“The Fire This Time”: The Politics of Contingency

Abstract

In this brief essay, I connect conceptualizations of dispossession with those of conjuncture, specifically conjuncture as an ethico-political category. Interested in the long history of racial capitalism and its iterative spatialities, I seek to foreground the contingency of the present and the politics made possible across time and in time. Drawing on postcolonial thought, especially that attentive to Blackness, I make an argument about the necessity of understanding urban transformations in relation to the present history of colonial settlement and removal.