Racial Banishment: Outdoors in Postcolonial Los Angeles

Keywords: banishment, postcolonial, urbicide, social death
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Pete White, founder and executive director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN), a Black liberation movement organization which is rooted in Skid Row, Los Angeles, explains why he uses the term banishment rather than displacement: “Banishment is when there is no place for you to go. Places for you to go are jails or death.” In this paper, I interpret White’s statement in relation to what Toni Morrison has termed the “outdoors” as well as the provocation of Cervenak and Carter through their reading of Saidiya Hartman’s work to consider the “here-to-stayness” of this outdoors in the afterlife of slavery. I argue that an understanding of Los Angeles as a postcolonial city deepens understandings of this “here-to-stayness.” In doing so, I seek to extend my previous work on racial banishment, which has drawn on Patterson’s concept of social death, through engagement with postcolonial critique. I hope to reinterpret social death in relation to the colonial-racial project of development which includes not only logics of urbicide and domicide but also those of resettlement and rehabilitation. But it is precisely from the interstices of such resettlement that outdoored subjects stage rebellion, refusal, and even return. They unsettle the postcolonial city.