Become Ungovernable: An Abolition Feminist Ethic for Democratic Living

By H.L.T. Quan

'Phenomenal ... Offers us possibilities for rescuing the concept of democracy from its fatal entanglement with racial, heteropatriarchal capitalism'—Angela Y. Davis

'Embraces the unruliness of collective struggle, and recognizes freedom not as a destination but practice—an abolitionist, feminist, anticapitalist, antiracist, radically inclusive practice'—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

'A compelling and inspiring book that belongs in our movements and our classrooms'—Chandra Talpade Mohanty, author of Feminism Without Borders

'An elegantly written masterpiece'—Barbara Ransby, author of Making All Black Lives Matter 

Become Ungovernable is a provocative new work of political thought setting out to reclaim “freedom”, “justice”, and “democracy”, revolutionary ideas that are all too often warped in the interests of capital and the state. Revealing the mirage of mainstream democratic thought and the false promises of liberal political ideologies, H.L.T. Quan offers an alternative approach: an abolition feminism drawing on a kaleidoscope of refusal praxes, and on a deep engagement with the Black Radical Tradition and queer analytics.

With each chapter anchored by episodes from the long history of resistance and rebellions against tyranny, Quan calls for us to take up a feminist ethic of living rooted in the principles of radical inclusion, mutuality and friendship as part of the larger toolkit for confronting fascism, white supremacy, and the neoliberal labor regime.

H.L.T. Quan is a political theorist, award-winning filmmaker and Associate Professor of Justice and Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Quan is the author of Growth Against Democracy and editor of Cedric J. Robinson.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Release date: Feb 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9780745349121

Book preview

Illustration

Become Ungovernable

"In Become Ungovernable, H.L.T. Quan offers us possibilities for rescuing the concept of democracy from its fatal entanglement with racial, heteropatriarchal capitalism. This phenomenal text urges us to seek radical democratic futures, not in more equitable modes of governance, but rather in revolutionary community-making practices—especially those emanating from anti-racist and abolition feminist traditions."

—Angela Y. Davis

An unruly book. Leaping across broad swaths of time and space, H.L.T. Quan exposes the prison house of liberal antidemocracy and the accumulation of rebellions inside in order to construct a theory of democracy as radical praxis. ‘Democratic living,’ as she calls it, refuses the tyranny of order, embraces the unruliness of collective struggle, and recognizes freedom not as a destination but practice—an abolitionist, feminist, anti-capitalist, antiracist, radically inclusive practice. In other words, to preserve life and break liberalism’s hold, we have to make a living. Quan shows us a way.

—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

An elegantly written masterpiece that covers a breathtaking amount of intellectual, political, and geographic territory: from the pre-Civil War American South to rebellions in northern China to the Zapatista experiment in Chiapas, Mexico. Building on a vast body of feminist, Black radical, and abolitionist literature, H.L.T. Quan calls for a feminist ethic of care as a guiding principle for the future, rejecting state-centered solutions as non-solutions to our collective longing for freedom and free spaces.

—Barbara Ransby, historian, writer, longtime activist, author of Making All Black Lives Matter

"Become Ungovernable is a masterpiece expression of H.L.T. Quan’s lifework. Reflecting analytical, theoretical, and creative insights cultivated through 25+ years as a documentary filmmaker and several decades as one of the most careful, uncompromising, thoughtful critical caretakers of the living Black radical archive conceptualized by the late, great Cedric Robinson, this book is a gift to all who are serious about the conjoined tasks of abolition and liberation."

—Dylan Rodríguez, University of California at Riverside, founding member of Critical Resistance and Cops Off Campus

Quite simply a brilliant, original, and capacious work of political theory anchored in an erudite analysis of core concepts like representative democracy, democratic elitism, authoritarianism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, justice, and governance. A compelling and inspiring book that belongs in our movements and our classrooms.

—Chandra Talpade Mohanty, author of Feminism Without Borders, Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity

Black Critique

Series editors: Anthony Bogues and Bedour Alagraa

Throughout the twentieth century and until today, anti-racist, radical decolonization struggles have attempted to create new forms of thought. Figures from Ida B. Wells to W.E.B. Du Bois and Steve Biko, from Claudia Jones to Walter Rodney and Amílcar Cabral produced work which drew from the historical experiences of Africa and the African diaspora. They drew inspiration from the Haitian revolution, radical Black abolitionist thought and practice, and other currents that marked the contours of a Black radical intellectual and political tradition.

