"The workers’ societies congratulated us, and the altruistic men, offered to visit us, and others offered to come and live with us. But we told them that they should initiate the same procedures in their country, that it was easy, and it was more glorious for them. … Everything stayed that way, and we hope that such ideas will be practiced, for the good of all humans, and in the name of universal brotherhood." - Luisa Capetillo
"The only purpose of education is to make new worlds collectively. This requires the practice of curiosity as a daily habit and the exercise of dignified and purposeful rebelliousness. Other worlds are possible." - Post-Novis Manifesto
Achille Mbembe argues in his Provisional Notes of the Postcolony (1992) that the postcolony is “made up of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery which, once they are in place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence” characterized by “political improvisation,” a “tendency to excess and lack of proportion,” and by the ways in which “identities are multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation.”2
Post-Colonial here describes the potential fabrication of critical and emancipatory projects, imaginaries and pedagogies produced and exported from the suppressive cartographies of colonized territories and conditions.
As part of the worldmaking project of this guide, the term Post-Colonial (in its hyphenated version) builds and departs from Mbembe’s definition. The Post-Colonial is not used in this guide as a critique of the former colonies and the apparatus of violent improvisation characteristic to them. Post-Colonial here describes the potential fabrication of critical and emancipatory projects, imaginaries and pedagogies produced and exported from the suppressive cartographies of colonized territories and conditions. The Post-Colonial is what happens when the cruel conditions of the colony have spilled on the rest of the world like organic matter.In Puerto Rico (as well as in other parts of the Caribbean and the rest of the world), the Post-Colonial imagination forms a parallel, speculative and critical project that operates in the radical poetry of Raquel Salas Rivera, in the fictions Luis Othoniel Rosa and in the reggaeton beats (the ones like Bad Bunny’s El Apagon/Aqui Vive Gente video-documentary with Bianca Graulau) that reverberate during the many protests and acts of solidarity in times of crisis in the archipelago.3
Post-Colonial agitational-propaganda shares methods and strategies modelled on the speculative future of current colonies while alluding to a series of identifiable traits on former (or current) colonial territories.
Propaganda Poster of Post-Novis.
Post-Colonial agitational-propaganda shares methods and strategies modelled on the speculative future of current colonies while alluding to a series of identifiable traits on former (or current) colonial territories. Born in the Caribbean tropics, the Post-Colonial recognizes how the condition of Puerto Rico as the world’s oldest colony and home of the iconic loudreader Luisa Capetillo (more on LOUDREADERS in the next installments), can project an emancipatory model of what Mbembe calls “the becoming Black of the world.”4 As tropical atmospheric phenomena and health crises intensify and expand beyond the geographical limits of the tropics in a rapidly warming world, the “globalization of markets, the post-imperial military complex, and electronic digital technologies” that the colonized part of the world has long been subject to become now the norm around the world. While Sayak Valencia affirms in Gore Capitalism while alluding to Mbembe that necropolitics as “the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die”, is “repositioned as a central motor of the management and application of economic and social policies in North-South relations,” the Post-Colonial here includes the cruelty that extends to every part of the planet, even North-North relations.5
Worldmaking practices in Puerto Rico take the shape of fashion manifestos, while organizing massive protests able to oust a governor for the first time in the five-hundred-year-old colonial history of the archipelago.
The “becoming Black of the world” implies that “all events and situations in the world of life can be assigned a market value” and thus have turned “the systematic risks experienced specifically by Black slaves during early capitalism,” into the “norm for, or at least the lot of, all subaltern humanity.”6
Exacerbated by a five-hundred-year-old colonial history crowned with the effects of a “gore” or “disaster” capitalism (to use the terms of Sayak Valencia and Naomi Klein) - which have been accentuated by Hurricane Maria, the recent sequence of massive earthquakes and the ongoing pandemic of the novel coronavirus with the ongoing threats of ever more daunting upcoming hurricane seasons - make worldmaking in Puerto Rico possible only under an extreme cocktail of risk.7 Worldmaking practices in Puerto Rico take the shape of fashion manifestos like the ones by the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción that wear purple T-shirts that read “Antipatriarcal, Feminista, Lesbiana, Trans, Caribeña, Latinoamericana”(Antipatriarchal, Feminist, Lesbian, Trans, Caribbean, Latin-American), while organizing massive protests able to oust a governor for the first time in the five-hundred-year-old colonial history of the archipelago.8
But as a half-a-millennium-old continuous and aggravating financial, environmental, ecological and health crisis make Puerto Rico one of the petri dishes for a global necrofuture, a Post-Colonial practice has the capacity to render, like the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, strategies of solidarity against and within the mantle of necropolitics. In a world where the commodification of death is commonplace, and where the abrupt interruption of networks of solidarity is the status quo, a Post-Colonial imaginary could articulate the “becoming Puerto Rico of the world.”
