At the Razor’s Edge of Democracy

Authoritarian Capitalism and Decolonial International Feminisms

Macarena Gómez-Barris

In opposition to state-centric perspectives, ours does not continue to prioritize the state as a privileged site of transformation. At the same time, it does not ignore the state in its limited political capacity.

Verónica Gago, Feminist International (2020)

There was always another truth, behind the truth.

Gabriel García Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)

In October 18, 2019, during the continued rise of white nationalism in the United States and fascist racial autocracy in Brazil, Chilean president Sebastian Piñera ordered a 3 percent hike in subway fares. By putting the squeeze on workers, Piñera’s new draconian policies ignited massive protests in Santiago with more than 1.2 million participants. In a society where 33 percent of the nation’s wealth resides with the top 1 percent, and where ex-military officials and a tiny elite control the majority of the country’s remaining precious natural resources, Piñera’s fare hike led to what became a key slogan of the ensuing movement: “Chile se despertó,” or “Chile woke up.”

In the immediate aftermath of the fare hike, dozens of Santiago’s subway stations were burned down, and following a well-choreographed media campaign, Piñera blamed protesters for the arson and declared a state of emergency. Reminiscent of Pinochet’s authoritarian period (1973–1990), Piñera also used heightened rhetoric to refer to protesters in his national speeches as the “the enemy of the state.”

During the last few months of 2019 and in the early months of 2020 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, tens of thousands of police and military units were mobilized by the state to put down the rebellion. In addition to committing a wide range of human rights abuses, police used antiriot shotguns to shoot activists, more than 346 of whom lost their eyes. Further, rape and torture were used as means to “quell” the popular uprising.1 Militarization in the streets created fierce opposition by a front-line movement that took over Plaza Italia and other parts of the downtown corridor as spaces of popular reoccupation. These movements staged solidarity with the long practices of front-line resistance by Mapuche communities in Wallmapu, the Indigenous territories that cross the Andes between Chile and Argentina. Yet, amid the power of such mass and heterogeneous protests sparked by the fare hike, it was the transversal and feminist performances of La Tesis Collective, founded by Daffne Valdés, Paula Cometa, Lea Cáceres, and Sibila Sotomayor, that reverberated around the globe.

“Un violador en tu camino” (lit. “A rapist in your path,” commonly translated as “The rapist is you”) are lyrics written and choreographed by the Chilean feminist group and then enacted by tens of thousands of Chilean women, nonbinary, trans, and queer (cuir) activists. The gesture of performing the choreography in front of the Moneda Palace as well as pointing to the state enlivens an antiauthoritarian critique at the core of an international trans*feminist movement.2 Performed hundreds of times in Chile and then creatively reappropriated around the world, its aim has been to denounce femicide, sexual assault, patriarchal authority, gender inequality, and the sovereignty of state power, aims carefully articulated within broader abolitionist efforts against the state’s repression and brutality. Indeed, the sheer public display of hundreds of thousands of unwavering female activists using their bodies as a collective denouncement of authoritarian capitalism makes visible the immense intersectional strength of a movement that foregrounds liberation by declaring a counter war on the state.

To their credit, new feminist and anticapitalist movements in the hemisphere like the one in Chile and the transversal feminist struggle in Argentina have often been leaderless, making it difficult to co-opt or corrupt individual interests over collective ones. Further, movements for gender, sex, and reproductive rights have not been articulated through single-issue concerns but instead through an expansive and transformative agenda aimed at changing the elite colonial, economic, political, and legal model of the nation-state, as well as raising environmental, Indigenous, immigrant, health, education, living wage, and multispecies justice and antiextractive land and water protection.3 The widely circulating phrase “Chile was the birthplace of neoliberalism, and Chile is where neoliberalism will die” encapsulates the sentiment that the model of global capitalism failed the majority. It is this broader decolonial feminist resistance that points to the state as well as the political economy of extractive neoliberal capitalism at the heart of resuscitating, invigorating, and deepening radical democracy in the hemisphere.

