Romy Opperman

(please email me if you don't have access to the article)

The reception of the work of Charles Mills has mostly been
restricted to responses to Rawls, social epistemology, and Black
feminist critique. All overlook the sustained analysis of space, race,
and waste, which this article argues is its most valuable contribution
for critical philosophy of race today. This article claims that
that in addition to “cognitive resistance,” an analysis of Black trash
suggests intimate ecological resistance as a fundamental aspect of
the political self-assertion of racialized “subpersons,” and argues
that this challenges any qualified fidelity to the basic tenets of liberal
political philosophy. Focusing on waste from the pig industry
in North Carolina, the article returns to Mills’s essay “Black Trash”
to demonstrate the importance of ecology to the racial contract and
its renewed relevance. Building on Shatema Threadcraft’s critical
engagement with Mills in Intimate Justice, the article concludes
that a Black trash feminist approach that foregrounds intimate
matters is necessary for ecological resistance.

Nuclear has long been debated in terms of intergenerational justice. The rise of nuclear environmentalism that presents nuclear energy as the solution to decarbonize and thus meet the challenges of climate change, however, raises a fresh and urgent set of questions concerning justice between and among generations. I argue that to work through the questions around nuclear in the age of climate change we need to begin with an anti-colonial feminist lens. Such an approach foregrounds reproductive justice concerns to critically examine the assumptions in nuclear environmentalism and offers an alternative perspective on the inter-and intra-generational stakes of nuclear as a climate solution.

Do planetary ethics require us to reappraise the concept of racism? And what does philosophical attention to racism illuminate about the planetary?

The apparent neutrality of the planet can be used to cloak, perpetuate, and even deepen racism. At its worst, those who are racialized as non-white are conceived as problems for planetary flourishing. Examples abound: from spectacular eco-fascism to prevalent eugenicist discourses around climate migration and overpopulation, to the common belief that the issues raised by environmental and climate justice effectively delay and distract from the real and urgent work of dealing with climate change. Yet, racism is best understood as an inter-species, inter-elemental affair, a mode of relationality, and a hierarchical organization of the living and the non-living, bound up with planetary processes and formations, and, indeed, with the concept and study of the planet itself. In short, it is no distraction.

My original intentions for this post were complicated by three visitations.[1] They came in the form of active, disruptive pasts that I did not consciously or voluntarily summon, and in possession by memories, that neither fully belonged to myself nor to others. These visitations raised a host of personal, pedagogical, and philosophical concerns for me, calling me to think through my own relationship to race, to hauntings, and the obligation to counter institutional and historical-political forgetting.

(This post is part of our new series on Black Ecologies edited by Justin Hosbey, Leah Kaplan, & J.T. Roane - see link)
"By radical Black ecology I mean Black thinkers, movements, and communities that have refused the ruse that capitalism, the state, heteropatriarchy, and the domination of more-than-human nature are the means and ends of justice and freedom. In this post I focus on the period in which the movement for Environmental Justice (EJ) began to take shape, roughly from 1968 to the mid 80’s. My interest here is not in EJ itself, but in the contemporaneous undercurrents of radical, womanist Black ecology. What is striking about this period of radical Black ecology is how it couples analyses (and experiences) of the brutal violence and power of “the system,” with a wild and palpable sense of potentiality. Returning to it, we get the sense that “another world is possible,” and indeed is already being ushered in as a result of the efforts of these thinkers and movements, the struggles of ancestors, and through solidarity with other oppressed peoples around the globe. Putting this past in a constellation with our present prompts us to reflect on the extent to which our political horizon has become constricted. Yet, at the same time as it reveals the limited and contingent nature of what has come to delineate the possible for us, it also affirms struggles and desires for what we cannot yet name, but know that we need."

This article contributes to recent work that has turned to Frantz
Fanon for a socio-ecological approach to racism and colonization. Its intervention is to take up Fanon to critically reflect on
the concept and use of “environmental racism,” one of the few
approaches we have to hand to interrogate the place of race
in discussions of the Anthropocene. It shows that a Fanonian
approach to environmental racism integrates a socio-ecological
perspective with decolonial political phenomenology. It uses
this position as a foundation to rethink environmental racism, reframing the problem in terms of racist environments.
Environmental racism can then be understood as a symptom of
a more fundamental problem with modes of experiencing and
organizing the world.

Presentation at the Black Feminist Ecologies Salon, Wesleyan University
This virtual salon was organized and moderated by Garry Bertholf (African American Studies, Wesleyan University) and sponsored by the African American Studies Department and the Center for African American Studies at Wesleyan. The salon featured presentations by (in order): Chelsea Mikael Frazier (Literatures in English, Cornell University); Teona Williams (History and African American Studies, Yale University); Romy Opperman (Philosophy, The New School for Social Research); Allison Puglisi (American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University); J.T. Roane (African and African American Studies, Arizona State University); Christy Hyman (Geography, University of Nebraska at Lincoln); Celeste Henery (African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin); and Danielle Purifoy (Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Wesleyan University President Michael Roth provided welcoming remarks, while African American Studies majors Jada Reid ’22 and Dachelle Washington ’22 shared their respective poetic and musical gifts with the audience. This event took place via Zoom on Wednesday 24 February 2021

