The (Under)Commons across the Américas: Connecting Spaces for Fugitivity and Futurity

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines how the concepts of enclaves, satellites (Squires), and undercommons (Harney and Moten) intersect in ways that create space for fugitivity, anticolonial thinking, and futurity. Enclaves and satellites can function as a place of hiding to protect radical gestures, ideas, and activism, whereas the undercommons work as spaces to upend institutions, organizations, and cultures. Using the “brown” commons (José Esteban Muñoz) as examples, I argue that, in conversation, the brown commons and undercommons work rhetorically through fugitivity and futurity (as inspiration, connection, and hopefulness) to create spaces of refuge, rupture, and precariousness. In this study, various art forms from Colombian and Chilean artists illustrate how refuge, rupture, and precariousness rhetorically function in public spaces as well as enclaves or satellites; provide the kind of in-between cracks of nourishment, growth, and feeling/being alive geared toward futurity; but can also reinforce anti-Blackness through erasure. In the end, I argue that the undercommons as a theoretical framework informing the brown commons might resist some of this anti-Blackness that resides within latinidad across the Américas.