 Good afternoon and welcome. Can you hear me? Is it on? Yeah. Thank you all for coming. I was just commenting to Professor Sealy that we have to pull out more chairs. We filled the room, so congratulations and thank you all for coming. I am happy to welcome all of you to the Robert E. Wall Award lecture presentation. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Robert E. Wall Award program, Fairfield University's most prestigious award for faculty research. It honors a senior scholar who, through a competitive proposal process, is awarded a research sabbatical to bring to fruition a particular project and deliver a university-wide lecture on the project. The Robert E. Wall Award represents Fairfield's driving commitment to rigorous scholarship and academic excellence. Our Wall Award recipients signal the Jesuit value of the magis striving for the more, pushing the boundaries of their scholarly fields and advancing creative knowledge. We are so fortunate that today we have many of the past Wall Award recipients over the past 25 years, so I invite all prior Wall Award winners present with us this afternoon to stand and be recognized as we celebrate 25 years of scholarly excellence at Fairfield University. You stand up. You know who you are. Our Robert E. Wall Award winner this year is Professor Chris Sealy. Dr. Sealy is an Associate Professor of Philosophy. She works in the areas of Continental Philosophy, specifically Phenomenology and Existentialism, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Decolonial Philosophy. Her work has investigated the metaphysics of human identity, particularly as it operates in relation with the other. Her book, Levi Nass, Sartre and the Question of Transcendence, published by SUNY Press in 2013, advances the idea of identity of disruption that emerges from examining how identity is never closed in on itself. In addition to publishing articles in journals such as Hypatia and Critical Philosophy of Race, Professor Sealy serves as book review editor for the Journal of French and Francophide Philosophy. Professor Sealy's scholarship deeply informs her courses on Social and Political Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, and Existentialism. Professor Sealy's service to Fairfield University extends from acting as one of the Associate Directors of the Humanities Institute and Coordinator of the Magiskore Social Justice Signature Element to Director of our Black Studies Program. This afternoon, Professor Sealy will present her project, Crealizing a Nation, a Poetics and Politics of Community Otherwise. This book-length project will be published by Northwestern University Press in 2020. Crealizing the Nation reads the everyday performance of nationness through the conceptual tools offered by Crealization. In doing so, the book foregrounds certain shifts in how we conceive borders, subject formation, and relationality so that the nation can be read in terms of plural and liberatory conceptions of human life. Drawing on Caribbean, decolonial, and Latina feminist resources, Professor Sealy shows that properly Crealizing account of the nation establishes national communities as always complex, always constitutive of disruptive creations of anti-colonial resistance, and always in negotiation with certain enactments of sabotage from below. Please join me in welcoming our award winner, Professor Chris Sealy. Come on, can you hear me? Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? All right, it's a lot of people. Kind of nervous. Thank you so much for coming, each and every one of you. My family is here, my good friends are here. One of my oldest friends from high school in Trinidad and Tobago is here. I really can't ask for anything more, so warm heart. So the good news, as Provost Seagill mentioned, is that this book will be published in October of 2020. The not-so-good news is that when we do get to Q&A, and there are questions about all the awful things that I left out, I'm not going to be able to do anything with those comments because that kitchen is closed. So yeah, but I do look forward to your questions. Before I begin, I do want to say a huge thank you to Provost Christine Seagill, who's, it's through her office that I was awarded the award last spring, and that time off was really what I needed to bring this to fruition and completion and ultimate publication. So very big gratitude goes to Christine and her office. So I have just about 30 minutes of comments prepared, and so I'll try to stick to that as close as possible because I do want to give us time for questions and conversation before we get to the reception. So this book project grew out of my reading an ultimate review of Mike Monaghan's 2011 book, and this is the book right here. In that work, Monaghan develops an account of what he names the Creolizing Subject and opposes this to a subject of purity, a subject for whom an inner coherence or wholeness is pitted over against an external world, and that's a quote from Mike Monaghan's work. The Creolizing Subject, on the other hand, is one who understands experience in terms of ambiguity, openness, and dynamic articulations of borders between self and other. In 2013, I offered some speculative questions in response to Mike's work and then continued to obsess over them because that's what we do for the next six years. So on my reading, Mike's book hinted towards how this Creolizing Subject might generate different kinds of orientations towards borders and national identity, perhaps even gesturing towards some anti-resist nationalism. But it didn't do much more than that, and so because of that, I fleshed out these and other related questions in this argument