Commentary: Sofia Zaragocin

Abstract

Repair is about doing, (re)doing, and materiality. This plenary makes it very clear that repair means taking action, building relations, and a continuous attention to the material. The authors stress the methods of land-as-pedagogy, Black place making and the afterlives of slavery as political and cultural practices. The emphasis is on action and building relations that sustain the materiality of repair. I’d like to take up the four intersecting points mentioned in this paper that can act as a roadmap for geographers and others who are looking to do repair.

Repair is about doing, (re)doing, and materiality. This plenary makes it clear that repair means taking action, building relations, and a continuous attention to the material. The authors stress the methods of land-as-pedagogy, Black placemaking and the afterlives of slavery as political and cultural practices. The emphasis is on action and building relations that sustain the materiality of repair. I’d like to take up the four intersecting points mentioned in this paper that can act as a roadmap for geographers and others who are looking to do repair. Repair as a process and not an endpoint stands as a reminder that the work of repair is never finished or undone. Looking beyond the end result assures us that there will be no easy fixes or toolkits for repair and that what should drives us forward is a process that in fact will not end because coloniality persists. This leads to the second point about temporal imaginaries including idealizations of the past and future when doing repair. Temporality is key because it gives us the possibility of deciding over what repair can look like based on localized accounts of what was and what can be – understood as moments that can always be drawn upon even if they cannot exist in the present. The third point about repair being a deeply contextual project is fundamental for moving beyond a universalist approach which would be inherently contradictory to decolonial perspectives that look to the everyday and scale of the body. Finally, positioning repair as a political project of land, is what can unite hemispheric and transhemispheric ¹ accounts of repair. Land as a political project is complex and multi-scalar, including soil systems, spiritual and sacred beings, and ideas of embodiment – it can encompass a broad range of topics and plural political perspectives.

Different kinds of partnerships, reparations in the form of material redistribution and restructured power structures are part of what is possible if we deeply engage with repair. But first it is important to understand the political and everyday implications of how we come to apply these ideas of repair. Tianna highlights how environmental remediation could cause further displacement of the Black Community through eco-gentrification. As Tianna mentions, repair from this perspective is how settler colonial and racial capitalist states function. A settler colonial and racial capitalist state is incapable of understanding land-body pedagogy or the embodied ties to land and territory. And as such, this limits the radical potentiality of repair. The settler colonial and racial capitalist state will not question the historical origins of environmental degradation because that will inevitably require accountability. This is why Tianna’s emphasis on temporality is so important – because it engages with many imaginary ideas and visions present in desired spatial futurities that are simply incomprehensible to contemporary state structures. The work of repair is done by those who can imagine a different reality. As a scholar activist in the global south, I feel strongly connected to Tianna’s understanding of resistance and agency within Environmental Justice. Refusing displacement to environmental degradation in decolonial imaginary and political places such as Abya Yala ² o Améfrica Ladina ³ is at the heart of territorial struggles led by Indigenous and Black populations against extractive industry owned by the state or global north-based companies. I am hopeful in seeing relational understandings of what we in Abya Yala call re-existence (re-existencia) – or understanding resistance as praxis around the defense of life, a life that is not possible now but that we can imagine in territorial configurations. ⁴ Andrew’s contributions of colonial infrastructure as a beachhead that naturalize and deepen western white ideas of settler capitalism through the materiality of development and infrastructure is a key discussion within critiques of modernity in Latin America. The continuous inequality of colonialism that Andrew brings up with regards to two coal mines in Black Mesa represents common themes across the Americas regarding extractive industry. How are Indigenous populations to bring up repair when the present economic needs make extractive industry still attractive despite the harm to bodies and land. Precisely because the land is no longer recognizable after extractive industry as Andrew mentions, furthers the point about repair needing to be a process. These are the very structures that keep the global north and global south as binary and opposite ideas of lived space. So, I am wondering what is possible if we use repair to disrupt uneven global landscapes of power and coloniality. The scale of repair indeed must question borders, regions, and the global north-south divide.