The Method
The Post-Colonial Method simultaneously reappropriates the tools of the colonizing imaginary and continues historical underground projects of ideological subversion and resistance. Through reassembly, collage, storytelling, screenplays and teaching of historical material, the worldmaker process reclaims the paintings, texts, pedagogical programs, manifestoes and media summoned to erase, eradicate, occupy and romanticize the extraction, capture and predation of subjects, territories and imaginaries. The Post-Colonial Method performs kynical subversions and Narrative Architectures to make evident what hides at plain sight. By alluding to Diogenes the Kynic who roamed the streets of Athens with a lantern at plain daylight in search of an “honest” man, the Post-Colonial Method renders honest landscapes that question settler claims of ownership over “untamed,” “wild” and “undeveloped” landscapes by means of the disciplined brushstrokes on gypsum-primed canvases that memorialize settler-colonial nostalgia.9
A version of this text appeared first on Trigger Magazine.
Read the whole "A Loudreaders Guide to the Post-Colonial Method" column by WAI Architecture Think Tank.
Bio
WAI Architecture Think Tank is a planetary studio questioning the political, historical, and material legacy and imperatives of architecture and urbanism. Founded in Brussels in 2008 by Puerto Rican architect, artist, curator, educator, author and theorist Cruz Garcia and French architect, artist, curator, educator, author and poet Nathalie Frankowski, WAI is one several platforms of public engagement that include Beijing-based anti-profit art space Intelligentsia Gallery, and the free and alternative education platform and trade-school LOUDREADERS. Garcia and Frankowski are Associate Professors at Iowa State University, faculty at Columbia University, and have held visiting professorships at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, The School of Architecture at Taliesin. Their work has been part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art New York, Neues Museum in Nuremberg, and the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology Lisbon.They are authors of Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto, Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture, A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education, and the upcoming book Universal Principles of Architecture.
Notes
1 The concept of worldmakerhere recalls the Ch’ixi educators-astrologers-poets of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: “poet in the Aristotelian sense of the term: creator of the world, producer of food, connoisseur of the cycles of the cosmos. And this poiesis of the world, which takes place on the walk, on the kipus that record the memory and the regularities of the astral cycles, appears to us as evidence and a proposal”. See Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa. Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón Ediciones, 2010), 32–33. Translation by the authors.
2 Achille Mbembe, “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony,” Journal of the International African Institute, vol. 62, no.1 (1992): 3-37.
3 We discuss more on Post-Colonial contemporary practices in Puerto Rico and their relationship to loudreaders in Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski, “Loudreading in Post-colonial Landscapes (to the beat of Reggaeton),” in the Avery Review 48 (June 2020), http://averyreview.com/issues/48/ loudreading.
4 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 2-4.
5 For more on necropolitics see Mbembe, Necropolitics, 2003, 11-12. Valencia argues that while agreeing with Mbembe’s definition of Necropolitics, instead of seeing it as a geopolitically and racially-situated analysis of biopolitics, she proposes it in opposition to it. For Valencia “Necropolitics desacralizes biopolitics and commodifies the process of dying,” something fundamental to understanding the political reaction to the many deaths following Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and more recently with Covid all around the world. See Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).
6 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 2-4. Mbembe references Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Joseph Vogl, Le Spectre du capital (Paris: Diaphanes, 2013), 152.
7 See Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007); and Klein, The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018). See also Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason.
8 Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, is a leading Puerto Rican platform that explores feminism as a political project that intersects with questions of class, gender, and race. See Glorimar Velázquez Carrasquillo, “La Colectiva, o cómo construir un país desde el feminismo”, ONCE, August 26, 2019. [link]
9 “Kynical” is used here in reference to an architecture that employs irony and humour as forms of ideology critique. Kynical as as opposed to cynical, is a reference to the philosophical school founded by Diogenes of Sinope as described in Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1983).