The Black Critique series operates squarely within this tradition of ideas and political struggles. It includes books which foreground this rich and complex history. At a time when there is a deep desire for change, Black radicalism is one of the most underexplored traditions that can drive emancipatory change today. This series highlights these critical ideas from anywhere in the Black world, creating a new history of radical thought for our times.

Also available:

Against Racial Capitalism:

Selected Writings

Neville Alexander

Edited by Salim Vally and Enver Motala

Ere Roosevelt Came:

The Adventures of the Man in the Cloak – A Pan-African Novel of the Global 1930s Dusé Mohamed Ali

Edited by Marina Bilbija and Alex Lubin

Moving Against the System:

The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness Edited and with an Introduction by David Austin

Revolutionary Movements in Africa:

An Untold Story

Edited by Pascal Bianchini,

Ndongo Samba Sylla and Leo Zeilig

Anarchism and the Black Revolution:

The Definitive Edition

Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin

After the Postcolonial Caribbean:

Memory, Imagination, Hope

Brian Meeks

A Certain Amount of Madness:

The Life, Politics and Legacies of

Thomas Sankara

Edited by Amber Murrey

Of Black Study

Joshua Myers

On Racial Capitalism, Black

Internationalism, and Cultures of

Resistance

Cedric J. Robinson

Edited by H.L.T. Quan

Black Minded:

The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X

Michael Sawyer

Red International and Black Caribbean

Communists in New York City,

Mexico and the West Indies, 1919–1939

Margaret Stevens

The Point is to Change the World:

Selected Writings of Andaiye

Edited by Alissa Trotz

Illustration

First published 2024 by Pluto Press

New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA and Pluto Press, Inc.