for Creolizing the Nation. I propose that, under the conceptual tools offered by Creolization, the ontological structures of the modern nation form and by ontological here, I simply mean what we imagine to be the being of the nation form. Those ontological structures shift so as to offer conceptions of community, relation, and relationality that allow us to imagine collective national life differently. I ground my claims in the work of Martinican philosopher, novelist, and poet, Edward Glissant. In particular, I use his analysis of Creolizing social imaginaries to bring in frames of Creolization to bear on nationness. We can at least begin to think generatively about how such ontologies might make room for plural and more liberatory articulations of the human. To say this differently, I use Creolization to revisit the presumed finality of colonialism's violence, the terms of which are, more often than not, codified in standard conceptions of the nation. I read these terms, differences allergy, community aesthetic, and borders as closed through the lens of Creolization in order to trouble the assumption that these are the only terms available to us for thinking about things like the identity of the subject, and the constitution of community. Hence, in Creolizing the nation, I have in mind the implications of those everyday disruptive and resistive practices which scholars like Glissant foreground in their analyses of Creol societies. Societies comprising the Caribbean archipelago, and of course its northernmost tip, Louisiana. From the level of the everyday, these practices jostle the colonial and neocolonial totalities that make for the impossibility of free black life, that indeed codified black life as dispensable and even fungible. In so doing, they generate cracks in these totalities so that other possibilities might emerge. My argument here is that the nation is obliged to tell a different story about itself when such cracks and possibilities are accounted for. So, a little bit about Creolization, sorry. Central to practices named Creol is a fluidity of entanglements among fragments, the existence of which defy any claim to authenticity. To say this differently, Creol entanglements precisely do not participate in what in the book I name a metaphysics of the one. Some single and unchanging iconic copy against which all other copies are measured for legitimacy. The plateness in the room might recognize this formation. Sarah. Instead of this metaphysical stasis, Creolizing connections with origin are via misduplications what Heather Smith calls beautiful inauthenticities. Capturing both translations of and movements away from origins. This is very much shaped by historical circumstances that make it nearly impossible to reconstruct linear connections to the past. And so such Creolizing misduplications really grow out of a need as they signal inventions out of which new modes of dwelling and being with emerge. The properly Creolizing accounts of the nation that I develop is interested in these new modalities. Primarily for the possibilities therein of alternative subject formation, community constitutions and alternative relationships to power. It's also important for me to point out that out of these Creolizing practices the cultural artifacts that emerge are new not in terms of creation ex nihilo but are rather entangled patterns among pieces of predating forms. Iterations of which both retain resemblance and resist simple or clear replication. And so the new in Creolizing newness is about beginning again which is precisely what Caribbean and New World imaginaries must do in the face of their constituting catastrophes the rupture of the middle passage and then the necropolitics of the plantation. Given these historical ruptures any project of retrieving the past encounters the drowning of memory. In this slide you see depicted a most common practice of the transatlantic slave trade of slave ships drowning their so-called cargo overboard. He then responds to widespread disease among the ship's passengers or to having to lighten the weight of the ship's load. In Glissant's work he often refers to those balls and chains gone green on the Atlantic Ocean's floor. The balls and chains to which Africans remain shackled as they were thrown into the Atlantic Ocean. These are markers of those drowned and unrecoverable bodies. So out of this kind of history faithful restoration of the past is impossible and yet to borrow again Glissant's words the obligation to begin again is also a quote a debt to honor our boats. To begin again not as an atavistic return to origins not as an ahistorical project entirely uninformed by this abyssal past but rather through collective life that transmutes the fragments of memory into something necessarily new memory fragments becoming something otherwise. In this sense this history of drowned memory and fragmented past then also make it possible for the newness of creolizing practices to rupture the terrains of power in which they're located and out of which they mooch. Sidia Hartman's exposition of slave practices is pertinent here. Like my own reading of Creolization's relationship to power Hartman establishes that in the name of redress against the plantation's social death slave practices were and I quote here determined by exploited and exceeded the constraints of domination. It's in a similar vein that my book traces the ways in which Creol entanglements in the context of the new world don't simply translate the violence of colonial domination but rather traffic in a complex relationship to that power. I'm interested in how in attending to and foregrounding such complexities the presumed stasis