The Need for a Black Feminist Climate Justice

Abstract

This essay makes the case for an approach to climate justice grounded in Black feminist thought. I outline one such approach by adopting the analytic and method of Black feminist hauntology. One of my aims is to depart from the erasure of Black womxn in climate discourse and strategy, as marked either by vulnerability, abjection, and the inevitability of dispossession and death, or by astounding “resilience” in the face of repeated devastation, violence, and abandonment (Baker 2019; Sharpe 2013).1 Although there is much to be done in terms of registering differential impacts or racist violence against Black womxn, I want to center (and make the case for centering) Black feminist thought as a crucial way to reimagine climate justice. In this aspiration, I am guided by Hortense Spillers’ self-described labor. In Spillers’ words: I saw . . . black people being treated as a kind of raw material. That the history of black people was something you could use as a note of inspiration but it was never anything that had anything to do with you—you could never use it to explain something in theoretical terms . . . so my idea was to try to generate a discourse, or a vocabulary that would not just make it desirable, but would necessitate that black women be in the conversation. (Spillers et al. 2007, 300)In this respect I am informed by foundational work that has shown the impact of Black feminist thought for disciplines such as geography, geology, and philosophy (Jackson 2020; McKittrick 2006; Yussof 2018; Weheliye 2014). My focus and target, however, is that of climate justice, which is both a philosophically rich terrain and one that day by day reveals itself to be crushingly and immediately important for all.Developing the ecological dimensions of Black feminist hauntology, I consider its implications for debates around the intergenerational nature of climate change, while foregrounding its vexed affinities with recent work in eco-deconstruction that treats the hauntological dimensions of climate change and justice. I make my case here by responding to Matthias Fritsch's argument in Taking Turns with the Earth, that overcoming the assumptions that tend to limit philosophical and policy approaches to climate ethics and justice requires a “reconceptualization of humans as generational-terrestrial beings, as well as of intergenerational relations themselves” (Fritsch 2018, 6). My argument is (1) that addressing the problematic assumptions of climate justice requires countering the widespread erasure of Black womxn and of Black and decolonial feminist concerns and interests, within eco-deconstruction as well as climate ethics and justice more generally, and (2) that Black feminist hauntological thought harbors important tools and insights for these tasks, such that it offers the basis for a transformative vision of climate justice that is always already transgenerational and ecological.2 In my account, Black feminist hauntology combines a profound rethinking of relations with the earth with a distinctive spectral ontology, and it does so by thinking from a specific positionality and history, namely, Black womxn in slavery and its afterlives.This essay is not an exhaustive or conclusive account of Black feminist thinking on climate justice. I acknowledge the internal heterogeneity of Black feminist and womanist thought, as well as decolonial and Native feminisms that grapple with anti-Blackness, and the difference of emphases that mark each of them. Pulling from all of these, I adopt a narrow focus on what Viviane Saleh-Hanna calls “Black feminist hauntology,” as analytic and method. The vision of Black feminist climate justice that I work toward here insists on the need to grapple with systemic violence and historic and collective accountability to weave futures that are not merely the repetition of the past, whilst foregrounding a distinctive set of ethical obligations and responsibilities that depart from the presentism and human exceptionalism of established framings of climate change. Attending to the distinct webs of ethical, political, and spiritual responsibilities and relations brings into view an otherwise occluded sense of what the harms and stakes of climate change, or the “anti-Black climate,” are through a Black feminist hauntological lens (Sharpe 2016). I suggest that the harm is less that of inequity, exclusion, or recognition. Rather, it is a matter of the disruption and incapacitation of fulfilling one's responsibilities (of care, honor, celebration, mourning, remembrance, survival) to all the community. The demand might shift then, from greater representation or inclusion in whitestream climate negotiations and policy, to the capability to uphold responsibilities on our own terms.The uncanny dynamics of haunting are manifest in global anthropogenic climate change. The forces