Hemispheric Dialogues: Ruptures in the Colonial Legacies of the Americas

One of the central aims of this panel is to engage in conversations about the generative nexuses of colonial ruptures. In particular, we seek to address the inherent complexity and difficulty of engaging in practices of solidarity, while also stressing the importance of these kinds of endeavors in the context of colonial ruptures that make variable diasporas possible in the first place as such. For this reason, we treat colonial ruptures as the starting point for thinking through the possibilities of solidarity, immigration, and comparative philosophical projects; specifically, solidarities between and amongst subjects of oppressed groups. For the first panelist solidarity is implicated in the complexity and vastness of the geopolitical landscape of the Caribbean in general, and in Puerto Rico in particular. Such complexities necessitate particular strategies or modes of engaging in movements towards political emancipation. The paper seeks to interrogate the meaning of belonging in solidarity with others without appeal to state in the context of the Spanish Caribbean. The second paper articulates the ruptures that exist at the level of diaspora and uses an Inter-American dialogue in order to make clearer the ruptures that exist at the level of state and immigration. The final paper turns to the geopolitical context of the Americas, and the coinciding colonization of Indigenous and African peoples. This paper seeks to address how theorizations of processes of colonization can also be understood as engaging revealing the ruptures of colonization in spite of which solidarity is possible. In each geopolitical and historical context, we seek to engage dialogues that address vertical forms of oppression, between colonizers and colonized, in inter-American hemispheric dialogue. Moreover, collectively we argue that political, emancipatory movements require not only introspections of the methods through which emancipation is sought. In the words of Jodi Byrd in The Transit of Empire (2011), we turn our attention to what she calls the “horizontal” axis, or the multiplicity of oppressed groups, as the site through which such introspection can begin.