1930 Village Center Circle, 3-834, Las Vegas, NV 89134

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © H. L. T. Quan 2024

The right of H. L. T. Quan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

Contents

Preface

PART I: ANTIDEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

1.   Against Tyranny: An Introduction

Manufactured Consensus

The Many Meanings of Justice

In the Land of Siba

Spaces of Ungovernability

Spaces of In/justice

Against Tyranny

Notes on Method

2.   The Myth of White Autarky

Our Real Disease

American Fascism and the Betrayal of the Self

Freedom as Entitlement

The Conceits of Governability

Reconstructing Black Radical Praxes

3.   Democratic Thought and the Unthinkable

Part I. The Tyranny of Democratic Thinkability

Part II. The Tyranny of the Political

Part III. Democratic Living

4.   Love of Freedom: Jeffersonian Antidemocracy and the Politics of Governing

Blaming the Victims

The Entitlement of Rule

Sentiments of Liberty

Desiring Perfection

Radical Exclusion

The Spectacles of Turbulence

For the Preservation of the Free

5.   The Empty Sounds of Liberty

The Cosmetics of Liberty

Securing Freedom Made Orderly

The Limits of Representation

Reproducing Autarchy

The Empty Throne of Liberty

PART II: LIFE BEYOND GOVERNING

6.   From Homo Politicus to Robo Sapiens: An Interlude

Disorientation

The Arithmetic of Perfectability

7.   iLife and Death: The New/Old Capitalist Algorithm

Surveillance Capitalism

iRefuse

Work Ungoverned

The New, Old Algorithm of Apartheid

The Making of China’s Paris Commune

The Many Iterations of Ungovernability

8.   Governments Reform, People Revolt

Neither King nor Subjects

Land, Labor, and Living

Justice as Compassion and in Solidarity

9.   Speculative Justice and the Politics of Mutuality

Trans Spectacles and Queer Lives

Speculative Praxis

A New Analytic for Democratic Living

Scripting Gender Justice

10. Toward a Democratic Ethic of Living

Alive and Not Alive

Mythic Beings

In Friendship and Solidarity

The Ungoverned Periphery

Freedom to Thrive

Recrafting Self, Community, and World

A Feminist Ethic of Liberation

Tools for Democratic Living

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

for

crystal

and

all my sisters

Preface

This study recasts the many mystics and forgers of democracy and speculates on the meanings of living in democratic and just futures. Combining a careful exposition of White supremacy and its deleterious effects on democratic livability with a sustained examination of abolition feminism, I hope to flip the script on democratic thinkability. In my work as a documentary filmmaker for more than a quarter of century, I am frequently struck by how robust communities of people, both in and beyond the United States, meaningfully practice forms of democratic living, where sharing and loving, rather than accumulating and hoarding, dominate social relations. This is especially true among those who are frequently denied basic forms of justice—including the lack of recognition and representation—are excluded from social provisions, and are almost entirely shut out of policymaking apparatuses and arenas. In recent years, as Black Lives Matter! is sung on the streets across the globe, the halls of Congress and Parliament rarely prefigure Black lives as meaningful policy matters. Indeed, and at the same time that virulent right-wing populism is ascendant and on the move, the people who are marked as differently vulnerable (be they poor, people of Color, queer, migrant) are conjured and costumed as change makers, yet are rarely included in institutions and processes that matter. This work posits that democracy as a form of governance has limited use, conceptually or otherwise, for a people learning how to survive and thrive in solidarity, with dignity and justice for all. Reconceptualizing democracy as a way of life, however, enables it to be resourced for democratic living as a praxis. In Become Ungovernable I extend Cedric J. Robinson’s work,1 arguing that much of what has been taught about and thought of as democracy is hostile to democracy, democratic thought, and democratic living. I retool Robinson’s term antidemocracy to expose this antidemocratic ideologeme.

If democracy can be conceived as a way of life, that is also true of antidemocracy. To properly assess the context from which practices of resistance emerge and how tools for democratic living are fashioned, I rely on historians, digging into not only the lifeworld of those living beyond the pale (that is, the ungovernable) but also the lifeworlds that spawn antidemocracy. In these times of climate catastrophes, pandemic, and White supremacy, it is tempting to leave borders and boundaries behind as we enter portals necessary for more just futures. It is nevertheless prudent to remember that while climate knows no bounds and diseases do not discriminate, spatialized differences accentuate vulnerabilities, especially within regimes of precarious labor. I also rely on feminist intersectional analytics to minimize simplistic renderings of life and living.

Part I of this book delineates the complicated metaphysics of governing, instantiating the ways in which people and communities are rendered governable, and how they persist in rule refusals, however momentarily. Who is marked as ungovernable frequently provides the reason for subjection and governing violence—the very conditions that render people and spaces vulnerable. How they refuse and resist governing and/or render themselves ungovernable bear lessons for democratic livability. Part II thus moves beyond governing to assess the many tools available—theoretical and practical, old and new—for democratic livability and just present/futures.

When I began this research, I had not imagined delving into the episteme or ideologeme of early American republicanism, especially that of Jeffersonian politics. Unpacking antidemocracy, however, cannot be done without a serious interrogation of Jeffersonian antidemocracy—an ideologeme whose architects explicitly embraced, if not outright extolled, the virtue of reducing the status of a people to that of chattel slavery—an antithesis of rule by the many. As the authors of the textbook America: Past and Present put it: republicanism represented more than a particular form of government. It was a way of life, a core ideology.2 If this is so, then to properly assess antidemocracy as a way of life, we must unearth the materiality that contributed to its alternatives.

This historical detour also took on greater urgency as ethnic studies, especially Black Studies, including critical race theory (CRT), became the targets of political attacks, legislative initiatives, and curricular backlash.3 These attacks are anti-intellectual and antidemocratic, meant to be a misdirection and misinformation campaign against universities, public education, and, cogently, the general demands for equity and just policies. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s deaths, when Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) organizers managed to galvanize over thirty million protestors during the 2020 protest season, right-wing forces sought to deflect and minimize the impact of these unprecedented mobilizations, including the irrefutable exposure of anti-Black violence, endemic racism, the absence of applicative justice for Black people, and the enduring presence of White supremacy. While these ideas and realities are not news to most people of Color, especially Black people living in the US, they have long eluded or sublimated in the collective consciousness of the White majority. This general awakening disrupted an unjust peace and summoned forth a well-financed and well-connected censorious mob, more at home in fascist regimes than so-called democracies.

Far from signifying nothing, the most recent attack on critical scholarship is a misdirection, aimed at not just a specialized field of academic studies but the very history of racial capitalism and gendered violence. After all, it was the wildly successful 1619 Project, spearheaded by Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times, that caught the censors’ initial crosshairs.4 Hannah-Jones sought to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contribution of Black Americans at the very center of the United States narrative.5 As Adam Serwer of The Atlantic and others have noted, the fight over the 1619 Project is not about the facts but about perceptions and investments in certain narratives.6 More than five decades ago and within the context of another backlash against several decades of persistent mass protests for a more equitable and just life, James Baldwin anticipated such terror from basic historical learning when he observed that we carry [history] within us, and it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.7 That organizers of BLM, M4BL, and other Black feminist–led formations managed such a feat that had eluded previous generations of activists and organizers made them easy targets for the right-wing media machinery and further spawned a counterreaction minimizing their achievements.