set into play by the actions of the past and the present are unsated by arguments that evade culpability. The feigned innocence or ignorance of the presently living and future generations does nothing to alleviate the burden of inheritance and responsibility, and the grip of the ghosts that now stalk the earth. And yet, in much climate ethics and justice, debates have tended to revolve around such issues of ignorance, innocence, and nonidentity, and to sidestep the asynchronous temporal structure of responsibility and entangled causality that we are experiencing (in profoundly uneven ways) as catastrophic climate change.3The assumption of liberal political philosophy as the appropriate and natural framework to think intergenerational justice and climate ethics has led to the adoption of a model of an anthropocentric, individualistic, primarily “free” self as universal, and with it an essentially presentist or synchronous core theory of justice.4 If global anthropogenic climate change increasingly reveals the force of the dead, the past, nonhuman, and the virtual on the present and those presently living humans—this force, the animating force of the spectral as it disrupts seemingly natural categories of time, species, life, and ethics, is not in itself new. Rather, our time, global Western capitalist modernity, owes its apparent newness and identity to its disavowal of the spectral, of ghosts, inheritance, and ways of “being-with-the-dead” (Ruin 2018). It is to these disavowed and ancient matters that Derrida returns with the concept of hauntology.Hauntology is for Derrida a response to the privileging of presence in the history of Western philosophy. This response requires taking seriously “this element that is neither living nor dead, present nor absent . . . It does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on the Being of beings, or to the essence of life or death. It requires . . . hauntology. We will take this category to be irreducible, and first of all to everything it makes possible: ontology, theology, positive or negative onto-theology” (Derrida 2006, 63). Hauntology is at once metaphysical and profoundly ethical and political, or rather, as Derrida presents it here, it is the groundless ground of anything like ethics and politics. Hauntology makes it possible to think the asymmetrical relation of the other, or of self and identity as constituted through relations to others, dead, past, nonhuman, “not yet born,” through the gift and curse of inheritance, and responsibility to an always unpossessable past and future.5 This “infinite asymmetry” of hauntology is what leads Derrida to conceive of justice as excessive of the present moment and the currently living, and of calculation, right, law, and distribution (Derrida 2006, 26). In contrast with the presentist, anthropocentric, individual subject presupposed in many theories of justice, hauntology contends that it is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. (Derrida 2006, xviii)Hauntology is therefore an exploration of justice that is profoundly at odds with liberal political philosophy and capitalist social life.Initially, hauntology may seem far removed from the pressing matters of global urgency that are the domain of climate justice. Yet hauntology is promising since it helps us to understand the foundational limitations of hegemonic debates in climate justice and to begin to elaborate an alternative. In Taking Turns with the Earth, Matthias Fritsch (2018) has developed a number of these and systematically applied them to debates that focus on the intergenerational nature of climate ethics and justice. Fritsch's efforts deserve our attention here since they show the philosophical significance of hauntology for climate justice, and, at the same time, their lacunae and limitations are instructive and begin to indicate that something is missing. I show that what is in many respects an exemplary attempt to put eco-deconstruction to work with climate justice is haunted by Black womxn and by Black feminist thought. I pursue what this haunting makes possible and argue that it is an important example that supports the case for the necessity of a theory and practice of climate justice anchored in Black feminist thought.Fritsch presents eco-deconstruction as an alternative to the assumed social ontology and concept of justice that has tended to shape debates around climate change in philosophy and policy. He argues that the apparent novelty posed by climate change as an intergenerational and terrestrial ontological and ethical problem, its status as unique “moral storm,” is due more to the “guiding assumption” that “a core or nonextensionist theory of justice would not (yet) have to treat generational relations” (Fritsch 2018, 3, 9).6 In respect to the perceived newness of the intergenerational aspect of climate justice, “at times,” it is “presented on the