In the first part of this essay, I use the term authoritarian capitalism to consider features of new/old fascism that are rooted in colonial and patriarchal structures and that have been reconfigured within this latest stage of the global capitalist political economy. Ruthie Gilmore refers to the antistate state as a system of governance that does the work of continually dismantling the social and economic gains and liberal protections within the state.4 Authoritarian capitalism, I contend, is the structure that underpins the antistate state (or the neoliberal state) that consolidates precisely when capitalism has reached its maximum growth point under democracy. To put this directly, the fact of radical wealth inequality so that ten white men, eight of whom are from the United States, own as much wealth as half of the population on the planet is a model that cannot be sustained under the pretense of democracy. Instead, such skewed injustice and disparity, like in earlier historical periods, must be continually sustained with the strong-arm apparatuses of police and military governance.

In the essay’s second part, I address how rupturing, dismantling, and conclusively undoing authoritarian capitalism and white patriarchal supremacy is not a simple task and requires many approaches that include the powerful work of Black Lives Matters organizing, critical resistance, Indigenous land and water defense, and multiple horizontal efforts aimed at both abolition and decolonization. At the same time, the work of international feminist mass movements in the Global South makes central the degree to which the state under patriarchal rule is not the arbiter of gender/sexual and transphobic violence but its key perpetrator and must be addressed as such.

Many of these mobilizations have learned from Black, Indigenous, and immigrant struggles that make feminist and gender/sex analysis central and therefore have produced broad-based efforts that work to delegitimize the normative functions of patriarchal state authority. Articulating zero tolerance for femicide and the routinized forms of sex/gender violence under authoritarian capitalism, working to dismantle carceral logics, creating visibility for gender parity in political processes, putting queer and trans* rights first, and raising forms of coalitional politics that consider Afro-Indigenous struggles and territories complexly counter the paradigm of war unleashed by the colonial-modern state.5 By drawing upon examples in the Americas, I address the need for transversal and decolonial, cuir-trans*feminist approaches to imagine a future beyond the fascist shadow of our time-space present.

Colonial Authoritarian Origins

Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism draws a direct line between colonial systems and modern fascism.6 As he states:

We must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, … each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.7

In this powerful inversion that moves the object of scrutiny from the colonized other to the savaging subject of empire, Césaire articulates, in Stuart Hall’s sense of the word, the concentration camps and the plantation systems of European colonialism to its twentieth century incarnation as modern fascism. The infection that spreads and the poison that Césaire refers to then is the rise of state and populist collusion with mass and targeted racialized death in the twentieth century that currently continues unabated.

Attempts to define recent forms of fascisms by theorists on the political Left, whether Marxists, Troteskyists, autonomists, or anarchists, often miss what decolonial theory reveals, which is how colonial systems of global power are continuous in modernity; though racial capitalism mutates and proliferates, its underlying system is based in colonial extractive relations that originate within racialized structures of punishment and death so aptly described above by Césaire.

As we know from abolition scholars, the history of the police and the military emerged from within plantation and settler colonialism, whose objective was to rule over and repress organized rebellion.8 As Victor E. Kappler describes in the U.S. colonial context:

New England settlers appointed Indian Constables to police Native Americans (National Constable Association, 1995), the St. Louis police were founded to protect residents from Native Americans in that frontier city, and many southern police departments began as slave patrols. In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property.9

Colonial slave patrols underpin the system of modern policing that manufactured Indigenous and African-descended people as criminals, displacing the organization of an economic and affective economy founded upon massive violence and dispossession. And, as Sarah Haley shows in relation to the imprisonment of Black female labor, policing evolved upon the structure of racialized domestic labor. “The sight of black women on the streets in black neighborhoods,” Haley writes, “perhaps with their voices raised, was an assault on the model of a docile black woman in the white domestic sphere, and therefore subject to punishment.”10 The Jim Crow system of punishment that protected white women’s domestic spheres of influence was key to the broader logics of white supremacy as an authoritarian structure that punished nonwhite subjects through a transtemporal penal system we now refer to as the U.S. prison industrial complex and more broadly to carceral capitalism, to name how we are all imprisoned by the digital surveillances of a corporate state.