As a matter of justice, then, intellectuals everywhere have a responsibility to mobilize with every tool possible, including intellectual resources, against authoritarianism, including this virulent manifestation. As such, it is instructive to revisit the lifeworlds of so-called revolutionary greats and the early thinkers and doers of American antidemocracy. Many of these greats pursued an elusive quest for perfect governing that nearly a quarter of a millennium later their descendants are still trying to keep alive by relying on a political sensibility partially grounded in historical amnesia.8

This book seeks to make two related arguments. First, ungovernability is an important theoretical space for thinking about resistance and mobilization. Second, resisting antidemocracy in these protofascist times requires a democratic toolkit that takes stock of ungovernable happenstance, wherever it might be. By bringing these into the same frame, I provide a gradual focus on democracy, not as a state formation or form of government, but as praxis, or a way of life, or to get basic with each other, as the Black feminist Toni Cade Bambara put it.9 To live democratically, we need life aids such as abolition feminism and alternative imaginaries of justice that engender democratic livability.

What are the governing projects? The most familiar ones confront highly visible structures of domination and oppression such as gender, nation, and class, as well as others that are more hybridized, fluid, and less visible. This work is a modest attempt at unlearning democratic elitism by exploring the speculative praxis of democratic living. To do so, part I digs into the politics of governability and the making of antidemocracy, especially early US history and the maintenance of White rule. Part II explores the spaces of ungovernability and speculates on various tools for democratic living, taking up diverse instances of rule refusals against tyranny, especially antiauthoritarian resistance, in the US and China.

This work foregrounds the big and small tyrannies of governing and the willful refusals against being governed. While the forms of state tyranny are innumerable and no doubt awesome, the tyranny of governing is even more saturated and permeable. As a form of absolutism or rule by a despotic government, tyranny is teleological and can take many forms by both state and nonstate entities. If total population control and management are the aims and ends of the modern state, as Michel Foucault argued, then absolutism is the metalogic that underwrites all modern projects, including state and nonstate governing endeavors.10 This work locates and memorializes some of the ways in which ordinary, nonstate actors thwart state and nonstate governing projects. In electing ungovernable as an idea and a praxis, they take up refusal against state-building projects, but also against all forms of governing.

I argue that to build a world where many worlds fit as embodied by the Zapatistas’ living ethos, a radical ethic of liberation and a praxis of radical inclusion are necessary.11 It is a matter of record that, from the studies of race, gender, democracies and economies to sexuality and transhumanism, critical scholarship has unsettled foundational thought and broadened the parameters of thinkability. Guided by the principle that discovery logic is frequently a settler mentality,12 instead of making claims of knowledge discoveries, this book resources and reclaims fugitive and subaltern knowledges that ground and nurture contemporary, democratic, anticolonial, and democratic thought and praxes. Logically, I draw from critical studies of race, gender, and sexuality, especially critical Black feminist scholarship, to furnish the necessary theoretical and methodological interventions to counter dominant discursive practices and incite narrative subversions.

Methodologically, this work does not reflexively label contemporary Republican politics, policies, or the court decisions advanced by Republicans as conservative, because that term typically conveys an embrace of modest, piecemeal reforms that are aimed at maintaining the status quo. Ideologies and actions that seek to radically transform the status quo should not be misnamed or reflexively labeled as conservative. Such ideas and actions might advocate traditionalist, parochial, or elitist ontologies and epistemes, and the use of these terms would better reveal the ideological investments as well as their methods of achievement. Radical exclusion of the other, for instance, is not conservative but an extreme praxis and part of a fascist ideological toolkit.

As a signpost pointing toward unruly or ungovernable subjects, I read genderqueer or gender nonconforming as a gender-refusal praxis because historically countless trans and queer people have been marked for harm by association with counternormativity and deviancy, and they in turn marked themselves thus to signal the intentional reclaiming of their marginal, nonconforming subjectivities and lifeworlds.13 This approach recognizes the radical potentials of a politics where the nonnormative and marginal position can be a basis for doing liberatory politics.14

As this work goes to press, the ongoing nightmare in Gaza intensifies, and censorious winds boomerang and ricochet, ensnaring antiauthoritarian thought and war criticism in their gust along with Palestinian lives that seem to matter so little—or not at all—to those who wield the mechanics of war and statecraft. I am reminded of Arundhati Roy’s speech about confronting empire, delivered at the 2003 World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Two decades ago, in the months before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, more than three hundred thousand people participated in the forum’s opening march. Like the tens of millions across the globe, they were marching to preemptively protest what would be a preemptive war. While they did not succeed in stopping that war, this was an unprecedented show of people power against a war policy. Tens of thousands of forum attendees also went to the closing ceremony, featuring Roy along with scholar activist Noam Chomsky. Roy reminded the participants that confronting empire, including its war power, demands resourcing tools available to the many, and not just the few: Our strategies should not only be to confront Empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentless— and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.15

