Moving away from damage-centered research and confronting sovereignty

In our meeting on October 27th Audrey presented the text “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities”, written by Eve Tuck. Here Tuck is calling for a moratorium in a type of researched that she identifies as “damage-centered” that defines communities by their experiences of pain and oppression. As Tuck says, “In damaged-centered research, one of the major activities is to document pain or loss in an individual, community and tribe.” (p.413) Even though they situate their analysis in the history of exploitation of those communities, Tuck observes that “the danger in damage-centered research it is a pathologizing approach in which the oppression singularly defines a community.” (p.413). One alternative Tuck presents is a research that is based on desire rather than damage. Desire-based research allow to account for the complexities and contradiction of communities. While it recognizes the pain and loss of those communities, it accounts for the hopes, visions and humanity of the lives of the people. In doing so, it sees them more than broken people. 

Kate opened the discussion with a question about the idea of sovereignty in the indigenous context. At the end of the text Tuck introduce the centrality of the idea of sovereignty within the desire-based framework. 

"We can practice our sovereignty within a framework of desire but cannot within a damage framework. By this I mean that a framework of desire recognizes our sovereignty as a core element of our being and meaning making, a damage framework excludes this recognition." (p.423)

We spent time trying to flesh out the idea of sovereignty, how do we think about it beyond Modern political narratives, and the difficulty of thinking about sovereignty without the logics of coloniality. One of the problems we identify with the idea of sovereignty is how it has been attached to ideas of the modern State, absolute authority, and ownership.  We discussed about the difficulty of understanding the concept in different contexts in relation to the US indigenous context: in the case of India, in the Palestine-Israel conflict, and in Irish history. 

There are some differences to consider in the Indigenous context. First, sovereignty is tied to the land, but not in the logic of ownership, but rather in a form of relational convivence with land, that could be understood with an idea of stewardship. Sovereignty manifests itself through the land, practices, bodies, stories and traditions. Second, we should think sovereignty in regard to the communities, as a defense of a way of living of those who belong to the community. In this sense, sovereignty can be understood as a way to assert and affirm community and culture. Here one should be aware the inadequacy of modern concepts of the individual, but as Tuck mentions, we should think more of the contradictions and multiplicity of ‘complex personhood’. Third, sovereignty and survival are strongly linked. Due to the history of settler colonialism, claims to sovereignty can be understood as a defense for the survival of the communities and tribes. There are more complexities about the relationship between members of a tribe, the belonging to a community, the recognition of tribes as nations and the relationship between different tribes in the context of US Native American history that are beyond the scope of this summary. 

Some of the challenges we faced with this discussion is recognizing the pervasiveness of modern European concepts to think the realities of different colonial communities and experiences. We talk of this difficulty as not only a linguistic and philosophical one, but also as a historical and geopolitical one. There are challenges when we attempt to apply ideas such as sovereignty in context with different colonial histories, political, economic, geographical, linguistic and cultural differences. Puja called to be careful with the problems of ‘incommensurability’, and the limitations/possibilities of reimagining a concept as sovereignty. In some contexts, such as possibly Kashmir, it might not be productive to apply a concept as sovereignty. Is important then to attend issues in their historic, cultural, economic, and geopolitical specificity. 

Lastly, we closed with questions about solidarity that takes seriously the need to move beyond damage-centered frameworks. How is it possible to build solidarity that is not based on injury? Beyond a common wound? We thought about the possibilities of coming together in our aspirations, desires, and longings. We opened the possibility of building solidarity with the desire to open new possibilities and doing a productive work of reimagination….