Confronting Coloniality’s Unpayable Debts

Abstract

The Western origins of solidarity are rooted in debt collection. Expressed in Latin as obligatio in solidum, this practice of Roman law bound debtors to one another. When obligations were designated as in solido, two or more people were each liable for the whole of the same debt (Laitinen and Pessi 2014). This designation presumes, first and foremost, that the debt owed can be repaid. However, the debts still accruing through ongoing settler colonialism and its enduring logics of race can never be fully repaid (Da Silva 2022). Thus, if financial obligations in solido formed legal bonds among debtors for repayment, what bonds, if any, can be formed in the context of unpayable debts? This question, I propose, is of primary concern for theorizing solidarity in a settler society. To begin answering this question I turn to the 2020 production of Sweet Land, an original opera created by Los Angeles experimental performance company The Industry. Staged as an immersive, site-specific procession throughout sections of the Los Angeles State Historic Park, the opera toggles between fever dreams and waking nightmares to untangle and interrogate the ongoing project of settler colonialism in the United States. This article considers Sweet Land alongside the concept of solidarity in order to theorize how performance offers insights into building anticolonial solidarities attentive to ongoing histories of settler coloniality. I first suggest that although solidarity is more often considered a progressive or liberatory organizing method, it must be understood as a mode of unification that operates across the ideological spectrum to both make and break worlds. I then turn to the opera's dramaturgical structure to analyse how it interrupts familiar understandings of solidarity's affective commitments. Ultimately, I suggest that Sweet Land offers a way to conceptualize anticolonial solidarities through distinction and distance rather than commonality and proximity.