Embodying Peripheries
From Firenze University Press Book
Giuseppina Forte, University of California Berkeley
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Kuan Hwa, University of California Berkeley
“horše t·uuxi! Native American Student Development recognizes that UC Berkeley sits on the territory of xucˇyun (Huichin), the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona Band.
We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has benefited, and continues to benefit, from the use and occupation of this land, since the institution’s founding in 1868.
Consistent with our values of community, inclusion and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university’s relationship to Native peoples. As members of the Berkeley community, it is vitally important that we not only recognize the history of the land on which we stand, but also, we recognize that the Muwekma Ohlone people are alive and flourishing members of the Berkeley and broader Bay Area communities today.
This acknowledgement was co-created with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and Native American Student Development and is a living document.”1
Conventionally deemed “peripheral,” not central, the people of the “peripheries” are yet the protagonists of alternative modernities, as confirmed by our labor, protest, survival, and bodily practices that take place on the margins of urban centers. Liminality of the edges affords transformation of both people and the city proper, and sensorimotor embodiment is the process and praxis for part of this change. Embodying Peripheries engages the ways in which subjectivities differ across urban space, in which our race(s), class(es), abilities, roles, and gender(s)/sexualities are not accidental features of the cosmopolites, but historically effected and primary components of inequity. Inequity is mirrored within city demographics and struggles, such as in Northern California’s bay area, but also within the larger purview of the urban distribution of the planet, as current global inequalities iterate the same inequalities created by the injury of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and Eurocentric heteronormative patriarchy of the last 500 years (Moore et al, 2019; Go, 2016; Lugones, 2010).
National economies, anti-blackness, and global capital are intertwined in this contemporary condition we all (all of us, really) inherit within our own bodies as our very conditions of material life, since all bodies and labor bear the intergenerational imprint of modernist statecraft and historically elaborated notions of property, hierarchy, and belonging or exclusion (Mbembe, 2017). At the local level, partitions of exclusion often intersect with national histories of conflict, and economic globalization. In some instances across the global centers of the world, economic policies concretize ideologies of exclusion, using the nation-state and legal statuses as the technologies through which peripheralization is concretized and enacted onto the bodies of citizen-subjects and subjects who are decidedly not citizens. Brenda Yeoh has shown that “the embodied urban experiences of unmoored transnational lowly paid migrant workers whose navigation of transnational routes to and from ‘home’ and ‘host’ (the city) are not inevitable but perpetuated by the city’s disciplinary policies of ‘use and discard’. For example, policies ensuring the transience of female foreign domestic worker bodies in cities such as Singapore, in turn, reinforce the permanence of transnational mobilities among unskilled labor migrants”(Yeoh, 2006). So too in this volume, it is possible to see that the state — be it USA, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, India, Nigeria, or others, plays a constitutive role in development policies and attribution of citizen rights or resources that can affect the embodied lives and practices of those within, or excluded from, their borders. The philosopher Martin Heidegger called the fact that we cannot choose the reality or human existence into which we were birthed geworfenheit, the “thrownness” of our being-in-the-world (Heidegger, 1972). The sociogeny of embodied life is complex, since places have their own histories and dynamics; from our thrownness it is up to us how to move forward in a glocal present that is continuously reshaped by globalizing processes that are not natural and therefore can be reimagined (Fanon, 1967).
DOI: 10.36253/978–88–5518–661–2
Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/catalogue/embodying-peripheries/7348