In the Global North and the Global South, authoritarian systems depend upon structures of punishment and criminality that instantiate a gender, class, and color order that continually criminalizes and widens the net on dissent. As I have written elsewhere, authoritarian states like those that are usually associated with Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (or what we might refer to as the Global South), target poor, female, queer, trans, Indigenous, and Black populations, converting those already expelled from the logics of primitive accumulation and dispossession into objectified subjects of the colonial rule of law.11

Authoritarianism and liberal democracy often share a symbiotic relationship, especially given that the racial state deploys differential systems of brutality to secure private property, extracting surplus from Black and Indigenous bodies and biodiverse territories (be they in rural peripheries or urban centers). Capitalism produces high consumer debt ratios and ratifies impossibly unequal concentrations of wealth, while continually repressing any potential opposition. More recently, this has been rhetorically and politically accomplished through a series of authoritarian tactics that include popular appeals to a mythic white past, law and order, anxiety about race and sexuality, anti-intellectualism, and misinformation campaigns and policy maneuvers that perpetuate a series of fabricated histories without addressing the fungible origins of property theft.

A key mark of fascist and authoritarian rule is not only its rhetorical strategies but the symbolic and material targeting of enemies. As Pratap Mehta writes:

The targeting of enemies—minorities, liberals, secularists, leftists, urban naxals, intellectuals, assorted protestors—is not driven by a calculus of ordinary politics.… When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies the truth ceases to matter, normal restraint of civilization and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.12

Though Mehta describes the fascist directions of Narendra Modi and the BJP in India, similar authoritarian tactics have been utilized in Trump’s America, Duterte’s security regime in the Philippines, Bolsonaro’s racist imaginary of Brazil, and Piñero’s criminalization of protesters in Chile. These autocratic figures work to center their patriarchal authority, challenging the liberal notion of multiracial democratic societies by first attacking racialized and sexualized others.13 Indeed, new forms of global fascism continue to be rendered through patriarchal figures and their monocultural representations. And the authoritarian antistate state casts an ever-widening net over those it criminalizes and capitalism expels. What the current political moment crystalizes is that liberal democracy has never been the end game: Astra Taylor reminds us with her recent book that “democracy may not exist, but we may miss it when it’s gone.”

White and ethnic nationalist sentiments run through nostalgic representations of the past that imbue strong men with virulent capacities. For instance, Donald Trump’s 2017 “Make America Great Again” campaign, Jair Bolsonaro’s recursion to the traditional Brazilian Christian family in 2018, and Duterte’s 2016 “Fearless Solutions, Fast Actions” slogan all aim to interpolate an electorate that gives primacy to militarized security, heteronormative exclusivity, and anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and antiminoritarian understandings of white phantasmatic national coherence. These strategies also function through ongoing violent expulsions of foreign others. As Jason Stanley described in relation to Trump’s xenophobia, protecting the nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States was an executive order that not only halted refugees from the war in Syria, placing a travel ban on citizens of seven Muslim Countries, but its specific focus on religious identity contradicted the Establishment Clause of the U.S. constitution. As Stanley notes, this makes evident the fact that the Constitution can be manipulated for fascist political ends.14 I will return to the issue of the Constitution, since it is a document that births the nation-state and structurally organizes illiberal and unequal societies, yet it has also become a site of revisioning and imagining toward a deepening of radical democracy. Yet I would like to emphasize Stanley’s point because it shows that liberal democratic institutions are not a fait accompli but constantly unmasked, reworked, deliberated upon, and manipulated in directions that either produce positive rights or that contribute to their undoing.

