Description
Relationality is rightly receiving attention in the study of world politics, in attempts to exceed its historical reduction to anarchy or regulated forms of hierarchy. In privileging relational over conflictual frames, however, current treatments tend to overlook its conditions of emergence within extractive structures of coloniality and capital and its appositionality with violence. Indeed, one might argue that relationality is currently, uncritically, positioned as the very antidote to coloniality and capital or at least as reparative of its worst harms. This paper turns to Sylvia Wynter’s early work to probe the emergence of a ‘disqualified’ relationality emerging on the provision grounds (known as ‘plots’) where slaves grew food for subsistence and developed forms of black ‘underlife’ in the shadow of colonial Atlantic plantations. The paper examines relationality as counter-systemic praxis, yet one that emerges within transatlantic material relations marked by grammars of coloniality and capital and in the midst of palimpsestic -semiotic, physical and affective --violence. The afterlives and futurities of this disqualified relationality, a discussion of present-day state practices that criminalise the institution of ‘family land’ shows, continue to be marked by this ambivalence through the ongoing reproduction of ‘self-sufficient’ Black labour with uncertain access to land.