and homogeneity of national life is always already jostled by its constitutive outside. And so my chapters try to foreground this too easily forgotten possibility of disrupting the nation's totalizing ontology. I argue that such disruptions live in Creolization's translations and misduplications and in its alternative reframing of subjectivity, relationality and ultimately community. To be clear it's not the case that these practices extend their disruptions to the level of state mechanisms. So the nature of the sabotage in question can't be measured by capacities to overthrow state domination. Nevertheless, despite their non-frontal engagement with power there is a political register to these everyday Creolizing practices. A register that tomorrow again from City of Hartman actually asks us to think more expansively and differently about what even counts as political resistance. In my turn to France Fanon later in the book I bring Creolization's Poetics of Resistance into conversation with the squarely anti-colonial politics of resistance that so many of us continue to turn to Fanon for. And I do this to show that the very distinction between poetics and politics slips in the case of Creolizing contestations of mainstream determinations of the properly human. Contestations that produce socialities not completely accounted for by that mainstream. Michelin Kretchlow's language of jostling appears often in my analysis since it provides an apt metaphor for what I find most productive in using Creolizing comportments at the level of the everyday as an argument for reorienting our conception of the nation. The claim of my analysis is that jostled by these comportments the ontologies that support the mechanics of national formation are no longer unaffected by Creolizations otherwise. Hence from the level of the everyday practices that are Creolizing invite us to think imaginatively about what it might mean to live in and with the nation formed differently. What it might mean to enact France Fanon's leap so that invention might enter into collective existence. So though the overall effect of Creolizing the nation is not to undo matrices of power that stitch together the governmentality of the state I do want to argue that through Creolization the organizing coloniality of that power does not have the last word. So this book develops this claim first in looking at conceptions of subject, community and relationality that Glissant develops then in bringing these concepts into critical conversation with Latina feminist critiques. So reading Gloria Anzaldua, Maria Lugones and philosopher and phenomenologist Mariana Ortega all alongside Glissant. And lastly I offer Glissant's Creolizing poetics as potential discursive support for France Fanon's more overtly political demand for a decolonial orientation towards national life. So across these three sections I show that when it becomes possible to imagine community and relationality in ways not coded for by the logics that determine human life as dispensable even if it is the case that these imaginative practices happens through networks below and not at the level of mainstream political structures, coloniality is robbed of the last word. More significantly, these imaginative practices mean that certain xenophobic constructions of nationness do not exhaust what collective national life might be. Speaking of xenophobia. So in all, it's been fascinating to develop this project during the latest resurgence of fascist nationalisms across the globe. Not to mention the renewed traction of white nationalism in this our era of Trump. Writing this in such a political climate has made its constituting argument feel both fundamentally impossible and fundamentally necessary. Impossible since there seems to be nothing to salvage from the idea of nation and nationalism, right? Why continue to work within this frame if at its heart is what Etienne Ballabar identifies as a founding posture of defense that determines difference as threat. But the argument I make also feels necessary. The nation form will more than likely continue to be the organizing frame for the political, economic, and sociocultural aspects of our lives. And so we're urgently called to determine conditions for some other possibility, some other relational living out of which there can be a plurality of futures and plural articulations of the human. My hope is to have offered creolization as a frame, perhaps not the only frame, for thinking through such possibilities. As a set of practices that take us to the level of the intimate and everyday life, creolization names those new ways of being in the world which insert themselves into the liminal folds of the social, so as to jostle our social architecture. This is like what Maria Lugonis conceptualizes as those heterogeneous socialities that are always already part of a social landscape. Plural world orientations coexist precisely because of the need generated by dominant structures of violence to resist life as unfreedom. But these plural orientations also effectively insert traces of and otherwise into these structures. And in so doing, their violence does not have the last word on what it means to be human. So in the end, the book asks us to think about communities as perhaps national and structure and as ever dynamic constitutions of creolizing processes all at the same time. These co-constitutive processes, nationalization and creolization, entangle at the everyday culture in ways that often make those practices of sabotage invisible, or perhaps even unrecognizable to more standard ways of understanding resistance. Nevertheless, through that entanglement, meaning productions take shape