Become Ungovernable is a gathering of tools that includes the many scholarly works and movement endeavors that the imperial archive has long sought to evict. While many of the episodes of rule refusals showcased here are not new, they are different and differently peopled. These are stories about governing and the many attempts at ungoverning. They are also about the many shaming democracy of the few while forging democratic livability for the many, and about the quest to render justice as something more than whatever the powerful say it is. In confronting tyranny, therefore, it is also wise to remember that we be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.16

PART I

Antidemocracy in America

1

Against Tyranny: An Introduction

Philosophical intelligence is never so truthful, clean, and precise as when it starts from oppression and does not have to defend any privileges, because it has none.

Enrique Dussel1

Not all speed is movement. . . . If your house ain’t in order, you ain’t in order. It is so much easier to be out there than right here. The revolution ain’t out there. Yet. But it is here. Should be. And arguing that instant-coffee-ten-minutes-to-midnight alibi to justify hasty-headed dealing with your mate is shit. Ain’t no such animal as an instant guerrilla.

Toni Cade Bambara2

Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power. . . . It would, in effect, be a feral city.

Richard J. Norton3

MANUFACTURED CONSENSUS

If governmentality is the grandest of modern obsessions, then being ungovernable constitutes its greatest threat. In Philosophy of Liberation, Enrique Dussel reminds us that there is no philosophical practice without an academic ‘apparatus’ for instruction and learning.4 In the west, one of the greatest noble lies—a manufactured consensus—is the idea that those who are being subjected to governing have authored their own subjection or their consent to be governed. Justice theories foreground this malicious myth as a priori.5 In A Theory of Justice, a work that dominates contemporary discourses on justice, John Rawls centralizes the well-ordered society as a fundamental idea for understanding justice as fairness.6 The problem with this manufactured consensus on governing and desiring order is that it casts the absence of order, authority, government, and governing as alien, bad, chaotic, and inhuman. Moreover, the ideologeme of settler colonialism, gendered racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy justifies the very order of things that it conjures, and renders unthinkable those that it does not. As a paradigm, justice as a hegemonic academic apparatus necessarily fetishizes and services order and governing. This, then, is the metaphysics of ruling. Dussel, however, invites us to rebel against it by taking up a philosophy of liberation that prioritizes the wretched of the earth—the oppressed as ‘origin’ and ‘space’—and their praxis of liberation as a practical, ethical discourse.7 Liberatory praxes are thus predicated on being in relations with the other, and acts of solidarity are relational.

To explore ungovernability and willful refusals, this book deviates from the manufactured consensus that fetishizes the state, order, authority, and power by the few over the many, while sublimating oppression and eviscerating the everyday dignity and struggles of the many. This work centers resistance against governing, real and imagined, frequently as work in progress, and rarely sanctioned by the state and its allies. Building on pathways laid out by Sara Ahmed, Cedric J. Robinson, Toni Cade Bambara, Dussel, and others, the following chapters explore the willful refusal by individuals and communities against the big and small tyrannies of rule and governing.8 These willful communities and subjects take up refusal projects that more often than not wreak havoc on economic, political, sociocultural systems, as they inevitably lodge grievances against the metaphysics of ruling. In doing so, they also furnish tools for different praxes of being human, engendering alternative meanings for justice and ethics of living.

Such antisystemic and counterhegemonic labors frequently elude accountings of radical or revolutionary movements and mobilizations because they do not always directly confront state projects, though by definition they are rarely far afield. Moreover, as these ungovernable subjects and communities battle against governing, their fights are multifaceted and forge on multiple fronts. From struggles for land, reproductive autonomy, and gender nonconformity, to the freedom to preserve one’s cultural heritage and create art, governing refusals—especially against normative regulations—take many forms.9 If piracy, slave rebellions, and other acts against property predominated as threats to the nineteenth-century Atlantic imperial world order,10 then flight, border crossing, anti-prison and police, and gender nonconformity constitute some of the most dominant acts of resistance against the neoliberal, White supremacist, heteropatriarchal, twenty-first-century world order. And yet they are mere ciphers of contemporary ungovernability, pointing to a broader and more capacious repertoire of resistance against order writ large—ranging from labor and peace protests to anti-apartheid, anti-violence, anti-moral policing, and extinction rebellions.

