In her opening ceremony, Ana Maurine Lara makes the claim that “given knowledge and language… there is a responsibility to enact that knowledge and that language, and to render with great care the many ways of being that have sustained us and that are the sources of our greatest power” (2019, 20). Moving through her ofrenda, we are asked to participate in the call and response, to understand the responsibility of knowledge, both embodied and relational, as a collective endeavor. Rather than absorb, we are asked to partake in what queer freedom : Black sovereignty means to us, and to disentangle Christian colonial logics from future potentialities.
In particular, the notion of arrivant states stuck out to me. On page 12, Lara writes that we have a shared task “to reconcile with our shared roles in Indigenous genocide and in the continued perpetuation of the colonial settler futurities through the Christian colonial arrivant state, in all of its forms.” Here, my question feels hard to articulate, but is something akin to: how do we even begin to work towards queer freedom : Black sovereignty from the Christian colonial state? Or do we not engage with the arrivant state and instead focus on deconstructing our own settler colonist futurities? How do we make this ofrenda into practice?
also, not sure if anyone else has picked up on this as well, but the other tip to write an award-winning ethnography is to include the word palimpsest… i’m not sure we’ve had a single text without it lmao