The razor's edge of safety and terror

[dreamer_easy]

"At the same time, settler colonialism involves the subjugation and forced labor of chattel slaves5 , whose bodies and lives become the property, and who are kept landless. Slavery in settler colonial contexts is distinct from other forms of indenture whereby excess labor is extracted from persons. First, chattels are commodities of labor and therefore it is the slave’s person that is the excess. Second, unlike workers who may aspire to own land, the slave’s very presence on the land is already an excess that must be dis-located. Thus, the slave is a desirable commodity but the person underneath is imprisonable, punishable, and murderable. The violence of keeping/killing the chattel slave makes them deathlike monsters in the settler imagination; they are reconfigured/disfigured as the threat, the razor’s edge of safety and terror."

-- Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization is not a metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-­‐40.

This is similar to stuff in my Pyramids of Mars book, the terrifying possibility that the exotic people you have cruelly treated will turn and treat you cruelly -- the mummy, Fu Manchu -- but what a hair-raising way of expressing it. I'm only partway through but this essay is hair-raising in general.

Getting a bit of reading done at the moment because I've blocked Reddit. XD