Relations beyond Colonial Borders

Abstract

This section presents selected contributions to the workshop “Relations beyond Colonial Borders: Indigeneity, Racialization, Hospitality,” convened by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs at the Three Sisters Kitchen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in April 2023. Natalia Brizuela, Samera Esmeir, Alyosha Goldstein, and Rebecca Schreiber brought together scholars, activists, poets, and artists whose work critically engages the modern border regime as a geopolitical technology indispensable to practices of colonial occupation and imperial management. The workshop focused on a number of key questions: How are we to think movement and inhabitation without reproducing the political and the legal frameworks that the modern border regime solidifies? Could it be that these irrepressible struggles, resistances, and worlds not only show the violence of borders but also illuminate what remains in their excess? How do Indigenous relational practices unsettle or otherwise challenge colonial border regimes? How does Indigeneity “travel” for those Indigenous peoples who have been displaced or who have chosen to live in places other than their historical homelands? How might the practices of people in the context of forced mobility, who aspire to cross a border to elsewhere or to return to their homes, be reflective of something other than the desire to settle in a land?