Solidarity and Identity Politics amid Colonial-Racial Capitalism: Protective Accompaniment in a Colombian Resistance Community

Abstract

This paper examines internationalist solidarity and performance (Heatherton 2022; Koopman 2011; Mohanty 2003; Taylor 2020) in conversation with current debates about identity politics’ liberatory potential (Haidar 2018; Táíwò) amid racial capitalism (Al-Bulushi 2022; Bledsoe, McCreary & Wright 2022; Ferreira 2022). I examine a case of resistance to colonial-racial capitalism in rural Colombia through an internationalist accompaniment project mobilizing imperial social hierarchies to protect a threatened resistance community and thwart accumulation by dispossession. Methodologically, this project is radical performance geography rooted in autoethnography of my own experience in a protective accompaniment organization, along with oral histories with fellow accompaniers and accompanied campesinos in Colombia about the impacts of their solidarity encounter over the course of fifteen years. Connecting with ongoing debates about racial capitalism, internationalism, and identity politics, I interrogate the extent to which international accompaniment reproduces neocolonialism and/or embodies anticolonial resistance.