Dis/possession Afoot: American (Anthropological) Traditions of Anti‐Blackness and Coloniality

Abstract

In this essay, we call on linguistic anthropology to combat specific modes of White Supremacy (anti‐Blackness, anti‐Indigeneity, and anti‐Nativeness) by recognizing them as intimately central to the formations and formulations of our (sub)field in the US (and broader) context. We speak to and from particular legacies of dispossession and repossession engendered by two mated and enduring structural processes, settler colonialism (Simpson 2014) and racial slavery (Hartman 2008; Sharpe 2016; Mignolo 2006), which continue to animate the ubiquity of owning via the making of (linguistic) anthropological knowledge (owning through knowing and collecting) and via the knowing, collecting, and wearing of Black and Native people that helps make up everyday life in America (e.g., mascots, blackface, pop cultural caricatures, Halloween costumes, language appropriation, slave souvenirs, dream catchers and on and on (Meek 2006; 2020; Smalls and Davis forthcoming; Smalls forthcoming). Finally, we draw on Black and Native theorists to offer practices of solidarities and abolition (Byrd 2019; Harris 2019; Latty et. al 2016; Leroy 2016; King 2019; Tuck et. al 2014; Morrill et al. 2016).

White Supremacy and the Making of Anthropology

“…There have been recent calls to disrupt white supremacy in anthropology through what Clarke (2022) calls a "radical humanism," which departs from the white universalist humanisms of previous centuries to adopt a new "politics of engagement" (p. 33). Anthropologists have argued that we must be attuned to the role of anti-Blackness as constitutive of systems of white supremacy (Burton 2015, Davis & Smalls 2021, Garth 2021, King et al 2020. There have also been different approaches to anti-Blackness, however.…”

“…There have also been different approaches to anti-Blackness, however. Whereas some claim to move beyond an analytic of white supremacy to foreground instead the analytic of anti-Blackness (Vargas & Jung 2021), others argue that anti-Blackness is an equally important analytic concept that runs alongside and in relation to white supremacy (Pierre 2013, Smalls et al 2021.…”

Language and Race: Settler Colonial Consequences and Epistemic Disruptions

“…Colonial ideologies that initially marked Blacks and Native Americans as foundationally different humans than White middle-class anthropologists continue to reinscribe racial markedness (Davis & Smalls 2021, Mignolo 2015. Noting colonial and postcolonial racial hierarchies still prevalent in the anthropological study of "primitive" magic, Jones (2017, p. 162) contends, "Euro-Americans came to construe intellectual aptitudes for rationality and reflexivity as their own distinctive historical achievements."…”