* I’m leaving the issue of consent unproblematized for the moment. The formation of a class of people who experience freedom as the freedom to consent to sell their labor has almost always been the creation of a class who is free to starve if they don’t sell it on the terms of the people interested in buying that labor. Under capitalism, the freedom to enter into contractual labor, therefore, is fundamentally a coercive freedom for those whose only property is their labor. And yes, I did just use a footnote in a tumblr post.