The Production of Resistance: Spatial Technologies in Lumbee and Waccamaw History

• In Event: Resistance and Disruption

Abstract

This paper addresses the epistemological schism between positivist and critical sociologies by drawing from the New Technology Approach (NTA), a stratified ontology that redefines social formations by their capacity to resist entropy. While Michael Burawoy’s "Reflexive Science" deepened critical case construction, it often truncates the history of civilization by centering modern capital as the primary causal force. By synthesizing the NTA with Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space, this paper reframes the colonial encounter as a collision of distinct spacetime strata.
The NTA posits that indigenous nations utilized narrative and ritual as "technologies of interiority" to produce negentropic anchors for human subjectivity, establishing a "Cosmos" distinct from universal entropy. Conversely, the colonial state imposes "Abstract Space"—a geometric, quantifiable grid characterized by linear time and the "Terror of History". This imposition generates "spacetime slippage," a material disorientation where organic indigenous life is forced into the incompatible rhythms of the bureaucratic assemblage.
We operationalize this framework through a comparative analysis of the Lumbee and Waccamaw Siouan peoples’ resistance in North Carolina. By applying the NTA to these cases, we analyze how the physical environment influenced the "agential cuts" of the state. We argue that the Waccamaw’s lake was highly visible to state power, accelerating their spatial erasure, while the Lumbee utilized the river and swamp to create lived spaces that elided colonial value, making resistance more tenable. This comparison reveals how colonial power is rooted in the production of abstract space and offers a non-anthropomorphic framework for analyzing the persistence of native nations against synthetic macro-agents.

Authors

• Christopher Shane Elliott, UNCW

• Lauren Edes, University of North Carolina Wilmington

• Olivia Johnson, University of North Carolina Wilmington