The institutions built on stolen land from Indigenous populations, benefitted from enslaved peoples have upheld empire and affected not only those within Turtle Island but lies at the heart of the very creation of the global south(s). So, for scholars based outside the global north, the reach of repair is almost unimaginable. As I write this commentary, Yasunidos (an Ecuador based civil society movement) led and won an international campaign for a national referendum to protect all life from extractivist industry in one of the most biodiverse places on the planet – the Yasuni National park. I am thinking a lot of what repair will and has meant for Indigenous populations (some which are in voluntary isolation) but also for ecological movements in the global south. Intergenerational responsibility is cited as one of the Yasunidos movement’s key concepts. ⁵ Tianna mentions intergenerational connections to place to mean that people want social cohesion to be repaired while also having the political and economic stability to sustain collective life. The relational transformation that Tianna mentions could be an option for movements like those of Yasuni and others, and in some ways is apparent in the anti-dam movement in Dzogu India. As Mabel shows us, the anti-dam movement depicts how young activists are combining different desired imaginaries about their land based on ancestral and future livelihoods. Taking action for these activists means a critical revitalization of Lepcha heritage and looking at Dzongu not as disposable place but as a site of repair. In the postcolonial context of India’s Eastern Himalayas, coloniality makes itself present through large hydropower projects that mix environmental degradation and land dispossession under the logics of sustainable development and renewable energy which are now part of the climate change toolbox that is applied at a global scale. Reflections such as those proposed by Mabel are key in further challenging the greening of empire ⁶ that inevitably characterizes the global north’s response to climate change and ecological breakdown.

Sara mentions that there are parts of life and existence that can never be repaired. Andrew shows us how the earth is forever changed, and that restoration can be a form of colonial action. These are perhaps some of the most painful ideas to come across when we engage with repair. Collective and individual feelings are poignant around loss of life, and questions about emotional repair remain. But as Sara also mentions this means doing better from our specific capacities and positions. Not doing anything, is not an option. Sara proposes going beyond land acknowledgment to reorient the resources we have from the acts of repair, restoration, and redistribution from the perspective of land as pedagogy. Similarly, the epistemological shift that has occurred in Abya Yala primarily led by decolonial feminisms to engage with Indigenous worldviews and the work of critical feminist geography collectives in the global souths have engaged with concepts such as body-territory that are defined ultimately by land. Struggles for territory in other parts of the globe can tell us a lot about what has already worked or not with regards to repair. Partnerships at a global scale with regards to repair are essential.

Repair alongside terms and practices that have been present within critical geography such as decolonization and abolition work allow us to dig deeper. Now we have the terms to match our actions: remediation, recompense, repair, and reparative praxis. I’d like to emphasis the uneven responsibility to further understand and do the work of repair in all that we do, our discipline and home institutions and the ideas presented by Andrew, Tianna, Mabel, and Sara all show us ways forward. The emphasis is on doing and creating collective space, reflection, and praxis. This includes our institutions, departments, disciplines, and the AAG conferences, that in turn furthers our political responsibility to place. ⁷ The coalitions and unity that Tianna points to are new ways of creating repaired land relations that uplift Black life. Sara gives us concrete examples within our teaching as to what is possible when we do geography in our institutions from a focus of repair. Mabel points to the work being done by young anti-dam activists that combine different temporalities, spiritualities, and heritage to sustain sites of repair. And Andrew cautions us to beware of the limits of restoration and rehabilitation as liberal concepts at the service of extractive industry such as mining. Andrew reminds us to remember that bodies – not just land and territory – need repair. This is our everyday work in which we become accountable to our actions and not just to our theories.

It seems that how we come to define repair is of utmost importance. How do we keep repair radical enough and out of reach from liberal appropriations of the terms? How do we do this at multiple scales and simultaneously, while taking into account our uneven responsibility to repair? The emphasis on the collective over the individual becomes strikingly clear for how we decide to think about repair. How are accountability and repair connected particular across the global north and global souths? And finally do the decolonized spatial categories of space such as Turtle Island, Abya Yala, and Améfrica Ladina, as well as the embodied connections to space such as land-territory and body-territory (and the connections we make between these spatial imaginaries), facilitate repair from a place of autonomy and self-determination? I have attempted not only to connect the ideas between Sara, Tianna, Mabel, and Andrew but also engage them with some of the ways in which doing and defending embodied connections to territory in Abya Yala and Améfrica ladina are present, and in very in similar ways. I do this to push the AAG to become constantly uncomfortable with its position in the global north. But also to remind us about the global reach of our actions including repair. Repair as has been discussed by Sara, Tianna, Mabel, and Andrew is of utmost interest to global south-based scholars and activists. I urge the authors as well as readers of this text to move beyond Anglocentric understandings of repair. Standing alongside decolonization and abolition, repair must also undergo processes of translation and translocation.