assumption that before industrial modernity, ethics was more or less restricted to face-to-face relations that simply do not extend to future people” (3). Yet, as Fritsch rightly notes, “short-term thinking and disregard for noncontemporary generations” are arguably parochial and seem “germane to industrial, capitalist modernity, with its claim to draw ethical resources only from itself, rather than from inheritance” (3–4). Many of the problems in intergenerational and climate justice stem from this assumption, and thus the treating of intergenerational ontological and ethical relations as exceptional or as an addendum.Instead of attempting to expand this “core theory of justice,” we should, as Fritsch argues, turn to other models of ontology and ethics better equipped to treat “intergenerational issues,” issues that “demand a reconsideration, both socio-ontological and normative, of the role of time in human life” (Fritsch 2018, 6). Fritsch generatively develops aspects of phenomenology and deconstruction to provide such a social ontology and two complementary models of justice that he calls asymmetrical reciprocity and taking turns. Both are grounded in (1) the critique of “possessive individualism” and Western political sovereignty, (2) a “spectral ontology,” or hauntology, and (3) a rethinking of time and ethics in ways that are oriented by (1) and (2). The alternative that I outline by turning to Black feminist hauntology both complements and seriously complicates Fritsch's account. The hauntological relations that I identify in Black feminist thought and practice offer a “reconceptualization of humans as generational-terrestrial beings, as well as of intergenerational relations themselves” (Fritsch 2018, 6) that I argue can not only address and overcome many of the problems identified by Fritsch and others with climate justice, but also show the importance of what haunts these critiques.In “Speculations on a Transformative Theory of Justice,” Denise Ferreira da Silva begins by connecting a global Black feminist and decolonial project with that of deconstruction.7 At issue in Ferreira da Silva's critique of justice is the cleavage of form from matter or content, and with it, theory from practice. This cleavage has the implication that “most accounts of justice focus on its formal (abstract) nature, such as the characterizations of social justice as doomed precisely because its realization requires substantive social reforms and not only an extension of formal (legal) protection, as in the case of civil rights claims” (Ferreira da Silva 2017). Following this initial assessment, Ferreira da Silva gives a critical survey of established paradigms of justice helpful for understanding some of the implications of Black feminist thought for what is currently understood as climate justice.To begin, Ferreira da Silva rules out Rawlsian frames of distributive justice that reduce the social to the economic and confuse color-gender-blindness with neutrality. Similarly, while restorative justice and transitional justice seem to offer alternatives to the aforementioned juridical formalism, insofar as they remain focused on either persons or states, they are ill-equipped to grapple with global racial capital, and to redress forms of ongoing and systemic violence and injustice toward a subnational group or entity, where the injury is often perpetrated by their own state or at least state sanctioned (Ferdinand 2018). And while, as Ferreira da Silva notes, feminist theorists of justice such as Iris Marion Young departed from distributive justice paradigms on the basis of the need to attend to “historical oppression and domination by a white heteropatriarchal state and social institutions,” she suggests that the proposed remedies “such as inclusion, recognition, and reparations” are incommensurate with the weight of raciality (Ferreira da Silva 2017).The limitations of these models of justice are exposed when faced with a speculative question: “What would justice become if raciality entered its formulation? Would it yield a program for the realizing of justice . . . that does not rest on the obscuration of how the total value expropriated from slave labor and native lands exists now as global capital?” (Ferreira da Silva 2017). Understanding the profound implications of this question requires an excavation of the foundations and operation of sovereignty, law, and humanity in Western capitalist modernity. As Ferreira da Silva and Sylvia Wynter have both argued on the basis of their arche- and genea-logic investigations of global raciality, justice, as it is currently exercised and understood, relies on the continual dispossession of “slave labor and native lands” (Ferreira Da Silva 2007; Wynter 1995; 2003). The reality of this process and relation (as expropriation, captivity, and murder) is rendered opaque through the construction of race, or “raciality, the