in a way that make the political move as it were. Instead of remaining a static and unchanging, fets are complete. I've turned to Glissant's notion of rhizomatic errantry for the conceptual vocabulary to capture this movement. Metaphors of the mangrove here is significant for Glissant. In particular, its rhizomatic root system is one of a horizontal spread instead of a vertical anchoring. The mangrove's rhizome system also anchors in watery ground, right? It grows in a swamp, allowing for motion alongside the anchoring of the plant life. It's what Glissant would name the moored whirling of Antillian life worlds. But especially, rhizomatic errantry, Glissant's conceptual base for developing his model of a composite community, allows us to think of how the all of national, of the nation form, sorry, might be also accountable to the relation of our plural histories. In reorienting our understanding of the nation to include this dynamism, we not only utilize a sense of nationness as already open to different, better and more liberatory constitutions of itself, but perhaps more significantly, make more visible what, to my mind, are radical agencies at the level of the mundane. To return again to Maria Lugonis, attention to the jostling effects of creolization on the nation's formation affords us a view of marginalized subjects as active and resisting agents who, in making a way out of no way, change the course of the political. I make it clear in the book that the possibilities towards creolizing imaginaries lead are to be read as just that in the register of possibility, the political effects of which are not in offering clearly delineated structures or codes, but rather in how these imaginaries contest the telos or purpose of existing power. What emerges through this undoing of power's claim to legitimacy is an otherwise that is opaquely so, radically outside the frame of the power being contested. As Anthony Alessandrini puts it, such possibilities must emerge as, quote, an orientation towards a future that has not yet come, unquote. The radical nature of this decolonial option, its newness, will remain unsignifiable within the power codes from which it gestures a break. And so any political program signifying as perhaps explicitly or visibly delineated in the present would be squarely of the present, not yet an effect of its rupturing, and not yet the kind of break that would signal this otherwise. Hence, would have offered as a properly creolizing account of the nation centers on imaginary or a poetics sufficiently otherwise so as to orient the nation in this way towards a future that is yet to come and that has not yet come. Out of this reframing, closure shows up as premature and stasis shows up as a failure to do what Amy Allen urges in her book to enact, quote, the project of the coupling progress as an imperative from progress as a fact, unquote. And so it's in this spirit that I conclude the book. By signaling its incompleteness and by turning my readers towards questions and problem spaces it generates which in the open-ended spirit of creolization just might take us beyond the creolizing frame. In ending in this way, my hope is to avoid framing a project of creolizing the nation as one with an end, but rather as one through which we encounter decolonizing the nation form as an imperative. This imperative would call for vigilance against narratives of the post-colonial that frame colonialism's past as a past that, to quote Alice Andrini again, can be easily left behind. This is especially urgent given that much of the past practices of colonialism continue to directly inform its post and so it can only be understood as past through dangerous disavowals. Particular to these past but not past practices is the occupation and settlement of lands stolen from indigenous peoples in the Americas which continue to support settler states like the U.S. and Canada. And so the task of creolizing the nation is accountable to the indigenous anti-colonial platforms that emerge in resistance to this ongoing settler colonial violence. Hence, I take a question like Jody Byrd's to be a part of the problem space generated by this book. Jody Byrd is an indigenous scholar and citizen of the Chikotor Nation in Oklahoma. Her work prompts me to ask what would it mean to give an account of creolization that avoids what she names the quote Syllagistic Traps of Participatory Democracy born out of violent occupation of lands. Unquote. To reiterate, taking creolization to the nation form allows us to think against the supposed finality of colonial violence. That thinking against helps us theorize an anti-colonial agency in subversive cultural productions which work to undo colonialism's monopolies on subject formation, world relation and how we ought to think about community and belonging. I'm drawn to Jody Byrd's analysis of what it might mean to critically engage with and perhaps move beyond the totality of colonial violence without deploying its logics. In other words, what would it mean to move beyond coloniality via routes that are themselves illegible or perhaps opaque to those colonial logics? As a start, and only that, I want to take up Byrd's account of a horizontally oriented cacophony. This is Byrd's language. A decolonial option that begins in the plural histories shaped by colonial violence. As I read her, the possibility of decolonial futures rests squarely in the horizontal relationships among colonialism's resisting subjects. Diasporic descendants are stolen Africans and indentured East Asians, arriving from those more recent migratory circuits shaped in colonialism's wake and new world First Peoples who remain despite the past and