I take up ungovernability, and ungovernable subjects and communities, rather than anarchy and anarchist movements because anarchism in the west continues to worship at the altar of order.11 While rejecting the fantasy of a well-ordered society—the façade that fronts modern paradigms of in/justices12—anarchists themselves are deluded in a desire for a fictive order predicated on the abstracted autonomous individual. Justice in a well-ordered society is a justice sheltered from compassion and solidarity for the weak, garrisoned within the cage of freedom as entitlement, all the while propped up by an empty throne of liberty.

Part I of this book thus interrogates the vagaries of liberty, in/justice, and antidemocracy. While extending this general interrogation of antidemocracy to account for contemporary currents of democratic thinkability, part II highlights tools that emerged from various spaces of ungovernability, including the everyday resistance of those who subsist on the margins and work within regimes of precarious labor. From migrant workers protesting in manufacturing plants in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to radical Black feminists furnishing abolition feminism, these contemporary rebels, like their peasant and slave predecessors, persist in refashioning tools for just futures and in the here and now.

THE MANY MEANINGS OF JUSTICE

Building on the work of Sara Ahmed, I take up Bambara’s invitation to willfully resist submission to rule or governing, as part and parcel of making oneself totally unavailable for servitude.13 This is a practical utopian standpoint14 that engenders active resistance against gendered racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy. Many of Bambara’s stories are about communities in resistance, Black women organizers, and struggles for freedom and justice. In this facto-fictive world,15 one finds an urgent recasting of freedom not as entitlement but as a revolutionary process by which you become unavailable for servitude, and community or the collective as a space that nurtures everyday practice of freedom as well as a second sight that gives us the knowledge that we have sovereignty, the authority to free ourselves on our own terms.16 Here, Ahmed’s use of willful subject and willfulness helpfully delineates the many ways in which oppressed people, especially women and people of Color, pervert domination and oppression, both as a style of politics and as disobedience to the sovereign because to be judged willful is to become killjoy . . . one who gets in the ways of a happiness or the unjust peace of the existing world order.17 To make oneself unavailable for governing, to become ungovernable, is to style a politics that is willful and willfully antiauthoritarian.

In the west, an academic ideological apparatus, centering individual autonomy and liberty, evicts from justice the concerns and responsibilities for substantive justice, and replaces them with order. As Robinson argues, even its most radical interlocutor, anarchism, fails to dislodge this ideologeme because it remains faithful and obedient to the ontologies and lifeworlds that gave birth to it.18 Part of this onto-epistemology centers on order as a life necessity and on the fictive autonomy of the individual. Where liberty is understood as an entitlement of the few, bodily autonomy, especially for the many, at best is considered an afterthought—worse, the denial of bodily autonomy becomes essential to perfecting governing and biopolitical management. The raging campaign against women’s bodily autonomy in the US is a prime example. For feminists who persist on being willfully antiauthoritarian, bodily autonomy needs to be differentiated from the abstraction of individual autonomy. Where antidemocracy is concerned, individual autonomy is an entitlement reserved for the few. In contrast, when bodily autonomy is a starting point of nominal freedom, it prefigures collective emancipatory projects for delving into the life, labor, and struggles of those who have been evicted from governing.

Many contemporary articulations of anarchism are fundamentally flawed because they merely constitute an alternative order not an opposition to order.19 To understand this qualitative difference, we can think about how some practices of gender nonconforming, for instance, are informed by an alternative gender but not necessarily an alternative to gender.20 Empirical accountings of withholding availability for governing—such as marronage, border crossing, prison abolition, and certain forms of gender transgressions—suggest that there exist not only alternative genealogies of anarchism but also alternatives to order and governing. There are also non-state-centric modes of refusal because not all popular resistance and acts of refusal are directed toward state projects. An over-valorization of state re/action has the effect of overshadowing or missing entirely alternative spaces, imaginaries, and life forms.21

James Baldwin long understood that the meanings of justice must be freed from the garrison imposed by the apparatuses of order and the state. To do so, we need to consider the source: If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, the protected members of middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those precisely, who need the law’s protection most!— and listen to their testimony.22 Indeed, movements for justice are as much about the dethroning of liberty and freeing justice from forgeries as they are about bringing attention to social discontents and subjections. The struggles for reproductive justice by women of Color in the US, for instance, are not only about making demands on middle-class, White ciswomen and others to uncage their limited-choice framework, but also about unlearning freedom as an entitlement for the few. In so doing, these activists and scholars broaden reproductive freedom as they flesh out a more capacious justice framework, engendering bodily sovereignty, including reproductive autonomy, that previously was not available.23 Beyond the skepticism of legal realism, the work by Loretta Ross, Dorothy Roberts, and Andrea Smith, among others, suggests that the struggles for reproductive justice are also about liberating freedom and justice from liberal notions of individual choice (à la the autonomous individual) that only a few entitled can afford, and from the elitist commitments to White supremacy and Black subordination that supersede all other concerns.24