In the period of global visible resurgence of far-right ideology, we must also consider how antifeminist and antigay discourses have become central to the dangerous rhetoric used by political leaders, movements, and parties to advance political agendas with fascist underpinnings. The historical connections with targeting queer populations in relation to European fascism is clear, such as the burning down of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (a foundation that campaigned for LGBTQ rights) during the German Third Reich and other forms of terror, deportation, and persecution against those Hitler’s regime coded as subversive. Bolsonaro’s outlandish statements about rather having his son be dead or a drug addict than gay and his effort to ban homosexual references from textbooks are just two of the many examples that could be noted in the current homophobic and transphobic strains of autocratic demagoguery.

Authoritarian Capitalism

Whether a state is “truly fascist” is almost beyond the point, given that authoritarian practices run amok within liberal democracies to feed the beast of capitalist extraction.

For instance, “nature” in capitalism is conceived as an input, where soil, water, timber, minerals, ore, and oil are represented as commodities, converting biophysical resources into primitive accumulation. Given that racialized, poor, Indigenous, and Black communities are more likely to live and exist in spaces where extractive industries operate, they become targeted by the state as that which must be either removed or eradicated. When Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous land and water defenders protect spaces of high biodiversity, they are then made the target of the military security apparatus, precisely because such antiextractive organizing impedes the accumulative progress of the developmentalist corporate state.

India, Brazil, Canada, Guatemala, and Honduras all experience high degrees of targeted violence against antiextractive activists, where the police and military actively rove to secure new territorial frontiers; Black and Indigenous female bodies literally become the block to extractive capitalism. The Honduran state-sponsored militia death of the Lenca Indigenous activist Berta Caceres in 2014 is an example of the overlapping structures of ecocide, feminicide, and genocide that are the core practices of global capitalism under authoritarian governance.

Those experiencing the imperial and colonial imprint of racialized governance both “at home and abroad” understand the demagogic intolerance that sits at the root of the four-hundred-year-old U.S. experiment with liberal democracy. Let me state the obvious. The rise of fascism in the globalized world today may surprise many, but least of all Black, Indigenous, and other colonized peoples who have observed state governance as one long and continuous abuse of power with recent fascisms as its apex expression. In the toxins poured into U.S. communities of color and the Global South or the increased forms of Indigenous land dispossession; in the dearth of quality unionized jobs and increased surveillance practices, and in the dispossessions created by gentrification; in the lack of quality access to housing, health care, clean water, and good public education; in the ongoing attacks on nonnormative bodies and the precarious structures of Black and Brown female labor, the people that capitalism leaves out must be quelled. This is why authoritarianism looms large as a planetary condition, hovering as the polluted fodder that continually erodes democratic gains and capacities.

In the words of Jamil Khader, professor of English literature at Bethlehem University in Palestine:

Trump’s objection to outsourcing, rejection of free-trade treaties, and his call for more government economic intervention are all symptoms of the fact that neoliberal economic policies and the democratic values associated with them can no longer drive capitalist growth. As a result, the crisis of global capitalism today is driving nations worldwide toward new forms of politico-economic organization—namely authoritarian capitalism.

Thinking with this quote, we might conjecture that the ghostly trace of neoliberalism may have had its last gasp. And in its place, we might refer to a new-old system: authoritarian capitalism. As Khader synthetically outlines about democracy’s tipping point and the drive of capitalist growth, new consolidations of racialized global capital rely on the rule of law. We can only conclude that authoritarianism and fascism are embedded within institutions of liberal democracy rather than outside of them, precisely because of their entanglement with racial capitalism.

If neoliberalism has ended and we are moving closer to what we might call authoritarian capitalism, what are the ways that this new-old formation begs for a decolonial, queer of color,15 and trans*feminist critique of this fascist and decaying late stage of capitalism? After neoliberalism, what must be burned to the ground to build anew?