present genocidal policies of that same colonialism. More significantly, this horizontal relationship is squarely outside of a colonial relation that reduces anything relevant to the history of the Americas to a colonized colonizer divide. What Byrd shows is that when we ground our decolonial resistance in a notion of cacophony, we, to quote her here, dissenter these vertical interactions between colonizer and colonized and re-center the horizontal struggles among peoples with competing claims to historical oppressions, unquote. And so cacophonous negotiations of colonialism's past and present mean that we, quote, bang our heads together in search for cross-cultural understanding, unquote. I'm quoting here the short story entitled The Chaos of Angels by Choctaw Scholar and poet Leanne Howe. The pain and intensity of Howe's imagery is meant to convey the difficulty involved in working towards such cross-cultural understandings. Understandings that aren't simply about different cultural orientations to the world, but rather about real material histories of violence and real material claims to repair. Hence, a question that faces me at the end of this book is what happens to or in creolization when it brings the history of forced transplantation, coerced migratory labor, and diasporic placeness into conversation with what Burr describes as the oppositional place-based claims and experiences of first peoples. Remember, the process of creolization happens out of a history of radical rupture and absence. Intact origins lay recoverable on the Atlantic Ocean's floor, which means that creolization is about having to begin out of a radical loss of the past or rather out of a present absence of that past. However, Jody Byrd reminds us that for indigeneity, quote, there is a long line of continuity between the past and the present that has not been interrupted, that has not been disrupted, unquote. For first peoples, the pre-of colonial conquest remains present. The continuity of the line between indigeneity's past and present marks neocolonialism's ongoing occupation of native land. More significantly, colonialism's anti-indigenous past, right, genocide and settlement, is precisely what conditions the loss and rupture upon which creolization becomes a constituting element of the Americas. To say this differently, the clearing that makes possible the migrations and arrivals out of which creolization grows is none other than the clearing away of the native. My own ancestors, stolen West Africans and East Indians tricked into bondage of indentured labor, arrived in the Americas on the back of this clearing away. That's my mom and dad. So when heads bang together in the afterlife of empire, it seems apt to say that we have arrived at a point in which, quoting Byrd, diaspora collides with settler colonialism, unquote. Where any possibility of decolonizing imaginaries must include a kind of transformative accountability to this collision point. Indigenous scholars remind us that it's often the case that post-colonial aspirations towards this kind of accountability ultimately perpetuate the very settler logics they aim to undo. Case in point are those non-critical or perhaps non-cacophonic goals of inclusion, of welcoming, of hospitality, that blindly assume the settler state to have the kind of legitimacy into which one would even desire to be included or welcomed. On certain readings, creolization might be interpreted as one such post-colonial aspiration towards inclusion and assimilation in a multicultural settler state. However, as I have tried to align and deployed it in this book, the relationality of creolizing processes is errant, rhizomatic, and perhaps more significantly keeps opacity at the center. Taking Glissant as my guide, I have shown that any relational process conceptualized in a creolizing frame would be open-ended in the messiness of the rhizome's routings, would gather singularities in a knowing that is not one of transparency and full access, and would be less about final resolutions and more about the complex communicative enactments of ongoing community formation. And so if, in its encounter with the oppositional place-based claims of indigenous peoples, a creolizing relation does not route itself differently in response, but instead retrenches into, quoting Bird again, a rationalizing of the original historical traumas that births settler colonialism, then the relation is no longer shaped in a creolizing spirit. In that creolizing rerouting, what is hoped for is, to quote Bird again, the possibility of indigenous memory and migratory resistance to forge alliances across historical and cultural experiences in opposition to the competitions upon which colonialism relies. In turning to this critical vocabulary of cacophonous interventions, I purport that acts of indigenous resurgence and self-affirmation also positions themselves to avoid, quote, the pitfalls associated with retreating into an uncritical essentialism, unquote, this is a quote from Glenn Coltard's most recent work, Red Skin, White Mass. Franz Fanon similarly warns against such pitfalls in Wretched of the Earth, and I deploy this centrally in my book. In other words, horizontal negotiations among communities with historical claims against colonial violence would mean that the place-based claims of indigenous communities unfold in active collision with other colonized peoples. Nashnaabek scholar and musician Leanne Simpson reminds us that what ought to be most central to contemporary indigenous place-based claims is neither nostalgia for an untainted past nor the nativism of recalcitrant claims to belonging, but rather certain obligations on the part of