Routes of Reclamation

• In Event: Elemental Postcards from Beyond Empire: Excavation / Dust

Abstract

80 years after it was sent, a photograph, addressed from the domestic heart of WWII-era US empire, was delivered to Monroe, Louisiana to the great-niece of its intended recipient. The image shows three Black women in skirts and suit jackets standing between the double front doors of a stately house in West Oakland, California. They smile proudly at the camera, conveying a comportment of property, status, and well-being back to their home communities in Louisiana, and forward in time to ancestors who were left with vacant lots and crumbling fortunes.

Where reparations tasks the state and its claimants with an inherently skewed economic word problem, this paper asks what becomes of Black subjectivity when positioned relative to the act of claiming place through both narrative and property. Likewise, how are Black families (re)claimed by places to which they are still tethered by relations of property? I look at claims like that of Bruce’s Beach in Manhattan Beach, California, and my own family’s relationship to property in Monroe, Louisiana, to disentangle desires for liberation, recognition, and belonging from the colonial act of claiming. Approaching these questions from beyond the edge of empire, I argue that claims-making can exceed settler territoriality to forge a storied, non-exclusive relationship with land that makes Black and Indigenous solidarities and futurities mutually constitutive.

Author

• Kaily Heitz, University of California-Los Angeles