BAR Book Forum: Macarena Gómez-Barris’s “Beyond the Pink Tide“and Harsha Walia’s “Undoing Border Imperialism”
Our authors explore “how to live decolonial thought-action” and imagine a world without borders.
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer a few questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Macarena Gómez-Barrisand Harsha Walia. Gómez-Barrisis Chairperson of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute.Her book is Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas.Walia is a South Asian activist, writer, and popular educator rooted in migrant justice, Indigenous solidarity, Palestinian liberation, antiracist, feminist, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist movements and communities for over a decade. Her book is Undoing Border Imperialism.
Macarena Gómez-Barris’s Beyond the Pink Tide
“We have to be less invested in making better nation-states and more invested in creating alternative political worlds.”
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Macarena Gómez-Barris: Beyond the Pink Tide represents my effort to think beyond the confining paradigm of liberal democracy that continues to deliver us to authoritarian and patriarchal rule. It is written for students, activists, educators, and artists during increasingly dangerous times, asking us to redefine politics as not bound to the normativity of the nation state.
I focus on the recent experiences of the ebbs and flows between Left and Right governments in the Americas. I show how, regardless of who is in power, youth, queer / trans people, trans-migrants, activists, and Indigenous and Black peoples are continually submerged by the state. Yet, the book retains a critically hopeful tone that lifts up otros mundos or other worlds that are made in the undercurrents of violence.
Through close analysis of student activisms, queer (cuir) and trans aesthetics, Indigenous cultural memory, and art that is made in the shadows of borders, I analyze how we have to be less invested in making better nation-states and more invested in creating alternative political worlds. This is the artful practice of Transnational Americas study and how to live decolonial thought-action.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
Many activists and community organizers of color work with the assumption that the dynamics taking place under the apparatus of the US racial state extend far beyond its borders. And, much has been learned from the revolutionary experiences and the ferocity of counter-revolutions throughout the Americas. However, more exchange, dialogue, and theory is needed across the hemisphere and with the Global South, both to avoid the pitfalls of the past and to shore up our critical past-present-future resources.
“More exchange, dialogue, and theory is needed across the hemisphere and with the Global South.”
My work brings to the foreground the collective solutions, responses, and criticalities that refuse the logics of liberal democracy. For instance, I analyze the lyrics and routes of political exchange in “Somos Sur,” the rap musical collaboration by Chilean mestiza Ana Tijoux and Palestinian DJ Shadia Mansour. Such sonic and diasporic circuits use the platform of Black musical dissidence to remember Third World / Global South solidarities. The song also importantly condemns Palestinian occupation and the occupation of Mapuche Indigenous territories in South America by blending musical and visual elements from both political worlds.
Beyond the Pink Tide is dedicated to showing how these imaginings teach us to think and relate beyond the dispossessions of liberal democracy.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
We must unlearn, unthink, and un-tie the knot of liberal democracy and move beyond the pink tide (the metaphor I use throughout the book for the turn to progressive governments in the Americas from the 1990s forward). Liberal democracy has been normalized as having inherent value, yet it is a system and logic steeped in theft, enslavement, inequality, and capitalist expansion that accumulates for the few, and dispossesses the many.
We assume that Leftist or progressive leaders will do a better job and outrun the selfish ideologies of conservativism, and they sometimes do. However, states of all political persuasions have proven to be adept at expanding securitization, neoliberalism, xenophobia, corruption, and occupation, with particular intensity over the last forty years. In the era of capitalism’s acceleration, liberal democracy has become a completely bankrupt idea. Thus, we must unlearn it in order to make room for the worlds already in motion, those worlds that teem and sway in the undercurrents.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
For this particular book, I thought a lot about the work of Hannah Arendt, even though I’m not sure I even cite her or find all of the work compelling. Still Arendt’s work was a useful counterpoint to my thinking exercise on the Americas. Our own history of authoritarianisms often gets written out of world theories that instead periodize state violence through the European modern period of fascist totalitarianism. I insist on the question, what about coloniality? In this sense, the work of Anibal Quijano is always essential as is the great tradition of Latin American radical critique including the work of Paolo Freire, Sylvia Rivera-Cusicanqui, Rigoberta Menchú, Pedro Lemebel, Nelly Richard, Arturo Escobar, Mabel Moraña, John Beverley, Diamela Eltit, the poetry of Raul Zurita, and so many others. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have a lot to say on debt that is directly transferrable to Latin America. This is one of the reasons we decided to translate parts of The Undercommons into Portuguese in the journal e-misferica when it first came out.
“I insist on the question, what about coloniality?”
The work of Chicana and Queer Feminisms, including Gloria Anzaldúa and Tijuana-based scholar Sayak Valencia, Emma Pérez, and my mentor Rosa Linda Fregoso, and my student Gretel Vera-Rosas all helped me think through the long shadow of the US/Mexico border and the problem of feminicide in frontier and gory capitalism. The work of cultural critique by Licia Fiol-Matta, Amy Sara Carroll, Jodi Byrd, Julia Bryan Wilson and Amelia Jones is simply stellar. And, the art work of Post-Commodity, Patricio Guzmán, Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, Regina José Galindo, Teresa Margolles, and so many others have deeply influenced my intellectual perspective in this particular book.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
This is a great question. I think artists, activists, and scholars are particularly well positioned to imagine and design new worlds alongside all those who live in the undercurrents of dominant society. This book presents the living present of these otros mundos and offers a way to think beyond the limited framework of the nation-state. And, it asks us to see the violent histories of dispossession and occupation for what they are. We have to seek equitable, horizontal, affiliative, trans-feminist, radical, Indigenous and Black centered, historically conscious, decolonial, and multidirectional transformation – now!
