In Beyond Constraint, Shona N. Jackson offers a new approach to labour and its analysis by demonstrating the fundamental relation between black and Indigenous People’s sovereign, free, and coerced labour in the Americas. Through the writings of Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, and Sylvia Wynter, Jackson confronts the elision of Indigenous People’s labour in the black radical tradition. She argues that this elision is an effect of the structural relation of antiblackness to anti-indigeneity through which native and black bodies are arranged on either side of a split between unproductive labour and productive work necessary for capital accumulation and for how we read capital in political economic critique. This division between labour and work forces the radical tradition to sustain the break between black and Indigenous peoples as part of its critical strategies of liberation. To address this impasse, Jackson reads the tradition against the grain for openings to indigeneity and a method for recovering lost labours.
- Cover
- Contents
- Note on Terminology and Access
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Relation
- Left and Limit
- Pre-Positions: Grammar, Independence, and Sovereignty
- Part I: Labour, Work, and Middle/Passages
- 1. Conversion
- Land as Labour and Labour as Land
- Pessimisms: Invisible Labour versus Visible Work
- Conversion
- Conclusion
- 2. Toward a Middle/Passage Methodology
- Drowning the Limit
- The Atlantic
- Passage as Method
- Conclusion
- Part II: Natively Rethinking the Caribbean Radical Tradition
- 3. Left Limits and Black Possibilities
- Working on Water
- Rupture and Racial Capital
- Openings
- Conclusion
- 4. Against the Grain
- Resisting Inscription
- Interventions: C. L. R. James and Walter Rodney
- Conclusion
- 5. “Marxian and Not Marxian”: Centering Sylvia Wynter in the Radical Tradition
- Un/Disciplined
- An Un/Gendered Critique of Scarcity in Capitalist Political Economy
- Indigeneity as Labour Resistance: The Wynterian Critique of Land-Labour
- Of Skins and “Cenes”: Relationality and the Epoch
- Conclusion
- Part III: Rights and Representations
- 6. Work as Metaphor, Labour as Metonymy
- Resisting Hieroglyphs
- Saving Latitudes
- Metaphor and Metonymy
- Conclusion
- Coda: The Ark of Black and Indigenous Labour
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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