The film At the Edge of Democracy by Petra Costa (2019) describes the precarity of a system based on electoral democracy that is built upon unsolid foundations. Its haunting opening describes the origin name for the country in which Costa was born, the Brazil tree, which is now extinct. “Only the name remains,” she says on voiceover as if to speak to the phantasms of the colonial Anthropocene.16 She also references the transatlantic slave trade and the inheritances of a nation steeped in the colonial military structures that first put down the rebellions of Afro-descended peoples and then became the root of modern authoritarian regimes. As Costa underscores about the present period when describing the military regime that lasted between 1964 and 1985: “In Bolsonaro’s cosmology, militants like my parents should have been killed. It was the face of a country that had never punished the crimes committed under military rule. A country that had been shaped by slavery, privilege, and coups.”

After its military dictatorship, one of the longest in the region, Brazil did little to formally address the atrocities of modern authoritarianism, just as it had not confronted its colonial legacies and brutality. There is an important scene in At the Edge of Democracy when the military police activate against the protesters and violently beat a Black man in front of the camera. The filmmaker says on the film’s voiceover, “Our democracy was founded on forgetting.” This is a profound statement of how racialized brutality and its erasure underlie the making of the nation-state. And such occluded horrors are buried but persist within democratic institutions, even during transition to democracy periods.17 Yet, in this way, Brazil is not exceptional, since the settler nation-state indeed is amnesiac and relies upon the continual recurrence of anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and misogynistic strategies as its operational foundation.

Writing in the 1940s at the height of Hitler’s power, Walter Benjamin observed that “fascism tends to an aestheticization of politics,” by which he meant that fascism produces spectatorship that allows popular classes to feel recognized within the structure without upending the relations of power and ownership that produced that structure in the first place. In Surviving Autocracy (2020), Masha Gessen writes of the difficulty of living under Trumpian news cycles, a way of being that is both fragmented and scattered. We may indeed be living within and differentially dying within authoritarian capitalism, a structure of feeling so fragmented and disorienting that it confuses us into not being able to name its deciduous and hidden, but not yet extinct, colonial root.

The Autumn of Authoritarianism

How can we theorize new forms of authoritarian governance that operate from within the structures of illiberal democracy? How can we cut at the root of authoritarian capitalism to reimagine power as nonextractive? These are questions that cannot be resolved by a Biden victory and administration or the taken-for-granted gains of a liberal democracy. As the pandemic has made evident, antidemocratic forces like social media, the spread of fiction over facts, and disinformation campaigns are the embers that ignite the populist wildfires of global fascism. Yet the hard fact of more than seven million votes for Donald Trump in the presidential election, with white women increasing their votes this election, is more evidence of the U.S. electorate’s ongoing broad and deep investment in racial supremacy as well as authoritarian rule. Yet Black Lives Matters and Indigenous proposals like the Red New Deal as well as UPROSE’s just transitions efforts all show the propulsive and urgent force of antiextractive organizing against racial capitalism.18

If the gains made under liberal democracy were only partial and have continued to sustain white heteropatriarchal supremacy, it is through transversal struggle that radical democracy can be deepened. Learning from U.S. Native feminisms, Black feminisms, and queer / women of color feminist theories and activisms in the Global North, as well as anarcho-Indigenous feminisms, ecological socialisms, and decolonial praxis from the Americas, allows us to address long-standing issues of how to historicize gendered violence within the matrix of coloniality that is the modern nation-state.19 Antiracist, trans*feminist, and queer trans of color movements directly counter the patriarchal heterosexism of the state, and on-the-ground struggle nurtures radical democracy as a living practice.20 It is in the collaborative and leading-edge work of abolition and decolonization that activists continue to unravel white patriarchal authority to reveal the many horizons of planetary futures.

In Feminist International, Veronica Gago describes how the female body is a site of war by the patriarchal state and how it is only through counterweaponization that embodiment and the body will bring a new world into being. In the daily work of bodily living, new forms of power, or potencia, generate the texture of decolonial alternatives.21 Through the nexus of the collective actions of sex workers, contingent labor, migrants, and reproductive rights activism, Gago describes another possibility, one of wide and interlinked global coalition.

