Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor"

ANTIPODE Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor"

Abstract: This essay offers a critical analysis of the metaphysical and methodological presuppositions of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor". While Tuck and Yang position settler colonial spatiality as structured by a settler-native-slave triad, we argue that their critique of metaphor entails the collapse of the triad into a settler-native dyad, the reduction of slavery to forced labour, and a division between the material and the symbolic that forecloses not only an analysis of slavery, but also the constitution of settler colonialism itself. Through an immanent critique of "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor" we identify what animates their critique of metaphor, and drawing on scholarship in Black studies, we offer an alternative theorisation of slavery and settler colonialism.

What the Settler and the "Savage" share is a capacity for time and space coherence. At every scale-the soul, the body, the group, the land, and the universe-they can both practice cartography, and although at every scale their maps are radically incompatible, their respective "mapness" is never in question. This capacity for cartographic coherence is the thing itself, that which secures subjectivity for both the Settler and the "Savage" and articulates them to one another in a network of connections, transfers, and displacements.

Geography's discursive attachment to stasis and physicality, the idea that space "just is", and that space and place are merely containers for human complexities and social relations is terribly seductive ...

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor" has significantly influenced a growing body of literature on settler colonialism, intervening especially in decolonial geographies, methodologies, and pedagogies.

The essay has been widely circulated in activist spaces, finding its way onto the reading lists of Democratic Socialists of America chapters, and classrooms and workshops across the continent. The political reception of the essay reflects its broader socio-historical context, as it has become a resource for Indigenous activists and their allies seeking reorientation following the failures of Occupy Wall Street, and it has provided nourishment for resurging Indigenous movements, such as Idle No More and NoDAPL. In and beyond the immediate context, Tuck and Yang participate in contemporary iterations of decolonial struggle that seek to redress the longue durée of modernity, its expression as settler colonialism, and the endlessly expanding pile of wreckage that it produces.

But the essay not only reflects a socio-historical context-it articulates a metaphysical orientation towards text and context. Most obviously, Tuck and Yang's titular imperative rehearses a well-known take on the structure of metaphor. When metaphor "invades decolonization" the very possibility of decolonization is destroyed, as it is stolen from its literal referent and transported to the realm of semantic superabundance. Recovering and reviving what metaphor has stolen is meant to reorient the proper scope and scale of decolonial struggle. In this essay we identify how the Möbius strip between Tuck and Yang's critique of metaphor and their directive for decolonization is made real through purported similitude to another field of struggle: abolition. Their charge does not just rebuff poststructuralist misdirection, it also operationalises a synecdoche that engulfs slavery by having decolonization stand in for the totality of struggle. Across their collaborative publications, their work simultaneously invokes and subsumes Black studies scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, Audre Lorde, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Fred Moten, Frank B. Wilderson the Third, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Katherine McKittrick, Thomas Shapiro, and the Black/Land Project. Through epigraphs and secondary asides that mobilise this work on anti-Blackness, Tuck and Yang gesture towards what elsewhere is referred to as a "tangled" relationship between slavery and their paradigmatic analysis of settler colonialism. This relationship is most often expressed by way of a "settler-native-slave" triad, a model whose reliance on difference-in-unity nonetheless collapses difference under a presumptive totality. On the one hand, anti-Blackness is employed as a structure alongside settler colonialism, each identified through distinct logics. Each vertex of the triad appears to have equal influence. The dynamic shifts, however, when attempting to broach the relationality between vertices. By citing Black scholarship with little and often no elaboration, Tuck and Yang exemplify how anti-Blackness is theoretically engulfed by the settler colonial paradigm. Seen as derivative, rather than essential to the constitution of the triad, the figure of the slave is transubstantiated into either a colonised or proto-settler position. That is, under the weight of the settler-colonial structure, the equality of the triad transmutes into the hierarchy of a binary.

Tuck and Yang's political manoeuvres serve as a cautionary example of what Frank B. Wilderson calls "the ruse of analogy" as they fold slavery into settler colonialism in order to mediate the dis/similarity between the slave and native. The problem with such moves lay in the way that they position slaves within the world, imbuing them with positive substance, so as to vivify the ethical-political dilemmas of decolonization. This essay examines Tuck and Yang's text as exemplifying a theoretical tension between sovereignty and the figure of the slave that subtends settler colonial studies, which is also to say that Tuck and Yang's work is under consideration insofar as it is a symptom of a general problematic within the aforementioned field. Our analysis proceeds in three parts. First, we identify the object Tuck and Yang want to recover from the metaphor. Next, we elaborate how this object is both sustained and undermined by metaphysical commitments that divide the material from the symbolic, space from its symbols. Lastly, we articulate how this object-orientation pulls slavery into its orbit, only to disavow and subsume it. Contrary to positions that would want to protect the essence of Blackness from appropriation by other discourses, we argue that anti-Blackness is animated by the gratuitous substitution that marks metaphoricity. We contend, in metaphysical and methodological contradistinction to Tuck and Yang, that slavery is (nothing but) metaphor.