onto-epistemological toolbox” (Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva 2012, 367). The toolbox of raciality opposes “the transparent ‘I’: Man, the subject, the ontological figure consolidated in post-Enlightenment European thought” to the racialized (Ferreira Da Silva 2007, xvi). It enables the fabrication of subjects who in fact can never properly be subjects in the terms of the dominant order of the human. Raciality forecloses full ethical and political salience to the racialized, and bars them from the supposedly fair and free exchange of wage labor and participation in the capitalist economy (Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva 2012, 367–68). It underpins justice since it allows for the reconciliation of otherwise contradictory tensions (e.g., between the purported universality and equality of Western modernity and the constitutive exclusion of all its Others). The importance of the production of raciality is made invisible by the formalism of the “juridico-economic architecture” of justice and the seeming naturalness of hierarchical difference (Ferreira da Silva 2017).Within this global analysis of raciality, Blackness has served as the ultimate Other against which the self-transparent, atomistic, autarkic “subjects of universal reason” have been constructed (Ferreira da Silva 2014, 82). And, as Hartman argues in her response to C. B. Macpherson's analysis of “possessive individualism,” the liberal subject and the key categories of liberal political philosophy were constituted through Black subjection and captivity (Hartman 1997, 233). What is distinct about Blackness is the role that it has been made to serve as a way of organizing life and matter, into those considered free individuals, on the one hand, and on the other those beings and things considered raw matter that can be extracted, formed, traded, and possessed as exchangeable, interchangeable commodities without value (Warren 2019; Yussof 2018). This is “the afterlife of slavery.” We are haunted by the “racial calculus and political arithmetic” that continues to act as the “grammar” of our present (Hartman 2007, 6; Spillers 1987)—such that the ontological, ethical, and political categories of agency and matter, personhood and animality, human and nonhuman, so foundational for theories of justice, are inextricably tied to a racial-colonial heteropatriarchal hierarchy crafted in genocide and slavery.The construction of Blackness as “flesh” (that is, as the “zero point” of the New World Order of raciality) occurred through an “ungendering” of enslaved Africans and their descendants with the ends of foreclosing ethical relationality and tying their bodies and futurities to property (Spillers 1987; Wynter 1990). Ungendering does not mean that gender and sexual violence are inconsequential in the case of Blackness, but rather that these categories are co-constitutive.8 Enslaved womxn's status as bestial, sentient, fungible commodities meant that their labors could be lawfully and rightly expropriated and that their children automatically became property (Hartman 2016). In brief, the order and subject of capitalist Western modernity have at the heart the control and possession of Black womxn and their labors—always deemed “unproductive” in advance, and thus not warranting recognition as human or as requiring compensation. Attending to gender and sexuality in slavery and its afterlives is therefore essential for understanding the disavowed vampirism that Saleh-Hanna describes: “a parasitic Whiteness dependent on degraded conceptions of Black personhood through which forced Black labor is imagined legitimate, legal and ethical” and thus the spectral, vampiric relations that constitute the world of global capital (Saleh-Hanna 2015, 9). The implications of this parasitic relation (and the essential role of racialized gendering and ungendering for it) extend beyond those bodies and spaces marked as Black, since “Whiteness, as such, relies on and literally feeds off anti-Blackness, without which it could not uphold the White power structures upon which European colonialism then and now is dependent” (Saleh-Hanna 2015, 9).With Black feminist hauntology, Saleh-Hanna shows how Black feminist thought anticipates the central claim of Specters of Marx, that “No justice . . . seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead” (Derrida 2006, xviii). It does so from an anchoring in Black and decolonial feminist grounds, that is, in a past that remains active and present, and oriented by a futurity that aspires to the interwoven projects of abolition and decolonization.9 Both projects involve haunting, and are twinned not only through overlapping geo-histories and climate vulnerabilities, but also through the shared work of defending and reanimating what has been cast as raw matter and dead land (Ferreira Da Silva 2020; Tuck and Ree 2013).As we