indigenous peoples to, quoting Simpson here, to reclaim the fluidity of their traditions and not the rigidity of colonialism, unquote. Framed in this way, indigenous resistance might be called to the kinds of fluid and contaminated world relations not unlike what Edward Gleeson theorizes in creolizing community formations. Likewise, for someone like me, whose own histories are of transplantation and arrival, I am called to understand my own creole indigeneity alongside the particular colonial violence made visible by acts of indigenous resurgence and resistance. And so to conclude, in ending with creolizing the nation as an imperative and not as a fact seems, at least on my reading, quite in line with the implications of creolization. These are implications that center cacophony, critical vigilance, and suspicion towards resolution as they center those everyday practices of resisting subjects who, in Maria Lugonis' words, inhabit the power grid in great resistance, unquote. Creolizing the nation takes our attention to those subaltern agencies, territory, translocated, and indigenous alike, that are always already authoring new ways of relating to the world in response to colonial and neocolonial domination. To think about the constituting totality of the nation in this way, creolizing, errant, negotiating plural histories and struggles is to conceive the possibility of its decolonial future. Never easy, always cacophonous, but the opaque horizon towards which a properly creolizing conception of a nation totality hopefully moves. So these are the questions I'm thinking about right now for my next project. Sorry, family and the audience, but I'm getting ready to start again. But I'll stop here and I very much look forward to your questions. Thank you. So I'm going to help Chris field some questions. I'll run around and do the microphone, and as soon as Chris gets off of that high podium. And is your microphone on, my friend? Yep, there we go. So we're ready. Who's got the first question? Thank you so much, Dr. Sealy, for your inspired and magnificent words and your talk, and for the beautiful family portrait at the end. Could you talk about the playlist? That's a surprise that we have lined up for you. So during our reception at the, on the permission of Associate Provost Jacqueline Borishko, we were allowed to generate a playlist that to my mind consists of a list of artists and songs that capture the spirit of what I want to convey in this book. So you'll be hearing that during the reception. That's all I have to see. Fascinating talk. Thank you, Chris. I have just a quick question, maybe two. So when you are talking about memory, are you thinking more about collective memory or individual memory transmitted through, you know, poetic writings or any literary writings? So that's the first question. Second question. I really like your title, Crealizing the Nation. It seems that you want to emphasize an agency to intervene, because, I mean, in my thinking, nation could be by nature is not pure. So when you are using the word crealizing, are you thinking about as the critics, as scholars, philosophers, you want to do something about it? Or you are calling for people to do it? Thank you. Yeah, so maybe I'll start with a second question first. And so when I first came to these sorts of questions and sort of envisioned this as a thing that I can say and argue for in a book, my interests were really developing a conceptual framework that would allow that sort of impurity to be foregrounded when one thinks of the nation and national life and what it means to have a national identity and to feel part of a national community, right? The fact that, well, to think of the nation is to always already think of a kind of moving, non-static impurity. And to even add this, that really comes from my own personal experience of navigating nationness, right, as an immigrant who has very complicated relationship to home, a national home. And so for me, the crealizing and crealizing the nation is simply a theory that I think does a good job of foregrounding that kind of impurity and movement. And then the second question, the memory question, definitely a kind of collective memory. And so not simply a collective memory, but a collective memory that is collective precisely in its felt absence, right? A radical absence and loss that despite continues to frame and shape how Caribbean-ness and Antillian literature and poetry, we have a poet in our midst, think about what it means to be Caribbean as a very sort of distinct and kind of identity in relationship to the world. So that would be the short answer to that question. Sunil. Thanks for coming, Sunil. Did you bring the baby? This is amazing. Your parents are so gorgeous. I know. I was just looking at them. I don't know what happened. It's amazing. I'm going to ask a sort of historian's question, I guess. I was sort of struck by the way in which you're sort of grappling with two seemingly sort of oppositional regimes of historicity and temporality. There's one founded in a sort of rupture, the abyss and the absence, and that produces a sort of radical futurity, a sort of openness to the future, a sort of emancipation from the past that sort of opens up these sort of new political horizon. And how then this can then be understood in terms of politics of an indigeneity that has a much different political horizon, a sort of different temporal horizon. I'm sort of wondering if these two things can be put together. I mean, I understand the sort of creolization that comes as a way of reconciling these two temporalities into some sort of formation, but are these two conceptions of the political just irreconcilable, or