With Tao Leigh Goffe, Courtney Desiree Morris, Deva Woodly, and Romy Opperman - In this roundtable a circle of feminist scholars/creative practitioners come together to honor the lifeworks of M. Jacqui Alexander and Sylvia Wynter. Our conversation is inspired by the centrality of practice and form, ritual and ceremony, labor and community in Alexander and Wynter’s work. Together, we will explore the forms and potentialities of feminist pedagogy and study today by reflecting on these themes in our own work and in the work of our Black feminist elders. We thereby aim to begin to challenge the hierarchization of knowledge and violence of institutional power that Alexander experienced during her time as a long-term visiting professor of women’s studies at The New School, and to honor the gift of her legacy by sharing it with others. We hope that the session is itself a ceremony of sorts that might enable the Gender & Sexualities Studies Institute to begin differently than its historical antecedents.

This paper begins with Matthias Frisch’s central claim in Taking Turns with the Earth: Phenomenology, Deconstruction and Intergenerational Justice, that (climate) “justice should be thought in such a way as to take the temporal connectedness of human lives across birth and death centrally into account” (7). I show that Black feminist and womanist thought harbors important resources for this task. I argue that this body of work both enriches and complicates the account of generational time, reproduction, natality, and spectral lifedeath that Frisch develops through his engagement with phenomenology and deconstruction. My central claim is that Black feminist and womanist thought offers another tradition which we should think with to continue Frisch’s task of remedying the underdeveloped sense of social ontology that tends to limit work in climate ethics and justice. Turning to Black feminism and womanism also counters the lack of sustained philosophical attention to race, racism, gender and sexuality in climate literature and policy. My position is that Black feminist and womanist thought has important implications for how we conceptualize social ontology, and thus intergenerational time and justice.
With this end in mind, I attend to how the work of figures such as Alice Walker, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Christina Sharpe, and Sylvia Wynter, combines a profound rethinking of relations with the earth, with distinctive approach to intergenerational time, justice, and social ontology. I focus on Black feminist and womanist treatments of gendered and racialized regimes of reproduction and the potential of the distinctive philosophy of history that emerges from it for rethinking intergenerational time and justice. I understand this approach as a critical history of the present and work of counter-memory which aims to resuscitate and channel the dead, both known and unknowable, and thus to honor ethical obligations to ancestors in the service of present and future. In this tradition, past and present are not thought as radically discontinuous from the past but as animated by it. I contend that this provides another vantage point to think the spectral hauntology that Frisch takes from Derrida in order to address the presentism and human exceptionalism of framings of climate change in terms of democracy and justice.
In the first section I give a brief account of Frisch’s position, focusing on his proposal of a model of “Double Turn Taking among Generations and with the Earth,” agreeing with his claim that we must think our ethical obligations in regards to climate change in a way that reflects certain features of Derrida’s “hauntology,” where (human) life is understood as nonsynchronous with itself, haunted by spectres of the dead, the past and more-than-human. The second section turns to the work of key Black feminist and womanist thinkers, showing how they engage similar questions of reproduction, intergenerational time, and the aporia of human and animal, living and dead, in a way that amounts to something akin to a “hauntology,” but one that is rooted in a specific positionality and history, namely, that of black women in slavery and its afterlives. The third concluding section lays out some implications of this for Frisch’s account, indicating pathways for future work towards black feminist and womanist climate justice.

Presented at IAEP (International Association of Environmental Philosophy) 2nd November, 2019.
This paper focuses on the erasure of issues of freedom and domination from prevailing liberal approaches to environmental justice. Drawing on the work of Val Plumwod, Frantz Fanon, and Ghassan Hage, I argue that environmental racism violently constricts and makes unlivable forms of life not premised on the domination and exploitation of human and more-than-human worlds. Critically departing from distributive frameworks of environmental justice, I give a sketch of four features of ecological freedom, beginning to flesh this out by focusing on Andreas Malm’s work on “maroon ecology”, in order to reflect on struggles in the present.

Presented at SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existentialist Philosophy) November 1st 2019. This paper tracks the influence of Walter Benjamin in Lose Your Mother, outlining what I am calling Saidiya Hartman’s natural history. I see her articulation of natural history as a practice of witnessing and counter-memory, which critically interprets apparently meaningless and “base matter”, in an attempt to do justice to the detritus of history. Through this lens waste, ruins, and barren landscapes become a repository of subjugated memory through which we might reactivate fragments of the past in and against the present.