have seen, hauntology names the noncoincidence of the self, the present moment, and the living, but this broad ontological claim is always ethical and political, already irreducible from matters of justice. The political stakes and commitments of hauntology (that appear only in the margins of Fritsch's account) are foundational to Black feminist hauntology. Saleh-Hanna explains that “In Black Feminist Hauntology unfinished business is the result of oppression . . . ghosts remain because justice has not been achieved” (Saleh-Hanna 2015, 14). Ghosts proliferate and persist from untimely and ungrieved deaths. Bodies without burial or mourning ceremony, bodies without heads, without names, thrown overboard, into pits. Places, worlds, left only in ruins that we are taught to overlook. Haunting is a symptom of denied and erased violence that persists in the present unreconciled and unforgivable. Haunting is the index of a disjunct between norm and reality; it points to the supplement and remainder of the present reality. “Reading the dead” and communing with ghosts is revolutionary, messianic, and “utopian,” insofar as it calls us to attend to the present as it is shot through with the past, not as relic or nostalgia, but as repository of the virtual that might be activated through action undertaken in solidarity with the other potential worlds that our current (racial) capitalist realist reality has usurped and repressed (Ferreira Da Silva 2020; Gordon 2008). As an “exorcizing framework,” Black feminist hauntology seeks to disinter the sources of ongoing and denied injustice, particularly those of anti-Blackness and colonialism. At the same time, it also operates as hospitality to the ghosts of the “kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppression of capitalist imperialism” (Derrida 2006, xviii) that Derrida acknowledges.It is by attending to ghosts and to haunting, to the invisible but persistent, to the erased and forgotten, the subjugated and the ancestral, to all those forces and beings denied by Modernity that return to haunt it, that we might locate and transform what otherwise appear to be eternal and necessary systems of violence and oppression. Here, Saleh-Hanna builds on Avery F. Gordon's Ghostly Matters, particularly the analysis of Toni Morrison's Beloved and what Gordon calls her theory of “rememory,” as well as the linkage of haunting to messianic and utopian justice, and the concept of the ghost as a “social figure,” where “investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life” (Gordon 2008, 8). In Black feminist hauntology, however, the “ghost I call upon is a Black feminist. She is the voices and the intellectual contributions of Black womxn who have known and seen that which has not been articulated or documented in White-ologies” (Saleh-Hanna 2015, 15). This qualification suggests a sense of Black feminism as always already intergenerational, comprised of the living, dead, not yet born, and past, present, and future, yet moored in a specific positionality and shared conditions of experience, one that adds complexity to the concepts of standpoint and identity politics central to Black feminist thought (Hill Collins 2002). It also indicates how along with exorcism, and hospitality to ghosts, Black feminist hauntology aims at “shape-shifting” (Saleh-Hanna 2015, 15) that is a transformation of the community and subjects of justice from its current narrow confines—those deemed fully human and living within racial capital and thus worthy of ethical and political salience—to futurities drawn by the projects of abolition and decolonization.In sum, as it is theorized by Saleh-Hanna and explored by the other thinkers I engage with here, Black feminist hauntology is woven from two movements: (1) deconstructive critique or “decomposition,” through exorcism and hospitality to ghosts, and (2) shapeshifting or the transformation of systems of violence by what they have held captive or repressed.10 Both moments have as their goal what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls “transformative” global justice (Ferreira da Silva 2017).11 On the basis of the inability of justice to reckon with raciality, Ferreira da Silva calls for and speculates on a transformative, decolonial, Black feminist justice. Transformative justice would employ a Black feminist “Poethics” that aims “to produce a reading of the onto-epistemological grounds of the Category of Blackness” (Ferreira da Silva 2014, 82). This reading does not rely on the categories foundational for modern scientific Western reason, but rather proceeds through their deconstruction or “decomposition” (Ferreira da Silva 2017). Although necessarily speculative, transformative justice can only manifest through practices that decompose global capital and as such rework the categories of value and of matter. In sum, “Such a transformative theory of justice