Of monsters and boomerangs: Colonial returns in the late liberal city

Abstract

Our crisis is colonial. This is not a metaphorical statement. It is a historical assessment. If the global South today holds up the mirror of the future to the global North, this is but the effect of the endurance of forms of colonialism at work precisely in their contemporary deformations. When Aimé Césaire in 1950 spoke of the ‘terrific boomerang effect’ of colonialism he had fascist Europe in his sights. This article suggests that today, in the days of revanchist austerity and resurgent far-right populism, the boomerangs are again coming back thick and fast; it traces three intensified points of convergence between liberal-democratic and (post)colonial geographies: mass eviction, the deeper extraction of value from social-biological life, and repressive force. Dispossession—as a modality of government in its own right—is one name through which we might think this conjuncture. A conjuncture that marks the unraveling of not only the normative self-image of liberal politics (as it tumbles closer to its self-ascribed Other—the authoritarian), but also the very foundations upon which our critical urban thought rests—the liberal city.