Throughout Argentina and Chile prior to the pandemic and even during, feminist movements have taken over the streets by the hundreds of thousands. Feminist struggle considers longer histories of social movements that counter state-sanctioned violence, repression, and fiscal austerity.22 The massified use of repressive tactics by the state against these movements for radical change reveals the weakness of current models of democracy that use the weapons of war, military tanks, bullets, torture, rape, and the dispersion of chemicals to disarticulate the heterogeneity of such uprising.

Despite war as statecraft, profound democratic processes and a deepening of horizontal power takes place through hundreds of mobilizations that traverse all sectors, genders, social strata, and generations of Chilean society. Since 2006, mass mobilizations effectively built upon student and worker movements demanded less austerity, better wages, and free public education.

More recently, constituent assemblies have fortified a sense of localized community and invigorated participation, fending off the social fragmentation that characterized the period during and following authoritarian rule. Popular assemblies such as those that have taken place throughout Ecuador, Bolivia, and other parts of the Americas deepen the reach of democracy into local and communal spaces. And they offer a potent form of popular power, such as the recent 2020 plebiscite vote for constitutional change in Chile, an effort to rewrite the 1980 Constitution left in place by Pinochet. Eighty percent of the electorate voted for a new constitution, the result of months of work in popular assemblies, with rich discussions on the character of the problems within the neoliberal capitalist model that privatized social security, health care, and education and left many Chileans in consumer debt.

Embers and Ashes

Can we imagine a way out of such uneven and differentiated systems of economic and racialized state power? In a depressing political climate of illiberal democracy and rising neofascism, we must look beyond individual personality traits to focus instead on the contemporary authoritarian character of governance and at the same time name and dismantle new forms of capital accumulation and the militarized police state. Mariame Kaba describes the necessity of abolition for horizontal redress and restorative justice. The dismantling of police and military occupation is necessary to move toward fundamentally addressing and imagining beyond the violence of a vertical world.23

We might also return to the Indigenous Mapuche women’s call for Indigenous sovereignty24 and the specific proposal Escucha Huinka (Listen white man), written by Indigenous community historians that demands plurinational shared governance.25

The collective dance of Mapuche Indigenous women who reworked the choreography of the La Tesis Collective to powerfully incorporate the sacred Kultrum drum points directly to the colonial state for its terracide. As the trans*feminist and Indigenous expressions of La Tesis Collective demands, we must seek accountability from those in power and those that perpetuate the structures of authoritarian violence. The feminist decolonial queer and trans life worth living demands an antiauthoritarian future, one born from the ashes of colonial and authoritarian capitalism.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and author who works at the intersections of authoritarianism, the visual arts, extractivism, and the environmental and decolonial humanities. Her books include Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile, Beyond the Pink Tide: Artistic and Political Undercurrents, and The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Her in-progress book is At the Sea’s Edge.