IN THE LAND OF SIBA

Since being civilized has become synonymous with being governed, the threat of being and remaining ungoverned is perhaps the greatest threat to dominions. As James C. Scott points out, on close inspection of Chinese and other civilizational discourses about the ‘barbarian,’ the ‘raw,’ the ‘primitive’ . . . those terms, practically, mean ungoverned, not-yet-incorporated.25 Scott argues that "civilizational discourses never entertain the possibility of people voluntarily going over to the barbarian, hence such statuses are stigmatized and ethnicized."26 In other words, those who are not legible to the state for the purpose of state management and administrative disciplining, or ungoverned, are ethnicized and tribalized—in a word, racialized. Racial projects are thus almost always governing projects.

Those racial, gendered, sexual others who are deemed ungoverned make up the ungoverned periphery. This terrain, real or imagined, constitutes a long-run threat, embodying a constant temptation, a constant alternative to life within the state and beyond.27 For this reason, those who willfully resist governing also must be deemed a remnant of the past and primitivized. But as Scott warns us, once we entertained the possibility that the ‘barbarians’ are not just ‘there’ as a residue but may well have chosen their location, their subsistence practices, and their social structure to maintain their autonomy, the standard civilizational story of social evolution collapses utterly.28

The praxis of not being governed thus presupposes those prestate and counterstate entities—humans and communities—as willful subjects.29 Ungovernability, as well as the art and will of not being governed, are therefore the material expressions of agents, those whom Ahmed calls willful subjects, making themselves unavailable for governing,30 or the active refusal and the will to counter rule. Within the context of Moroccan history, for instance, siba (beyond the pale) sometimes is understood as anarchy. Scott maintains that siba is better understood as institutional dissidence or ungoverned terrain of political autonomy and independence—not being subordinated to the state. In this context, political autonomy was . . . a choice, not a given.31 In other words, those who chose the land of siba (ungoverned) instead of the land mahkazen (governed) have self-consciously elected to move or to stay beyond the pale.32

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, pale in English denotes jurisdiction including colonial settlements. According to urban myths, there is an area in Ireland that used to be called the Pale. There is also a region in the Russian Empire that was called the Pale of Settlement. Pale is thus the figurative boundary or an actual area enclosed or fenced in by old wooden posts. The spaces within the wall or barriers, therefore, are deemed acceptable or restricted preserves. And not unlike the existence of maroon and free Black communities in the time of slavery or sovereign Indigenous tribes, beyond the pale lies the temptation and promise of deviance and transgression. Indeed, and since the Middle Ages, beyond the pale has taken on the connotation of being outside of acceptable behavior, or transgression understood as deviancy. In The Audacity of Hope, for instance, former president Barack Obama hinted at his support for the death penalty by referring to certain extraordinarily heinous crimes such as mass murder and the rape and murder of a child as beyond the pale.33 The land of siba, understood as beyond the pale, hints at a contemptuous predisposition against transgressive subjects and spaces. The ungovernables and ungovernable spaces are thus beyond the pale—that is, beyond nominal jurisdiction and acceptability. In a word, counternormative.34

The archive of governing is replete with instances in which ordinary people and communities sought out the land of siba, though they may have called it differently depending on the contingencies of time and space. In our times, we have taken to calling them in descriptive, derogatory, and even aspirational terms such as runaways, fugitives, FOBs,35 wetbacks, illegals, deviants, terrorists, and queers. They are also whom Ahmed calls willful subjects—those who are, among other things, unwilling to get along, refuse to laugh along, or identified as a problem and are labeled disobedient simply for persisting.36 If some of us were never meant to survive,37 then to simply exist is to be willful and disobedient. Disobedience takes myriad forms—from the mundane to the fantastic, these willful subjects assert their wills and ways, all the while rendering themselves unavailable for governing and living beyond the pale.