Paper presented at "Racial Disposability and Cultures of Resistance," October 10-12, 2019.
The domestic worker in early twentieth-century United States and the cleaner of the spaces of neoliberal capitalism are figures with which Saidiya Hartman and Françoise Vergès think the specificity of Black women’s labor. This paper brings their work into dialogue, arguing that it makes clear the need to consider reproductive and environmental justice together, in a way that exceeds liberal frames of justice. Both Hartman and Vergès situate these forms of socially reproductive labor in terms of the long history of a racialized and gendered logic of disposability, in which Black women’s reproductive labor was, and continues to be, of central strategic and ideological importance for racial capitalism. This logic ensures that the indispensable work of “the belly of the world” and “those who clean the world” is invisible and unacknowledged, and those who perform it are treated as waste (Hartman 2016; Vergès 2019). Vergès considers not only the poverty and oppression entailed by Black women’s labor in the “racial capitalocene”, but also the weathering effects of chronic exhaustion and stress, and the body burden of quotidian exposure to toxic chemicals and waste. Reflecting on the duration and diffuse effects of these conditions, I understand the womb as a site in which the environmental injustice of racialized and gendered labor becomes reproductive injustice. I close by comparing Vergès’ consideration of the 2017 ONET strike in France, and Hartman’s engagement with the general strike; asking how have and might Black women challenge the transnational and generational logic of disposability.

My thesis is that coloniality works as a propertizing force, transforming peoples, knowledges, and ecologies into property or property-to-be, subjectifying those treated as property to know the world and themselves in these terms. This propertization requires the systematic reproduction and maintenance of an epistemic blindness to what is being destroyed in the process. Anchoring my analysis in Ciro Guerra’s film Embrace of the Serpent,  I argue that coloniality as propertization is a kind of world destruction. What I want to highlight by saying this is that concepts such as expropriation or exploitation are insufficient to grasp what is at work in coloniality. I focus on two intertwined processes animated by the axes of racism and the control of labour: wildly destructive ecological transformations that we might call ecocide, and the genocidal process of the murder of knowledges, which Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls, ‘epistemicide’.  Embrace of the Serpent shows how these linked processes violently alter the elements that together make up a world. However, it also causes us to question the finality and success of world destruction, reflecting on the linear and apocalyptic temporality that Qijuano and many others illuminate as site for decolonial critique.  The question that I pose in this paper is how we might think the gravity and intensity of coloniality’s world destruction whilst rethinking the notion of world and the temporality of destruction itself.

This paper was presented at the American Comparative Literature Association 2016 in the seminar “Utopia Renewed”. It was born from a desire to resist the commodification and aestheticization of Afrofuturism and to critically explore the feelings of fascination and suspicion that the more apocalyptic strain of Afro-Pessimism engenders in me. I look at the form utopia takes for the seemingly most anti-utopian and self-avowed blackest corner of Black thought, Afro-pessimism. I argue that the old utopian impulse for radical rupture is at work in Afro-Pessimism, however, given the analysis of Blackness that these thinkers undertake, the whole ethico-political terrain through which we might attempt to realize a utopian project is barred in advance, being complicit in the anti- Blackness that is the object of destruction. Since on this view the world is structured by anti-Blackness, if we can detect anything at all like a utopianism here, it can only be that of the world’s annihilation. The end of the world is therefore the only possibility for what is currently impossible: a world that does not have anti-Blackness as its guarantor of coherence. The extent to which this is an echo of the pattern of the current hegemonic model of utocalypse hinges on the way in which we understand world. I suggest that we find two ways of reading world in the corpus of Afro-Pessimism. Frank Wilderson detaches ‘the world’ from its historical, geographical and material coordinates, so that it becomes something like the totality of all possibilities of being on a planetary scale. I critique this understanding of world because it entails an apocalyptic vision that hypostasizes Blackness as a destructive force of death. Alternatively, reading Hortense Spillers suggests a second sense of world. This is world as the episteme of the ‘New World’ which retains its situatedness, despite having an especially longue durée and almost global scope. Rejecting the first sense of world allows us to remain committed to radical rupture and self-annihilation without lapsing into recycled patterns of apocalyptic desire. We can retain the destructive force of ending the world without betraying it by positing a barely secularized ontology. By situating world as episteme, we open up the task of thinking the “unthought” such that the unthinkable might become possible. To conclude I indicate the way in which some Afrofuturist works begin to do this and attend to the radical destructiveness operative in this movement with the aim of making it slightly less amenable to cooption.

Here I focus on one passage from Deleuze's book "Foucault" that has shaped the reception of Foucault's writing on the thought from Outside. This paper responds to these two claims. The first section reconsiders Foucault’s treatment of ‘life’ and resistance in the formulation of biopower found in The History of Sexuality Vol 1. It is here that I locate Deleuze’s major misreading of Foucault, which I argue has contributed to a tradition that fundamentally misunderstands Foucault on the problem of the ‘outside’ and life, and includes figures such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Roberto Esposito. I conclude that the lack of critical attention to the essential incompatibility of this ‘vital’ reading with Foucault’s thought is troubling and symptomatic of the manner in which the concept of life continues to act as a ‘quasi-transcendental’ of our thought. The second section responds to Deleuze’s claim that thought from the outside should be understood as ‘a certain vitalism’ in which ‘Foucault’s thought culminates.’ I argue that Deleuze attempts to ontologize a historically situated concept of life. My aim here is not so much to criticize the inaccuracy of Deleuze’s knowing misreading, (although the scholarly inattentiveness to this is problematic); but to begin considering this particular instance of Deleuze’s “buggery” as a practice of truth.