Notes

See Human Rights Watch, “Chile: Events of 2019,” Human Rights Watch Report, accessed April 14, 2021, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/chile#.
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“El violador eres tú—LETRA COMPLETA del HIMNO FEMINISTA Un violador en tu camino,” YouTube video posted by La Nación Costa Rica, December 5, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB1cWh27rmI.
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For a detailed analysis of Indigenous resurgence and alliances, see Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon, eds., Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Also see The Red Nation, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save our Earth (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2021). On decolonization in the broader Americas, see Sylvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Chi’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111 (2012): 95–109.
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The formulation of the antistate state appears in Ruth Wilson Gilmore, In the Shadow of the Shadow State, in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, Incite! Women of Color against Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
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On the paradigm of war, see Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
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Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review, 2000). For a critical Indigenous studies perspective on colonialism, see Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
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Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 13.
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There are many scholars and theorists to cite here, but an essential classic reference is Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).
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See Victor E. Kappeler, “A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing,” EKU Online, January 7, 2014, https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing.
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Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
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See Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), chap. 5.
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Pratab Bhana Mehta, “JNU Violence Reflects an Apocalyptical Politics Driven by a Constant Need to Find New Enemies,” Indian Express, January 7, 2020, cited in Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York: Random House, 2018), 10.
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For instance, Jair Bolsonaro has used a war of words to criminalize queer and trans* peoples, as well as same-sex sexual relations, and even though new protections have narrowly been granted by the Brazilian Supreme Court, hate speech and anti-LGBTQ* violence has increased. And, of course, this keeps changing as Bolsonaro continuously attacks the Supreme Court for rights projections and stacks the vociferous conservative (as of now) court minority. See Fabio Teixeira and Oscar Lopez, “With Brazil’s Bolsonaro Attacking the Supreme Court, Are Gay Rights at Risk,” Reuters, July 20, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/brazil-lgbt-politics-idINL8N2EE6CH.
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See Jason Stanley “Preface,” How Fascism Works: The Politics of US and Them, New York: Random House, 2018.
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See Roderick A. Ferguson’s reflection on queer of color critique and authoritarianism. Roderick A. Ferguson, “Authoritarianism and the Planetary Mission of Queer of Color Critique: A Short Reflection,” Safundi 21, no. 3 (July 2020): 282–290.
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See Macarena Gómez-Barris, “The Colonial Anthropocene: Damage, Remapping, and Resurgent Resources,” Antipode Online, March 2019, https://antipodeonline.org/2019/03/19/the-colonial-anthropocene/.
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The dynamics of burial, resurgence, and symbolic and material incorporation of the afterlives of colonialism and nation building in many ways define the nation, as I wrote about in Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
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The Red Nation, Red Deal.
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On Native and Indigenous feminisms, see especially Mishuana Goeman and Jennifer Nez Denetdale, “Introduction: Native Feminisms; Legacies, Interventions and Indigenous Sovereignties,” Wacazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 9–13; and Joanne Barker, ed., Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). For intersections with queer theory, see Jodi Byrd, “Loving Unbecoming: The Queer Politics of the Transitive Native,” in ed. Joanne Barker, Critically Sovereign (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 207–228. and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
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See Macarena Gómez-Barris, Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).
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Verónica Gago, Feminist International: How to Change Everything (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2020).
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For a powerful instance of this, see Maria Galindo and Mujeres Creando Comunidad, “Feminist Constitution,” in “Decolonial Gesture,” ed. Macarena Gómez-Barris, Marcial Godoy-Anativia, and Jill Lane, special issue, e-misférica 11, no.1 (2014), http://archive.hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/emisferica-111-decolonial-gesture.
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On restorative justice and the profound work of abolition and transformative political struggle as well as forms of seeking justice, contending with harm, and addressing accountability beyond the punishment system, see Mariame Kaba’s brilliant recent book based on decades of abolition struggle. Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021).
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See Moira Millán, “Stop the Terricide: Manifesto for Buen Vivir,” Kedistan, April 28, 2021, https://www.kedistan.net/2021/04/28/buen-vivir-manifesto/. For an important discussion on Indigenous sovereignty, see Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s introduction to her edited volume on Indigenous sovereignty in Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2009).
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See Pablo Marimán, Serqio Caniuqueo, José Millalén, and Rodrigo Levil, ¡… Escucha Winka …! (Santiago: Lom Ediciones, 2006, The Mapuche scholar Luis Cárcamo Huechante introduced the epilogue in Luis Cárcamo Huechante, “Epilogue to ¡… Escucha Winka …!,” in “Decolonial Gesture,” ed. Macarena Gómez-Barris, Marcial Godoy-Anativia, and Jill Lane, special issue, e-misférica 11, no.1 (2014): http://archive.hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/emisferica-111-decolonial-gesture; https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-11-1-decolonial-gesture/11-1-essays/epilogue-to-listen-huinka.html.
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Essays