Land

What is the object Tuck and Yang want to recover from metaphor? The answer is deceptively simple: Land. "Decolonization is not a metaphor" because decolonization, understood by Tuck and Yang, requires the return of land and the reconstitution of Indigenous geographies. This requirement is textured by their reading of Patrick Wolfe, whose popular elaboration of settler colonialism as a "project of elimination" (instead of the more recognised project of exploitation and accumulation) led him to identify its "primary motive" as being driven not by "race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilisation, etc.) but access to territory." Like Wolfe, Tuck and Yang's now just-as-cited version of settler colonialism is distinct from internal and external colonialism, even when it operates through both. External colonialism entails the expropriation of parts of Indigenous worlds and resources, for the purpose of exporting them to the metropole; internal colonialism is the governance of the colonised within the borders of the colonising nation. Unlike external and internal colonialism, settler colonialism is predicated upon settlers claiming all land for their new home. Tuck and Yang find that settlers establish a claim to permanent ownership of land through its conversion into property. Their analysis reiterates, in this respect, the Lockean matrix by which the settler obtains the right to property in land upon mixing land with their labour, and the appropriation and cultivation of land enables its commodification. Capitalism and the state are thus read as "technologies of colonialism, developed over time to further colonial projects." By reversing (without substantively complicating) the relation between capitalism and colonialism, Tuck and Yang forward an inverted Marxist analysis that extends the critique of liberal-capital land acquisition. Given the absence of spatial separation between coloniser and colonised and the total expropriation of Indigenous life, land (as opposed to labour) is centralised as that which is "most valuable, contested, and required." Land, then, is the "principal momentum" that grounds capitalism in colonialism.

Labour does not disappear as a problem when land is the unifying principle; instead, it is reinvested in other moments of primitive accumulation, namely slavery. The purpose of slavery is to work the land that settlers have claimed as property, while race, as "an invention of colonialism," is condensed into a technology of separability to enable this extraction. Racial slavery is subordinated to settler colonialism because land is the material basis of the slave's productive labour. In short, slavery is conceived as "the forced labor of stolen peoples on stolen land." We will return to this reduction of slavery to forced labour, which we call the "labour theory of slavery."

The drive toward the permanent and total ownership of land (be it "land, water, air, subterranean earth") is, of course, about more than just land-it concerns what is in land ("as diverse, specific, and un-generalizable ... a teacher and conduit of memory") more than land (as property). While Tuck and Yang's central text does not broach what Indigenous relations to land are, Tuck has devoted analysis with other interlocutors towards an exposition of what land might be otherwise. In "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor," the status of Indigenous relations to land proceeds through its negating force, rather than positive assessment: settler property disrupts Indigenous spatial sensibilities by reducing land to the potential of its commodification. The settler colonial fantasy of terra nullius attempts to clear land of all non-empirical impediments to its aim, be they alternative modes of sovereignty, personhood, memory, or relationality. The continuation of Indigenous life, therefore, stands between the settler and the land. Thus, "everything within a settler colonial society strains to destroy or assimilate the Native in order to disappear them from the land." Tuck and Yang's conception of violence requires positing extra-material layers to violence precisely because colonisation-as-clearing devours everything in its way.

Attention to such "profound epistemic, ontological, and cosmological violence" isn't especially new to settler colonial, decolonial, or postcolonial critique. Despite this attention, it is clear that Tuck and Yang's analysis via negativa (through the implied absence of what is lost) remains committed to an empiricist conception of land prior to its conversion into property. The full political-epistemological force of settler colonialism can only be ascertained through an unflinching focus on land as the prerequisite for maintaining and recovering Indigenous life. This is also to say, paradoxically, that land is the common ground that unites colonial projects of control and decolonial projects of reclamation: the fact of land (beyond or before ways of relating to land) is assumed, against both colonial (proprietary) and decolonial (relational) epistemologies. Land grounds both settler futurity and decolonial futures. It functions as what Wilderson in the epigraph refers to as "the thing itself, that which secures subjectivity for both the Settler and the 'Savage' and articulates them to one another in a network of connections, transfers, and displacements."

If land is the condition of possibility for social life, it should be centralised in method and praxis. Its displacement in the humanities and social sciences would demonstrate a failure to stay with what is essential. In collaboration with Marcia Mckenzie, Tuck diagnoses this continued displacement in the wake of "the proliferation of postmodern and postpositivist theories of the late twentieth century." The misguided focus on the role of language in mediating social relations means that "postmodern" approaches struggle with "loss of knowledge of the real." Taking the materiality of place into consideration would mean reckoning with the conditions of occupation: the history of genocide and the ongoing displacement and dispossession of people from the land. "Postpositivist" social theories would fail to confront the fact of colonial occupation because they institute a division between mind and body (and by extension mind from land), and uphold the former over the latter. Tuck and Mckenzie charge that it is easier to ignore "fuel extractions, agricultural practices, pollution and toxic dumping, hyper-development, and water use" when everything is symbolic.

Without the literal return of land, the metaphoricity of settler colonialism is supposed to succumb to the imperatives of a politically bankrupt multicultural present while being reified as if it were a timeless phenomenon. In this reading, the decolonial metaphor mystifies how occupation and appropriation are ongoing, and neglects the continued existence of people who might lay claim to land- what Morrill et al. refer to as the making of "future ghosts". With Indigenous-centred perspectives obscured, efforts to decolonize the syllabus, for example, are endlessly susceptible to re-appropriation, domestication, the "public cathexis of white guilt", and, ultimately, the re-inscription of settler colonialism that Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez call "the curriculum project of replacement". It is important to note that this critique explicitly singles out Black demands during and after the Civil Rights movement as being too ready for inclusion, exemplified in the diluted and self-cannibalising practice of "multicultural education". As proxies for multiculturalism, "liberal concerns with equity or access" have as their eventual goal the telos of "settler emplacement" and reproduction of "settler futurity". To be unconcerned with land is to be against the inhabitants of that land. Land, in its implacable there-ness, is proof that the settler-colonial project continues, while "the presence of Indigenous peoples-who make a priori claims to land and ways of being-is a constant reminder that the settler colonial project is incomplete". Indeed, "The easy adoption of decolonization as a metaphor (and nothing else) is a form of this anxiety, because it is a premature attempt at reconciliation". Settler colonialism is only concerned with the being of Indigenous peoples to the extent that their continued existence might make profane the divine purpose of property.