With few exceptions, our collective quotidian life is governed by the big and small tyrannies of governments, capital, and cultural orthodoxies; therefore, living and dreaming beyond the pale are inherently impermanent. It would be a mistake, however, to interpret impermanence as lack of persistence. While the spatial and temporal dimensions of collective refusal to be governed shift, this does not imply that the will not to be governed is fleeting. Apparent obedience to rules and jurisdictions can also engender other forms of refusal.38 Even a superficial review of the history of Black resistance against White supremacy, for instance—especially the epic debate between the accommodationist and integrationist strategies in the US that has spanned more than a century—affirms the notion that sometimes to not go along, you must at least perform getting along. By acceding to the Sultan’s claim of spiritual authority, the Berbers persisted in the land of siba—remaining ungoverned, beyond mahkazen.39

This important distinction between the ungoverned and governed is captured in the ways we make judgments, design policies, and invest resources, among other things; it is based on the differentiation between subject peoples and self-governing peoples—or, more crudely, ‘cooked’ and ‘raw,’ ‘tame’ and ‘wild,’ ‘valley people’ and ‘hill people,’40 or nice people and trouble-makers. As Scott points out: "the linkage between being civilized and being a subject of the state is so taken for granted that the terms subject peoples on the one hand or self-governing peoples on the other capture the essential difference.41 Indeed, who gets what, when, and where—the very questions underwriting the totality of modern distributive justice principles and informing policy design and implementation—are countersigned by the way we imagine, categorize, and differentiate those governed (deemed governable) from those who are ungoverned (or deemed ungovernable or deviants). Who lives, who receives low-interest loans, what activities get tagged as heinous and targeted for incarceration and premature death, or whose lives matter—these frequently depend on whether they are deemed subject peoples or self-governing peoples," whether they are perceived as governable or ungovernable.

In the same way that Ahmed reads feminism as an unhappy archive,42 I approach the willful resistance to governing as an unhappy archive of governing, filled with stories about women being unhappy. Specifically, it is full of stories about women who are not made happy by what is supposed to make them happy.43 So, the things that are supposed to make women happy, such as marriage and motherhood, actually make them unhappy. Similarly, the state, property, cultural normativity, marriage, and motherhood, which are supposed to make people and communities happy and fulfilled, have rendered them stateless, dispossessed, deviants. I dig into this unhappy archive of governing to sample a few stories about unhappy subjects and communities, their grievances about being governed, and their countering of rules.44 These are stories about those willful subjects who frequently refuse to go along to get along, though sometimes they may get along so as not to go along. These are stories about communities that rebelliously build against being displaced, though sometimes they move along so that they do not get replaced along the way.

In this unhappy archive of governing, those deemed ungovernable subjects imagine themselves as self-governing peoples, though the self in this self-governing is not always autonomous or free from collective belonging. This archive of the ordinary45 is peopled by individuals and collectives of peasants, slaves, women, queers, migrants, and other sociocultural misfits, in formations against tyranny. Unlike the subjects in Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed, this unhappy archive consists of more than a collection of subjects who turned away from state-building projects, though many of them are no friends or collaborators of the state. These are rule-breaking and rule-refusing subjects and communities who are unhappy with the state, as well as with capital and other sociocultural dominions. They refuse the dominant terms of order—be they political, economic, or cultural—and in the process get cast as ungovernable, with its attendant punitive and at times deadly consequences. Following Anthony Bogues’s suggestion, by opening up this unhappy archive of the ordinary, I hope to not only supply stories of resistance46 but to explore radical thought from perspectives of those who have made themselves unavailable for governing. As chapter 8 will show, for instance, among the many apolitical radical traditions, the idea of living unencumbered by politics and without government flourished in ancient China, and holds lessons for living beyond the pale and developing alternative ethics for sharing resources.

Centering on ungovernability diverges from anarchist studies that situate anarchy, anarchist movements, and anarchism as antitheses to the state (and sometimes capital). This divergence is not due to romantic nostalgia for a past where the modern state has not been conceived or is still in its infancy; nor is it a romantic longing for a future where the state withers away. Instead, I believe the state is not omnipresent. As Marx argued, history documents constant struggles by humans who find ways and wills to resist against tyrannies, including against the claimed sovereignty of class dominance. It is therefore neither controversial nor novel to note that humans and their communities have opposed misery, oppression, and unfreedom at every turn. They have coped with, struggled against, imagined, and built alternatives to tyrannies of all forms, for indeed, tyranny comes in many forms, and the state, modern or not, does not have a monopoly on tyrannies.47

This book, especially part I, therefore, devotes great attention to delineating antidemocracy and other forms of state-led tyrannies, centering the incompetence and immorality of the state and its allies, along with other dominions. It divulges insights about living and dreaming beyond the pale—in the land of siba, however momentarily—ungoverned by state, capital and/or other forms of dominion. From everyday resistance by slaves to open rebellions by peasants, from workers protesting managerial despotism, to generalized mobilization against policing, from the language of nüshu, to