Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”

Abstract

This essay offers a critical analysis of the metaphysical and methodological presuppositions of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”. While Tuck and Yang position settler colonial spatiality as structured by a settler‐native‐slave triad, we argue that their critique of metaphor entails the collapse of the triad into a settler‐native dyad, the reduction of slavery to forced labour, and a division between the material and the symbolic that forecloses not only an analysis of slavery, but also the constitution of settler colonialism itself. Through an immanent critique of “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” we identify what animates their critique of metaphor, and drawing on scholarship in Black studies, we offer an alternative theorisation of slavery and settler colonialism.

Dismantling white supremacy in environmental studies and sciences: an argument for anti-racist and decolonizing pedagogies

“…Indeed, urban environmental topics and the social forces that drive environmental concern could helpfully inform a more conscientious approach to environmentalism as a movement that is geographically cross-cutting. Carolyn Finney (2014) sums up the problem of Black voices being omitted from the mainstream narrations of the environmental movement as having a long historical origin story, in which the view of Black people as less than human precluded their voices and their engagement from many of the spaces, intellectual and otherwise, where European-American voices held sway. In similar tension, recent scholarship on Black ecologies has formulated "an alternative epistemic entry point for historicizing and interrupting mounting ecological crisis" drawing upon Nathan Hare's work (1970) to highlight the vulnerabilities that are also deeply tied to the social, economic, and ecological predicaments facing the Black community (Roane and Hoseby 2019).…”

Introduction: Computing in/from the South

“…As Marika Cifor, Patricia Garia, T. L. Cowan, Jasmine Rault, Tonia Sutherland, Anita Say Chan, Jennifer Rode, Anna Lauren Hoffman, Niloufar Salehi, and Lisa Nakamura, the collective authors of the "Feminist Data Manifest-No" assert, such projects "commit to taking back control over the ways we behave, love, and engage with data and its technologies" (n.d). 1 Yet, as Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang remind us, these projects are messy and involve "strategic and contingent collaborations" rather than lasting and simplifying solidarities (Tuck & Yang, 2012, 28;Garba & Sorentino, 2020). Whose vision of decoloniality matters when describing the potentialities and limits of these developments (Lyons et al, 2017;Raval, 2019)?…”

More than just remembering the 100th anniversary of (White) women’s suffrage: vote to rematriate the land

“…One problem Tuck and Yang (2012), point out is that the proportion of settler colonialists to Indigenous people in North America is incommensurable, but they include all decedents of enslaved people, Latinx, and voluntary migrants as settlers. However, Garba and Sorentino (2020) criticize this distrust of metaphor because they argue that slavery is a metaphor and that abolition as an idea threatens the underpinning of global capitalism. Both seem to agree that the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty as well as abolition, the end of enslavement and its contemporary incarnations (e.g., mass incarceration, redlining, military industrial complex), means the end of the world, or at least the end of an epoch of history.…”