Envisioning Ethereal Realities

Individualism and the individual is based on centuries of philosophical debate, principles of debate and systems for organizing whole societies which constitute reality (Smith, 50). Fundamentally, conceptions of gender are founded on biological determinist European centric ways of thought which seek to villainize any conceptions of gender outside the binaries of colonial technologies. In particular, Oyewumi on page 1 of chapter 1, states that biology operates in excess privilege in determining the explanation of difference for gender, race, and class. In doing so, gender, class, and race are ontologically created to facilitate the colonial violence of binary realities. For communities with imposed gendered realities, many existed without said preexisting conceptions of gender with shared interests, decisions, or social position. However, the purpose of gender from a colonial position seeks to operationalize bio-logic mechanisms of social conceptions that could be separated and applied universally across different places and times. For example, Njambi, in their counter narrative on “female genital mutilation,” describes the ritualistic practices of safe sex, coming of age, and exposure to adulthood maneuvers beyond the satisfaction of christian missionaries who aimed to impose different practices that centered male circumcision and monogamy instead of “female circumcision and polygamy.

At the root of this discussion is a sense of being inherently contrary to those of ruling capitalist white supremacists. It is almost as if deviating from those realities is an entire world of being given little to no value from the ruling class, but brought into fruition and centered amongst other communities and our sites of retention and support.

Beyond the violence of anti-Blackness and racial economies, Plantation futures provides a critical dialogue that moves beyond the discussion of naming and visualizing violence towards a discussion of recontextualizing the realities that we are immersed into for the creation of renewed futurities. That being said,  we may note Katherine McKittrick’s intentions in drawing connections from the plantation as a site of dispossession and orphaned beginnings to the prison industrial complex and contemporary sites of poverty and dystopia. However, these discussions are not to single out an okayness with the violence of today or a coercive coming to terms with one’s relation to said violence, but rather in an effort to comprehend and assert the humanness of Black existence which can be extended to discussions of resistance and humanness in the other overt forms of white supremacy and colonization. In turn, conversations of orphaned beginnings are lessened in starkness from our contemporary realities and used to provide explanations for envisioning the futurity of these same realities across time and space. In particular, these connections do not serve to forget the realities that have perpetuated the violence of today as these histories are a continuum of decolonial humanness promoted for engagement of decolonial futurities.