Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1353/cro.2024.a963639

Abstract

Perkinson discusses the origins of colonialism and white supremacy, tracing it back to the relationship with the land. He explores the shift from pastoral-nomad lifeways to city-state agriculture, leading to a myth of cultivar sovereignty and Christian supremacy. He argues that white supremacy is rooted in a myth of mastery over the non-human world, with a focus on urban-centered control of land. He highlights the resistance of pastoral nomad traditions against city-state coercion and the importance of a respectful land-based symbiosis. Furthermore, he stresses that the deep historical taproot of white supremacy implies a particular relationship to land centered in cities, supported by farmlands, and ultimately leading to the enslavement of both land and non-humankind.

INTRODUCTION

beginning in the middle ("east")

I begin in the middle—as in fact we all do all the time. But today it has special cache—at least in connection with one particular direction, as in "Middle-East." In the main, I want to talk about colonialism in history. But that demands recognizing its most blatant spectacle "feeding" the capitalist machine today. So yes, the Mid-East, in all of our news feeds. But of course, on a round planet, we ultimately fool ourselves if we think there really is such a thing as "east" that is distinct from "west." Go far enough east on a big ball called a planet and one is in the far west. Go a bit further and one is suddenly kissing, if not crawling up, one's own rear end. But then there is the Sun, which in a galaxy spiraled out from its hot-fusion generation, does indeed admit a recurrent appearance in a particular direction on a slowly oscillating horizon, in relation to whatever is one's place of standing on the rocky crust thrown out over millions of years from the molten iron core churning out heat to the surface, at least on our own astonishing orb of ocean that we mislabel "Earth."

We probably should have called it "Water," given that 71% of its surface is actually just that.1 We dwell on a rotating rotundity of salt-sea that very early-on was apparently "embraced intimately" by a careening lover called Theia, who gave up part of Her substance to Her consort,2 knocking the latter forever after off-balance3 and into a wobbling dizziness, as in any romance of repute, while Herself taking up companionable distance as the Sun's alter-presence, creating seasons and moods—summer-maid "Bridget" and winter-crone "Cailleach" in ancient Celtic indigenous rendering, way back in my own ancestry. Ever since, She has massaged Her lover's skin-surface in a continuous back-and-forth we scientifically call "tides," as She guides all surface life with Her mysterious and alluring night-shine in what can only be called the most steadfast and long-enduring "marriage" this planet has ever witnessed. [End Page 501]

And on such a rotating wet ball as we now minutely inhabit, we could well serenade "east" as the directional birthplace of a haunt of dance continually samba-ed by ancestor Sun and lover Moon—as in fact most indigenous peoples have not only faithfully done for eons but spun into magnificent story-myths and piquant ritual-rites whose intention was to honor and remember and "feed" such ancestral "Presences." And it is just such a four-directional depth and land-sovereignty kith-and-kin attention that I wish to honor in this writing.

But of course, we now inhabit a monstrosity of rapine extraction and gluttonous consumption disingenuously dissimulated as "the global economy" that has no regard for such wild gifts of limit and recognition and instruction and whose white Western chatter of deluded self-importance only offers "east" in its latest headline as a moniker accompanied by the term "middle" to denote a terrain of on-going predation that takes us immediately to the heart of our subject. Colonial aggression on land and on its most attentive and respectful human dwellers has been continuous for nigh on 5,000 years and, at this particular moment, "explodes" both literally and graphically in socially-mediated blood-and-gore news frenzies in relationship to—among others—the very Palestinian Bedouin herders who will emerge as witnesses to a possibility otherwise in the historical sketch offered.

And already you can see that my imagination—as indeed both my heart and my rage—run wild beyond the incarcerating membrane of sounds we typically call "words." (And just a quick footnote, I will use the word "wild" here not in its Western colonial presumption of "natural" settings devoid of humans, but in an older sense of "undomesticated, untamed"—including human communities not yet "reduced" to coercive labor for production, but still imbedded symbiotically...