Geo Maher - Anticolonial Eruptions (American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present)

When George Floyd was murdered, Minneapolis erupted . This was the consensus, the lingua franca, of nearly every mainstream media outlet attempting to grapple with the street rebellions that burst forth unexpectedly in May 2020, spreading like wildfire across the US and beyond in the months that followed.

What is obvious to some is unthinkable to others, however. While those closest can often feel the rumbling, for many others volcanic metaphors bespeak shock and surprise, the sudden bursting forth of previously invisible forces. Something deeper, even subterranean, is at play, surging like so much molten lava, waiting to break the surface and unleash hell. To be clear: we are speaking of people, not nature, though sometimes the difference between the two is not so clear. Think of the proper name Katrina, or the perceptible weight of unnamable forces that

For Ta-Nehisi Coates, this is the case with racism, depicted so often as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature that one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men. But if racism seeks to portray itself as a force of nature, and indeed accomplishes its most brutal work through this naturalization, do we err dangerously by granting it what it wants, even in disastrous form?

For some critics, to compare racism to a natural disaster, as Coates does, runs the risk of accepting the truth of its categories, succumbing in the process to pessimism, fatalism, and despair.who resist it do so with the power of an irrepressibly seismic reaction beyond all possible moral condemnation.

Such disastrous beings can throw even the permanence of nature into chaos. Slaves planning an 1810 uprising in Virginia referred to the planned revolt as an earthquake, and one conspirator was overheard to remark that he was entitled to his freedom, and he would be damned, if he did not have it in a fortnight.

These questions resonate deafeningly today. If you could hardly blame those slaves who crept through the night to set plantation houses ablaze, striking terror into the heart of the American South, the same is true today as fire is again applied as a mechanical, indeed a natural response to police violence: to the Minneapolis Third Precinct building after George Floyds murder, to police vehicles nationwide in the weeks that followed, and to the Wendys where Rayshard Brooks was shot dead by Atlanta police less than a month later. So natural a response, in fact, that some 54 percent of Americans agreed that protesters were justified in burning down the Third Precinct. If it is a central pretension of Western modernity that nature is a vast prison that stands opposed to human liberation and freedom, then here we find something far different, turning such notions on their head.

From Native Hawaiians defending the literal volcano at Mauna Kea to those water defenders congregating to resist the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock under the banner This is far from fatalism or despair, and even with the judgment of the gods reversed, Coatess terms still apply: you cant subpoena this earthquake either, theres no slowing this whirlwind, and you certainly cant blame a volcano for erupting.

Resistance is everywhere, but everywhere a surprise. Why? What explains the downright shock among the powerful when confronted by the most human of demandsfor life, freedom, and equality? Any system of domination relies, to some degree at least, on the pretension that those in power deserve to be there, that their rule is by definition legitimate and good. And more often than not, those in power are persuaded by the comforting stories they tell themselves. This book is about the kind of hubris that such comforts produce among the powerful, and that blinds them to those who would oppose their rule.