do they need to be reconciled in some way, or do they sabotage each other? Are there sort of pitfalls to a politics of indigeneity in this sort of radical futurity? Because this sort of settler-colonial project is premised on a sort of disavowal of the past. So I don't know. Yeah, and so these are exactly the questions that will probably make me miserable for another six years because that's what I'm about to find out. And so, right, and so, to begin, right, so there are different ways of opening up the what is of creolization, and I have decided to use someone like Edward Glissant, because I think Glissant does a particularly good job of giving a reading of creolization and of creolizing imaginary that is precisely about this radical future, precisely because nothing is left of the past, but also are forging towards a generativity that, to return to what I said, needs to honour its boats, right? So it's not that the past is not felt and not informing the kind of futuricity that he's talking about, right? But at the same time, that rupture is still there in ways that is really diametrically opposed when you try to write. But I feel compelled to bring these two things together because if I'm laying out a platform for what it means to live and be in the world in a decolonial way, how could I not talk about settler colonial violence, right? Exactly, so that just seems to me to be the next responsible question to ask. And so, here I go. Hi, and thank you. According to your vision then on Election Day, how are we to reimagine our local, state, and national governments and communities, and what would the world look like? I'm looking for Gweno Fonzo, who is the scholar of American politics. Yeah, right. So, I mean, actually, good question, right? Because your question prompts me to say again that how I'm thinking about political negotiations, how I'm thinking about the negotiation of politics and political structures, how I'm thinking about how political resistance looks is not necessarily in this frontal negotiation with mainstream politics, right? So what you think of in terms of structures of governmentality and, you know, state mechanisms, right? Which is not to say that those questions aren't precisely important, they are. They just don't figure into the questions that I'm asking in this project. What I am interested in the project is a focus on other more liminal, subaltern ways that human beings, that human subjects manifest political resistance. Find ways in the midst of those state mechanisms to determine options for free life, right? Which could include voting, right? Which could include, you know, doing the Democrat versus Republican, the blue, the red thing. But the kinds of resistance that I'm thinking about and referencing are really resistances to systems of violence that continue with either of those options, right? So it's not about if we vote Democrat, then sort of arrive at a decolonizing way of being Americans. That's not the case, right? So for the purpose of this project, those kinds of options, those kinds of participations in political life is not quite what I'm thinking about and asking about, if that... If you were to realize your vision and follow your thought, what would my world look like? How would we live? Yeah, so I don't know that ahead of time and so the trouble is that in anticipating and saying that in clear terms ahead of time, we precisely foreclose the radical nature of the possibility that I'm referencing, right? We precisely cannot know what it looks like ahead of time and forge towards it at the same time, which is why it's difficult and uncomfortable and not particularly easy. It's supposed to be disruptive. And Frans Fanon does a really good job of that, right? He talks about the sense in which, you know, any sort of anti-colonial revolution will fail because it's always too late or too early, right? It's just impossible to present in legible terms precisely because of its radical nature. So I wish I had a better question, a way to answer your question, but that coming out of this framework, that would be the answer to that sort of question. So we have three more questions that I've seen. I'm going to start right here. Hi, it was a fascinating talk. Keep it coming. So I came in in the middle, so I don't know if you address this, but it seemed to me like, so you're theorizing this kind of fractured, sob-altern set of resistances, right? And so my question is, what is the possibility of solidarities along that continuum of these fractured resistances of sob-altern creolizations, right? Solidarities along the decolonial or non-colonial axes, you know? So among the people who shared that history in different configurations of some sort. And then the other question is, so you've mentioned that there's this opacity and then that there's no goal necessarily or like being with this kind of space, right? This unstable space, but yet you also say that there's an emancipatory project of being free. What does that look like? So I'll start with the goal question. So it's a... It's a... So the movement towards is to be thought of in terms of propulsive but not telelogical, right? So there's a movement towards, but the danger is that the minute we determine we're too quickly in advance, right? With our very limited colonizing conceptual tools, what that thing towards which we're moving, right? The dangers that we reproduce the very logics because that's kind of all we have, right? And so it's... And so I think that such possibilities of being... having purpose that is not telelogical, I think kind of needs to come from the communities that we're talking about, communities that precisely need or