Infrastructure in Black

Abstract

Abstract This essay interprets a 1714 petition by five Black Bostonians as a challenge to the role infrastructure played in racial capitalism's development in colonial New England. It theorizes this petition as an “ante-commons,” or a collective action at once before, alongside, and apposite to colonial modes of possession. It further shows how commons in early America did not simply oppose racial capitalism; they often supplemented enclosure, dispossession, and accumulation. Infra this whole story—underneath the extant archives and subsequent settler narratives of colonial New England's racial infrastructure—are intimately intertwined Black and Native lives and lands that unsettled possession in both its individuated and common forms.