Ante-Possession: A History of Dispossession’s Present

Abstract

Abstract This article examines efforts by the dispossessed to challenge dispossession without claiming prior possession or demanding renewed possession as a singular remedy. It juxtaposes the author’s work as a volunteer advocate for migrants detained in El Paso, Texas, with late seventeenth-century records of the trial of an enslaved Black man named Juan Patricio for assaulting a priest after helping a Maya woman named Fabiana Pech, in Yucatán, Mexico. This juxtaposition reveals a long history of dispossession and Black and Indigenous challenges to it, as well as a method for reading that history by attending to the poiesis of the archive, or the manner in which sources imaginatively remake what we know and how we act in ways that are not dependent upon the willful volition of individual actors. The article proposes a shift away from theories of dispossession that presuppose prior possession and toward a theory of ante-possession: lives lived prior to, in opposition to, or in apposition to possession as such. “We could call these social relations ante-possessive to capture the many ways they thrive before, against, or alongside racial capitalist modes of possession.”