have a... There's a necessity with which they... This is their only possibility of living fully human lives. And so how that solidarity... And then I'm going to answer your first question. How that... What that solidarity is going to look like in the book, I turn to someone like Maria Lugones because she uses this language... She uses a language of complex communication. She uses a language of, you know, polyglossia, right? So anticipating in advance that when we sort of bang our heads together, we sort of necessarily will not understand everything or hardly anything, right, of the language of the other and have to figure out how to work with this other group or this other person that for whom we don't have a clear and transparent understanding. And I think that's pretty radical because often, right, promises of solidarity sort of rest in the assumption that... Right, we fully get each other. I understand you, you understand me, and so, okay, let's get to work, right? That's kind of not what Maria Lugones is describing in her conception of complex communication, which I find really productive. Beth? Thank you. Great talk. Thank you, Beth. So many great, you know, phrases and things that I need to go away and look at my notes and think about how they fit together. But part of what I'm thinking about is our shared love of New Orleans, of course, and public memory especially because I'm thinking about the time when you were really, you know, deep in drafting and thinking about this book as a time when, you know, there was the fight over the memorials coming down, the Confederate memorials in New Orleans, as real sites of public memory. And at the same time that there's that, I think public memory as being so much about in the movements of the parades, of the Mardi Gras Indians, of the, yes, you got Wild Chapatulas, right? So we don't think of that as public memory, but I think that is a kind of public memory. So I'm wondering if you can say anything about how you were thinking about public memory in this book or as you're drafting this book or, you know, around that. Yeah, that's a good question because a lot of what, a lot of the places that I, or the instances that I go to in the book are really about these sort of intimate everyday practices of resistance. But I think there are ways to retain what I find valuable in that intimacy and everydayness in those sort of more public articulations of disruption, those more public articulations of imagining community and our shared history and memory in a radically different way without changing too much about what I want to say. So I think that this could pertain to things like that. So thank you. I think we have time for about one more question. Yes, so fabulous stuff all around and I'm sort of following up on Bette's stuff about the Confederate monuments and memory and public memory. I think, you know, and also the question about, oh, by the way, I'm Gwen Alfonso, so I was referring to about American politics. So, you know, the question, Chris, what you're talking about is actually not at all on the same sort of wavelength as we conventionally think about politics. Although the two things don't necessarily have to be completely different, but, you know, they're just not there on parallel tracks as you sort of were talking about. So, you know, I think institutions, like initially I was, because I'm an institutionalist, I was trying to think what is the role for institutions, but I think like Foucault, you're not kind of focused so much on institutions at the center. You're more focused on the margins, right? You're sort of focused on the marginality rather than the institutionality of politics in that way, right? But then what you see is you come up with this tension between what a state has to do, a state has to set standards, as, you know, Foucault tells us with governmentality and stuff, a state has to set standards and sort of normalize certain experiences and make it accessible to others so that they can sort of perform what it needs to do, you know, function and policy and so on and so forth. So, I think, though, what you're saying is transformation is not happening at the part of policymaking and these formal legal artifacts or developments, but transformation is happening in the moment, often, right? In the cacophony of, like, dialogue, for instance, in the present rather than in some kind of solidified entity. Or, I mean, do you want to speak to that? Like, do you see it crystallized in any way? Or do you not? So, yes to all of that, right? And so, and I would add that, you know, alongside, right, so this is not a but but an and, alongside the sort of the marginal focus of the questions that I'm asking, it's both marginal and in between, right? So, in other words, when, as those more formal mechanics of state governmentality are unfolding, we encounter this kind of, like, difficulty in everyday cacophony and messiness, right? There is something productive about that and it doesn't necessarily mean that these state mechanisms are unnecessary, right? Right, so this is not an either or, right? And that this sort of these messiness of the liminal and the marginal, right? What I think, Crealization does a really good job in naming, right? So Crealization is just a conceptual name that I find helpful to use for these sorts of instances, right? So these are not, these are not diametrically opposed, but I want to say that they're always included in these state mechanisms and one does, and so the manifestation of one does not signal that the other one is never always there if, but ultimately yes to all of that, so. So if you would join me in congratulating Chris on an outstanding talk.