Dwelling in the Irreparable

• In Event: Temporalities of Catastrophe

Abstract

This paper considers how contemporary reparations movements have not simply sought restitution for past wrongs but also conveyed the irreparability of historical injustices that are perpetuated, reproduced, and repurposed in the present. Reparation and irreparability in this sense have been articulated by collective endeavors organized in response to chattel slavery and its afterlives, colonization and Indigenous dispossession, and racial regimes of social and ecological expendability in order to contend with the duration and endurance of catastrophe. This paper asks how reparations frameworks manifest tensions between reconciliation and redress, complicity and exoneration, historicity and futurity. I counterpose frameworks for reparation that specifically challenge notions of compensation, consolation, and closure to adjudicatory projects aimed at the formal resolution of past injustice as a means of safeguarding state authority and capital accumulation. Key examples are drawn from initiatives including N'COBRA (National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America), the Caribbean Reparation Commission, and the Black Live Matters Reparations Policy Agenda, as well as the Canadian and South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Reparations and reconciliation frameworks are further considered in relation to efforts to organize on behalf of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada and the US. Through an analysis of these examples, this paper argues for the importance of grappling with the constitutive and ongoing irreparability of colonial and racial violence, while also making collective demands that foreground the culpability of states and capital and make possible the survival of those dispossessed and brutalized pending further substantive reckoning, retribution, and transformation.

Author

• Alyosha Goldstein, The University of New Mexico