Harsha Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism
“Borders allow for the free flow of capital, while limiting the movement of those whom capital exploits.”
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Harsha Walia: We are inundated with information on the ‘crises’ at borders -- whether it’s detained children in the US or migrant deaths in the Mediterranean. These crises are often portrayed in two related ways -- one is domestic and the other is humanitarian. But the U.S-Mexico border, the Mediterranean, and Manus Island are not disconnected localized struggles -- of course they have their local contours -- but these are structures and policies of racialized exclusion and labor exploitation that are shared across jurisdictions. Similarly, the rise of right-wing xenophobia and fascism that is accompanying the “global migrant crises” is not unique to Trump -- we must look at what is happening with the escalation of right-wing nationalist parties in Europe and anti-Dalit anti-Muslim Hindutva in India, for example.
So thinking, alternatively, through border imperialism shifts us to an expansive transnational understanding. Rather than conceiving of immigration as a domestic policy issue to be managed “better” by the state, the lens of border imperialism focuses the conversation on the systemic structuring of global displacement and migration through and in collusion with capitalism, colonial empire, state building, and gendered racialized hierarchies of oppression.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
The book is primarily in service to grassroots organizers who want to effectively analyze and mobilize around migrant issues in their communities. I hope for immigrant rights and allied community organizers to not fall for the model minority trap of discussing immigration -- and migrant themselves -- as morally “good” or “bad.”
We must, instead, link and forefront migration (the vast majority of which is not professional visa holders or other privileged forms of immigration) as driven by root causes of dispossession and displacement. We don’t have a border crisis; we have a displacement crisis! People are being forced off their lands as a result of war or occupation, or impoverishment from economic imperialism, or climate change (there will be estimated 300 million climate refugees in the next three decades). This challenges us to move from liberal, charitable, humanitarian responses about ‘treating immigrants better’ towards a politics of justice and international solidarity: “we are here because you are there.”
“We don’t have a border crisis; we have a displacement crisis!”
This, by extension, also means that the violence of the immigration system cannot simply be reformed because migrant justice requires the dismantling of racial capitalism, imperialism and oppression. Violence at the border cannot be mitigated with different border policies; borders are violence, and borders of powerful nation-states are functioning as they are intended to: to allow for the free flow of capital, while limiting the movement of those whom capital exploits.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
I hope we can unlearn that immigration is somehow separate from the struggles of Indigenous and Black communities. Immigrant exclusion is possible because of the founding violences of settler-colonialism and slavery, and when we see how these systems are bound up in each other -- albeit, differently -- then we turn from single-issue campaigning to see how struggles are interconnected. The rhetoric of “we are all immigrants” is particularly offensive to the presence and 500-year struggle of Indigenous nations whose lands we are on. “Misrepresenting the process of European colonization of North America, making everyone an immigrant, serves to preserve the ‘official story’ of a mostly benign and benevolent USA, and to mask the fact that the pre-US independence settlers, were, well, settlers,” recounts Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. The invocation of “no one is illegal on stolen land” is a more necessary and urgent call to think through migrant rights and responsibilities to these lands in order to strive for liberation.
“The erasure of Black migrants is part of the ideology of anti-Blackness that must be unlearnt.”
I don’t think the book addresses this thoroughly, but one foundational error that we as non-Black immigrant rights organizers in North America have made and been rightfully challenged on is to frame immigration as an issue primarily impacting Brown communities. And I think this erasure of Black migrants is part of the ideology of anti-Blackness that must be unlearnt. The Black Alliance for Just Immigration writes, “When the intersections of migration, race, and gender are considered, Black migrant women and girls remain de-centered and invisibilized.” With respect to immigrant rights organizing, challenging anti-Blackness requires us -- amongst other things -- to refuse proximity to whiteness and the state to distinguish good vs. bad immigrants, and to reject all forms of criminalization and state violence. As Saidiya Hartman reminds us, abolition is the “daily practice of refusal and waywardness and care in the space of captivity, enclosure, and incarceration.”
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
I think if we articulate borders not just as geographic sites but also as structures of affect, then we see the ways in which many hierarchical stratifications in our world are essentially bordering practices. Edward Said writes, “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imagining.” Private property under capitalism is ultimately about capturing and bordering the common use of lands, just as military checkpoints, prison walls, gated communities in gentrified neighborhoods, secured corporate boardrooms, and gendered bathrooms are bordering practices that delineate zones of invisibility, exclusion, and death. Can we, then, dream of worlds without these cages, militaries, borders, reserves, toxic industries, corporations, and sweatshops? Can we imagine worlds where we have self-determination over our own bodies, lives, cultures, lands, and labor? Imagining a multitude of these new worlds is undoing all these borders and hierarchies, and I think the penultimate expression of collective care.
Roberto Sirventis Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for the Political Theology Network. He’s currently writing a book with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong called American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.
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