envisions global justice as a radical material transformation, that is, the aftermath of decolonization or what the world will have become after it has been known anew” (Ferreira da Silva 2017). This is the abolition or end of the current world through “poethics” or “wake work,” practices of memory and defense of the dead in a constellation with the living and the future.12 It is abolition understood as the rebirth of a world in which Black womxn, and thus all people, can care for the dead, dying, and not yet born.13 As I go on to show, these means and ends are grounded in a distinctive Black feminist spectral ontology, or hauntology.Let us return to Taking Turns through this Black feminist hauntological lens. Fritsch draws on Derrida's “critique of colonial, possessive subjectivity,” in his reading of Robinson Crusoe as exemplary figure of liberalism that shares with modern democracy the model of sovereignty that “C. B. Macpherson . . . called ‘possessive individualism’” (Fritsch 2018, 212). This reading gives essential context to the model of selfhood that Fritsch suggests is assumed by climate justice, such that modern liberal democracy can be seen as another side of “imperialist colonial sovereignty” that is fundamentally “carnivorous, sexist, individualistic, humanist, presentist, colonialist, and imperialist” (ibid.).14 Although there is an earlier acknowledgment in the book of the need to “integrate histories of oppression, such as racism, colonial, sexist, and class oppression” (145), this brief mention principally serves to support Frisch's claim that the models of justice he develops are stronger than those of ideal theory. While in his “response to critics” Fritsch does acknowledge settler colonialism and mentions slavery once, the latter almost disappears in parentheses in a discussion of primitive accumulation (Fritsch 2020, 564).Modern Western sovereignty and humanism, liberal individualism, colonialism, capitalism, and global Anthropogenic climate change cannot fully be comprehended if the question of raciality is sidestepped. More precisely, Black feminist accounts show that reckoning with and from Blackness is necessary since Blackness is a “laboratory” for global modernity and “a means for organizing both human and nonhuman life” on a planetary scale (Glissant 1997, 74; Bennett 2018, 103). Black feminist thought is vital for any analysis (critical or otherwise) of the Anthropocene, and related optics of the Capitalocene and the Plantionocene (Dillon 2019; Haraway 2015; McKittrick 2013; Sharpe 2016). As Axelle Karera puts it, “If . . . ‘Blackness . . . is the specter that haunts the Anthropocene and its possible futures,’ it is imperative that we incisively revisit the conditions that make ‘blackened’ life and death unregisterable and therefore un-grievable” (Karera 2019, 44). Otherwise, Karera argues, political and ethical transformations many celebrate as ushered in by the “Anthropocene,” and by climate change, risk “a post-apocalyptic world without any signs of ethical transformation” (ibid.). The black maternal is the “unthought” of the grammar or social ontology that Fritsch (following Derrida) haltingly begins to analyze. Black feminist hauntology is especially well- equipped to understand and depart from the problematic onto-ethico-political assumptions shaping hegemonic conceptions of climate justice. This is one crucial reason why I argue that no climate justice can be complete without it.As Ferreira da Silva reminds us in her vision of transformative justice as always global and decolonial, Blackness and the project of Black feminism are always already bound up with global capital, (settler) colonialism, imperialism, postcolonies and postcolonial metropoles, the control and organization of labor, contemporary migrations, and ecological violence (Ferreira Da Silva 2020; Saleh-Hanna 2015; Sharpe 2016).15 In response to the charge leveled at so-called identity politics, of an exclusionary and restrictive focus on a particular identity (assumed to be given, stable, and obvious) over and against the universal (and thus any truly just justice), I reiterate the importance of haunting and the work of hosting. Black feminist hauntology is also haunted by forgotten relations and repressed pasts. Haunted, for instance, by the trans* in the Black maternal, by “the Native” as constructed by the heteropatriarchal apparatuses of the settler colonial state, without which neither the Master nor Slave can be properly understood, and by more-than-human relatives. The ethical and political work of hospitality to these ghosts and to erased, shared, complex histories that can never be fully known but nevertheless are constitutive of thought and life is demanded by Black feminist hauntology of itself. Attending to this inexhaustible dimension shows how rather than closing in on itself, a situated concern can be an opening onto the in